A Hillbilly Earthday

I have never given money to Greenpeace.

I'm not an environmentalist and I don't personally know a hillbilly who is one.

Purple-fringed Orchid

I don't like to see animals suffer for no reason, but I don't believe in animal rights, either. For instance, I have no moral reservations about shooting a deer that I plan to eat and then cutting the guts out of it before I drag it home. It doesn't bother me at all for my wife to wear rabbit fur. And I don't sit up at night feeling guilty about the battery hens who spend their lives in cages laying the eggs I eat.

There are even little pieces of nature that I absolutely hate - wild roses being perhaps chief among them, although groundhogs and 'possums don't rate highly with me either - especially not while my garden's out.

My Southern Baptist approach to life won't allow me to think in terms of "Mother" Earth; but like most hillbillies, I do have a deep sense of my relationship with the land I live on.

And I love it...

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The average mountain inhabitant is more than just proud of where they come from. People who live in the mountains are usually more aware of the land: aware of what it can give them, aware of what will hurt it, aware of what it can do to them if they are careless or if the misuse it.

The Cardinal Flower

And they are aware of its beauty.

Few things rivals the view that can be had on the climb up Fancy Gap on I-77 coming into Virginia (where on a clear day you can see Grandfather Mountain); or on state Rt. 80 in Virginia, looking down on the Russell Fork near the Break Interstate Park; or from Brasstown Bald in Georgia or Lookout Mountain in Tennessee or a hundred other spots in Appalachia.

But beauty in the mountains doesn't have to be about the spectacular. Or at least the spectacular doesn't have to be big.

The flowers of the region provide a good example of how beauty can be condensed into fairly small packages. Dr. Kenneth Stein of the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech took the pictures used on this page and gave me permission to display a few of them here for you. The pictures are copyrighted by Stein. He has pictures of 50 Appalachian wild flowers available online at his web site. Stein is planning to release a CD of Appalachian wild flowers in May.

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