Storyhunting and Spying For Unexpected Thresholds

 

When you see a little two-track road that sneaks between the fence of an abandoned gypsum mine and and sternly marked "private property" and then disappears into a mysterious wood? 

You should absolutely drive down that road because it's guaranteed to be constituted by secrets, mystery and forgotten beauty.  You can also be sure that the spirit of sneaking down that quiet seemingly-deserted road will stay inside of you and guide you down other roads that you might otherwise pass by.  

Small roads marked "Dead End,"  which won't actually truly dead-end until you've seen all kinds of cleverly re-imagined, expressively-adorned former mobile-homes and tiny saltbox houses now embedded into the mountain's slope and making thriving homes for hard-working and imaginative inhabitants.  

And actually the "dead end" will be a new threshold once you arrive.  The ambiguous way the trees and and another fence and a parklike lawn will invite you to get out of the car?  That'll spark creative justifications for  trekking beside more No Trespassing signs (not past them, just parallel to them,) until you work yourself to the place where the road used to cross the North Fork Holston, and you'll find a ghost bridge that used to be half owned by Washington County and half owned by Smyth County, a bridge where long ago the the first unsolved murder in these parts happened.  

You'll find out later how a throat was slit at midnight in the dead center of that bridge.  Maybe both of them had been drinking at the bars that no longer adorn the river's edge here?  Later that day, you'll hear, too, how neither county wanted to claim jurisdiction for investigating the crime, because maybe the murder would unearth too many old stories and implications, grudges and slights.   And so instead the murder remains unsolved (a kind of ghost) and the bridge has disappeared too.  

But hold on to the spirit of the secret road.  It will take you more places you never would have gone, but places that will make you into a better kind of person.  More curious, more reverent, less obedient and more attentive to all the thresholds before you.

#storyhunting with the wise and wonderful Connie Collins.