Distilled: The Legend of Jane Bald - Debra Mihalic Staples
On a September morning, I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail from Carvers Gap toward Jane Bald, retracing the 150-year-old steps of the woman for whom it’s named. Sun and clouds pattern the mountains with wandering shadows as the trail’s white blaze leads me across the balds, a stretch of open summits known as the Roan Highlands, on the borderline between Tennessee and North Carolina. Ascending Jane Bald on feet made heavy by altitude, I still feel I might levitate, so intense is the alchemy of light, wind, and space. It’s a warm day, but autumn has already arrived here: Gusts ruffle blond grasses, yellow-leaved beautyberry twigs hold blue clusters, Roan Mountain goldenrod glows.
When the wind subsides, scents of rock and soil arise, along with sounds of small creatures scuttling unseen through the brush. Then the wind rises again. Abrasive, it tears through the meadows, skirls down the slopes, scours particles from my skin to make me part of the landscape. The trail is rocky in places, worn down into the soil bed in others, over-loved. Maneuvering my bulky, booted feet past each other in the trenched parts narrows my attention to the trail’s history and how its existence reaches into time the way the mountain silhouettes stretch into shades of blue—not in a line, but in folds and waves.
A weathered wooden sign marks the 5,807-foot summit of Jane Bald, named for Jane Cook, a young North Carolina woman. One long-told version of the story is that she was hiking home from visiting relatives in November of 1870 when, after falling ill with milk sickness, she collapsed here and died. Back then, milk sickness, a form of tremetol-poisoning, was a common but poorly understood affliction, caused by drinking milk from animals who had grazed on a frothy-flowered plant called white snakeroot.
But the truth is Jane Cook didn’t die here, according to the late Elsie Cook Yelton. In an interview with the newspaper Johnson City Press, published March 29, 1999, she said Jane was accompanied by her sister, Harriet, and it was Harriet, not Jane, who was stricken with milk sickness and collapsed on the bald. Elsie Cook Yelton was the daughter of Harriet’s son, Flem, who was a young child when his mother died. Harriet and Jane’s sister, Judy, raised Flem and told him what happened to Harriet, which he later related to Elsie. She told how Jane and Harriet, both in their early twenties, made the long trek across the Roan Highlands to visit two of their sisters who lived on the Tennessee side of the mountains. Elsie also included this account in a collection of family stories she published in 2005, Where the Dogwood Blooms.
Pausing on the trail, I wonder if a landscape holds remnants of what happened there, retaining the intangible, shadowy afterimages of events, reverberating with what’s left unresolved. Sorrow is stitched to Jane Bald by my knowledge of its naming story, so it already had an association of sadness for me before I arrived, yet I don’t sense it here today. Instead, I feel the buoyancy I experience in high, windswept places. Maybe if you go someplace expecting to feel a certain way, you’ve already stifled whatever primal sense might have been stirred by shades of past incidents. Or it might be that the presence of so many other hikers enjoying the trail today distracts me. I want to test my hypothesis, visit Jane Bald at a time when no one else is here and lie for a while on the tufted grasses—smell the plants and earth, hear the wind strum over it all, watch the clouds travel the broad expanse of sky.
But I’m here now, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to return. I move off the trail, turn away from the stream of other hikers. Leaning on my hiking pole, I gaze over the meadow and follow the path of the wind through the grasses, listen to its wails and whispers, wait for the story.
#
Harriet and Jane, wrapped in shawls against the chill of the November morning, ascended Roan Mountain. At times when the trees cast shadows across their path and reminded them panthers, bears, and wolves roamed these woods, they broke into a song for courage, relieved when the trail finally emerged from the forest. They paused, hearts pounding from the climb, then, after catching their breath, they set out across the high, rounded balds. They walked the path at a swift pace; their skirts, one blue, one green, rippled with their movements. Jane carried a basket holding wedges of cornbread wrapped in a cloth, a few apples, and two jars of water. It would take the rest of the daylight hours to cross the spine of the Highlands and descend into Tennessee, where they’d spend several days visiting with two of their sisters, who had settled there with their husbands.
Their hard-soled, boot-like shoes, worn over home-knitted wool stockings, chafed their feet, but discomfort was so common an occurrence in their lives it was something they could easily ignore during this rare spell of freedom from housework, farm chores, all the tasks and demands of their days. For Harriet, it was also a respite from caring for her two-year-old son, Flem, who was being looked after by Judy, her older sister. She marveled at how she already missed him.
They’d initially planned their journey for earlier in the year but postponed it when Harriet first fell ill with milk-sickness, and she hadn’t felt well again until lately. Now it was November, but they were having a stretch of fine weather; shorter days and winter snows were coming, so if they didn’t go now, it would be months before they’d have another chance to visit their sisters. The weight of their absence had grown too heavy to bear. The recent Civil War had taken loved ones from them, including their brother, Bill, whose loss grieved them deeply. They’d lived through raids from both armies and the desperation of surviving on the meager leavings. After what they’d endured, the prospect of a lengthy, strenuous journey on foot was worth it to see their kin, despite the risk of a turn in the weather. The beauty of the route was already lifting their spirits.
Their long day on the trail gave them the luxury of talking with each other uninterrupted, a scarce occurrence in their large family, yet often they fell into contemplative silence. They stopped on the crest of the Highlands and perched on a sun-warmed outcrop to rest while they ate their food and drank the water they’d carried from their home spring, gazing out over the waves of blue-gray mountains that reached toward the horizon in every direction, awed by the magnificent breadth of open sky. Then, propelled by anticipation of the reunion with their sisters and the knowledge that they had just enough time to arrive by dark, they headed down the mountainside into Tennessee.
