“Here is a railroad spike. Wait! Here is another.”
A recent Saturday morning hike found my hiking companions and I on a mountain trail that followed an old, long abandoned railroad track. As was so often the case, the CCC workers build trails that followed the course where once railroad tracks had been laid. Many of the trails now used in the Pisgah, Cherokee, and Nantahala National Forest, and in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are such trails. The trails are along some of the beautiful streams that descend from the slopes of the majestic mountains in these areas. No doubt, it made the tasks of building hiking trails easier for the CCC workers to simply follow, modifying as they went, these old railroad beds, turning them into wonderful places to trek.
As my companions and I walk some of these trails we, using our imaginations, often talk about the nature of the work of the loggers and those responsible for moving the logs down the mountains to the sawmills and railroad yards for shipping to paper mills and furniture factories in towns and cities located “elsewhere”. The work must have been hard, demanding, and very dangerous. For those responsible for cutting the trees, piling and burning the brush, “snaking” the cut trees down the slopes by using horses/mules/oxen, and then handling the trees once they got them off the slopes, the labor involved was tough. In the days, when most of the cutting of the timber from the mountains was done, there were no chainsaws and hydraulic lifts to use to make their work easier. The tools they used were “double-bit” axes, crosscut saws, peavies, snatch-blocks, go-devils, gluts, trace-chains, double-trees, yokes, mule and horse harness (sometimes called “gears”), and lots of sweat, brute strength, and common sense. For those responsible for the “narrow-gauge” railroads (used for transporting the logs), the work was just as hard and just as demanding and just as dangerous. It is hard to imagine all that was involved in engineering, building, laying steel tracks and cross-ties, running the trains, loading and unloading the logs, and then in pulling up the tracks and relocating the whole train to another hollow in order to repeat the whole process again. In today’s, one hundred plus years removed, world it is hard to even imagine what all of that was like. With all of the technological and mechanical advancements that mark our world we struggle to comprehend the world of “back then”.
On this particular Saturday morning, as we made our way down the mountain, beside a rushing crystal clear stream, we were walking the trail that followed and an old railroad path. As we walked we were enjoying the beauty of the morning. We were surrounded by beautiful and abundant wildflowers in a vast array of colors. Our conversation was in regards to the history of the area in which we were walking. Looking down, as I plotted my next footstep, I saw a rusty old steel railroad spike laying on the ground. Immediately I stopped, stooped over, and retrieved it from the ground. Proudly, I held it in my hand and showed it to my companions saying, “Here is a railroad spike”. We looked it over closely and discussed the fact that the spike had (probably) been laying here for more than 100 years. Given that fact, we decided to take it with us. One of my companions had an empty Gatorade plastic bottle, which would be a good place to store it for the rest of our journey. As we placed the spike in the container I looked down at my feet. Low and behold, there was another one laying on the ground. I said, “Wait! Here is another”. Thus, we finished our hike with a wonderful day for reflection and remembering; and two rusty steel railroad spikes. That is hard to beat!