The Mountain is proof that you can come home again
The house where I grew up and that in 2021 has been in our family for 63 years. My parents bought the Homestead house in 1958 from its original owners, the Galyons. The addition was built in 1968.
My name is Rusty Graham and I am both of and from the mountain.
That’s what we call this little piece of the Cumberland Plateau — the mountain. And although I’ve been away from the mountain for most of my adult life, it forever beckons and calls me and when I return it welcomes me back. I was born to it and it’s forever my home. It’s where I’m from and who I am. I am the mountain and the mountain is me.
My dad was Wayne Graham, the second oldest of the eight children produced from the union of Paul and Elizabeth (Hinch) Graham. Vance (deceased) was the oldest, followed by Wayne (deceased), Betty (Threet), Sam, Paulette (Reed), Sola (Goss), Jerry and Judy (Swallows). If you’ve spent any time at all on the mountain then you likely know one or more of them. With only some exception they never left the mountain and if they did, they got back as soon as they could.
The mountain calls. The mountain receives.
Wayne Graham from Howard Springs, Cumberland County High School class of 1955, and Sandy Wright from Crab Orchard, CCHS class of 1956, married in 1957 and within three years my sister Storme and I were born, followed a few years later by sister Molly. We were a typical mountain family. Our lives revolved around church, school and family, and family meant extended family. We were Grahams so we had a passel of cousins who we were always around. I look back and it was a fairly magical time. The lens of time removes a lot of the noise and focuses on all that was good. And it was all pretty good to begin with.
Wayne Graham was a forester (he never had a degree) who managed tree farms for Hiwassee Land Company, a subsidiary of Bowater Paper Company. He was a deacon at Homestead Baptist Church and served on the Kids Inc. board and was elected to the Cumberland County Board of Education. He loved the mountain, and it loved him. It seemed like he knew everyone here and everyone knew him. Sandy Graham was quite popular as well and worked a series of administrative jobs, then once my older sister and I left home, went back to school and earned a teaching degree and retired as an elementary school teacher, most of it at Pleasant Hill Elementary. Neither left the mountain during that time.
The mountain sustains.
I spent years running from the mountain and all it represented. I was born in Cumberland Medical Center in 1960 and grew up in the same Homestead house that my family still owns and uses. I went all the way through Homestead Elementary and I graduated from Cumberland County High School in 1978. My dad died in the summer of 1973, when I was 12. I was devastated. I still am. After high school, for any number of reasons that I’m just now discovering — maybe uncovering is the better word — I ran from the mountain, leaving a trail of self-destructive behavior behind me.
Three colleges in two years with virtually no credit to show for it led me to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, where I was a crash-rescue firefighter for four years, two of those overseas. I’ve always been privately proud of my service, and that I’m reconnecting with my buddies from that time brings me happiness, joy even. They’re still some of my best friends, nearly 40 years later. Now that supporting the military and veterans is cool again, I’m a little more publicly proud. My service and my reasons for serving are still personal. But I’m happy that veterans who appreciate — and absolutely deserve — that attention are finally getting it. But I digress.
Upon discharge from the Air Force, I came back to Crossville. Of course. It was the summer of 1984 and I fully intended to resume higher education at the University of Tennessee that fall. But through a friend I fell into a reporter’s job at the Crossville Chronicle, the genesis of a career in journalism.
The mountain nurtures.
Once again feeling constricted by the familiarity of the mountain, that my business was not always my own, I jumped when presented an opportunity in Texas, spending the next few years there until I hit the no-degree wall and needed to finish college. My best option was to return to Crossville and prepare to go on to UT. I lived in the family Homestead house and got basics out of the way at Roane State, this time loving school as much as I had despised it before.
The mountain clarifies.
I went on to UT and after earning my bachelor’s I worked for short time at the Fairfield Glade Bulletin, a job I got after bumping into a high school friend at Dairy Queen. But it wasn’t long before I needed to run again, back to Texas and a job at a mid-size daily newspaper. I met my future wife and we moved to Houston, had a terrific son and got divorced. Life happens. I held a series of journalism jobs, including a teaching stint at Texas A&M, as editor of a group of weekly newspapers in Houston and working in communications for a large urban school district.
Gnawing at me through it all — my career, my marriage, my divorce, my whole life, really, since that summer of 1973 — was the notion of the mountain. Not the mountain itself, although that unique geography begins to explain mountain values and mountain culture. It was those values and culture that I wanted to understand. My dad — the embodiment of mountain values — never left the mountain, permanently anyway. During his illness he spent time in a hospital in Knoxville. When he knew that his time on earth was nearing its end, he asked to be brought back to the mountain to die. He was, and he did. He died on the mountain where he was born and where he lived. His physical remains are still here.
The mountain calls you home.
I began to get myself into a position to quit working at a real job — I am NOT retired — and explore my own interests, chief among them the mountain. I’m not back here all the way but I’m spending a lot more time in Crossville and Cumberland County, looking at the mountain through the eyes of those who are here and especially through the eyes of those who knew my dad. I’m beginning to see the what and why of the mountain and its magic.
The mountain reveals.
Crossville is a different place today than the small town where I grew up. Folks from other places have discovered something of its power and have moved here and call it home. Maybe it’s the natural beauty. Maybe it’s the four distinct seasons. Maybe it’s the people who are already here. Maybe it’s the golf courses. Maybe it’s the Vols. I just don’t yet know.
But I do know the mountain calls. And, thank God, the mountain receives.
rpdgraham@gmail.com