BACK TO WAR VALLEY
By Mike Faulk

From the duck blind on this frosty morn, I was on my way back to the cabin when – about a hundred yards north of my destination – the smoke from the dwindling wood fire hit me like a ton of bricks. Some how, in an instant, the smell of that fire transported me fifty years across time to Mamaw and Papaw’s old farm house in War Valley.

Rural electrification came to Hawkins County in the late forties and early fifties. “Juice” was then added to the old house – but just barely.

A single wire dangled from the center of the room that was furnished with their old bed and a half-dozen ladder-back chairs in a half-moon configuration ringing the fireplace area. A lone bulb with no shade or fixture lighted the room. The light was turned off and on by a switch activated by a string attached to the footboard of the bed.

Mamaw cooked on a woodstove which doubled as the kitchen heat source. There was no running water. The well shaft was just outside the kitchen porch. The black cast-iron kettle insured a ready supply of hot, unfrozen water.

The outhouse was about 40 yards from the front door on the side of a bank across the farm road from the corn crib. I hated the rooster that seemed to stand guard over the corn crib. The privy was a “two-holer” with ample quantities of old newspapers and pages from the last year’s Sears catalog. The cold and that old rooster made winter trips to the facility of short duration.

Growing up in the fifties meant Sunday socializing – mostly with family. The trek from Silver Lake Road in Church Hill to the Dykes’ farm in War Valley seemed to take hours. It was really only about fifteen miles across the old McPheeter’s Bend bridge, down Goshen Valley Road to Mowl’s mill, and then up War Valley Road to the old well house where the daily milking pales were emptied into those big milk cans.

Mowl’s mill dam is a historic site in my book. From there, I caught my first bluegill. The burning of the old mill predates my memory. But I recall the jump from the bank across the millrace to the dam - a quantum leap for a six year old. But I digress.

Winter visits to Mamaw and Papaw’s involved the adults sitting in the chairs surrounding the fireplace and the youngsters pushing and shoving for position on the hearth nearest the fire. We were allowed to remain in front of the fire long enough to warm the seat of our britches and then, after rotating 180 degrees - our faces. Then it was someone else’s turn.

It was that smell when I faced Carson and Lurlie’s fireplace that somehow, maybe through time travel, or a worm hole, or some other cosmic dimension, transcended fifty years and found its way to my olfactory senses on this cold November morning. I don’t know where those memories had been. But they’re mighty powerful now – more powerful than the TVA “juice” that first lit the old Dykes farm house five decades before.