BLUE RIDGE MY HOME

 



Spent some time among the trees today. Took my time. Sat down twice to be still and see my world up close. I looked around in the woods, snapped some photos. The ground I was standing and sitting on was my home, the Blue Ridge Mountains. Everywhere I look, I see the Blue Ridge Mountains on the inside among the trees native to the region. On the highway driving through wooded areas, I look as hard as I can at the leaf-covered ground, the tree trunks, the rocks, the ferns, and dream for a moment of walking in there, feeling the ground, seeing the scene from the inside. I can't look so hard when driving, but I take glances with focused attention for a second at a time. I love being in the woods. And I love being in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I feel a stillness among trees, a calm that brings me into tune with the slower life forms. Our human minds race so fast, we surely freak out the trees just walking among them. Or maybe they like the energy of our minds. More and more I like silence, seldom even put on the radio for news. Don't care much who is killing how many this week. The mountains, the trees around me were something of a free flowing mantra going on in my mind, the Blue Ridge Mountains, my home. Recently, everywhere I go in the mountain, out among the trees, walking in the meadow with Donkey Jack, driving, I see and stand upon my beloved mountains.

I like to see the mountains in the distance, big gray and white clouds boiling in the air currents I've learned in this southeastern quadrant of the county. I love it that I am able to look out over the Glade Valley and Ennice townships from Air Bellows Gap Road and see the clouds drifting in their currents of air flow. Today was a perfect day with clouds to see all the currents at once. I did not think to snap a picture, I was so engaged in seeing the clouds mapping out the flow in the air. In the woods I am in what for me is real church. The real deal. No collection, no preaching, no singing, no being nice when you don't feel like it, no wishing you were someplace else. When I sit down in the woods I am in stillness sublime. In the early years when I traveled all over this and surrounding mountains on foot, a dog was with me, a dog I loved to go walking with, Sadie. She was a tan and white fox dog, Airedale mix, good mind. She was only limited by my inability to teach her. Out in the woods, she was at home, just like I was, but even more for a dog. She could smell the tracks of every critter that had passed by in the last few days and nights. She read trails in the woods by scent when all I had to go by was sight. I'm like Mr Bo Jangles in the song, his dog up and died, after twenty years he still grieves. She was an ideal walking companion.

 

 

All these pictures were made from sitting in one spot, the scenery I was facing. This is where I felt in touch with the mountain today. I know this particular area very well from years past in days out walking with Sadie, and after Sadie, Aster, exploring the mountain, the trees, the water, the rocks. My house has pocket-sized rocks everywhere. Outside, I have rocks scattered about that I've brought home. It was in these mountains that I learned aesthetic appreciation for rocks. A rock is already the ideal sculpture. I picked up a nicely-shaped white one today, but did not want to carry it home and left it on an old stump covered with moss. Out walking I like to pick up the rock that calls my attention, the one I notice that says this is the one, the souvenir of the walk, pocket-sized. I have carried some fairly heavy ones home, too, believing at the moment I needed it someplace where I could see its beauty often. Along the walkway by the house I've placed rocks as big as both hands could lift into the back of the pickup from Whitetop Mountain. Whitetop has rocks like I've not seen anywhere else, not that I've seen everyplace, just that I think they're beautiful, angular, looking chiseled into abstract forms. I think of every rock as God's sculpture. Each one is shaped by its own experience. Some have rolled under glaciers so long ago it's inconceivable. Originally, rock was molten something on the order of lava when the earth was a ball of fire. I see the rocks as chunks of ice, frozen magma.  

 

 

 

 

I don't know if I get "renewed" spending time in the forest. I tended today to think about the mountains, the Blue Ridge, how happy and grateful I am these mountains are my home. Today in the woods I felt embraced by spirit. I don't mean in a woo-woo way, but a clarity of mind, joy in everything I saw. These photos were all made from the same spot, the place I chose to sit down, not because the scenery in this spot is better than any other, only because I didn't feel like walking any further without a rest. It's no good to rush through the forest anyway. It is best appreciated sitting still. Without meditating I felt like the experience of this wooded area in this time was just right and put me into a meditative mind. I'd not seen this place in several years. It was a review of the mountain I love with all my heart, walking on last years leaves and ground spongy from a summer of rain. It felt good underfoot, the ideal carpet that your shoe sinks into just enough to give good traction. Patches of ferns I walked through carefully. I don't like to break them and don't like being unable to see the ground where I put my feet. The ferns are pretty but I'd rather walk through them with a dog leading the way. The serpents of the region are colored like the ground. A dog's awareness and senses are sharper than mine. I have to pay more attention without a dog.

