Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (7 page)

“That’s true,” Henry said. “There are all
kinda
rules and regulations for
buryin
somebody in the park.”

They came to a
blowdown
where a huge tree lay across the trail. Henry climbed over it and Phoebe stooped to go underneath. Henry reached under the trunk and took her hand to steady her so she wouldn’t have to crawl and get her knees muddy.

“There’s a reason for restrictions on burials in the park,” he said.

“What is it?”

He let go of her hand, but stood looking at her with concern, and said, “You don’t really
wanna
talk about this
kinda
thing right now, do ye?”

“Sure I do,” she said. “We’ve got another forty-five minutes of
walkin
ahead of us.”

Henry smiled. The mischievous sense of humor so prevalent in the community was blazing from his eyes and suddenly all the years and all the sadness dropped away from Phoebe and they were just kids again, playing in the woods.

“
There’s millions of people
roamin
around in this park,” he said as he turned away from her and resumed walking. “You wouldn’t
believe
what
kinda
stuff they get up to.”

“Like what?”

“Like
throwin
out a bag of ashes on the upwind side of a full picnic ground and
gettin
little flakes of granny all over people’s tater salad.”

Phoebe snorted. “Good Lord, can’t they even step into the woods?” Ten feet into the verdant
Smokies
would put them totally out of view behind a screen of vegetation.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Eighty-five percent of the visitors to the park never get more than fifty yards from their car.
There’s
about 900 miles of trails and 2,100 miles of rivers and creeks, but nearly
everbody’s
trompin
around on the same little bald patches of dirt.”

They both laughed.

“I can’t see the
reasonin
behind
bringin
yer
loved one’s ashes to the park just so you can toss
em
out onto the asphalt,” he said. “But that’s what people do, time after time. And that’s just
one
example. We’ve caught
em
puttin
ashes in a creek a few feet upstream from
swimmin
holes where little kids are
splashin
around or right above where some fool’s
fillin
up a canteen!”

Phoebe laughed so hard that it made her lose her footing. She had to windmill her arms to stay upright. “I thought people knew better than to drink
outta
these creeks nowadays.”

“Well they don’t. They come here from God knows where so they can indulge a fantasy about
drinkin
fresh cold mountain spring water, but they’re actually
drinkin
the used toilet and bath water from wild hogs.”

Phoebe was laughing and smiling now and Henry was glad he was able to take her mind off her sadness. If tourist escapades made her feel better, he was happy to oblige. Thirty years spent wrangling people and critters had given him an endless supply of material.

“Lord, Phoebe, sometimes they don’t even take the ashes
outta
the container! We’ve found sealed plastic bags full of ashes
layin
right in the middle of a creek,
stickin
up in plain view of a scenic overlook. But when they do
that
, we can catch
em
. People don’t realize there’s a little metal tag inside the packages that identifies the deceased.

“When we get hold of that tag, we can track down the
survivin
family and find out who did it. I can’t understand it, but even with the ones who manage to get the container open, sometimes we find the little metal tags
layin
right in or beside the trail, or the fisheries people see
em
flashin
in the creek. We go after those people, too.”

“That’s pitiful,” Phoebe said.

 “Well, I guess if they’re lucky, people don’t have much experience
disposin
of human remains,” Henry said. “You’d hope only a professional would get practice at it. And the amateurs are
doin
it when they’re the most upset they’ve ever been in their lives. So I guess there’s a lot of potential for mistakes.

“And the survivor’s likely to be old and female. That plastic is real strong and an elderly woman’s too weak to tear it open bare handed. And too frail to wade into a creek to fish the old man out and try again.”

Phoebe laughed and said, “That’s true.”

“It gets worse,” Henry said. “Sometimes a ridge
runner’ll
find a brand new headstone right alongside the
Appalachian Trail
! If we didn’t police it, Phoebe, there’d be dead people
layin
all over the most popular places in the park. We’d have eight hundred square miles of wilderness ringed with mass graves!”

Phoebe snorted with laughter.

“Then there’s the memorial tree people,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how many requests we get ever year to plant a memorial tree in one of the few little bits of lawn we’ve got in the public areas. The biggest hardwood forest on the face of the earth
ain’t
enough. They
wanna
plant one more tree, usually an invasive species, with a commemorative plaque, and they want it right in front of a
Visitor
Center
.”

“Why not plant the tree in a place where
people’d
need
em
?” Phoebe asked.

“I don’t know! I’m sure they mean well. It’s just that people
love
this park beyond reason. And they want to do
somethin
nice for the dead person, but they just don’t think it through.”

