UP ON TOXIC MOUNTAIN

Something is happening here on my mountain I find alarming, but nobody else does. The last few years I've seen butterflies diminish in number so much and so fast, I see we will not have butterflies next year. This year I've seen just a few butterflies. Years past, I saw multitudes of them around clusters of Joe Pye flowers. Last year just a few, this year mostly none, now and then one appears. The county's long-arm bush-hog used for trimming the sides of the roads of small trees and other growth, that makes ugly out of beautiful everywhere it goes, came through here a week or so ago. The driver of the tractor made it a point to go out of his way to make a special effort to mow down the stand of Joe Pyes behind my mailbox post. I was out picking up the mail next day and saw a lone butterfly flying around the mailbox looking for the Joe Pye. It was a sad moment for me to see a lone butterfly looking for the flowers that were there the day before. It's not stupidity on the driver's part, it's following orders, doing what he's told, policy. Years ago, I put a 6' long wrecking bar in the ground next to a Joe Pye to protect it. He mowed up to the bar, raised the mower over the bar and took out the Joe Pye the other side of it.

 

 

An acre of wildflowers in the donkey meadow was loaded with flowers all summer. Walking in the meadow through the wildflowers, I never saw one honeybee. Only saw a few bumble bees, very few, and them smaller than they used to be. Insects that also pollinate were absent. Saw very few bugs this summer. The jewelweed flowered far less this year than ever before. Between the house and where I park the car is a big patch of jewelweed. Few flowers this year and few seedpods.  I've not seen any hummingbirds among them this year. The Christmas tree growers have poisoned the water so the native trout have died out, as have the minnows and the snails. The water snakes that live on fish in the creeks are far less in number. My land is surrounded on three sides by Christmas tree fields. They have poisoned the entire mountain. Far fewer birds come to the bird feeders this year. This is the first year I've seen dramatic absence of life around here. Nobody says a word about it. I bring it up to somebody and I'm accused of being a conspiracy theorist, telling you I live among extremely right-wing republicans. Virginia Foxx, the parrot, is my so-called representative.

 

 

I've not seen any wasp nests this year. The exterior walls to the house are perfect for mud daubers to fix their clay tubes to. None this year. I've not seen hornets or yellow jackets. Just a few years ago, all these insects were abundant here. After about twenty years of Christmas trees on the mountain, life is nearly extinguished, the topsoil is ruined and the creeks poisoned. The County advises residents not to drink water from springs, rather to use wells for the deep underground water. Christmas trees are the money crop in the area. The growers make enough money to be a big chunk of the county's tax base, so much that they rule. Like the multi-national corporations have taken over national government, the Christmas tree growers have become our local government. Commissioners have become subservient to the Christmas tree growers who drive the new oxymoron, Cadillac pickups. County government does not encourage the growers to be less toxic or mindful of the statistic that this county has the highest rate of cancer in the state. Everybody knows it, it's understood. The County tells us not to drink the water. Too bad the ground water is poison, somebody is making money, the only part that matters.

 

 

 

It makes me feel weird to be the only one seeing what is happening, or not denying it. Plus, it's not on television. Television people don't notice things like butterflies and bees as anything but nuisance. Fake news tells them it isn't happening. If I were to mention to county authorities the Christmas tree growers have killed life on Air Bellows Mountain, I'd be told it's not really like that, I need to be less dramatic and get with the program. It's the same everywhere Christmas trees grow. The growers put out press that they are environmentally conscious and don't use chemicals much. But when they do, instead of spraying the trees individually like they used to, a grower in an enclosed tractor sprays the fields from the road at night with a vast sprayer putting out a fog that goes where the wind blows. They do it at night so residents won't see it. They fertilize by helicopter, spraying fertilizer pellets in the woods and creek when the copter turns around, sounding like hail on my roof. I don't want their oil-based fertilizer on my land. Too bad. The rain washes the fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides down the hill onto my land. The donkeys are, thereby, poisoned too. In forty years I've seen abundant, rich land, pristine creeks abundant with native trout, minnows, water snakes, poisoned to the extent the land and water have become poison. For money and television.

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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THE AIR BELLOWS DRIVE THRU ART MUSEUM

air bellows drive thru art museum

ABDTAM

 

For a number of years I've been making photographs inside the tunnel under the Blue Ridge Parkway at Air Bellows Gap. The walls were plain concrete since the beginning of the Parkway until one day somebody wrote something on a wall with spray paint in the 1980s. Then another and another until the inside was covered with graffiti  by winter. The next season, more writings and images. Then, of course, a middle-class Flatlander objected, called the Parkway office and pled a prosecutorial case about it being offensive. Parkway maintenance painted the walls an ugly brown, covered the beautiful growing abstraction on the two walls, about 30'x10'. I loved it when the new markings began to cover the brown. A few years later, somebody complained to the Parkway office again and they painted it over again. It was covered up in a year. Then came the Reagan Revolution and transferring money from the Dept of Interior budget to the military. Hence, minimal maintenance since the 1980s, large sections of pavement needing repair. They seldom mow along the sides of the road anymore, which is ok by me. I like to see grass grow and go to seed.