 

 

 

 

Nothing in particular was on my mind. It drifted around in appreciation of the Blue Ridge, again, joy and gratitude that I'd found these mountains and become so well acquainted, know them on so many levels, and best of all, know them in my heart. The heart is where I know these mountains. These mountains helped to open my heart in very important ways. I've learned the landscape so well that in my later years, like old man Tom Pruitt, I don't need to get out there and see it much. It was like the mountain was telling me that I and the mountain are one. Today was a joyous review of a place I'd not seen in many a year. I feel like I know the different places I like to go to personally as a kind of spirit. Again, not woo-woo, but the clarity of the world outside the ways of the human mind. This is the world that inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The trees are air filters for all the critters that need oxygen to inhale. We complete the cycle with the trees. They give me oxygen, I give them carbon-dioxide. Possibly freshness of air is what feels like spirit to me among the trees. Perhaps the fresh air is what I'm breathing and it gives the place a golden glow in the mind's eye. It's the stillness that makes me want to put up a tent and move in. 

 

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

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MY GENERATION: FLAT TOP CATS AND DUNGAREE DOLLS

 

 

 

As I look at my generation with a cold eye, I don't see anything worth crowing about except rock n roll. I remember in high school believing my generation was going to be "awesome," really believing it, even feeling a pride in my generation. We were the first white people to use the word "cool" outside jazz circles. There were so many black people in the early years of rock n roll from the rhythm n blues angle that I believed this was the end of racism. Then came the time of civil rights protesting that had an air of righteousness about it. The emergence of Bob Dylan in the early Sixties was even more evidence that my generation was extraordinary. We who listened to Bob Dylan in his early years became convinced right away that he stood somewhere beyond the others. Dylan has been the pop star of my lifetime like Frank Sinatra was for my parents' generation. I've seen both in concert. Sinatra was dynamic in his style and Dylan was dynamic in his style. Sinatra sang. Dylan sang, wrote the lyrics, composed the music, played guitar, hand-picked his band, tours with the band every year. Sinatra was an artist as a performer and actor, Dylan an artist all the way around. Dylan blew my mind then, he blows my mind now. Mr Tambourine Man never gets old, nor does Sinatra singing Watertown.

 

bob dylan

 

 

My generation, like the musicians of the Sixties "classic rock," then "underground," meaning you couldn't hear it anywhere on the radio, and the musicians of Punk, that also was not played on the radio except college stations, they went Pfitzzzz, shooting stars taken down by heroin. As was the case with the Be-bop jazz musicians the generation before, where the white kids picked up the word cool. I did jr hi and high school through the late Fifties. The music was my connection with the world outside home, school and church. Bill Haley convinced me my generation was cool, We're gonna rock around the clock tonight, we're gonna rock, rock, rock til the broad daylight, we're gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight. The poetry of my youth. Well I saw uncle John with bald-headed Sally, he saw aunt Mary comin and he duck back in the alley. I didn't get it til many years later that Long Tall Sally was about masturbation. Long Tall Sally was uncle John's wiener. Busted. I knew Edie Sedgwick was the "you" in Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone a long time before I got it about Long Tall Sally. That was the time in my life when I knew all the words to all Little Richard's songs, Chuck Berry songs, Bill Haley's and Buddy Holly's, esp Rave On. They are still with me. Can't leave out Ronnie Hawkins' Mary Lou, perhaps my favorite song of the whole period. I can pull up the words of any of those songs at will, as well as many others, like Heartbreak Hotel. Fifties lyrics are the poetry in my head.  

