Curves, tunnels, steep ascents, unnerving drops down the mountain when the weight of the train threatens to overrun the engine and send the whole enterprise cascading down into ruin.

Life is like that.

^{Phoebe, left, and Poe look me over and wonder if he can be trusted, this strange man who has taken them into his home. Will we be fed, and loved? Will we be sheltered from life’s storms? Who is this man anyway? Why are we here? (Click the image for an expanded view)}

And, fight it or not, there are times when the brakes don’t hold. The cars jump their couplings and somersault ahead, tumbling over the engine in a great squeal of rending metal and the futile cries of our despair.

We’re never prepared.

We’ve always known it was coming. True, we’ve never known the day, the hour, let alone the minute the call would come. But we’ve know it was coming.

And come it does, just as we knew it would, catching us unawares and unready, off balance and out of sorts. Every damn time.

And I know that Phoebe and Poe are out of sorts as well. Loved ones — be they four-legged or two — always are at times like these.

We believe we can never know exactly how dogs feel, can never know exactly what they must be thinking, but we should not find that strange. It’s the same with other people. We can never really stand in their shoes either.

The best we can do, I guess, is practice empathy and extend grace — four legs or two.

And that’s what we’re trying now. And on Day 2 it’s going about as badly or as well as you might expect: In other words, we are making it up as we go.

At least Phoebe and Poe are easy going and wise in the way 12-year-old dogs can be, and wisdom certainly doesn’t hurt if you’re baking a dish without a recipe — as we are doing.

Wish us luck.

Stone cabins were less common than log buildings in early Appalachian life, but families made do with what was readily at hand — and there was no shortage of rock.

So I wasn’t surprised when I discovered the remains of a stone cabin in the woods off the road leading to the mountain-top radio towers off Tatham Gap Road. The cabin was about a mile from the fork where the road splits on its route from Andrews, North Carolina, to Robbinsville.

It offered a near perfect example of how families lived in these mountains in the late 1700- and early 1800s.

The remains of the rock cabin and outhouse along Radio-Tower Road are typical of homes from that era.

They can seem almost impossibly small to us now. It’s a windowless structure, roughly 16 feet by 20 feet — perhaps a bit smaller — but enough back in those days to shelter a full family.

The outhouse or privy sits about 100 feet away, and also is made of stone. The nearest neighbor was likely miles away.

The cabins were known as “pens” for their windowless, solid wall designs. They had a single door and a large fireplace for cooking and heat. The emphasis during construction was on speed of building, and function and durability over comfort.

They were built to last and survive harsh winters and mountain storms. Apart from the roof, this one has survived some 200 years of mountain winters and summers.

Birds called from the woods, and I put my hand on Hazel’s head to calm her while I squatted on the edge of the ravine and listened. Apart from the birds, the only other sound was the wind breathing through the trees and moving the first green shoots of spring.

All else was quiet atop the mountain.

Hazel and I were alone except for the ghosts of the long dead Cherokee that must haunt these peaks on Tatham Gap Road, or Forest Service Road 423, a section of the 5,000-mile long Trail of Tears that marks one of the early but ongoing efforts by our country to get rid of our non-white residents — to kidnap, imprison, kill or oust them and claim this world of vast spaces for our own, more white, more European kind.

It is, as I say, an ongoing campaign — this relentless effort to rid ourselves of the other.

And 143 years ago, these woods would have been alive with the cries and tears of the Cherokee, who were corralled in their home valleys and force-marched to more barren lands, less desirable lands in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma.

When it came time to kidnap and imprison the Cherokee, the U.S. Army cleared and widened an ancient Native American path from the Cheoah Valley in Graham County, North Carolina, through Long Creek Valley and over Snowbird Mountain until they reached Pile Ridge in Cherokee County where they would hold the prisoners until they could be driven like cattle to the Oklahoma Territory.

Some 17,000 were forced from their homes in North Carolina and surrounding states, with more than 4,000 of them dying along the way. The old, the young and the feeble were first to go, and then many of the healthy — all ravaged by cold, rain, heat or snow, and weakened by shock, abuse, mistreatment, indifference and hunger.

It was as American as America today where masked and heavily armed troops have been sicced by a vile federal administration on “alien” immigrants in communities from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to New Iberia, Louisiana, from California to Connecticut.

Like the Cherokee of old, the new unwanted are being housed in pop-up prisons designed for cruelty and callousness, managed by private, for-profit Gestapos — the CEO Group, CoreCivic and others that are running these charnel houses of capitalist evil — the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, the Karnes County Detention Center in Texas, the South Florida Detention Center, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” in the cypress swamps of south Florida, and others.

It’s almost as if is 1838 all over again.

It’s older than America, of course, and probably is as old as our species. Riots broke out in London in 1517 as anger over immigrant workers boiled over, eventually making their way into a play credited to William Shakespeare.

This speech from the play is delivered to the angry crowd by London Sheriff Thomas More. He asks the rioters to imagine that they themselves are the immigrants being attacked:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.”

A few Cherokee, of course, didn’t make the trip at all. They hid out in the mountains along the Trail of Tears and avoided the interloping new-comers for years, rebuilding their society and lives day by day until they reassembled the rudiments of a nation.

Today the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina controls approximately 57,000 acres of land, primarily the Qualla Boundary near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

But the stink of what we did as a nation has endured and will endure long after the deaths of all of us complaining about the hoards of immigrants supposedly taking our jobs, raping our daughters and buying up all the homes in our lands.

Eating our pets, I hear.

How easily we forget our history. How easily we neglect to live by the precepts taught us as children. How easily we sell our souls.

Before he died, he wrote songs. Good ones. He wrote “No Deeper Blue,” “I’ll be Here in the Morning,” “Be Here to Love Me,” “If I Needed You,” Pancho & Lefty,” and a whole lot more. He wrote “Rex’s Blues.”

Haunted throughout his life, he wrote songs to help keep the visitants at bay. He sang the good songs. He wrote better ones. He sang those songs too.

And on New Year’s Day, 1997, Townes Van Zandt died from cardiac arrhythmia aggravated by years of drug and alcohol addiction.

He was 52 years old.

“He sang about how precious it was to be alive yet spent a good deal of his life killing himself with drugs and alcohol.” — Michael Hall, Texas Monthly

He came from money, from an old Texas family that has a county named for them — Van Zandt County, about fifty miles east of Dallas. Townes Hall, the main building at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, is named for his great-grandfather on his mother’s side.

But Van Zandt didn’t care for money. He lived much of his life on the open road. If he came into any money along the way, he usually gambled it away; He preferred the company of outcasts, outlaws and the poor.

“You were living a lie if you sang the blues and hadn’t lived them,” he once told his first wife, Fran.

He lived them.

If I Needed You

If I needed you, would you come to me?
Would you come to me and ease my pain?
If you needed me, I would come to you
I’d swim the seas for to ease your pain

Well, in the night forlorn, oh, the morning’s born
And the morning shines with the lights of love
And you will miss sunrise if you close your eyes
And that would break my heart in two

The lady’s with me now since I showed her how
To lay her lily hand in mine
Loop and Lil agree, she’s a sight to see
A treasure for the poor to find

Well, if I needed you, would you come to me?
Would you come to me and ease my pain?
If you needed me, I would come to you
I would swim the seas for to ease your pain