Great Buzzard

The Cherokee legend of how these mountains around Asheville were created is beautiful.  The Cherokee believe that at the beginning of time, all animals were Great Animals, giants who lived in the sky.  The Earth was covered with water.  One day the Great Water Beetle's curiosity drove him to dive beneath the water.  He brought up some mud.  The mud began to pile together.  While the ground was still wet, the giant Buzzard flew through the sky. 

 He grew tired as he approached the land of the Cherokee and began to sink down and fly closer to Earth.  His great wings swooped down and hit the Earth, creating a valley, and as they swooped back up they created the mountains we see today.

These mountains around Asheville are home for me.  My family is from here and their stories help define this place as home for me.  My grandparents met at the skating rink (where the Orange Peel is now) when they were teenagers.  Their parents raised them on biscuits and pork through the Great Depression.  

 (Asheville 1940s)

My grandfather is now buried in Candler, next to the tiny shack of a house he was raised in.  His childhood poverty left him, and his siblings, greedy and power-hungry later in life--joining country clubs and anxiously counting their millions made through the boom in the eighties.  It feels right for him to be right back where he started.  

My uncle owned a bar with sawdust on the floor on Lexington through the 70s, when Asheville was in a very serious period of decline. His wife was busty, crass, and still cusses like she's sitting on a barstool, as we sit in her living room and drink tea out of china bought from the flea market.  

 I'm proud of my family's stories, because they've taught me lessons of how to live my own life.  A new story over the same ground as their old.

 Perhaps the Great Buzzard in the Cherokee myth didn't create the mountains with his giant wings, but this story helped to shape the Cherokee's perception of the world they saw around them.  Perhaps they looked out on these mountains and saw that the Great Buzzard had made something majestic from the muddy ground.  Perhaps they saw that the beauty wasn't lessened because it was accidental.  From what I know of the Cherokee, they lived their lives this way, creating magic from the Earth and appreciating the accidents of nature.

 I can't choose where I'm from and who my family is, but I can chose the stories that define me.  And I choose to see the beauty in this great "accident" of life.  I choose to embrace the stories of my past and of my family and make them beautiful in my memory.  In this way the stories create me, but I create them as well.