 

ABDTAM

 

As a result of the budget cuts, the Parkway painted over the graffiti no more. It grew and became beautiful after some years. Then one of my neighbors caught a kid adding to it. He knew the kid's mother, called her, got the kid in trouble with a zero tolerance mom, who got with the Parkway office and they had the kid paint the interior of the tunnel gray. I was so irritated with my neighbor I never said anything about it, because I could not address the subject without getting red in the face and a bit aggressive in tone of voice. What the hell. A fresh canvas. Nobody has painted over it since. Maybe it has been ten or more years that the colors and lines grow on top of themselves, colors galore. Writing on top of writing such that new things appear on top of everything else, then new words and colors appear on top of that, on and on until colors and lines become an abstract canvas. It has no plan, no design, no unifying anything except the space, itself. The patterns are purest chance. Somebody goes in there with a spray can, chooses a spot, scrawls whatever comes to mind and leaves in a hurry to avoid getting caught.

 

ABDTAM

 

The place seems to me an important spot for the community of the county. Teenagers have no voice in adult society, are paid no attention to. They are nuisances, because adults don't want to be bothered by them, certainly don't want to listen to them. So kids evolve a culture among themselves that concerns offending adults. Pink hair, turquoise hair, tattoos, music adults can't tolerate, graffiti,  slang, sharp sticks in the eye of disapproving adults. I see the impulse to scrawl words and lines on the wall in the tunnel a small gesture of defiance, a rebel gesture, shooting the bird to adult society, the people that look down on them, talk down to them, pay no attention to them, dismiss them as irrelevant. Of course, this is not all the kids. It's largely the outsiders and the ones that feel left out. Only a few can be star jocks and cheerleaders, the only ones with any significance in and outside the school. It's like Miss America. One winner, forty-nine losers. The kids left out listen to hard metal music or punk and wear the most offensive tshirt images they can get away with. The style image is aggressive offensive. The graffiti is another expression of this attitude. Like John Lee Hooker sang in his song, Boogie Chillun, It's in him, it's got to come out. I feel like a localized spot for graffiti functions something like a pressure release valve.

 

ABDTAM

 

Almost two weeks ago I parked off the road outside the tunnel and went inside to get some photographs. Beautiful walls, but I was not satisfied with any of the pictures. I try to compose them by colors and find compositions of lines in relation to the colors, yet am unable to catch what I see, or what I feel. It finally came to me that what I love about the walls is the spontaneous random chance of every jotting, an abstraction created by pure chance. Cy Twombly is good at making a canvas that looks like chance. These two walls are composed by chance itself. No one artist's mind composed it. It simply happened. Finally, it came to me to make photographs in the tunnel by chance. I drove through it yesterday. Opened the camera ready to go, held it pointing out the driver's side window without looking at the image. Driving slowly through the tunnel, I clicked the camera over and over until I came to the end. Got five images. The images are here, from top to bottom in the order they happened. These are the most satisfying images I've recorded in there. Before, I was looking at it with mind. Take mind out of it and I enter the spirit of the thing itself. I do feel like these five images capture the spirit of the place like no other photographs I've made in there. In a way, I feel like I've found the spirit of the place. It has a spirit I feel driving through it, for me a happy spirit. I don't look at it with judgment and desire to punish. I'm happy it is located so close to my home.

 

ABDTAM

 

 

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DECIPHERING DESTINY

karl horst hodicke

Looking back at how and why I came to where I am, living in solitude in Blue Ridge Mountains, specifically the central Blue Ridge, it looks like divine destiny from forty years after. Yet, at the time, I only knew place as rural. It felt more like stepping into the unknown than some high sounding word like destiny, like I know what destiny means. Bob Dylan defined destiny as, briefly, what one already knows about oneself. Whatever that means. I feel like it gives me something to go by, a place to start looking. From my own point of view it was arbitrary as spinning a quarter on a tabletop and betting on which side turns up. I knew woods were plentiful and the people were old-timey. Purpose, manual labor on a farm as caretaker, somebody who had never cut down a tree or driven a tractor. I learned fast. Every fall I had to cut firewood for four houses through the winter. That's a lot of wood. I only cut dead trees, of which there are plenty. We seldom think about trees growing old and dying, but they do. Fallen tree trunks lie everywhere in the forest in varied phases of decay. Some will stand for decades before they fall. I have actually witnessed two locust trees fall over. Each one I just happened to glance at movement that caught my eye in the near distance and it turned out to be a locust tree on its way down. I say, "actually," for it being so rare a thing to see, like witnessing a deer give birth, which I've seen once.

