Highcountry Almanac

Preservation

Buildings, Trades, & Neighborhoods

Wildlife

Land, Water, & Life

Culture

Skill, Song, & Story

Notes

Correspondence
The Stone That Stayed
The Stone That Stayed
A swimmer cuts through the green water of Mead's Quarry, leaving a clean wake across twenty-five acres of an ancient cut that sinks eighty feet to a floor of solid... Read more...
The Holding House
The Holding House
The midday sun over the Tellico Plains valley does not invite movement. By three in the afternoon in mid-July, the humidity has settled into the bottomland along the river like... Read more...
The Climb Out of Tellico Plains
The Climb Out of Tellico Plains
The asphalt begins where the houses stop, just past the edge of Tellico Plains. In the valley, the July air holds the heavy, river-bottom heat of East Tennessee—a thick, wet... Read more...
Kudzu
Kudzu
By noon the asphalt on Old River Road has gone soft enough to take a bootheel, and it gives off that flat, oily smell of baked tar into the humidity... Read more...
The Tellico in July
The Tellico in July
Morning mist leaves a slick film on rosebay leaves along the upper Tellico River long before the sun clears the high ridges of the Unicoi Mountains. The water runs thin... Read more...
Singing the Notes.
Singing the Notes.
Before the leader has finished naming the page, the sound is already up — a raw, many-voiced roar of bare vowels slammed against the white pine walls of Headrick's Chapel.... Read more...
The Load-Bearing Dark
The Load-Bearing Dark
June dusk in East Tennessee rises before it falls. It comes up out of the creek beds first, a blue-gray exhalation that climbs the ridges until the tree lines blur.... Read more...
A Break
A Break
Four days of warnings. Thunderstorms sideways, flood alerts stacking on tornado alerts, the phone going off at three in the morning and again at six. You open the windows in... Read more...
The Long End of Winter
The Long End of Winter
The pot has been on since three. Tiny meatballs, escarole, a broth that takes the whole afternoon. By six the windows are fogged and something warm and deep has settled into... Read more...
Gobblers Only
Gobblers Only
The air in the cove at five in the morning is heavy with the scent of damp earth and decomposing hemlock logs. Sitting against the fluted base of a mature... Read more...
Old Shadow
Old Shadow
The spring moves in a series of halts and surges through the coves of Blount and Monroe counties. On the south-facing benches where the sun strikes early, the leaf litter... Read more...
Dogwood
Dogwood
April in Knoxville. The drive to work changes overnight. White blooms appear in the understory where yesterday there were only bare branches, and the ridgelines have shifted in a way... Read more...