DRIFTING ON ICE

     robert mangold, distorted circle with polygon, 1973

The mountain is covered with ice. I'm glad it was not as predicted. Forecast said freezing rain and snow from Friday around noon through Saturday. We got about a half an inch of very fine granules of ice on top of freezing rain that put down a half inch layer of ice on the roads under the half inch of ice granules. The little bit of texture made walking on it easy and driving possible, except for a steep grade up or down the hill. Even four-wheel can't handle that. After the precipitation we had frozen fog the rest of the day. I walked next door a third of a mile to Allan's, face advancing through the oncoming faint breeze with tiny flakes of ice so small they can't be seen, only felt on the face. It was not unpleasant. In that way I preferred the return home with that little bit of breeze on my back. Then I didn't even know the air had these microscopic pieces of flying ice.

From inside the house I could see against distant background the slight rain of the ice that looked like a snow of tiny flakes. The temperature was below twenty. I wore two pair of sweatpants, a tshirt, a long-sleeved tshirt and a sweatshirt under a good warm coat and a neck scarf my friend Pat knitted for me many years ago. Two hats. Gloves. The shoes I wore were my regular shoes. With no insulation under the floor, my feet are cold all the time anyway, so why would a little bit colder matter? I was warm everywhere but feet, face and hands. Gloves tend to make my hands colder than they would be without the gloves. I bought some driving gloves for this winter, but never wear them because my fingers freeze in them. I wore the gloves anyway. Hands were not quite as cold as they would be without the gloves.

A gray squirrel from the woods across the road is foraging for sunflower seeds I threw out there an hour ago. I'm glad the squirrel has decided to pick up snacks here. I like to watch squirrels. Every move they make is quick. I've seen them jump from tree to tree, flying through the air with all four feet extended and open to grasp a limb not half an inch thick. They are the monkeys of our forests. Two red squirrels live in the trees around the house. They pick up bird seed too. Several bluejays, thirty or more snowbirds, a pair of cardinals. The male cardinal is a rooster. Another cardinal comes in and the cardinal that claims this feeding station for his territory runs the other one off immediately. A few sparrows. Some nuthatches, a pair of woodpeckers, titmice, chickadees and two different kinds of buntings. These are the winter birds. Finches come in summer with the doves and wrens. I feed them twice a day when it's cold on the belief that they need plenty of food energy to get them through the long cold nights. They're growing too. The oil in the sunflower seeds gives their feathers a luminous quality. I know they love it. Birds have a certain vanity about their feathers.

My friend Justin came by in his 4-wheel pickup with his wife Crystal and his kids, Vada, Cheyanne and Landon. They took me with them riding around on the ice on back roads. Justin loves to put the truck in 2-wheel and spin around curves sideways and he's good at straightening it up as soon as it's necessary. He can't "drift" a pickup with big tires made for grip on dry pavement. I know he can drift a car through a curve, a rear-wheel drive car, but I've never seen him do it. We went around to back roads and had a ball. At night headlights warn of approaching vehicles, which there were none of in the roads we took. Only one set of tracks in front of us, somebody doing the same thing we were doing. The kids slept. Drifting is from the movie, Fast And Furious: Tokyo Drift. It's a good movie if you like car driving action. Drifting is running the rear wheels so fast they can't get a grip. It smokes the tires like after a nascar race when the winner holds the checkered flag out his window and drifts in circles, sometimes sending up a cloud of smoke the car disappears inside. I found a video of a guy drifting up the California mountain highway, Mulholland Drive. He left two black lines all the way up the road. Justin is a good driver, a very good driver. His dad taught him well. One exercise he passed to Justin was to drive with outside wheels on the white line. It helps to know where the edge of the road is in relation to the front edge of the hood. It's about keeping it in the road. I'm relaxed when I ride with him, knowing what an excellent driver he is. I felt as comfortable riding with his dad in the past.