karl horst hodicke

The top of the list of the unforeseen is that I choose to stay here unto my last day. To have been told any time during the first ten years that I'd be here for life, I'd have felt like it was a prison sentence. Right away, it felt like home, familiar in ways I could not make out why. The first familiar was everyone talked like my grandmother Worthington, who grew up in Kansas. I wrote it off to a universally American rural accent. That was as far as I could get making out how it was familiar. The people I met along the way were natured like my grandmother, philosophically minded. I don't mean philosophical like resignation, but thought about questions they had, worked things out reasonably and morally in their minds. My friend Justin is a good example of the old-time mountain way of thinking. He has a conundrum, he goes fishing, works it out in his mind. Last year he had such a conundrum he asked Crystal to allow him to be off to himself a couple of days. He slept in his sleeping bag in the deer blind, stayed to himself, went fishing. By the third day, decision made, he was fresh and ready to go, the burden that had grown onto his back fallen away. Justin's practical sense of morality blows my mind the times I've seen it in action. In this I see him carrying the heart of the mountain way of life as it's fading fast by generations. It was not intimidated into him by church, but worked out in practical everyday life with a philosophical mind. I've seen the same reasoning in the people gone now of the old culture, Jr Maxwell in particular. They had active philosophical minds. I don't mean they read Kant and Heidegger. Their reading amounted to the Bible, philosophy from front to back. 

karl horst hodicke

I got my philosophical-minded ways from grandmother. By the time of my parents' generation, the Bible was reduced to a book of rules you dare not question. My generation of people brought up by religionists value questioning. Many of us questioned our ways out of religion. I reached a place where I saw religion is fake, though was unable to see beyond religion, a projection of the human mind, associating religion with God. I had to let go of God. Soon after, I found that God indeed is, but not much like I got from religion, besides verses the preacher never interpreted to my satisfaction, like, God is love. In the church I came up in, God hated an awful lot and was the Supreme Judge. Of course, the white people were God's chosen, specifically American with English names. For many years I disliked my name because it was too much like a name on an office door. I had a problem with that until one day I realized my name does not make me, I make my name. My name means who I am. To some it means an arrogant asshole, to some it means a jackass whisperer, to some somewhat likable, to some a friend. The name appears to be destined for an office door, but not necessarily. I never had an inner need for my name on a door. What I wanted for myself, without knowing it, was to be where I am now. In childhood, my grandmother was my comfort. Also, with extensive woods nearby, the canopy of trees were my other comfort. With her and in the woods were the places I could be who I am.

karl horst hodicke

My relationships with adults amounted to obedience. With grandmother, it mattered that I was a sentient being who thought about things and wanted to learn. In the woods, I felt the closeness of the world of nature. I knew the renewing quality of a canopy of trees. I learned after about thirty years in the mountains that my grandmother's parents moved to Kansas from Pulaski County, Kentucky, southeastern Kentucky, explaining her accent and her philosophical mind. Even before realizing she was a transplanted hillbilly, I had referred to these mountains as grandmother's arms. The woods, the trees, I need like a bird needs feathers. This is my destiny, the place my parachute landed me, in a little empty house on a back road, a place I can walk among trees all day long and never be far from home. In my early years, people from Away would want me to drive a couple hours to someplace to go hiking in the mountains. I only went once out of curiosity and found the same as I have here someplace else. Never felt the need to go hiking. I step out the door, cross the road and I'm on a path in the woods beside a mountain stream. I've walked all over the woods of Air Bellows and some beyond with the dog of my life, Sadie. She came to me already named or I would have called her Louise. So she was Sadie Louise. My destiny turned out to be the places of my childhood I felt safe, the places I felt were real in an unreal world. How I found the place that is just right for who I am by a seeming throw of the die is beyond my ability to see.

