THE LONG WAIT OF THE FORGOTTEN

16:10 0 Comments

[Spanish Version]

“On the top of the mountain and facing to the East, where God will come back to the Earth”. That´s the way they were buried, waiting for the day their beliefs will become truth, and they´ll come back to life to see the last day. The problem is that time erases memory and only a few still remember that they rest in peace there.

Deep Creek is a little area in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Known for their waterfalls, tourists go there to enjoy its beautiful landscapes and practice rafting and tubing. Young people and hikers don´t know that they are really close to old graveyards. The last witnesses of a story wrote with fire among the brush and vegetation of, these blue and gray hills.


Great Smoky Mountains National Park was inaugurated in 1940 by the president John D. Roosevelt, but the Congress had passed the denomination for the area in 1934. Those six years was the time it took to prepare what nowadays is known as a Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site.

But, even the most honorable action you can do  has its shadows. Great Smoky Mountains are a protected area and that means no human can change anything there. That was one of the jobs done in those six years between the law and the inauguration. The lands were expropriated and the inhabitants banished.

“They expelled our parents from their houses and after that they burned all the buildings they had. They even destroyed the church and the school. Nobody could go back to their homes,” one of the great daughters of the people who lived in that area explains the history that her father told her once, long ago. For her, the man who burned those buildings is a kind of devil without a heart and with a black shadow around him. But even revenge has an end and now the pain of their ancestors is only a tradition and a sign of respect. The last try to prevent the deaths will die for a second time along with the memory.


If there weren´t any trails and any bridges, nobody would imagine that long ago people used to live in Deep Creek. The dead are the only ones that the heartless man surrounded by black shadows didn´t dare to evict.

“I think there was a list of the names of the people who are buried here and the first time we came here, our fathers told us where our great grandparents are. Now no one knows more than the names that are written on the headstones,” another one of the partakers in the event says. She doesn´t remember the names of her relatives buried there, but she goes there every year to pay her respects to the dead. “Even you don´t know their names. This event is not about crying;it´s about remembering the people who worked hard for us. That is something the new generations can´t understand”, she complains about the low number of people who participated in the event. “Ten years ago, there were almost a hundred of us, now you can see it”, no more than thirty people were in this occasion.


A paper flower in each tomb and petals on the ground, that´s the way the cemetery looks after this little group of people decide to waste their time remembering their ancestors in a ceremony that allows to the participants to know what we were, how we live and that on the top of the mountains, facing to the East  there are people waiting for the Lord to return to Earth so they can come back to life.