We passed a place where Crystal told me she almost killed a girl. Of course I asked for the story. The girl was her friend and she'd been screwing Crystal's first husband before he died. Crystal found out soon after he died, Crystal wanted to "beat the crap out of her. I wanted to really hurt her." Crystal knew a town detective and went to him asking how far she could beat the girl down and stay out of jail. He advised her not to do it. She told me what she intended to do with the girl. It was wicked. She talked to Justin about it. Justin has a great deal of experience fighting, and he talked her out of it. The problem, Crystal felt, was that once she got started beating her she wouldn't stop til the girl was dead. She said, "I was a grieving widow!" Crystal grew up with two older brothers. She can fight. She talked herself out of it by realizing she probably would beat the girl to death, and didn't want to go to prison over it. She knew she would "lose it." She said, "I was out of it. He had just died. If she'd broken my nose, I wouldn't even have felt it. I would have destroyed her. It's best I didn't do it." The girl left the county and hasn't come back. I'm thinking somebody told her Crystal was seriously looking for her. And she knew what that meant.

You'd think you don't see much riding the roads at night, but all three of us were satisfied we saw an awful lot. Several years ago my friend Joyce was visiting from Charlotte. I took her for a ride on some roads after dark I thought especially nice. Headlights were good, houses were lit up, the road carried the shape of the landscape. Old fence posts. I thought I was giving her a good mountain experience. When we returned she told me she didn't see anything. It was night. That knocked a big one out from under me. I thought, but couldn't say, Are you blind? The time my mother and dad drove here from Kansas, I knew they'd never been in these mountains. They drove through the mountains quite a ways from the western edge to the eastern edge. In the central Blue Ridge that's a good distance. I asked mother how she liked landscape on the drive. "I didn't see anything. I just watched the road." She was the passenger. So how do you know in advance, before speaking, who is satisfied with just seeing the road and who needs to see landscape? It's a stab in the dark. This is how we find out. Trial and error.


*

DRIVING ON ICE IN THE MOUNTAINS

     mark tobey, 1957

Yesterday, next to the last day of the year, I started on the road to visit friends and watch football, the Redskins and Cowboys. It's a 23 mile trip by highway and 15 by the Parkway. I decided to take the Parkway, not thinking about ice or any possible reason not to go that way. Starting up Air Bellows Gap Road, I saw the last half mile uphill toward the Parkway was sheer ice, the slickest kind. Front wheel drive and new front tires, I was feeling like I could make it. The best word I know to describe driving up that long hill of ice, a drop-off nearly straight down on the left side of the road and a ditch on the right, was "techous." That's mountain for touchy, like "tejus" is mountain for tedious. It was both techous and tejus. I made it to the Parkway. The gate to the Parkway had been closed, but the lock was missing, so the gate was hanging half way open. I stepped out, opened the gate, looked at the ice on the Parkway and thought: I can make It.

As soon as I started driving on the Parkway's ice, as glass-like slick as ice gets, the kind of ice you have very limited control on, I read the ice and saw I was in for it. Also saw I was not going to go back down that road to the Parkway. On front wheel drive, the rear end is bad to swing around going downhill on ice. I assessed I had a better chance on the Parkway. Going into the first curve opposite the Air Bellows Overlook, the road slanted toward the ditch from the centerline for runoff, and that little bit of a downhill grade to the side took my traction. About 3 seconds of sliding sideways toward the ditch, traction took hold and I kept it in the road. There I got my learning: do not trifle with this ice. Coming out of that curve I saw the pavement was dry in places where the sun hit the road. It was in shady places with a wall of mountainside on the south side of the road. That told me where I would encounter ice all the way to where I intended to get off, maybe Mahogany Rock Road (Cable Car Road), but it is a very steep downhill grade leaving the Parkway there and I wasn't so sure I wanted to attempt it. It would be ice at least half a mile and the last 4/5 of that half mile spinning around and around and brought to rest by a tree. I thought I'd take it all the way to 21, then get on Glade Valley Road.

Several long patches of ice to deal with never got any easier from one to the next. Mostly the ice was in curves. One long stretch that was semi-straight and a pretty good grade downhill was so long that I stopped before entering it, assessing how to handle it. I went slow as I could, keeping foot on brake just enough to keep the momentum from carrying me away, never enough to lock wheels and lose traction. The stretch of ice was so long that the momentum took me past what I could control with the brakes and the car started moving along. Too late to put it in a lower gear. Ride it out and do the best you can. The dry pavement arrived just at the time I could see I'd be losing traction very soon. What a relief that pavement was. Then I had a series of curves to go through with mountain on the south side all the way. The downhill grade was not steep enough for gravity to take control away from me. Between 5 and 10 mph. Lots of holding my breath unconsciously. A few times I reminded myself to breathe. I wasn't afraid of tearing up the car, because at most it might get a dent in a corner, but no big deal unless it broke a headlight or taillight.

