Originally Posted by
The Ace
I stopped by Mountain Crossings today after Friday’s bad weather aborted my hike down from Dick’s Creek Gap and asked the person behind the counter if Winton had sold the place. With pleading eyes he looked over at a female employee and she said, “It’s okay, you can tell.” He pointed behind him toward the living quarters and said that George and Logan, the couple that had been managing the store, had bought it two weeks ago and taken over the lease of the building from Winton. He said that Winton has visions of a sailboat in his future. He plans to make some sort of good-bye announcement in a week or so.
The owners’ plans are to continue the business as is. No word on who will do the shakedowns, though. Everything looked normal, and store traffic was heavy as usual for this time of year. Outside, the same old psychotic cat walked along the stonewall alternately greeting some visitors’ outstretched hands with a rub, and others with a bite, whatever struck its warped fancy. About sixty feet up in one of the trees that grow in the ravine south of the outside patio sat a black bear, oblivious or uncaring to the camera carrying gawkers and waiting patiently for darkness to fall in order to begin his nightly scavenger hunt for the carelessly tossed candy wrapper, or sticky-lined Styrofoam cup. The sun broke though the gray clouds and set the entire mountainside ablaze with the seasonally late arriving reds, oranges, yellows, purples, and golds. For a moment Yonah peeked out above the ridgeline to the South, its toothy grin once again greeting the hikers climbing out of Neel’s Gap and laughing at them all the way to Unicoi.
Suddenly my mind was flooded with the memory of sitting here on the patio more than a quarter a century ago with my seven-old daughter, proud of the little trooper for making her first trek up Blood Mountain. I wondered if her own now seven year-old child would also stand here a half a century from now and remember generations gone and then ponder if her own grandchildren will one-day stand here also. A tug on my arm brings me back to reality. I look down into the face of my wife, still as fresh as the spring day that I married her forty years ago, and into her eyes, bluer than any sea that the restless Winton will ever sail. And, she gently says, “There is hot coffee waiting for us on the square in Dahlonega.” We turn to walk across the smoothly worn stone and down the ancient steps, the disappointment of the aborted hike replaced with the joy of generations gone and to come.
The days are growing shorter. Before long the mountains will be filled with the sound of the bare, ice-covered limbs rattling against each other like dry dead bones. But, for now it’s Autumn, the world is ablaze in color, and life is really, really good.
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