Phoebe reflected on how hard it was to be dignified, especially for hillbillies, and even more for a group of hillbillies. A cluster of hillbillies was a volatile mix. They were combustible in so many ways, both comic and violent, often both at the same time. They were an unpredictably impulsive lot. She knew because she was a purebred one herself, eleventh generation born in the
USA
.

To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living
koan
. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn’t tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music.
Wood carving with chainsaws.
Cloggers
who danced up a storm with the lower half of their bodies, but held the upper half perfectly still and stared off into the distance stone-faced. Or a group of bluegrass musicians who’d be playing the most raucous tunes imaginable, looking around at each other with bemused expressions that seemed to say
where’s all
that racket
comin
from
?

Phoebe believed that nearly all the adult males everywhere were pretty much the same way. Most of them could manage to keep the top half of themselves under a semblance of control, but the bottom half tended to run wild. As she continued to descend the trail she couldn’t help but think that most men were mentally ill below the waist.

It was turning out to be a pretty day by the time Phoebe and Henry made it back to the parking lot. They stood next to Phoebe’s car chatting until Henry sensed she was stalling.

“I’ve
gotta
go over to
Cataloochee
to check on a bear trap,” he said, “and I need to change out the batteries on an elk’s collar if I can find him. You’re welcome to ride along.”

“I wouldn’t
wanna
to be in the way,” Phoebe said.

“You won’t. I could use an extra pair of hands. But it’s a long drive across the mountain and we won’t get back here
til
late.”

Phoebe looked at her feet. She had the rest of the day off. She thought about going home and sitting alone with her cat, and trying not to cry over Sean. “That’d be great.”

Henry was driving his work vehicle, a white Ford Explorer he’d parked military style, facing out. The doors bore the dark green seal of the Department of the Interior. Phoebe wondered why it was called that. Shouldn’t it be the Department of the Exterior?

The truck was outfitted with a radio like the ones the police used. Henry kept it tuned to a channel that was like a party line where they could listen in on the chitchat of rangers from all over the park with a central dispatcher. Phoebe had trouble following what they were talking about, though, because they used code.

When a disembodied male voice reported a 507 and asked for instructions, Phoebe asked, “What’s a 507?”

“A bear jam,” Henry said.

The phrase meant nothing to her. She pondered the unfamiliar term. Was it a music festival in the park, or were bears actually playing instruments like the birds at Parrot Jungle? Maybe it was when a bunch of bears tried to cram into a small space. Somewhere she’d heard that a gang of bears was called a sloth or a sleuth, but she wondered who in their right minds would ever talk like that.

Her post-funeral train of thought seemed destined to continue on an idiotic downward spiral, so she asked, “What’s a bear jam?”

“Oh, it’s a traffic jam caused by tourists who’re
lookin
at a bear. People get excited when they see one so they’ll stop to take a look. Lots of times they don’t even pull over. They just put the car in park and leave it
sittin
in the middle of the road while they walk around to get a better view or take pictures. If one car stops on a one-lane road, everybody behind it has to stop too. The traffic gets backed up for miles.

“And of course some people aren’t satisfied with
lookin
from a distance. They try to get up close or bait the bear with food, or, if they’re drunk, they might try to chase one.”

“People
chase
bears?” Phoebe was incredulous.

“If they’re drunk enough.”

The national park had only a few interior roads so it was common to have to take a long convoluted route to get somewhere that wasn’t very far away as the crow flies. To get to the
Cataloochee
Valley
, which was across the mountains in
North Carolina
, Henry explained that they had to take secondary roads to I-40, go to
North Carolina
, then turn back toward
Tennessee
and drive along a notoriously curvy one-lane gravel road.

They’d driven for about fifteen minutes when the radio sputtered a message for Henry. “Dispatch to Matthews, what’s your 20?”

“Matthews to Dispatch, I’m traveling east on Little River Road.”

“Dispatch to Matthews, divert to Cades Cove and rendezvous with Sanders at the Cantilever Barn."

“Matthews to Dispatch, roger that.”

Henry stopped, executed a perfect three-point turn, and headed back the way they’d come.

“Sanders
is
a seasonal ranger,” Henry explained.

“What’s
goin
on?”

“I don’t know, but when they don’t give any details, its bad news. Something they don’t
wanna
say over the airwaves. People monitor our radios with scanners. So if there’s
somethin
dispatch doesn’t want tourists or the press to hear, they don’t say it. Looks like
Cataloochee
will have to wait for now.”