Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I found myself going into K-town today for an MRI that I didn't have scheduled until next week. Anyway, they wanted me there today, so off I went. They wanted to look at my brain because of all the strange pains I've been having in my eyes. Anyway, I've never had an MRI, but I figured it couldn't be worse than the CAT scans with the contrasting dye or the thing they hang you upside-down for. They evidently can't do those anymore because of my kidneys.

Well, I was wrong. It was pretty dreadful. They told me that the magnet was so powerful that all of the neutrons in my brain re-aligned and that was what caused the discomfort. It wasn't as awful as some of the things that have been done to me, but it was unexpected--the nausea and dizziness. Arrgh--My atoms hurt!

I've been revisiting the Foxfire series. I was in graduate school when Eliot Wigginton fell-- crashed really--from grace, and felt crushed as many people did who followed the Foxfire experiment. That this incredibly gifted educator was also a child molester defied reason. I've heard similar tales concerning the missionaries who came here during the Christy days. Not all was sweetness and light and outsiders have often taken advantage of the folk here.

But, I thought it time, since I've been doing my own research in this area, to go back and look at the Foxfire books. I think what strikes me this time is that kids really are the perfect conduit for gathering this information. The mountain people are naturally clannish and suspicious, but they would open up to high school kids much easier than they would to some anthropologist or chronicler.

The Foxfire project is still alive and well in Rabun county--without Wigginton. I imagine they are having to go further afield these days for material. Rabun county is pretty developed by now, I'd imagine. Anywhere north of Atlanta is these days.

I found this colorful and visceral worm cure in the Foxfire 1 book:

For tapeworm, starve it. Then hold some warm milk up to your nose and sniff deeply. The tapeworm will stick his head out of your nose to get the milk. Hold the milk farther and farther away from him, thus drawing him out.

~Wigginton, A Foxfire Book (Doubleday, 1972)

I'll have to ask my sources if they've heard that one.

Snow tonight, supposedly.

I was talking to this woman one day and since the wasps are very aggressive this time of year, we started talking about wasp stings. I’d said that I seemed to be getting more and more sensitive to them. My recovery time after getting stung is getting longer and I seem to have more difficulty breathing afterwards.

I hadn’t had many encounters with stings before. I’d had the odd yellow jacket sting and a few bee stings as a child, but since moving here, it has become something that happens fairly often.

“Well, there were a traveler who were visiting when I was a girl.” She said to me.

“I got stung right bad by a big ole wasp and he took a root out of his pocket and told me to chew on a piece of it. H’it’ were shaped just like a rattlesnake’s rattler and he called it snakeroot. I took just a bead off of it and chewed it and was all better very soon.”

She identified the root as being snakeroot.

Well, there are a gang of plants called “snakeroot’. Most of them got the name by being considered a treatment for snakebite at one time or another.

I’ve been trying to find her snakeroot based on her description of the shape of the root, but have come up empty. There are several possible candidates.


The most obvious would be Aristolochia serpentaria or Virginia Snakeroot.


James Mooney says in his Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee which lists some of the plants used locally:

UNASTE’TSITIYU ~ “very small root” ~ Aristolochia serpentaria – Virginia or black snakeroot: Decoction of root blown upon patient for fever and feverish headache, and drunk for coughs; root chewed and spit upon wound to cure snake bites; bruised root placed in hollow tooth for toothache, and held against nose made sore by constant blowing in colds. Dispensatory: “A stimulant tonic, acting also as a diaphoretic or diuretic, according to the mode of its application; ***also been highly recommended in intermittent fevers and though itself generally inadequate to the cure often proves serviceable as an adjunct to Peruvian bark or sulphate of quinia.” Also used for typhous diseases, in dyspepsia, as a gargle for sore throat, as a mild stimulant in typhoid fevers, and to promote eruptions. The genus derives its scientific name from its supposed efficacy in promoting menstrual discharge, and some species have acquired the “reputation of antidotes for the bites of serpents.”

But Virginia snakeroot doesn’t have the root structure of the plant I’m looking for.

I’m thinking a much better candidate would be Polygala senega L. or Seneca Snakeroot. This plant would have the root structure I’m looking for and has a common name of “rattlesnake root”. It’s a much better fit. I’ve seen both of these plants growing here in the mountains and know they would be available.

But I’m still sort of bemused as to why either would be given for a wasp sting, unless there was some sort of respiratory distress involved. I can see a sort of sympathetic magic justification for the Seneca. And wasp stings are self -limiting as long as there is no allergic reaction.

What do you think? Any herbalists out there with any ideas as to what she was talking about?

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Disclaimer! Please don't try to go and recreate any of the traditional cures that I talk about on the blog unless you are quite sure you know what you are doing and take full responsibility for doing so. I just collect them. I don't actually use them. Some herbs previously in common use have been found to have harmful effects. And some of them are quite deadly.

I'm visiting with a friend today and she's telling this story about how her brother accidentally set her on fire with a fat stick. She was okay but it did singe her hair up pretty badly. Her mother put the fire out.

A fat stick is one of those super charged sappy pine sticks that you use to start fires with.

But out of the telling of this story comes a local cure that I had not heard before. It's for the croup or any sort of respiratory ailment that causes shortness of breath.

What you do, is you set the fat stick on fire. Then you wrap it up in a piece of "meat skin".

I'd not heard "meat skin" before, so I asked.

"Like a piece of chicken skin?"

She looked at me like I'd gone out of my mind.

Evidently, "meat skin" is a piece of pork rind...I guess a pretty big one with the fat still attached to the skin.

So, you wrap up the burning fat stick with the meat skin and put a spoon under it...I guess where the end of the burning wood/pork rind burrito is.

What comes out and is gathered in the spoon is a sort of kerosene/pork fat/pine tar elixir.

Give this to the patient and it will open the bronchial tubes.

She swears she's seen this save babies lives.

But it's not exactly kosher.