karl horst hodicke

*

IN THE FLOW ON AIR BELLOWS MOUNTAIN

claude monet

Overcast sky today, threatening to rain all day and never did. The forecast was for rain. I watched the rhododendron leaves out the window from time to time for sign of raindrops. At the first sign of rain I would back the car down the hill to the barn and carry three bales to the donkey feeding station before rain. I wanted to do several things before wrestling the hay, knowing when I've brought up the three bales, packed them, carried some into the meadow for donkeys, I'd be tired. Planned to carry the hay last, then have a nap. The rain never came, I stretched out on the bed and woke up. Spent half an hour wondering why I was staying in the bed when it was obvious I was not headed for sleep. To rest. I needed to rest. To lie down for half an hour is sometimes as good a rest as a nap. Working on the farm, tired, needing a break, I would lie down on my back and watch the clouds. It worked so well and so fast I learned all I needed was to watch the clouds until I saw them move. It takes a moment looking up at the clouds to see their motion. First glance, they're still. Wait just a few seconds and they start moving, rather my eyes notice. I would lie there and watch the clouds move. Ready to get up and back to work refreshed. It was a way to take a break and not waste any time while I'm working. Had a lot to do and had to keep up with it. In less than a minute I was ready to go again. It helped keep me in tune, too. A brief meditation, a clearing of the mind. Looking at clouds helps clear my mind almost instantly. In motion, I only see the clouds still. I have to be still before I can see the clouds move. Lying on my back in the meadow watching clouds is the most relaxing thing I know. I've found the air currents of the southern part of the county watching the flow of clouds.  

claude monet

The air currents here on Air Bellows mountain run every which way. I'm in a holler between two ridges, north and south, and another ridge about three hundred yards to the east that runs perpendicular to the other two, and a ridge to the west about the same distance. Sometimes the wind whips around in this oddly shaped bowl in turbulence patterns. One moment the wind will be blowing one way and another moment the wind is swirling in a different direction. Wind blowing north and south, the ridges slope the wind up over my glen. The trees on the ridges above roar like a flying train and not a leaf down here will even be moving. The wind blowing east or west runs right through here. I like to pay attention to the wind as an aspect of flow. Water flows. Blood flows. Mind flows. A turning wheel flows. Most of the time in my holler the wind does not move very fast. The location of this house is in harmony with the surrounding landscape. Just a few hundred yards to the west around a curve runs the wind channel of Air Bellows Gap. The wind flows through there in a pattern so different from the patterns around the house it seems odd it's so close. The channel is a river of air. My holler is a still pool at the side of a mountain stream, outside the current, slowly renewed by the current, a still, quiet place. The air current through Air Bellows Gap flows around a bend and follows the channel of the creek to the waterfalls, down the creek to Whitehead, then up to Fender mountain and beyond into another current. I've been told this gap was given its name Air Bellows for the wind blowing through it both ways. I like living at three thousand feet in the Southern mountains.

claude monet

Low-flying clouds creep over the mountain, fog all day. A foggy day is beautiful every time of year. Many times I have been someplace else, like Pine Swamp, the township to the east of Whitehead, and saw my mountain in the distance covered by a cloud crawling over the long ridge the Parkway follows. I have walked the ridge from the house to Bullhead and all the way out to the far end of the mountain. Walking in these mountains is how I found home here. In the early years I walked long distances with the dog, learning the deer trails, the varieties of trees, outcroppings of rock, the creeks, the waterfalls. Two of the waterfalls in Air Bellows draw visitors, but at least four other waterfalls are tucked out of the way in wooded spaces only hunters see. There are even places that are waterfalls in a big rain and not even a creek when it's not raining. There was a time the then director of the Chamber of Commerce asked me for a waterfall photograph for the cover of one of their small tourism magazines advertising local businesses. I didn't want to make the Air Bellows falls a tourist attraction. This is not a state park and people from away never get it that people own the land they're trespassing. That's not entirely true, but enough to make it seem true. I took him a photograph of a small, beautiful waterfall with a nice rock beside it, some ferns and moss around. He loved the picture. After the magazine was done, he asked me where the waterfall was. I told him it is only a waterfall during a rain and a short time after. It doesn't exist. He didn't know what to do with that. His face fell in such a way I suspected he'd been asked how to find the waterfall in the picture. I doubt he gave such an answer to the question next time. Probably said he didn't know. He was way into promoting and advertising, selling the county. I am philosophically opposed to that mind, explaining why I turned in the picture of a waterfall that is not a waterfall.

