I moved my family from the city to the rural mountain forests of western North Carolina at the end of 1983, the day after Christmas. In the beginning, I had a pioneer farm adventure with a wife, two kids, a barn, and eighty-four animals. Before the end of the first year, I had no wife, one child, no animals, and an old green Ford truck named Frogger, with dashboard lights that made it my nighttime pretend BMW.

Tuhl and Virginia West were my nearest neighbors on the other side of dark yards and heavy woods, then across a crystal creek to the family home where Tuhl was born. The house was too small for the Goliath wood stove that kept it sauna hot in white-dead winter. It was an ugly orphan on Tuhl’s rich land, with thousands of Christmas trees to the north and east, a government boundary to the west, and three trout ponds on the south.

Tuhl was seventy-three when I arrived with my family. His leather face had stubbled crevasses below the sharp peak of his nose. His permanent grin lost favor to the light blue eyes that had fire, always. He was short, muscular, bent over, and fast. His hands shook rhythmically from the invading Parkinson’s and were too unsteady to shave his wispy gray beard. I had embezzled our future to settle a nomadic yearning, while Tuhl was homesteading another family generation.

Tuhl was our Moses, pointing the way through the Promised Land where we had fled. Gradually, like dripping water, our visits created a small pool for friendship. Blind luck or God’s hand, an elderly, uneducated bear hunter befriended a middle-aged, educated wandering hippie. There is no predicting.

Rural neighbors take each other in, foster children of geography, a history from harsher times, when you clung to your neighbor in hostile land. And so we did. Marriage, children, varmints, the mystery ownership of the busted liquor still on my property, guns, women, alcohol, money, weather, food—stones in shallow water that we turned over in the first year. After that year, the pool got so we couldn’t see the bottom and had to feel our way. Eventually, we traded surface for deep.

In our second year of friendship, Tuhl said, “Son, I been cipherin’ ‘bout taxes. I been payin’ ‘em fer fifty year and I’m done.”

“What do you mean ‘done’?”

“I ain’ta gonna pay no more. I quit three year ago.”

“Well, you can’t do that, Tuhl. The IRS will seize your land, trees, and the trout in those ponds.” My bookish words were polished by law school training, untarnished by life.

“We’ll see ‘bout that!” Tuhl grinned and fired up the eyes.

Months later, the IRS sent two young agents from Asheville, one Asian and one Caucasian, not that it matters. They arrived one afternoon unannounced. We were six o’clock, local-news-lucky Tuhl didn't shoot them. His loaded double-barrel shotgun lurked in the porch corner within reach of his rocking chair.

The shotgun pulsed when Tuhl was nearby. In the mountains, persistent rumor is lore, and lore ultimately becomes fact. In 1935, Tuhl killed a man who broke into the Civilian Conservation Corps line of starving men waiting to get a day’s work building the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was called self-defense.

Tuhl growled at the revenuers, “Who are ya and what’s yer biness on my property?” His untouched shotgun twitched.

“We’re from the Asheville office of the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. West, and want to ask you some questions about your taxes,” one of them said.

Tiny birds swaying on a thin wire, the agents teetered on the last board of the porch’s edge, not daring to sit.

“Ask yer questions, ‘cause I thought you hadta make money fer ya to owe taxes.”

“So, Mr. West, do you own these Christmas trees around your house?”

“Yep.”

“Do you sell them?”

“Shore do, but summer’s a bit early for you’uns to buy a Christmas tree.” The fire in Tuhl’s eyes lit, and the grin moved from resting position.

“Okay, Mr. West, but you sell the trees around Christmas?”

“Ever chance I gets.”

“Now, Mr. West, do those trout ponds belong to you too?

“They’s on my propity.”

“Do you sell fish from time to time?”

“I do.”

“So, you sell trees and trout, but you don’t make any money, is that it, Mr. West?”

“That’s shore nuff right, mister,” Tuhl said.

“Mr. West, where are your records for the sale of your Christmas trees and fish?”

“In here,” Tuhl said slowly, with a flimsy Parkinson’s hand pointing to his forehead.

“Well, how do you know that you don’t make any money, then?” the Asian asked. The agents fancied themselves big buzzards circling the wounded, but nothing was dead.