The worst would be to get stuck. No cell phone. I'd have to walk five miles home, much of it on ice, in cold wind. I didn't aim to do that. Not an option. Coming out of the last curve before Mahogany Rock Road, I saw the gate was closed and locked. I looked to see if I could drive around it. No. Only one thing to do. Turn around and go back over everything I'd been through and do it again. Driving uphill on the ice was so much easier it was almost like there was no ice. Driving back, I entertained a dread that Parkway rangers might have been by and repaired the gate with the missing lock at Air Bellows before I made it back. Slim chance on a Sunday, but freakier things happen. Driving around the curve at Air Bellows Overlook was the worst ice of the uphill run. That was the place I lost traction on the first run. The hairpin turn leaving the Parkway was sheer ice and the drop-off at the very edge of the road. I recalled a time I was leaving visiting friends on a night of pea soup fog. I was warned, "If you don't make that turn, the rattlesnakes will eat you up before you get to the bottom." I remember that sentence every time I go around the curve. I've done it so many times I wasn't concerned about making the turn. The worst of going off the road there would be bouncing from tree to tree like a pinball to the bottom or until wedged. Again, not an option.

From there I took a brief tour through the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum of Spontaneous Teenage Angst. It's the tunnel covered with spray-can graffiti that goes under the Parkway on the way toward the downhill grade on the ice I had dreaded since realizing the necessity of turning around. I did not want to do that. Inside the museum, maybe 20 feet long, the pavement was free of ice. I paused, calling upon mindfulness, and set out on the slickest ice I'd been on, downhill; the slant of the entire road for runoff leaned toward the side that went straight down again. More rattlesnakes and pinballs. I stayed on the upper side with left tires off the road on the side of the ditch. Traction. I made that stretch without losing traction. Next, the road took a steep downward direction with a curve at the bottom, ice slicker than on the Parkway because it had been driven over so much, telling me, for one thing, I could make it. From a dry spot in the road at the top of the downhill run where I stopped, I saw a car sideways in the road about half way up the hill. I saw that it would be a good chance of hitting the car if I made the attempt. He had front wheel drive too, but not new tires. I always go into winter with new tires on the front. They matter, especially when you live at Air Bellows.

A man standing outside the car. I pulled as close as I could get on the dry place and stopped. He and I talked. He was with his wife. Thought they'd drive on the Parkway and look at the scenery. I told him he doesn't want to do that. I was thinking, but couldn't say it, If you get on that Parkway, your wife will be cussing you for the next week, even if she's a good Baptist. I recommended when he got going again turn around and go someplace else on a state road that's maintained. I told a little bit of what I went through, the ice, the ice, the ice. He said somebody living nearby had gone to get a shovel. That didn't make any sense to me--a shovel and ice? I don't like to question other people's reasoning. I didn't have any sand or salt or even a shovel. I saw I could get around his car by leaving the road on the left, which I knew to be firm ground under the ice, a place I could keep traction through that difficult spot. He wasn't sure I could make it, but I knew my car, the road and myself. I was actually glad I had to drive around his car uncertain if I could make it through that particular grade without losing traction. I would have gone down it with left wheels off the road anyway.

I came out of that curve and the road was clear from there on. Great relief. I went over the decisions I'd made that in hindsight looked retarded. I told myself I should have turned around when I saw that hill of ice, the first place to freeze, the last place to thaw. It told me what the Parkway was, and I knew I could make it. Any degree of foresight would have told me the Parkway gate would be closed at Mahogany Rock. It never entered my mind so caught up in the present moment. Driving on ice is totally a present moment experience. Mind dares not waver. Mind pays total attention or you're lost. Thirty-five years experience driving on ice, every kind of ice there ever was, even ice under several inches of mud, I looked back over the day's experience as a driving rodeo. Didn't get stuck, the main thing, didn't hurt the car, only lost traction once, used every skill I'd developed over the years. I came out of it feeling successful. I had tested my skill to the very edge and it held. The mountains do indeed teach the people of the mountains how to drive.