 

 

 

The music of that time was so great to a teenage kid coming up on radio music parents listened to, none of it resonating with me, though some of it I liked. Peggy Lee was pretty cool. When rock n roll happened, I found my heartbeat. The music was rebellious, just the way I felt, though had to internalize it, which I did with the songs in my head and listening to stations on the radio that played the new music. Bought 45s and had the next thing to a tin can to listen to them on. Didn't matter. We didn't know about CDs and Bose then. Anything was better than nothing. My generation has made great leaps in sciences, fields we know nothing about, because interest in the field rarely extends beyond participants. The same applies to poetry, theater, fiction, film making. The greatest rock n roll band in the world is my generation, the Rolling Stones. Then, of course, there is the Who's My Generation, Peter Townshend who pointed a finger toward Meher Baba with the Who's album, Tommy. Perhaps the greatest discovery of my generation is recreational drugs right there alongside rock n roll. The drugs have taken their toll on my generation, though most survived, all the wiser for having been through something really dangerous and come out the other end. My generation has also been one of embarrassing conformity. We grew up believing television propaganda, like all generations since.

 

pete townsend

 

In college, nobody wanted to grow up and be like their parents. Thirty years later I went to a reunion and thought I was back then in a big room full of everybody's parents. It was disheartening, but I already knew it. I was surrounded by people who bought the package I rejected. I meant it when I said I didn't want to be like my parents. The laugh for me after thirty years of living outside group-think by intent and many of those years living with hillbillies, adopting their vision, it was disconcerting to find myself in the midst of lawyers, doctors, judges, and their dolled-up wives, putting on the dog for each other in suits that cost more than the pickup I was driving, suburbanites good at cocktail party chatter. Some winters before, I had carried a newborn calf through sixteen inches of snow to the barn to put it on some hay. Mother would not follow. I carried calf back to mother to let her smell it, carried it back to the barn, mother didn't follow. I took some hay bales to the spot on the snow the calf was born and made a nest for it, carried the calf back from the barn to place it on the only spot mother recognized it. Sixteen inches of snow. I didn't feel less than any of the judges around me and didn't feel better. We had very different experiences behind us and very different ideas of how we want to live our lives. They paid people to mow their lawns more money than I made.

 

 

My goal over the last thirty-eight years has been to live in the world, not of the world. It took several years to figure out what "the world" meant to my satisfaction. What I've come to is that the human mind is "the world." Creations of the mind constitute the world. Conformity is living of the world. Anti-conformity is living of the world. I'm not the only one of my generation who has stepped outside living of the world. We ask more of ourselves along the way through life than what channel is playing Cheers reruns. Maybe. That's a little high-sounding. Let's just say my generation has an awful lot of us who go our own way for our own reasons, checked out of the System consciously, however we individually interpret the System, uninterested in playing the climbing game, the status game, the money game. We leave that merry-go-round so we can have another ride of our preference, Ferris wheel, rollercoaster. In my case, I've rarely made over minimum wage, never wanted more, did not want to need to be an accountant just to live my life. I never wanted to live in a suburb where the houses are slight variations of each other and the mailbox out by the road needs to be housed in a brick structure because of kids bashing mailboxes on Saturday nights. I'd rather listen to the call of the crows, the tweet of the towhee, the buzzing sound chickadees make, the tree frogs, fiddle and banjo music, and conversation with my friends at the coffee shop in Sparta. Am in a place now where I want my life in first person instead of third person.   

the roan mountain hilltoppers

 

 

 

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HALCYON DAY

Another wet Monday with dim light all day. Not many squirrels and birds at the feeders. The traffic at the feeders is so slow in the rain, a coon climbs the post, maneuvers over the squirrel guard that only keeps chipmunks out, throws the roof off the birdfeeder and finishes the day's unfinished supply. I've put hook and eye at both ends of the roof, but raccoon hands have no problem unhooking them. The hooks are primarily to keep the tops on in a big wind. Raccoon throws the roof to the ground and has plenty of room to sit down and have a snack. I don't care. It's easy enough to pick up the roof and sit it back on. Squirrels climb a tree nearby and leap to the roof of the birdfeeders. It cracks me up to see one leap through the air twisting the tail for balance. Like a coon and a possum, squirrels have hands for all four feet. I've seen them leap through the air at the birdfeeder and often in the canopy of trees, from a branch of one tree to a branch in the next tree. The squirrels travel through the trees almost like monkeys. They catch the branch with all four feet. When they land on the birdfeeder, it is all four feet at once. I see a nuthatch darting about.