Tuhl said, “Well, sir, you sees these overalls I’m a-wearin’, don’t ya? I wears ‘em ever day. Have fer as long as I been raisin’ trees and fish. Ever day I gets up and puts these overalls on and goes ‘bout my biness. If’n I sells a tree or two, I puts the money in my right pocket.” His shaky hand jiggled the right pocket slightly open. “Then, if’n I sells some fish, I puts that money in this here left pocket of my britches.”

“So you have a system for keeping tree and fish money separate, do you?”

“It’s called the pocket method.” Tuhl widened his lips and stoked the eye fire.

“Well, then, at the end of the day, you have money in both pockets,” one of the buzzards rasped.

“Hold on there, son, let me finish my story. If’n I buy fertilizer fer the trees, or hires someone to trim ‘em, then I pays fer that with money out of the right pocket. If’n I buy trout chow, or has somebody clean out my ponds, I pays fer that with money in my left pocket. Ever night, I goes to bed, and I takes these overalls off and hangs ‘em on the bedpost on the right side of the bed. That’s where I sleep. The wife sleeps on the left side. We done that fer years. And I empty my pockets. They is never no money in the right pocket and nary any money in the left. Best I can figure, I’m breakin’ even on my biness ventures.” The blaze in Tuhl’s eyes was a sunset against an evening blue sky. The smile broadened as if it would soon disappear from the horizon of his face.

Almost sundown, the buzzards told Tuhl they were leaving but would be back after they did “some investigating” circles.

Two weeks later, the taxmen returned. “Mr. West, are you an educated man?” the Asian asked.

“Well, I went to Harvard,” Tuhl said. “You’uns have heard of Harvard, ain’t ya?”

“Harvard,” the Caucasian Fed sneered. “You went to Harvard?”

“Shore did, but I didn’t gradiate.” Tuhl’s eyes flickered as the embers ignited.

“So, just how far did you get, Mr. West?” the agent asked.

“Third grade,” Tuhl answered. As his eyes sparked flames, Tuhl’s mouth opened wide, ready to laugh.

“Boys, they used to be a Harvard Elementary School in the valley, and I made it through the middle of third grade there.”

The agents exchanged black-eyed glances, shook their heads, and left Tuhl with a whispered goodbye. Years later, I got a call from Tuhl as he was nearing death. He wanted me to know about his mattress. My lawyer ears could not hear his story, so I told him we had a bad connection. The IRS agents were never seen again, and I don’t think Tuhl paid any more taxes. They say death and taxes are certain. Maybe. Rumor has it that after his death, Tuhl’s family discovered a lumpy, deformed mattress on the bed where he hung his overalls. It wasn’t stuffed with cotton.

Years before Tuhl died, my family at the time included wife Mary Lou, daughter Elizabeth, and son Adam. We created a hobby farm to save ourselves. I rummage the memory as it being Mary Lou’s idea, but it was probably mine.

We started with clearing some of the hemlocks that shrouded our house. The felled trees were taken to a local sawmill, cut into boards, and used to construct a twenty-by-twenty-foot barn with a loft and two stalls. It was a harmless step toward a fatal cliff fall.

Soon after the barn was completed, we began to add animals—two by two, sometimes more. Noah’s ark floated in the storm while our ship would wreck. We started with two rabbits, one pregnant goat, a dozen chickens, several guinea fowl, and geese. Later we added a fenced area around the barn and got three damn horses.

After a yearlong orgy, the animals had diddled their way to eighty-four. Our farm family included thirty-seven chickens, twenty-nine rabbits, a dozen geese and guineas, three goats, and three still-damn horses. Every night after work, I parked Frogger in the barn and turned out the lights. One hundred sixty-eight yellow night-eyes glowed like fluorescent tentacles attached to eighty-four grumbling stomachs.

I particularly hated the horses. I was afraid of even the stubby, crippled pony, Penny. Like gang members, the horses sensed my fear and cornered me often. The leader, a female named Morgan, made all the threats.

Tuhl called early one morning. “Son, yer mare is on my propity and just torn up some of my trees.”

“Sorry, I’ll get the bridle and saddle and be right there.” Damn horses! I went to the barn to get the gear, then ran down my drive, across the bridge, and over to Tuhl’s. He was waiting on me outside.