Jane and Harriet remained a few days with their sisters, then on the day they departed, they left with plenty of time to arrive home in Dogwood Flats before nightfall. But the steep climb and the altitude on the Highlands strained Harriet’s illness-weakened body. Their progress slowed as she struggled against pain, nausea, shortness of breath.
They made their halting way back across the balds, following the path through pale grasses whipped sideways by a wind-driven cold front. Their flapping skirts, muted to tones of gray in the failing light, impeded their progress as Jane supported her sister, her steps paced to match Harriet’s, whose arms wrapped her torso, her head bowed. Suddenly Harriet folded to the ground. Jane kneeled beside her, alarmed now. She pleaded with Harriet to get up, to try again, but when she realized Harriet was far too ill to go on, she pulled her to a softer place, then curled around her. She sheltered Harriet with her own body through the long hours of roaring darkness, of bitter cold, of Harriet’s cries of pain, then delirium, convulsions, and finally comatose silence.
As morning light leaked into the sky, Jane murmured to Harriet, who was still breathing, that she was going for help. She stumbled down the mountainside through clouds gone to ground, keeping her gaze to the path so she didn’t lose her way in the fog. So cold she could barely move her limbs, she reached a cabin below Carvers Gap. The man who greeted her agreed to retrieve Harriet in his wagon, and they rode back up the mountain as far as they could, then climbed the rest of the way on foot. Together they carried Harriet down to the wagon, then carted her over the rough road to Dogwood Flats.
Harriet died at home later that morning. Jane went on to live into her nineties, bearing the memory of that November night when she did all she could to keep Harriet in this world.
#
Standing on Jane Bald as the cloud shadows wheel over the mountainsides all around me until I feel I’m in the center of a kaleidoscope, I think about this story I’ve conjured. Bits of it came from what I’d already learned from Elsie Cook Yelton’s accounts. My imagination supplied other parts. Perhaps the rest was simply here, in this landscape—truth fragments drifting on currents of time, snagged by my attention.
But that fable of a woman named Jane who died of milk sickness on the bald continues to surface from time to time. While most of the trail guidebooks I’ve consulted carry a summary of the facts behind the naming of Jane Bald, the persistence of that inaccurate version—as a woman’s solo journey that ended in tragedy—is telling. When it comes to legends, who gets a say in what is presented as truth, and why? Often, cultural attitudes creep in to shape the narratives. In this case, a fable was condensed from the vapor of truth until it not only eliminated Harriet completely, but also truncated Jane’s role, leaving out her efforts to keep Harriet alive. It implied that Jane perished from illness on the bald after walking the trail unaccompanied. Thus distilled, it became a cautionary tale: Women shouldn’t walk these mountains alone.
This is an admonition familiar in some form to women who hike solo. It’s not unusual to meet a lone female thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail, yet it’s still more likely that she will encounter precautions from others, however well-meant, than a male hiker will. The same holds true for us female day hikers; we are cautioned against hiking alone, as well as hiking only with other women. Yet we go anyway. We understand the risks, we’ve seen the news stories, but we also know the presence of companions, regardless of gender, is no guarantee of safe travel. Sometimes we need to go hiking with only ourselves, or a kindred soul or two, for company.
I imagine this was true of Jane and Harriet. They probably received resistance when they planned their journey; they lived in the nineteenth century, a time when young women’s daily lives were weighed down with rules of propriety. However, I suspect many of those rules were impractical, if not impossible, to apply to the lives of rural women. Raised in these mountains, Jane and Harriet didn’t feel the need for an escort to visit their sisters in Tennessee; they wanted to go, so they went. If Harriet hadn’t been ill, chances are they would have made it home safe by nightfall.
Watching a patch of sunlight glide across the slope below, illuminating each leaf and blade of grass, turning the red berries on the mountain ash into Christmas lights, I want to believe that at some time in Jane’s long life she climbed to the Roan Highlands again. I hope she stood alone on this bald and let the winds scour away layers of grief until she could smile at the memory of the day she and Harriet set out on the last journey they would ever take together. This place officially bears Jane’s name, but a few local folks haven’t forgotten Harriet; I’ve heard them refer to a lower nearby rise as Harriet Bald, and the shallow gap linking it with Jane Bald as Sister Saddle.
When I resume my hike over Jane Bald, I pass the remnants of someone’s recent camp—ashes marking where a fire burned inside a stone circle, flattened grass in the shape of a solitary sleeping bag. I wonder if that sleeper, lying in the meadow under the September stars, heard the wind and dreamed it was the voice of a dying woman. Or perhaps they dreamed instead of two young women passing by on the trail, laughing together as they journeyed across the Roan Highlands, their long skirts ruffled by the wind.
THE END
Originally published by Wild Roof Journal: Issue 19, March 2023
Debra Mihalic Staples lives in north Georgia. Her writing has appeared in Still: The Journal, High Country News, Wild Roof Journal, Gastropoda, Catfish Stew Volume III: Tender Morsels of Fine Southern Literature, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel: Contemporary Appalachian Writing, South Carolina Wildlife, and elsewhere. She was a two-time winner in the South Carolina Arts Commission Fiction Project.