I enjoy seeing the rainwater drip from leaf to leaf through the rhododendron and leaves of an oak sapling. By this time of summer, the leaves everywhere in the mountains are lush green like in June. Everyone who has seen as many summers in the mountains as I have knows that no two summers are alike and no one of them was predictable. It's the same with winter. People are talking about what this summer of wet shoes almost every day means for winter. I heard my first folk-report yesterday that we're looking at a hard winter. What does hard winter mean? A lot of snow? A lot of cold? A lot of both? Or maybe a not very cold winter that rains as frequently as this summer so we have freezing rain almost daily, ice. If it rains as much in the winter as it has this summer, we'll have ice regularly. That's the worst case look at it. Winter is never the worst or the best. It wavers between the two poles all winter long. I have no argument with the rain because it is bringing the water table back up, which was sinking fast, more springs drying up, due to the new houses all over the mountains, each using an electric pump to get their water from a well and returning it to a septic tank. I suppose the water table by now this summer is up to where it was maybe fifty years ago. I call that a blessing for the mountains and for the people living in the mountains. When fracking comes here, that's it for the water.

I see a towhee at one of the feeders. I go out every morning to fill the two feeders with black oil sunflower seeds. More than one pair of towhees is nesting in the grove of trees around the house. One or more of the towhees will make their distinctive whistle, and I respond with my poorly executed imitation of their whistle. We get a call and response communication going on while I'm visiting each feeder with the day's serving. At the place across the road where I throw seeds on the ground for crows, I call to them with a caw-caw, again, my version of it, which to a crow is obviously not a crow. It tells them it's the giant that puts out snacks for them making an attempt to speak Crow without knowing the language. In the old days when a farmer went out to call the cows, he didn't holler Moo. Come to dinner can be understood in any language once it is established. The towhees know the giant has a terrible accent, but they know what it means when the giant responds to them. Come and get it! The bird chirpings are quiet when it rains. The rain is merely sprinkling all day. I can walk to the mailbox and not get wet above the knees. Jewelweed on both sides of the path to the mailbox soak my pants from knees down and shoes. I don't care. It's summer. If the sky were not overcast, the temperature would be in the nineties. It sits on seventy today.

A moment of stillness outside. The sprinkling has let up, leaves are no longer wiggling, no birds chirping, so quiet I hear the clock ticking off the seconds. It is a momentary calm in the air that brings to mind days at sea when twice I have seen the ocean mirror smooth, not a ripple all the way to the horizon all the way around. Clouds reflected on the surface of the ocean exactly as above. It was one of those perfect as-above-so-below moments. The ship's prow did not break the surface. That point was where the great V of ripples began that spread out from the ship all the way to horizon. I believe such days were called halcyon days. Ships with sails sat in place waiting for wind to stir. Even with the rain I think of today as a halcyon day. Quiet, calm, at peace outside and inside. A day of stillness. A good day for reading and a nap. A fog is coming in, a low-flying cloud crossing the ridge here in slow motion. Silence but for water dripping from leaf to leaf, and visual stillness but for one towhee on a rhododendron branch grooming itself. It's a day that makes me think of Toru Takemitsu's compositions for piano. I don't want to put one on the jukebox, don't want to break the halcyon nature of the moment. I can hear him good enough in my mind.

 

 

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WHITEHEAD MY HOME

I'm sitting here thinking of my appreciation for the Whitehead township in Alleghany County, North Carolina. The present Raleigh government that has turned state government against the people of North Carolina, and some other problems I have with the state have to do with every brush up against the State of NC costs dearly with regrettable consequences. And I don't mean felony or misdemeanor or anything like that where the state is ruthless to its citizens. I learned never to look to the state for help. That is, unless I could afford it in hundreds of thousands or millions. If I had that kind of money I wouldn't need help.The state of North Carolina, like the United States of America, wants my money and that's the long and short of it. Whitehead Community does not collect taxes, does not provide services or make anything of itself. It is something on the order of an extended family of neighbors whose families have been neighbors for generations. I don't know most of the people of Whitehead, probably don't know more than one or two percent of the small population. It's at this level that people take care of one another, where someone who needs help can find help. I think of Whitehead as my community and have a heart connection with the people of Whitehead, the ones I know and the ones I don't know.