* 

ICY MOUNTAIN ROADS

down the hill


In the night we had an inch or two of snow with a film of ice on top of it. The road was scraped yesterday, but in the night received a thin layer of ice and some blown snow. Driving out of here this morning was ice all the way to hwy 18, 4 miles, half of it downhill and curvy. It's a good exercise for staying in the present moment. It will keep you there. I've driven on ice for so many winters I'm used to it. Last year was the first winter with Jr's car. That winter was characterized by quite a lot of snow and ice. Throughout the winter I took the car with new tires and front wheel drive through every kind of winter road surface. I appreciated the variety, because I was wanting to get the feel of the car and see how it did on ice. I'm comfortable with the car now, knowing its limit is a fairly steep uphill grade on ice. An upward inclination is fine until it takes a steeper grade, then the car slides backwards, turns around in the sliding and points down the hill with front right wheels in the ditch. That's ok I know I can drive out of the ditch. That was the only time I've lost it. Wasn't certain it would make it, assessed nothing is lost by trying, even if it doesn't work out.


What I don't want is to lose traction going down hill. Then it's like watching a movie on the windshield I have no control over. How I avoid it--don't lose traction. This applies for uphill too. Lose traction and start sliding sideways into the ditch. It's not as easy to get out of a snowy ditch going uphill as downhill. Once stopped on an uphill grade, it's a bit awkward getting traction trying to start uphill momentum on ice. What do you do? Keep the momentum going and keep it in the road. When I lose traction going uphill, I let up on the gas a bit and give just enough gas for the front tires to get enough grip to go. I gradually pick up speed so the tires won't lose traction from going too slow, keep the foot steady on the gas with no letup or surges.This evening I lost traction coming up the mountain only once, and that for no more than 3 seconds.


Drove to town this morning primarily to go to Selma's coffee shop. By now I have full confidence with the car, even with tires a year old, satisfied I can go anywhere in less than half a foot of snow. I've driven on ice aplenty in 3 4wheel drive pickups and one rear wheel drive before this front wheel drive Buick Century, my old man car. I like 4wheel best on ice and snow, but front wheel is so close to 4wheel in what it will do, the difference doesn't matter. It was a beautiful drive all the way to town, landscape painted white, trees like pencil lines on white paper. I drove slowly over the ice on the level part of the road because I did not want to be out of control for very long if the tires lost traction. Once on the highway the road was clear and there was no ice in the one place there is always ice. There might have been some black ice early this morning, though dumptrucks have been piled high spreading salt on the highways keeping them clear. I have to give it to the county's road crew. They do excellent work year round. In the winter, they're on top of it.


At Selma's it was warm inside. She said it had been a slow morning. I ordered my usual Kenyan coffee, which I find so satisfying when I drink it there or at home, it starts the day right. I want to drink it all day. It has that delicious a flavor for my palate. It's a relaxing flavor. Coffee tasters say it has a muddy taste. I believe I get what they mean. I'd prefer to call it a honey textured coffee without the mild bitterness of grocery store coffee. I don't know how to describe it. I appreciate the reference to a muddy flavor, though that doesn't describe it any more than honey does. It's a flavor I like a lot, and don't care to drink any other, because no other satisfies me. Kenyan does. Ethiopian is close in flavor, and I like it, but it's not Kenyan.


In the picture above you can see that I'm keeping the wheels in those two tracks of black, which is road surface. The white is ice. In this place I'm going is a downhill run, using the black tracks to apply the brakes slowing down enough to take the rest of the hill on ice and not lose traction. It feels good to know the roads here so well after 35 years of driving them. The mountains are good driving instructors. The first Nascar drivers were mountain liquor runners. These cold, icy days are rough, especially today with wind and ice crystals flying over the ground, blasting any exposed skin, like face, neck and ears. I go in weather like this like I go any other time of year. The car starts easily when it's cold, drives well on ice, so no problem. Don't worry, be happy.

