Mountain Ways, Plain

By Horace Judson

THE FOXFIRE BOOK

edited by ELIOT WIGGINTON 3

84 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.

Up in the hills of northern Georgia, tucked into a bony corner against the two Carolinas, is Rabun. It is a gap in the mountains, a county, a town and a school district named after the gap.

In recent years each generation has gone back to the mountains to save something vital of the country's sense of identity. Alan Lomax in the '30s, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger since, rescued what they could of the songs and music.

Six years ago, Eliot Wigginton came from Cornell, newly stuffed with Shakespeare and ideals, to face his first English classes at Rabun Gap. Within weeks his students taught him that they were bored beyond insubordination. He threw texts away, sent the kids out to raise the funds to start their own magazine and then into the hills and hollows with notebooks, tape recorders and cameras to study the techniques and graces of living on an all but vanished frontier. "Daily our grandparents are moving out of our lives," Wigginton writes in his brief preface. "When they're gone, the magnificent hunting tales, the ghost stories that kept a thousand children sleepless, the intricate tricks of self-sufficiency acquired through years of trial and error . . . all these go with them, and what a loss." What the students brought back could have been as tiresome as any other high school magazine; in fact, Foxfire has been coming out quarterly ever since, gathering subscriptions across the U.S. Presented in this anthology, the material has the straight, tough grain of authenticity.

Foxfire? The students chose the name; it is a tiny phosphorescent organism that gleams on old stumps and logs in shaded glens. In Foxfire the anthology, Lon Reid, a grizzled, quiet-spoken mountaineer, demonstrates how to make a tall-backed wooden chair, altogether by hand, just as he learned from his own father. Photos, diagrams and his taped words capture the craft completely. They also catch the man. A collection of hunting stories grows taller and taller, ending of course with bear; it is capped by old Minyard Conner's scandalous yarn of how his granddaddy killed the bear that caught him with his britches down.

Andrea Burrell gets her grandmother to show how to make soap from lye and lard. U.G. McCoy tells how to skin and cook a coon. There are home remedies, snake lore, weather signs, quilt patterns and stitches, faith healing and mountain recipes: carrot pudding, a century-old recipe for gingerbread, even fried pumpkin and Spanish blossoms.

Survival Shelf. The splendid set pieces of the book explain the intricate classic art of building a log cabin, notch by hand-hewn notch, the principles of stone chimney construction, the shingles split from the white oak log with wedges, go-devil, maul and froe. And how to feed up, slaughter, dress out, pepper cure, smoke, cook and eat a hog, with two opinions about what one does with the ears, which are gristly. Not to mention a dissertation on moonshining as a fine art--by men who practiced it well.

There is hardly any sentimentality here, but much clear-eyed love and some surprising beauty. Among the most beautiful people in the book is a superb old lady of 85 named Aunt Arie, who lives alone in a log cabin with well water and the food she raises. One of Wigginton's editors writes, introducing a long conversation with Aunt Arie, "As we talked, she told me how she used to live, but without feeling sorry for herself and without saying how many miles she walked to school each day."

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