Story Frame 64 – My Next Film Idea: The Mountains’ll Gitcha

One year for Christmas, I ordered a t-shirt for Leif from Slightly Stoopid, a rock band from California. Inspired by Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Def Leppard, Slightly Stoopid describes their music as "a fusion of folk, rock, reggae and blues with hip-hop, funk, metal and punk."

At the time, Slightly Stoopid was one of his favorite bands. I liked their music, too. "Girl U So Fine," released in August 2007, was one of my favorite songs ever. I loved the guitar work by Miles Doughty and Kyle McDonald.

When the t-shirt arrived, however, I felt slightly stoopid myself realizing I’d inadvertently ordered a child’s size. Luckily, there were still a few weeks left before Christmas, and I had an idea.

Just down the main road that connected the downtown area to my neighborhood by the lake, there was a little business in a little building over a little wine shop that was called Mary’s Magic. After a steep climb up the long flight of stairs on the left of the building, you entered into a warren of rickety old rooms housing Mary herself, and the seamstresses she employed “from the counties” – mountain women who liked to sew, gossip with one another, and pause for a cigarette in between their sewing projects.

Still needing one last gift for Leif, I brought the black t-shirt into her to see if she could make it into a pillow. She took it into her hands, turned it over and over, then laughed and said, well sure, why not.

I don’t know how old Mary was at the time. With her graying hair and kind dark eyes behind her glasses, she’d reached that age known vaguely as ‘ageless.’ What I did know, however, was that she was a great seamstress and full of piss and vinegar once she felt comfortable talking to you. Mary considered herself “mountain folk” and as an outsider, and a Northerner at that, it had taken her a while to warm up to me.

Once she saw I was a repeat customer, one who was genuinely interested in hearing her stories, if she wasn’t too busy, she would entertain me with a tale or two of mountain life and culture. I took to calling her “Magic Mary,” an affectionate inversion of the name on her business sign.

Fortunately, I’d arrived with my slightly stupid t-shirt-to-pillow project on a not very busy day, and so I took the opportunity to ask Magic Mary about something I’d overheard not long before.

“Have you ever heard an expression, “The mountains‘ll git ya?” I said, in my best imitation of a Southern accent. She looked surprised.

“Ho, yes!” she said laughing. (That’s not a typo. Around these parts, it’s not unusual to hear the word “oh” pronounced backwards. I think this is for emphasis.)

I told her I’d recently wandered into the outfitters store in Weaverville, no more than a few miles up the road. While there, I’d overheard a group of men man-gossiping about something somebody had done – apparently something they didn’t approve of. While I couldn’t make out the exact nature of the crime from behind the displays of fishing and hunting gear I was hiding behind, I did hear the verdict loud and clear.

“The mountains’ll git ‘im!,” one man said, a statement that was received with a chorus of approving grunts.

I was taken with the idea that these old mountains could inflict justice or revenge upon those who deserved it and had made a mental note to ask Magic Mary about it. If anyone knew, she would.

“Is that really a thing?” I asked after we’d finished with the t-shirt details.

“Ho yes,” she said again, this time with a serious expression on her face. “The stories I could tell you!”

“Like what?” I asked, always up for good stories and already thinking what a cool idea this might be for a documentary.

“Well, I could tell you a lot of them!” she said. “Like the time I had a customer who brought me a whole bunch of her clothes to alter, but then never came back to pick them up! And then, many months later, out of the blue, she finally stopped by. I asked her why it had taken her so long. And she told me she and her husband, who had a lot of money, had put in a contract to buy up someone’s family land for development.”

Here Mary paused for dramatic effect. Knowing the subject of outsiders coming in and buying up mountain folk’s lands, especially if they were unable to pay the taxes on it, was a touchy one, I leaned in to listen even more closely.

“And…?” I said, prompting her.

“He died on the morning they were supposed to close on the deal!” she said triumphantly. “He had a heart attack jesht like that!”

She nodded her head for emphasis, satisfied with the justice the mountains had apparently meted out.

“Tell me another one!” I said, mentally setting up film shoots and interviews.

Over the next twenty minutes or so, Mary unspooled a few more tales, enough to get me mentally drafting out a grant request for production funds, while hoping there wasn’t anything I myself was doing to upset the mountains I’d come to love. I envisioned the documentary as a cautionary tale for those who came to take advantage of the natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and try to profit from them.

Not long after that conversation, I saw a billboard along the I-26 highway on my way into Asheville. It was an advertisement for a 795-acre parcel of mountain land just east of the city that offered a golf course, designed by Tiger Woods, surrounded by a community of one thousand luxury homes. On the billboard, Woods appeared to gaze off in the distance at the mountains with the words “Come see what I see!” representing his thoughts.

That was in 2008.

And we all know what happened to him the following year: a high-profile marital scandal followed by the loss of millions of dollars in endorsement deals. By 2012, seven years after the project was announced and all the trees on the mountainside had been chopped down by the developers, fewer than 50 of the estimated 1000 homes had been sold, and the development project went into bankruptcy.

I don’t have any proof, but I like to think the mountains got ‘em.

Coming up next … Story Frame 65 – Inked!