A Photo Essay
Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
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Paris to Provence, 2006
Origins of Rabbit Rock
January, 2004
Dear Deborah,
Thanks for allowing me to sojourn here a while at Rabbit Rock. I’m thinking back to that day in 1998 when I first pitched my tent here, late on an August evening, the first human encampment in decades on this abandoned apple farm deep in the Pisgah National Forest of western North Carolina. Only two months earlier you had stepped onto this 26 acre parcel of that original farm and after surveying for only a minute or two the steep slope of granite boulders, towering hardwood trees and wild raspberry bushes, you had said, “This is it! This is the place.”
We were living in Texas at the time. But you had longed for your Smoky Mountain roots and I was promising you that if you bought the land, I could build you the log cabin of your dreams with timber I cut right on the property.
That August evening as I sat alone by my campfire and looked across the neighboring mountains at the distant tramway lights of Mt. Pisgah, I felt myself a very lucky man to have before me such a challenging and exciting adventure.
When I awoke the next morning, I found a muddy trickle of water only a few feet from my tent and followed it up the side of the mountain to a little spring, high enough above any possible building site to provide a good gravity feed water supply. I found tracks there (perhaps of a marmot or a ground hog) and poking around the little natural pool I disturbed scurrying salamanders, those harbingers of clean spring water. I cupped my hands under the cold, clear trickle coming out of the rock and drank the untested water. It was cold and sweet and I felt the primordial spirit of my ancestors there.
I set right to work and within two weeks had built a primitive 8x12 camp house of locust poles and corrugated tin where the following summer you and I would live while we built your long longed for mountain retreat.
The following May, with all our worldly possessions in a warehouse in Canton, I started cutting trees into logs and leveraging them out of the woods with an antique block and tackle and your mother’s hand-me-down four-wheel drive Ford Explorer. We had no electricity and no generator. So except for my gasoline powered chainsaw, we built everything by hand. I cut and laid the logs; and you “chinked” them with your own blend of cement mortar mix and spring water. In the evenings we read to each other from books of history, fiction and natural science. Our favorites were E.O. Wilson's autobiography and to our surprise, Daniel Lazare's fascinating history of the writing of the U.S. Constitution. And we listened to the night sounds of bobcats, great horned owls and hunting dogs baying after the scents of who knows what terrified wild creatures on rocky face across the gap.
It is still a wild place up here. Five years later still no electricity and none in the planning. Maybe solar power some day. Human encroachment creeps toward the boundaries of your fabled Rabbit Rock.
But those antique oil lamps and chandeliers you restored, and take pride in lighting every night you’re up here, give your lodge a romantic glow that Hollywood’s Industrial Light and Magic would have a hard time replicating. I feel so fortunate to be back here tonight in this golden light, in front of this warm and cozy woodstove in the winter of 2004. The full moon shines on the silent snow outside. In my turbulent and troubled life I have found nothing more rejuvenating than my trips to Rabbit Rock. The hawks flying over, the turkeys ambling through the woods, the elusive coyotes howling in the night, make me feel a part of an ancient family of wild creatures still making a way for themselves in a shrinking wilderness.
Thank you, Deborah, for your vision, your generosity and your respect for the earth and all things on it.
Love always,
Larry
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