I see on the WATE site that Rocky Top Mountain in the 15th District of Cocke County is burning.

My favorite uncle used to log those woods in the '40s and '50s.

Sometime around 1960 two of my cousins gave their dad an Army surplus Willys Jeep so he could travel back into the Fifteenth, as everybody in my family called it, to sightsee in the mountains where he was born. He sometimes took me with him and what a thrill it was for a fourteen-year-old to drive that Jeep. The gearbox was unsynchronized, the brakes were a joke, and it had no top, but we didn't care.

Uncle Ott would drive it along Highway 25/70 until we were well out of sight of the family's prying eyes and then he would let me take over on the dirt logging roads. It seemed to take us forever to cross the top and one stop had to be made about half-way up at a spring to refill the radiator. He would sit in the passenger's seat and tell tales of his boyhood as we creeped along the summit and down into the 'hollers' on the other side for the real reason we came.

There was moonshine 'likker' to be had everywhere and he knew all the sources. You see, after he quit logging, he was a jailer for a time at the courthouse in Newport.

We would slowly return home as he sipped from a quart fruit jar in a paper 'poke'.

He was buried in 1964 near his boyhood home in the Fifteenth. The last time I crossed Rocky Top was in 1968 in this '59 Volkswagen Beetle. I stopped at the spring to use the dipper and to remember Uncle Ott.