Kat, I called it a dead-end, but most of the time, you could keep going on foot--scrambling through the rhododendron and the greenbriar, finally climbing up the steep forrested slope to the top of the ridge befor you drop down into the head of another holler.

I'd guess the woman retreated up the holler at some point. Maybe she had left the holler for the wider world--had many adventures with her flute, and then came home and became something of a recluse. Goin' off and seeing the wide world would have given her a bit of a foreign flavor and perhaps lead to suspicion among those who had stayed. Hollers can be places of mystery and magic, places to hide--many a moonshine still could be found way up in the furthest reaches of remote hollers. The ancient Appalachians are low, rugged mountains, full of small communities and coal camps that are pretty isolated and fairly inaccessible, even today.

You can start up a fairly good sized holler, along a major creek or minor river, and then start going up the increasingly smaller branches of tributary creeks and go for miles and miles up hollers that get narrower and narrower. The road will go from 2 lane asphault to one lane, to gravel, to dirt, to rutted mud tracks where only 4 wheel drives can go in the winter or after rain.

Chances are, when you have wended your way back as far into the hills as you can, and followed the smallest tributary creek as far as there is room for a track to run beside it or through it, you will find an old house or shack, a tumbled down barn and downed barbed wire fences. Like as not, there will be an old apple tree or three--maybe a pear tree. Up on the top of the ridge will be an old family graveyard with four or five unreadable stones and a rusted out fence around it. Somebody probably lived there 'til only 30 years ago, and the old man in the cinderblock house that was at the mouth of this furthest holler is a grand-nephew of the people who lived there last.

I would guess hollers (or hollows the further north you get-remember the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow") are called that because those creeks literally hollowed out passages through and around the mountains.

While a holler is a creek valley-valley always suggests some spaciousness to me. When I think of holler, I think narrow, winding, just enough valley floor for the raod that follows the creek, and a line of houses that back right up to the side of the mountain.

Breezy-I'd love to hear that song.

Janie