I have learned over the 37 years I've lived at Air Bellows, hearing a history of the community from Tom Pruitt for fifteen years, from his brother Elder Millard Pruitt for fourteen years, from Jr Maxwell for seven years, the past and present of Whitehead, which now amounts to a small sign on a post by the side of Hwy 18 that says WHITEHEAD. That's about what's left. Whitehead Store is gone. Ross Richardson is keeping Jr Maxwell's tractor repair shop going. The Shaw handmade wood furniture showroom is in the front that used to be the Whitehead Store. In the back is his workshop. The old Sunoco gas station that was Welter Hamm's first Whitehead Store has been a storage unit for furniture from a beautiful old house across the highway that was torn down to make a place for a double-wide. Landmark Union Baptist Church was once a Regular Baptist in the time when Tom Pruitt was growing up, his life in church. He told me he could take me inside there and show me the exact spot on the floor where he was saved, like in the old hymn, I can tell you the time, I can show you the place, where the Lord saved me in his wonderful grace. Whitehead amounts to the individual people who live here, their stories from the past.

It's not an allegiance around a flag that the people of Whitehead look to. It's each other. It's like an extended family of neighbors. Even when we don't know each other, we are neighbors of Whitehead. It's not a feeling you get an award for. It's actually no feeling at all. It's something we take as for granted as a brother or sister, aunt or uncle, 4th cousin. It's not something we think about every day, but when people of the same family are together, they don't have to put on the dog, they know each other, even when they don't know each other. Like when I meet someone who is from Whitehead, I automatically respond to like distant kin. When I see someone in town from Whitehead, even if it's only once every five years, there is still the recognition of a neighbor. My experience of Whitehead is that some of the most interesting people I've known in my life are/were from Whitehead. That's so easily said it's like saying the ocean is wet. I've heard that Henry Whitter, guitar and vocal of Grayson and Whitter, who played music in the late 1920s, married a Whitehead woman and lived in Whitehead several years. It was preacher Earl Baker's mother he married.

I think of people I have known in cemeteries in Whitehead. It gives me a creepy feeling walking into a cemetery where someone I used to know and thought very well of is in a box under the grass. I have to remind myself that is just the bones, the individual I knew lives in spirit somewhere I'm not able to see, just around the corner. I can walk through a cemetery where I know none of the names and not have that creepy feeling. I was a pallbearer for Tom Pruitt and swore to myself I'll never do it again. I declined for Jr Maxwell's funeral. My arm still feels the grief of Tom's weight in the box I and five others were holding. I hated it. Someone I don't know, I can bear the weight with no problem. But when it's somebody I look up to as the top floor on a skyscraper, I have a rough time within. People I've learned to care about by knowing them, I have a hard time when they leave this world. One of the very hardest aspects of this world to live with is losing friends and loved ones to death. That includes dogs, cats, horses and other pets, even movie and tv stars. For me, it has been one of the most difficult learnings in life how to have what it takes to be willing to accept losing a friend, even when to go on would have been impossible. It's not the body I miss. The body amounts to the pages of a book, book itself. The person I know is the story in the book that you only get by reading, the same as you only get a person's story by knowing the person in a human form. The form is mortal, the spirit lives on.

 

The roads I travel in Whitehead I know well. They are beautiful drives, every one of them. I love wherever I drive in Whitehead, Pine Swamp Road, Air Bellows Gap Road, Spicer Mountain Road, Rifle Range Road, Highway 18, Cleary Road, Waterfall Road, to name a few. I've learned that every township in the county has its own personality, like every county in the mountains has its own personality. I've found Whitehead people to be just the kind of people I like, straight-forward, meaning what they say, no nonsense. I feel a strong sense of neighborliness. It's not so much visible as it is a feeling. Knowing people in a community is for me better than reading about it. In all my years of knowing mountain people, I've never gone to books to learn about them. What little reading I have done of Appalachian ways doesn't come close to knowing somebody. While I was going to Elder Millard Pruitt's Regular Baptist church, some publish-or-perish professor from Boone or someplace wrote a book about the Regular Baptist churches. I tried to read it and put it aside because it wasn't anything. In relation to what a Regular Baptist church is, his writing didn't even skim the surface. It didn't even touch the surface. Yet he's held up as an authority on the subject. Thinking of the people I know who are in and of Whitehead, I feel warm in the heart, happy that God landed my parachute among the people of Whitehead township, Alleghany County.

caterpillar

 

 

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