claude monet

For several years I would take a day and go to the woods with a book, a notebook, a pen, a thermos of hot tea and an apple or two. I'd go with dog to a place along the creek, a big flat rock in the creek, a flat rock beside the creek, anyplace I wanted to sit along the creek. My favorite spot was a rock that projected into the creek from the side, covered in moss, flat on top, a nice mossy bed, rhododendron, trees, a small waterfall to the right a short distance, and the creek, Waterfalls Creek, flowing down the hill to the left toward the big waterfalls farther on. Enough room on top of the rock to sit and place my things, and room for dog to stretch out behind me as I sat facing the water. She, Sadie, would explore the woods all day, coming back to me from time to time. I would mostly sit and watch the flow of the water. I have seen some rare occurrences sitting on the rock. This was in the time native trout lived in the creek, before the Christmas tree invasion that poisoned the ground and the water of Air Bellows and all the water downstream into the Little River. The springs on this mountain are the beginning of the Little River. The trout are gone, the ecosystem along the creeks is gone, the minnows, the water snakes, gone. The water is now dead. Back in the time it was living, the rock I sat on had a small pool to the right I looked down into. After sitting still for an hour, the trout came out from hiding and swam around in the pool, living their lives. This one day I saw a female trout in a shallow place where the water ran over small rocks, a male beside her. Two males took turns. One would shimmy beside her for awhile and swim out into the pool. Another male was waiting his turn and moved in to shimmy beside her. By the time he finished, the other was ready to go again. They made the round several times. After she'd shed all her eggs, she swam back and rejoined the extended family circling in the pool. Another time a water snake gave me a show of how beautifully a snake can swim. It was a swimming dance. As beautiful a thing as I've ever seen.

claude monet himself

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BIG BIRD ICHNOLOGY

This morning I went to my neighbor's house to do laundry. This is Judy and Lucas Carpenter's summer place across the road and into the trees. The snow is mostly gone from places the sun hits and continues in shaded places like the north side of mountains and the north side of a wall of trees. The parking area at the house was all snow. It had shrunk from seven or eight inches down to one or two, different in different places. I saw tracks in the snow from the car window. Stepped out and had a good look at tracks I'd never seen before, three big toes going forward from a place that looked like the palm of a hand, a pad. The toes splayed out like ten o'clock, twelve and two. Not a bear. It had to be a bird of some sort. Not an eagle's foot, not even close, and not gigantic turkey. The tracks lacked the toe that goes backwards for grabbing and roosting. It is a bird that evolved away from roosting, a bird that does not fly. A big bird. I have heard of people having emus in the county. The only one I'm aware of is across Hwy 21 from the skeletal remains of AM radio station WCOK, the place Lillie Nichols once lived. I don't know who owns the land now. The bird's tracks walked down the drive from the Caudill cemetery. At the parking area it walked around all over the place. It appeared Big Bird wanted to step into the woods among the trees, but could not find an area open enough. Evidently, the bird is not accustomed to walking in the woods. It walked all over the parking area. Twice left it to look for a place to travel on, could not find an opening in the trees to suit it, turned and came back to the parking area. It walked around and around, giving the appearance it was looking for where to go from this space. The driveway makes a U-turn the bird could not see from the parking area. 

The bird's exploration's found the U-turn and took the driveway toward the road. It searched along the side of the driveway for a place to step into the trees, but could not find an opening. The tracks went off down the driveway until the snow ended. It could see an opening at the end of the driveway from the last of the snow. I gather from it staying in open places, it lives in a fenced-in field. Driving up the road, earlier, near the turn up the driveway from the road, I noticed a smashed splat I took for bear first, but could tell driving by, it was not bear. On the way back, driving home, I stopped and made a picture of it and examined it. Definitely not bear. Bear is full of seeds. This had no seeds, even favored donkey without the fiber. It dribbled some walking away, the spots of dribble turning to the left toward the donkey meadow the other side of the road. Fence all the way along, I doubt it went into the meadow. My sensing is that it walked down the road past my house. It would not turn in here for all the trees and rhododendron. Maybe. The only place I can see it going if it went down the road would be to turn in at Allan's driveway, the open gate. If it went up the driveway, it would have found meadow, but fence on both sides all the way to the lake. It could turn into the driveway to the barn Gene Dysart built. The bird may have found the meadow to the right along that short driveway. If it took either way, it may still be in Air Bellows. I had not been to Carpenter's house since Saturday, and the tracks were not there. Driving home from town yesterday a little after five I did not see the splat in the road. I would have. I always notice when a bear takes a dump in the road. It looked like it had been run over only once. Not much traffic on the road in this weather. First thought seeing it this morning was doubt bears are out in this cold time. 

