mountains and valleys. Later humans, once they became separate from
bears and other animals, climbed to ridges and peaks to burn balds for
hunting pastures. The natives lived below, however, where there was water
and arable land. Their European successors did more or less the same, for
a long while. They maintained the fired spots as high summer pasture for
domesticated animals. Mostly they lived below, by rivers, creeks, and coves.
Cove land was farming land, close to water for drink and transportation.
The tops of mountains were, well, difficult—strenuous to reach and some-
times dangerous to descend. They were to be used only seasonally, as com-
mons.^18
Weather in the Appalachians is unsouthern, usually ten (or more) de-
grees colder than the piedmonts and plains to the east and west. Within the
mountains, too, weather may vary drastically between ,- and ,-foot
summits and valleys below. As to rainfall, mountaintops may get as much
as eighty inches annually, while valleys get sixty inches or less. Then there
is the simple but profound consequence of living on coves or in valleys,
far below high ridges and peaks: Depending on season and the predicted
risings and settings of the sun, mountaineers have ever been deprived of
light. Admiring the gorgeous scenery of the neighborhood of Grandfather
Mountain, in northwestern North Carolina, in high summer, I have been
dismayed that, where I stayed, the sun did not clear the ridge to the east
until :.., then passed below the western ridgeline before :..
I am tempted to hypothesize that light deprivation among typical below-
ridge-living Euro-Appalachians helps (at least) explain their stark morbidity
and the brutal forthrightness of their acknowledgment of death—this even
today, when death is, if not denied, sanitized. Consider the ‘‘ole-timey’’
musical score to Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant filmO Brother, Where
Art Thou?^19 The film is set in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but the music that
drives and tones the silly plot is overwhelmingly Appalachian, and death-
oriented fare indeed. Little girls sing, joyously anticipating becoming an-
gels doing roadwork in heaven. A grown ‘‘Man of Constant Sorrow’’ will
soon be ‘‘in my grave.’’ ‘‘I’ll Fly Away’’ means the singer can hardly wait to
die. Another title, ‘‘Keep on the Sunny Side,’’ urges mindless optimism de-
spite a repetitively gloomy ‘‘dark side of life.’’ Most spectacular is Ralph
Stanley’s reprise of the traditional ‘‘O Death.’’ (More of this remarkable film,
in a different context, in the Epilogue.) Low-country southerners, white and
black, share highlanders’ evangelical Protestantism and demographic and
medical history: many children, many of them dead early, and the survivors
poor and expecting early demises. But flatlanders rarely express life’s sor-