LILLEY CORNETT WOODS — Clifford Cornett has been gone for a long time, but his heart still knows every step of these woods.
His grandfather, Lilley Cornett, once owned this land in Letcher County in eastern Kentucky. As he walks the flatland, Clifford points out where the barn used to stand, where the iron clanged in the blacksmith’s shop, where the mill ground grain into flour and cornmeal. His grandfather once tried to dig out a lake in a swampy bottom, Clifford grins in remembrance. He just managed to sink a tractor instead.
The family grew or harvested everything they needed on this land — traveling to town just twice a year to buy big sacks of sugar and staples.
His family moved away in 1966 so his father could work in the coalmines in Illinois, as did others from the region; Clifford calls them “migrating coal miners.”
The Lilley Cornett Woods now are public land, preserved as an example of the old-growth forest that once covered the mountains of Appalachia. Seeing the woods is a glimpse into what the settlers would have seen generations ago. Clifford, 53, remembers Native Americans living on the land too — their land, even earlier.
Like a blessing unasked for, Clifford Cornett turned up to hike these woods, revisiting his memories after years of living in Illinois, the same day as did a contingent from Crescent Hill Church in Louisville, who had come to eastern Kentucky to learn about mountaintop removal.
Cornett — outgoing, generous by nature, sandy-haired and supple, delighted to be back home prowling the hills with his wife, Susan — gave a tutorial in all things green and growing.
Pulling a hook-handled cane from the back of his car, he used it not for balance but for instruction. “My dad did go through the woods when I was a kid, pointing out `That tree’s this, this tree’s that.’ “
He learned all the names. And on this trip home, Clifford repeated them as though greeting old friends, a litany of the mountain world in all its glory: sassafras, mountain laurel, umbrella magnolia, stinging nettles, black walnut, beech, sugar maple, maidenhair fern, Indian pipe, rattlesnake plaintain. And:
Three-pronged ginseng — although Clifford kept up the hunt for four-pronged as he hiked.
Tulip poplar, the state tree of Kentucky, with grooved bark, “fast-growing wood I love to work,” Clifford said.
Black cohosh — “I took plenty of that,” Susan said, having grown up in a place where people knew the medicinal uses of what grew around them. “I always wondered what it looked like.”
White oak — the Ford Motor Co. used wood from that to make the spokes on the wheels of Model Ts.
Blood root — the red color extracted from the roots used for a dye or to paint faces.
“This here might be spicewood,” Clifford said, plucking a leaf. “Oh, it is — smell it!” that spicy aroma making him grin.
The honey from the linden tree “will be snow-white and the best — you can drink it.”
A red oak stood maybe 400 feet tall — Clifford measured the age by the generations of the people who lived here, many of whom did not live to be 50 years old.
Clifford is endlessly curious; what he didn’t know, he asked the guide from Eastern Kentucky University to fill in the holes, a man who’s been hiking these woods for 35 years. They bantered back and forth, about the chestnut trees that took over the tops of the hills when the American chestnuts died out, about a teacher who lived at the mouth of Turkey Creek (and who wasn’t afraid to use a switch), about the animals who roam these woods.
“I never was the hunting type,” Clifford said. “I just wanted to see them and hear them,” the creatures running free. “That satisfied my mind.”
He wrapped his arms around a tree on the way up, leaning his cheek against it as a child nestles a mother.
At the summit, he opened his arms and leaned back his head.
“Thank you, Lord, for letting all of us beautiful people be here today,” Clifford hollered.
“Thank you, Lord!
“Thank you!”