Driving home, I saw tracks in the meadow across the creek from the donkey meadow. Snow was still on the ground, it being on the north side of the ridge. I walked out into the meadow after giving the donkeys some grain to take a look at the tracks. They were dog. I called Allan just now to tell him I suspect a possible emu may have walked up his driveway toward the lake. I said my feeling is that it was last night. He said there was a time Martha the dog barked for an hour at something, a bark he'd never heard her do before, the quick frequency of barks is what was different. He said the dogs don't bark at bears. Perhaps she saw something she had never seen before, didn't know what it was. He said he had heard about a woman who lives in Whitehead who had an ostrich. I'd guess an ostrich and an emu have similar footprints. Not the same, of course, but to someone who had never seen either, one or the other is the best I can do with a guess. I knew who he meant by the woman with the ostrich, but could not think of her name. I called somebody I knew who knew her. She does not have an ostrich. We talked awhile about who in Pine Swamp and Whitehead had emu. The only two we could think of were close to town. I came to a dead end. I'd put pictures of the tracks on facebook, telling that a possible emu is in Air Bellows, hoping somebody who saw it would know somebody with emus and alert them. I hate for Big Bird to be lost these cold, unforgiving winter nights. I trust it knows how to hunker down in a tight space to sleep. If coyotes are about, it won't live long. I feel an urgency to find whoever is missing an emu to rescue it. I've done all I'm able. I feel like facebook is the best place to post an alert. Beyond facebook, all I know to do is turn it over to God's will with a prayer. 

It has been a curiosity since seeing the tracks. My feeling is I guessed its path, confirmed by Martha's barking last night. From there, it could be anywhere by now. I have to mark this a momentous day, 3/3/15. Finding emu tracks in snow on the mountain is as much out of the blue as finding elephant tracks. When something happens that is this odd, I pay attention. For what, I don't know. It is so much like a dream I want to look at it as a dream, interpret it as I would a dream. It brings to mind the time thirty or more years ago I found a turkey egg on the rock resting against the screen door. Dog was in the house. I still have no idea how the egg found my door. More than likely, I'll never know where the emu came from or where it went. Big Bird was here, took a dump, and left. I looked at the facebook post to see if any clues had come in. April Joines said emus have been spotted on the parkway where some evidently were lost and took up there. So we have emus on the parkway now. They're good if they can evade the coyotes. It seems like if this one lived along the parkway it would not be so hesitant to leave an open area. Something that has been in the "wild" for awhile soon learns not to be out in the open so much. My sense of it is the bird was so relieved to find the road it relaxed and let go a bowel movement. I don't think it was marking territory like bears do. What a curious enigma to wake up to this morning. The ghost of Big Bird passed through.   

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THE POPLAR WALKING STICK

judy's walking stick

This afternoon I sat on a step and whittled on a walking stick for my friend Judy. She and Lucas go walking when they're visiting, taking walking sticks found someplace. Nice sticks, old and dry. I made this stick for Judy, for her own personal walking stick that was made with her in mind. I cut the poplar sapling to length last year and let it dry after cutting off the limbs with clippers. Today was a sun shining day after a dry day following two wet days. Justin used the good weather to put a fresh coat of stain-sealer on the south side of the log house. I went to be there for company and for backup considering he was working on ladders. I sat on the step using my pocketknife, a Case XX stainless single blade with black handle. It's been my knife for over thirty-five years. It's called a "clod buster." Why? I don't know. I used to have pocket knives with two and three blades. I never used more than one. I like a knife with a single blade. I sat on the step to the deck shaving the top layer of the bark in careful slices. I wanted to leave the under layer of the bark, a light tan that would darken with oil. I whittled each place a branch came out from the trunk down to a smooth bump. Poplar wood is almost white. These places have a target in the center, the beginnings of rings, inside a white semi-circle, looking somewhat like an eye. I think of them as eyes to assist walking, watching for serpents in particular. A seeing eye walking stick. I don't like fancy walking sticks. Seems to me like a walking stick in these mountains is best like the way of life in the mountains, plain, uniquely itself. It's designs, the circles, I thought would make a good repeating pattern along the length of the stick showing the pattern of the branches growing out from the trunk. The pattern of its design is itself, its unique and solitary self.

the handle

 

I was of two minds about finishing the stick. I wanted to leave the rough marks left from slicing strips of bark onto my lap and the step between and around my feet. I wanted to sand it too, make it smooth. I liked both ways of seeing it in my mind's eye, though preferred smooth. I chose to leave the upper foot of the stick, the part the hand holds, semi-rough to let the beauty of the shaving lines have their place. Instead of being a length of it like a handle grip, I made the end of it rough and smoothed it slightly down the part I think of as the handle, fading into smooth the rest of the stick's length. It is forty-six inches, two inches shy of four feet. A walking stick really doesn't need a crook like a cane. A crook becomes an obstacle to deal with using it for a walking stick. A cane is more for keeping balance and favoring a leg. A walking stick is for moving ahead, sometimes an assist uphill or downhill when a third foot would help. The stick is smooth from one end to the other with soft bumps for the eyes, no sharp edges to snag a finger. The skin that is the under layer of the bark has intricate patterns of vertical flow lines similar to the lines on the outer bark. The lower three feet are a soft light brown and smooth as a woman's leg in panty-hose. The tung oil is bringing out the honey brown of this layer of bark I'll call the skin. The end of the stick on top is whittled into a smooth hump and sanded even smoother. Three rings for the heart of the tree and the white wood around them makes another eye, an inch in diameter. Poplar is a deceptively light weight wood. The stick has a few of my mistakes on it, places I cut too deep and exposed the white wood. No problem. It's the accidental element in the design, the human element that says a machine did not make this stick out of lumber. I want its design to be the flow lines of its life. I thought for a short time about carving a ring around it to designate handle. It was too conscious an interruption from outside the stick. I didn't want any of its design to be made by my mind. I thought about stripping a band down to the white around it in places where I slipped and exposed the white. No. Mind again. Let a few unintended nicks make their own design.