FIRST SNOW OF MARCH

mountain laurel


More snow today. It's not quite dark yet. 27degrees. Slight wind. Snow blowing all afternoon since around 11. A few hours ago I estimated it at 3 inches going by the track the tires made. By now it's 4 or 4.5. The snow is letting up now that it has met its forecast quota. All is white again. White as snow. It will be a shock when we get back to the world of color. Now it's white and the gray of tree trunks and limbs. Makes me think of Zurich, Switzerland, in the snow. Zurich is all gray. All the city is gray. A lot of old European cities are gray. Pablo Neruda of Chile wrote a poem of being in a gray German city in snow, looking out the window he saw the big white dancing horses run around in a circle for exercise. The whole scene black and white. The horses rumps reminded him of oranges from home, the colorful world of Latin America, the memories he needs to cheer him up in a world where everything is dull European gray.



Set out for town to go by the dump and drop off some bags of detritus, from there to the Circle L on the far side of town toward Glade Valley for lunch with Jim Winfield. We get together for lunch about once a week and talk for a couple hours. Today, it didn't seem to click so well. It was like we were both somewhere else and weren't really connecting. He's been entertaining some great big questions about himself, the nature of the ego, cosmic questions and I give him plenty of space for that. Sometimes he's half giddy when he's found a new insight. Today he was awfully much in his mind. Usually is, but today more than usual. We talked plenty, nonstop. I doubt there was ever a full minute of silence at the table. We have very different ways of seeing things, and many that are similar. For one thing, we've both become curmudgeon old turds.



Winfield was a little bit downhearted because he got this notion he wanted to go to Chile or Haiti to help the relief effort, both places he knows well, and speaks the language both places. He knows the people. I believe he sees them in his mind's eye all the time, imagining what they're going through, wanting to help out. The bureaucracies that organize the relief won't have him. He's too old. His doctor recommends against going. You're too old. It didn't stop his longing to go. He asked me what I thought was behind his wanting so much to go. I said, it means you care. He accepted that. It felt better to him than what he'd been thinking, that it was an ego thing. I reminded him what he already knew, that he was perfectly suited for one place or the other with a lifetime experience, a natural for help with relief. His compassion pulls him to it. I'd say it's only ego in that everything we do is ego. There's no way around it. But it's an ego that benefits others in a hard time. Not a destructive ego, but a nurturing ego. That's plenty ok for motivation. It's not like it's unseflconscious narcissism streaking a baseball game.



I've known some people along the way who have a really interesting interior life they don't tell about and no one sees. Like Winfield used to keep his butterfly collection under a chair, because he wasn't proud of killing all the butterflies. It eventually found its way to the wall. I really enjoy looking at his collection of African masks and carvings. When he was in Zambia, these artifacts were funneling out of the Congo that was in civil wars in the eastern mountains. He had the good fortune to be there when they were available. He doesn't feel like he's done the right thing, taking them away from their culture, from where they belong, but they'd already been removed and there was no going back.



We sat at the table by the window and watched it snow as we ate. Neither one of us was anxious about it. He has a Suburu all-wheel. My front wheel is the same as 4wheel. With a snow shovel on the floor of the back seat, I can get out of anything I can get into, unless it's down a bank or into a tree. We started before the lunch people came in and were there after the place had cleared out. I enjoy talking with him. One of our greatest differences is the way we see what I'll have to call time. He sees it "linear," in a straight line, from start to finish. I see it a circle that makes a spiral. Like January 1 through December 31. A circle. A cycle. The next year is another circle connected to the one before. 6,000 years of civilization makes a really long slinky. I can't see that there is time outside the human mind. Cycles inside cycles, infinitely.



He mentioned a big Buddha he saw in, I think, Thailand. He said it is customary to rub the Buddha's big toe with a prayer. He said the toe was worn away from all the touching. It brought to mind a bronze statue of a saint I saw in the Vatican, whose front half of his foot had been kissed away over the centuries. The nub was smooth as smooth gets. Then we talked of a story in India that defines a Yuga, an Age, as the time it takes for a bird that migrates back and forth across the Himalayan mountains holding a silk scarf in its beak that touches the mountains as the bird flies over, until the mountains are worn down to plain. Geologists say these Appalachian mountains were once like the Himalayas. Rain, snow, cold and heat wore them down. These mountains seem like they are maybe more than half way toward plain from the Himalayan origin. Possibly a yuga can be calculated from the time these mountains were at their biggest to now and project in future how long until erosion is down to plain. That's a lot of millions of years. Then what's a year? A unit in the human mind.