“We is going to have to track her.”

So we did. I had never trailed anything but women. Tuhl could see hoof prints in the dirt. As with women, I couldn’t find a clue. We went well off Tuhl’s property, over the ridge, and into the next valley. The hard, steep climb exhausted me but widened Tuhl’s smile.

We found the mare in a bottom, in heat and tormenting a stallion. She circled his fenced pasture running wildly, taunting him with sexual horse remarks. I chased her while she punished him, and he followed after her from the other side of the chastity fence. Finally, I grabbed Morgan’s bridle rope and calmed her enough to put the saddle on and a bit in her mouth. I forgot her habit of puffing up with air when a saddle was cinched.

So Morgan rode me out of the pasture toward the rural paved road that led to my house. Smiling, she decided to gallop. With the exertion, she began to sweat and exhale the excess air in her lungs. The saddle slipped to her left, and soon she was at full run with me clinging sideways in the saddle. I finally leaped from her and ball-bounced off the pavement. I don’t know when I made the decision, but before I blood-skidded the road, I knew she was leaving the farm, that I was ridding myself of her soon. I called a friend and offered free horses, saddles, bridles, and everything else the horses owned if he would come now. He did right then. Morgan’s gang members left with her.

Days later, I took Elizabeth and Adam to the local general store. It squatted the banks of the South Toe River and was the neighborhood newsroom. It was the place to go watch fact ooze from gossip and to see bears, deer, and turkeys, because every hunter in the valley took their kill there for dead display. The kids were angling for candy and I gave in—they deserved a treat with the great, black divorce cloud forming. I followed them through the jigsaw shelves to the back of the store, where I saw Tuhl folded into a jutted-out corner, a dead-end maze crammed full of waxy old men with fixed, glass eyes.

Tuhl announced the arrival of the valley’s only “trick horseback rider,” and the figurines stared at me as I turned around to see who it was. Tuhl testified to the whole story, nothing but the truth, so help him God.

It was an eyewitness account because he had remained nearby, hiding and watching as I rode Morgan home. It ended with me under Morgan’s belly, clinging to the saddle cinches as my last trick of the ride just before I hit the pavement. With the crescendo, the old men slapped their thighs in unity, laughing their unanimous verdict. I laughed too, guilty.

In the year of our waning marriage, I held Mary Lou far less than my fly rod. Often I would hold the rod’s slender figure and disappear into the woods to fish. All mountain men fish and hunt, stuffing their dead and putting them on a wall.

Tuhl was a bear and raccoon hunter but had no visible trophies. But he did have a secret collection. I didn’t see it until a few winters in. By then, I had divorced the animals and my wife and traded my truck Frogger for a crappy old Porsche. It fit me well, as it ran on only three of four cylinders.

By October 1984, the divorce was underway, and Mary Lou and Elizabeth were planning an escape back to urbanity. Adam would stay with me. I kept our home on Locust Creek but sold three acres and a small cabin to Chicago Nancy (divorced, independent, quirky, filled her cabin with talking parrots, and allowed black snakes to roam inside—long story).

Nancy had a Christmas party at her home that year, and at dark dusk, the group migrated to the Wests’. Tuhl’s stove was so hot that it burned the edges off our county. Nevertheless, we all sardine-crammed into the little house to sweat. As I was trying to leave, Tuhl pulled me to his bedroom, which had only the small lumpy bed and an antique wood dresser. “Son, I want ya to see my prize collection,” Tuhl beamed. His eyes were brighter than the low light of the single lamp in the room. He slid the top dresser drawer open to reveal twenty-five curved bones, ranging from two to three inches long.

They were carefully positioned in rows on a purple velvet cloth cut to fit inside the drawer. I stared and tried to imagine. They looked like a group of petrified index fingers, all bent at about sixty degrees. No clue.

I stared and said nothing, as I couldn’t think of a single word for these vestigial objects.

Finally, Tuhl said, “Pick you one as a Christmas gift!”

“What are they?”

“Why, they’s coon peckers, son!”

“Coon peckers? You mean these are the privates of raccoons?”

“Shore is. Ain’t they nice?”

Faint hot, I hallucinated my past in the city at a seasonal party, forced to look at a neighbor’s family vacation pictures. No words had the courage to exit my open mouth.