 

the human touch

 

I want the only part that is of the human mind to be the stick itself. It did not cut itself to this length or whittle itself. A walking stick is a human thing, a product of the human mind. As a walking stick, I hoped it could be its own design. A poplar is a beautiful tree. A pair of tulip poplar trees were in full flower the first time I saw this house toward making the decision to pick up and go to the mountains and start my new life working a farm in the place where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart (WB Yeats). Thoreau's Walden was one of the first books I read upon moving in during winter. Thoreau was instrumental earlier in my life by way of civil disobedience learned toward dealing with the madman at home. My first lesson in the Tao; resistance by way of nonresistance. I wanted to face solitude, learn to handle it. Comfort with solitude took awhile taking root. The tulip poplar flowers struck me at the time an affirming sign. Poplar leaves turn yellow in the fall. They will be all yellow and the leaves drop, one at a time, until the tree has a sprinkling of leaves like stars, and they hold the look for quite awhile. Not far from here on the road to Whitehead, a stand of poplars on a ridge in the near distance makes a sight a photograph only diminishes in the fall when the leaves are gone and these poplars sparkle with random yellow leaves like stars. I know a place in the woods where the ground is so nearly straight up and down, rock for the ground covered with layers of decayed leaves, very difficult to walk on. Need a fifty foot rope to walk in that place. It has the biggest poplars I've seen. They're giants that grow straight up, huge trunks. In the 1920s or 30s, lumber companies came through these mountains buying all the timber, causing erosion problems that washed away sides of mountains. Evidently, they couldn't reach these trees. Yes, I'm a tree hugger. I hugged one of them, honored them for being the elders of the Air Bellows trees.

poplar bark

The woods on the mountain are all new since the mountains were stripped of their trees and the owners of the land made a little bit of money to help paying for a new house, and new fields cleared to plant oats and corn on. I think of the forest here virgin forest. The trees and growth in the woods all started growing less than a hundred years ago. Some less long ago, having been corn fields for cornbread and oats and hay for the horses. What's left of hay fields has largely gone to Christmas trees, purveyors of cancer to residents of NW North Carolina. It's ok. They pay a lot of taxes, the county budget couldn't make it without them. I was thinking today while whittling on Judy's walking stick of all the farms that were on this mountain, big farms that raised food for work horses and milk cows, chickens, family to live on through the course of a year. This is where making liquor came in. Liquor making was the only way a farmer had to make some money. It worked pretty well until it worked too well and the liquor-making corporations lobbied laws to prohibit a man from making liquor on his own land. A really good movie was made about that time not far from here around Stuart, Virginia, across the state line from Mt Airy, NC. It starred Val Kilmer and a lot of local people from the area. In scenes where a lot of men came together to stand up against the G-man, I saw local faces galore. I felt at home among them. It was especially refreshing to see mountain people portrayed accurately by way of film, even sympathetically as something besides toothless. Lawless is its title. The story was written by the son of the man the story follows, the film made from his book. The history of these hills is in Judy's walking stick that grew out of the ground of its own accord within ten feet of the house. I've put one coat of tung oil on it with bare hands. The stick soaked the oil up immediately. I'll put another coat on it later, and one a day for several days until I feel like it has done what I want it to do, preserve it as a walking stick and bring out its inner beauty, the beauty of its unique self.  

 

stick from the ground up

 

 

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THE WILDLIFE OF AIR BELLOWS

the bear

the bear and 2 coyotes--black coyote on right

bear and coyote

 

bear two nights before

These pictures were taken by a field camera triggered by motion, strapped to a tree. The place in the foreground  where the light is concentrated is the "bait pile," deer corn strewn over the ground and apples spread on the ground. The lore on coyotes says they don't eat apples. One of the pictures is a coyote with an apple in its mouth. It's the apples the coyotes are looking for here. The camera is about a tenth of a mile from my house on the other side of the road. I've been told bears were  in here, have seen traces, like at a rise in the road about half way between house and camera site a bear has been taking a dump on the road at the highest place that overlooks a great part of this valley between ridges. The camera recorded that the bear lay down comfortably in this place for two and a quarter hours. Coons, deer and coyotes passed through the pictures, the bear watching. I presume the bear knows the coyotes, the coons and the deer from nightly sightings. The bear is huge, estimated at 400+ pounds. From the standing picture, the bear looks pregnant to me, at least swollen up toward winter hibernation. I've become acquainted with this bear through the photographs. Since it appears comfortable here and has evidently been here several years, explaining the bear droppings on the place in the road that reappear from time to time, I feel like this is my bear sharing the mountain with me, my God-given neighbor.