We watched the snow unconcerned. When it was time to go, he offered to take Nancy Hunt, who worked in the kitchen and is his neighbor, to her house so Roy, who is in Galax, won't have to come by and pick her up. I went on up the road to Kermit's. Thought it might be a fair chance he wouldn't be too busy today. One man in the chair finishing up as I went in. Kermit and I watched it snow and talked. Ernest Joines called and told Kermit the Jubliee is off for tonight. Billy Dancy, who played banjo, was driving a truck down around Boone, said it's terrible. I told Kermit of an incident I saw on the way into town. The road was techous, like the old feller said, meaning it was slicker'n greased owl shit.



4 cars were directly ahead of me approaching town. They were awfully close to one another for this road condition, telling me not one of them was experienced driving on ice. I stayed way back. Way back. About in front of the VFW chicken bbq pit, the car in front hit the brakes. That was it. Went sliding this way and that. The next car hit the brakes. It slid into the front car. The 3rd car hit the 2nd car and they slid around like bumper cars at Myrtle Beach. The one in front of me left the road to stop. I had plenty of time to slow down gradually and stop. Fortunately, no one was behind me. None of the cars was damaged. Slow motion at slow speed. Everyone hit the refresh button drove on. One woman in a Jeep Cherokee pulled into the VFW parking lot to turn around and head back home. The 10 second Youtube moment gave me a clear picture of what was under my tires.



All the way home from town I was super cautious. I'd already had my education for the nature of this snow. It's the kind that insists you never lose traction. Never. The moment you lose traction you're gone. It won't be bad whatever happens at slow speed, but it's not something you want to happen at all. It was a slow drive with no one in front of me and no one behind, snow a couple inches deep and only a few tracks ahead of mine. By the time I turned onto Pine Swamp Road at Whitehead, the snow there was 3 inches. Along Air Bellows Gap Road only one track was ahead. The tires looked like a pickup. It turned off at the bottom of the mountain and I blazed the trail to the top, a time or two coming close to losing traction in the zones of the frozen ruts, but prevented it. My road was virgin snow all the way to the house. I was glad to get the car off the road. But it was a fun adventure. I have learned my car.

ICE AND SNOW

water, snow and ice

A little after 4 today the temperature is 19. This morning at 6:30 it was 10. Last night I think it was about 8 when I came home around 9. Good wind too. The car has the lights inside that are delayed so they stay on a short time after the doors are closed. Of course, last night it chose not to go off. It's done this before. I have to go out with adjustable wrench and a flashlight to take the ground cable off the battery to avoid a dead battery in the morning. It was an overhead light, which I took the lightbulb out of, and then one under the dash not so easy to get to, and a ding every 2 seconds. This morning I had to get to the station for the radio show, so with the same wind as last night and about the same temp, I was out there with hood up making about a tenth of a turn on the bolt tightening the battery cable with the wrench per turn, no more than an inch or two per move of the handle, sometimes connecting and sometimes not. I will find a way to disconnect that mess. I don't need and don't want the delayed lights, nor do I need or want the irritating ding noise.

Another feature I'm uneasy with is the way all the doors lock when the gear shift engages. To get out, I have to push a button to unlock the doors, then pull on the handle. It's something I have to make myself memorize, because it is hard to find in the dark. The button has some raised braille bumps, I suppose to help find it in the dark, though I seldom can. My mind pulls up memory of the burning pickup that could have been stopped at the start with a fire extinguisher. Cars on fire seldom make the news, so we have no idea how many there are, but from talking and asking around, I'm finding an awful lot of vehicles burn up. Actually, an alarming number. And people get burned up in them. It's not a joyous way to die. If something were to happen in the dark that required me to get out of the car right now with no light, plus anxious and jittery, I know I'd take awhile finding that button to push. I've put a big screwdriver in the pocket of the door panel. If I need to break the glass, a bare hand won't do it. Need something metal to break it with. Adjustable wrench is there too. That pocket is my toolbox. A screwdriver and a medium sized adjustable wrench can take care of a number of maladies.

