PALL MALL, Tenn. – It’s 7 a.m. and the sun has just risen over the Appalachian foothills of the Cumberland plateau, but already pickup trucks are lined up outside the York Country Store for a unique morning ritual.
In a backroom of the Pall Mall, Tenn. store, more than a dozen local men, some in weathered caps and camouflaged hunting jackets, hunch over checkered tablecloths, sipping from hot coffee or Mellow Yellows, bantering and peering into handfuls of playing cards in a game of “Pig.”
Among them are Mike York, a great nephew of Alvin York, the World War I hero credited with capturing over 100 German soldiers, his historic home nearby and the family-owned country store full of memorabilia. Here too is Jim Buck, 75, a former teacher who played the area card game as a kid, playing on a soda case next to a pot-belly stove in this rural part of Tennessee.
“Lay ‘em down. There we go,” one man urged as they vied for points amid wood-paneled walls hung with old frying pans, a list of Pig champions and a huge rattlesnake skin. “Oooh, lookie there. Yes sir!”
The before-work gatherings play out in one of the small towns that ring the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, 125,000 National Park-run acres straddling Kentucky and northeast Tennessee, where the river carves its way through deep gorges of the Cumberland Plateau amid a landscape of sandstone arches, forested mountains and lush valleys.