 

coyote with apple in its mouth

 

ninja raccoon faces coyote intruder

 

coyote turns away

 

deer and raccoons

  

Most interesting to me, seeing this line of 500 images in the course of a couple of days and a nights, is seeing the critters living in the woods around here do not attack each other on sight. In a couple of the pictures, coons and coyotes face each other. In one of them the coon is standing on its back feet in a martial arts fighting stance (195). The coyote looks on with apprehension, body language saying, Looking for trouble I am not. Next frame (196) occurs in the same minute, the coyote showing its side, showing itself not a threat. Ninja Raccoon relaxes his stance. I believe, one-on-one, a coon could shred a coyote's face in a hurry. Two or more coyotes, I believe, could subdue a coon, but they'd have to be swift, which they are, and experienced, which they are, and work as a team, which they do. It appears the bait pile, like a watering hole, is a safe zone where it is collectively agreed, no killing at the communal kitchen. Until one of the deer feels for a split second the shaft of an arrow pierce the heart. My hunter friend, the only one with permission to hunt this part of the woods, is recording times the bucks pass through. The camera also gives him an idea of what is living in these woods. He had always been told coyotes don't eat apples. Turns out they do. It also turns out he is feeding the night critters of Air Bellows, day critters too. I'm feeding the birds here at the house and the donkeys with sunflower seeds and carrots. He's feeding everything else with corn and apples.

 

all four pictures the black coyote

 

 

 

 

 

I found several pictures of the black coyote, the one easily mistaken for wolf. I went looking at google images for wolves and coyotes. The long thin snout is coyote. A wolf's snout is more like a dog's. It looks like the black coyote travels on his own. Possibly he's the leader of the pack, top dog, scouting all the time, looking for something of interest. If it will take more than one, like maybe a lone calf in a meadow, he rounds up the pack and lays out his plan for attack. Don't get attached to any of the animals in these pictures. This plot of ground is no more than a slice of pepperoni on their whole pizza. They have an extensive range. Humans are looking to kill the deer and the coyotes as well as a bear. Humans don't kill the coons so much anymore, but going by the apparent understanding between the coon and the coyote, coons know that coyotes like raccoon meat. In the picture above, the back of the black coyote, notice his left front leg is missing, though its shadow is on the ground. His leg is raised carefully in slow motion, turning to the right to place his foot silently on dry leaves. Or maybe he's just trotting through, seeing what he can see, smelling the scent of every coyote, coon, squirrel, crow, turkey, deer, bear, human that had passed in and out of the communal kitchen, listening for any sound of footsteps on dry leaves. Whatever he is doing, he is doing it in full consciousness in the present moment. 

 

crow

 

turkey

 

squirrels

 

the reaper

 



While I was writing about the black coyote, three college-age girls came to the door and asked permission to park here and walk to the waterfalls. They'd been told the waterfalls are beautiful. Here I am, looking at these pictures for a few hours, writing about what I see, and three girls whose probable closest acquaintance with wildlife might be the cats they grew up with, I felt it important to advise them of what is in these woods. The bigger ones, the coyotes and the bears, are new to the area, the reason I don't go walking in the woods anymore. I advised them to step on twigs, talk a lot, make noise, let everything know a bunch of humans is passing through. I told them they won't see anything, because everything will see them first and go someplace else. I said none of these animals is looking to get you. They don't want to get you. They will leave you alone. If you see one, don't run. I said running means to them you want to play chase. You lose. Stand still like they do when they see one another. Show absence of aggression. My final advice, "Be wary. Don't worry." I came back to the house. I think they went back to the car and left. My hunter friends, who know what is going on in these woods, only go into the woods with a gun that has stopping power. Friend, who hunts here, walks into the woods in bow season, arrow in place. The only time he will require is the time it takes to pull back the string and let it go. I used to say nothing to city people visiting waterfalls about the possibility of running into a bear, coyote or wolf, but now that I know what is in these woods, I feel obliged to warn city people with no country experience about what they're getting into. Give them a chance to make a decision. It's no petting zoo.

 

 

 

 

 

the bear

 

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