“Go on, son, pick ya one fer the family,” Tuhl offered.

No words, just doubts about how I would display this gift. In glass, with a wood frame, with calligraphy letters describing the art as a “Rare Raccoon Pecker”? In a delusional moment, I wanted to be back in the city with the whole collection, framed on our old den wall right next to the family pictures. No wonder my ex-wife and the farm animals had divorced me. No surprise Virginia had lived apart from Tuhl in their later years.

Still, I said nothing to Tuhl.

Finally, I asked, “Have you shown this to Nancy?”

Tuhl said, “No, and I ain’t shore Nancy would ‘preciate my collection.”

“Oh, yes, she will,” I said, clearing the room to see Nancy in the kitchen talking to Virginia. I took Nancy by the arm and pulled her past the red-hot stove toward the tiny bedroom. She had been living among us long enough to know that weird was normal. Life here had tilted her at the right angle to see that normal was weird. We found Tuhl standing over his trophies, carefully rearranging them as a curator would. The opening of the drawer had moved the pieces just slightly, so the whole thing looked in disarray to only Tuhl.

“Look, Nancy,” I said. “Guess what these are?”

Nancy stared. Tuhl grinned. I savored the moment, waiting for the reveal. No one spoke for a time, as we just smiled and stared at the collection. Tuhl and I thought we knew what was coming and Nancy didn’t.

“Are they small penises?” Nancy finally asked.

“Yes, they is! Gitya one as a Christmas gift,” Tuhl offered. After all, it was the season for giving and for celebrating Jesus’s birth. Nancy fingered several of them, scooped up a particularly distended one, put it in her jacket pocket, and said, “Thank you, Tuhl.” With that and a girl giggle, she left the room.

Tuhl and I stared at each other as his lips quivered and his eyes brightened the room. Because of the sad divorce, I began to laugh in the way of a thirteen-year-old boy and stayed with it for five minutes, as tears streamed down my cheeks and pee drops trickled down my leg. Tuhl’s tears joined mine. We slapped each other on the shoulder and declared it the best Christmas party ever. But it wasn’t.

In the years after the sad Christmas, Tuhl and I remained best neighbors even though I was from downstream and he was from up. He even invited me on bear hunts in the thirteen-thousand-acre Murchison Preserve, where Big Tom Wilson had once been the gamekeeper. Tuhl was one of a handful of men allowed to hunt the preserve. He showed me its beauty and mystery.

If you ask those born in the county, they will tell you they have a God-ordained right to use every square inch of it in the same way their ancestors have for generations. There is no forbidden fruit in this Eden. They fish and hunt it all, gather foul-tasting onions called “ramps,” pick galax plants to sell to florists, and pull ginseng roots that are shipped to Philadelphia and distributed to Chinese markets. Residents are generationally poor, which means they salvage every tiny scrap of anything to make it useful.

Today, those born in Yancey County don’t allow even their shadows to follow them, preferring to be alone. Even those who move here soon resent that their shadows follow. Some say these are the oldest peaks on earth. Yancey is a tourist destination offering cold nights and cool days even in summer, sheltered by thousands of acres of national forest. The tourist-laden Blue Ridge Parkway borders the county on the eastern side.

No one comes to Yancey by accident, only those seeking life like it was before the Civil War and reckless timbering began its gradual destruction over a century ago.

Today the woods are still dense with evergreen spruce, hemlock, and balsam claiming the highest elevations. Lower down toward the valleys, hardwoods prevail. On the highest peaks where timbering did not occur, century-old oak, maple, walnut, and hickory trees are common. American chestnuts once thrived but were blighted by an evil, invasive insect.

If you move to Yancey, as I did, there are three unspoken rules. First, you don’t gossip about anyone because they all know each other or are closely related. Second, if they initiate gossip about anyone, the first rule doesn’t apply and you are free to join in. Third, no matter where you came from and no matter how much better/smarter/niftier you think it is than Yancey, keep your opinion to yourself. Whatever people-infested hellhole you escaped, whether it was Florida, Jersey, or New York, remember that rats that have stolen onto a ship don’t get to tell the captain how to reach the destination. Follow these rules and you will be fine. Break them and you won’t.