I'll have a fire extinguisher in my car at all times. I've had a good learning in how anything can happen any time. When I was going places with Jean, she asked me early on why I wear a seatbelt after I'd suggested she fasten hers, like I'm not driving until she's fastened in. She asked if I'm afraid of dying. I said, anything can happen any time, and chances are I won't get killed. Without a seatbelt, however, I'd wish I had been killed. I've been run off the road by a car coming the other way in my lane twice, and I learned the side of the road is bumpier than the road. Quite a lot bumpier. With a seatbelt, I'm held in place where I can have some kind of control instead of flopping all over the seat and banging my head on the roof. It's just practical. Has nothing to do with the law. It's something that when you see it, there it is.

On the way to the station, I encountered patches of ice along the way. Most surprising was a patch of ice in the shadow of the tree in front of Welter Ham's house. It was odd. It's in a straight stretch, so it's no problem at all, just a surprise to be driving along and feel loss of traction for a second, that floating sensation. I looked in the mirror and saw it on the road. Over the next hill the road bears right in a long curve that sometimes has ice. This would be a perfect morning for it to have ice, so I took it easy in the curve looking for any kind of ice, black or white. No cars were piled up in ditches and I didn't see any ice. I've had to drive the other side of the road in that curve going home with right wheels off the road to the right to get whatever traction could be had from crushing ice on mowed grass, left wheels on ice and no control, going 5mph. That was a bad night for ice.

At WCOK the driveway was ice most of the way, but had a few bare spots placed well for getting enough momentum to make it to the next one. The parking area was all thick ice from the mush of the snow before the hard freeze after a moderate thaw. Getting good experience driving the Catfish in varieties of ice and snow. It handles very well. With new tires and front wheel drive, it does fairly well on ice. I don't dare use the brake or drive past what it can do. As I'm testing this car getting acquainted with it, learning it by feeling it, it handles very well in snow and ice. On ice, there's very little it can do, but I can make it do what I want it to do on ice. I can make it go forward on ice and can turn on ice, back up on ice. Very slowly, of course. The new tires matter. The front wheel drive grips well under the weight of the engine and the driver. When I do the pedal right it doesn't have to spin going forward or back. I'm very happy with how my friend gets me where I need to go. I like its center of gravity in curves too.

It's a good time to practice ice and snow driving. I've always driven pickups before. A car is a new adventure. The drive to town and on to WCOK was clear roads and quite a lot of people out. Hearing Ralph Stanley talking with Diane Rehm, I wanted to do a Ralph show today. I took some live recordings from the 70s when Roy Lee Centers and Ricky Lee were with the band. Curly Ray Cline too, but he was a Clinch Mountain Boy for a long time. He kind of became the fiddle sound of the Clinch Mountain Boys. Before that he was a Lonesome Pine Fiddler with the Goins brothers. East Kentucky boy. I almost said that period when Roy Lee Centers was with the band was my favorite, but it's not. There's no favorite. From his first recording to his last every one is excellent musicianship and singing from the heart and soul.

I wanted to play a fair amount of gospel by him today, not exclusively, maybe one out of 3. Gloryland with the whole band singing it like in an Old Baptist church. Rank Stranger. I sang it in church several years listening to Elder Millard Pruitt lead the singing. He meant that song from his soul, like Ralph Stanley does. Millard's singing voice was of that mountain quality of singing from the heart. It seemed kind of eerie to me the first time I saw Ralph Stanley up close and saw he was a little bitty feller. He was small man. Short, thin. Like Millard and like Jr. And like Millard and Jr, Ralph seems much larger than his body.

I believe about everybody in these mountains loves Rank Stranger. No mother nor dad, not a friend did I see. I knew not their names I knew not their faces. They all seemed to be rank strangers to me. In the old way of talking a rank stranger is a complete stranger. The story of a man who left the homeplace when he was young, meaning to return, and finally did in his later years. No one he knew before was living and no one remembered them. A tale of a pilgrim lost in the world looking for home. It's a strong theme in the spiritual lives of people in the old time way.

I sat in the radio station studio playing songs by Ralph and a number of Clinch Mountain Boys. It's another aspect of these mountains that makes me feel blessed to be here. I didn't know where I was going when I came to the mountains. Everything of these mountains has been a discovery. Ralph Stanley at the top of the list with people like Millard Pruitt and Jr Maxwell and Tom Pruitt and others. I believe if I had occasion to know Ralph Stanley I'd have a respect for the man he is, same as for the three just mentioned. He's that kind of man, so he seems to me. He's who he is and that's no big deal. His voice is a gift. He's just a man.