TO WOODLAWN AND BACK

Saturday at one was the deadline for the photo exhibit at the library. I'd taken two prints to Willard Gayheart in Woodlawn last Friday for matting toward the show. I was to pick them up Friday night at the Fiddle and Plow show at Willard's gallery. Friday I headed out for Woodlawn. It had snowed an inch and a half in the night, crunchy icy snow, the kind that would be easy to drive on the first few tire tracks over it. But after several tire tracks it turns to slick ice. I went down the road to Pine Swamp and determined I would not attempt to return that way in the dark and uphill. I saw several skid marks in the place I suspected I might not pass beyond. I'd backed down from that place in the dark once. It's not something I want to repeat. Backing downhill on a winding mountain dirt road covered with a sheet of ice in the dark, so glad the reverse light bulbs were working. Without them I'd have to open the door and watch the back tire in relation to the bank on the left side. I didn't want to do that. At the end of the unpaved part of the road, I came onto clear asphalt from there on. Before the ice I'd intended to drive down the Parkway to get Dana Ross, but could not use the Parkway for the ice. I went around using Waterfall Road, Air Bellows Gap Road, Brown Road, Pine Swamp Road, Wolf Branch Road, Mahogany Rock Road, Dewitt Road, Hwy 21, Pulltail Road, Vestal Road and then Mountain Hearth Road.

By the time I reached Dana's place I was ready to get home as fast as I could git. An icy mist so thick it made a fog was freezing on tree limbs. White pines were covered with ice, limbs hanging down with bottom limbs touching the ground. During my half hour drive I saw the tree limbs turning white and sagging toward the ground. I started thinking about trees breaking and falling across the road. No chainsaw in the trunk, I wanted to go home. When Dana came to the door I showed him what I was seeing. Woodlawn was north all the way. What I saw over the last half hour, given three more hours it will be black ice all the way home. I don't want to drive on black ice. It can't be done. I said straight out I wasn't going. It was Carl Jones and Erynn Marshall, a show I looked forward to. I was getting concerned about making it home with the frozen mist coming down so fast. We decided to sit by the fire with a cup of coffee and visit since I was there and the coffee might help me up the mountain. Outside a half hour later the tree limbs had cleared of the frost. They were up again with just a little bit of white on their tips. The temperature had risen above freezing. The icy snow on the ground had turned to slush, the ice was gone. It heartened me to go ahead and drive to Woodlawn. Then I remembered that I am no weather prophet and dare not pretend to be. Crazy as the weather was, I decided not to chance it. Forty miles to Woodlawn and no telling what was between here and there.

The mist cleared away, the snow and ice were completely gone. All the way home it was like nothing had happened. I went up the mountain on the road from Whitehead, a good choice. I get to the top and there was the ice and snow again. The snow and ice were localized to Air Bellows and Cherry Lane. Cherry Lane gets a current of air that runs through Roaring Gap and goes around Bullhead mountain. Those two gaps, Air Bellows Gap and Roaring Gap must have been letting the same weather through. Who knows? I am not a weather prophet. I just receive it as it happens.The big IT, the weather. Sometimes the weather seems like it has a personality, like it's conscious. If that weather Friday night was really conscious and speaking to me, I was getting the message loud and clear, get yer ass home. Walking to the house was in the snow that was there since morning. I didn't even wonder what was up. Didn't care. I got the message. I was home. Safe. No dents on the car, no air bag blowing up in my face, no insurance issues, no estimates, no repairs, no problem.

Still, I needed to get the two photographs I'd left last week for Willard to mat. Up Saturday morning to the coffee shop to have a coffee and work the Jumble puzzle in the paper, and visit with whoever was there, this morning Tom Guy. Willard opened his shop at 10, so I left Sparta at 9:30 to get to Woodlawn by 10:15. Took 21 and 58 through Independence and Galax. A good drive at a good time of day when few cars were on the road. I like the scenery in Southwest Virginia. Stopped and bought gas for 24c a gallon less than in NC. That much state tax difference. I like to support my state, but when my state charges me that much more tax when I buy something I need as much as gas, I'll give my money in Virginia. Since I go to Virginia regularly, that's where I buy gas. Saved $3 today. It's my way of saying to my state: you screw me, I screw you. My state is ruthless when it comes to taking my money. The state of NC regards me a numbered object that owes it money. Need I think of NC in any other way?

Willard did a beautiful job of matting the two photographs. One was Thornton Spencer of Whitetop Mountain Band playing his fiddle and the other was Lyle Croco of Buffalo Death Rattle, a Louisiana old-time band, playing his fiddle silhouette against blue sky. I'm not putting pictures in looking to win a contest, but to participate in the show. I like to hang something on the wall with other people from around here. I see it a community show, the people of this county who have an aesthetic eye for still photographs. We have quite a number of people in the county now who make some beautiful photographs. I like to see a show of them and I like to have something among theirs. Had a good uninterrupted conversation with Willard until we ran down. That's the best way to end a conversation, when it runs down. He had finished and framed his colored pencil drawing of me painting the picture of him. I'm happy to have something by Willard in the house. I also have his color drawing of Tommy Jarrell playing fiddle and Paul Brown on banjo. I'm going to hang them on the same wall, one above the other.

Back to Sparta by 58 and 21, to the library delivering the matted prints one hour before closing time. I filled out the forms, paid the fee, talked a bit with Debbie and staff, went to the coffee shop and visited with Tom Guy again. He'd been away and came back. Tim the Techman came in and we had a good conversation corner over coffee. Winding down after several hours of driving, talking and paying attention listening, I stumbled out of the coffee shop and Drew Tuggle called me from across the street in the art store. Carol was volunteering there on Saturday mornings. We talked for a good while until I couldn't stand up anymore without assistance. I had a new blanket in the back seat of the car I'd just bought at Magic something or other where Walmart used to be in Galax. I wanted to wrap up in the new blanket and sleep. At home I make a bee line for the bed, wrap up in the blanket and lay there with my head buzzing like a yellow jacket nest in the wall. I was thinking it hopeless to attempt to sleep. Maybe I could calm down watching a quiet movie. I stayed where I was, unwilling to move. Then woke up two hours later, refreshed.


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TWILITE BROADCASTERS @ TURKEY KNOB

      twilite broadcasters

Saturday night in the Turkey Knob region of Alleghany County, these guys pictured, the Twilite Broadcasters from Asheville area, played in Rob Mangum's outdoor makeshift arena. We came with folding chairs to sit on the lawn before a log cabin Rob has reconstructed on his land as a guest house. The band played on the porch with modest sound system that was just right. The audience saw them in relation to the log cabin, while they saw us in relation to a landscape to horizon. Their playing was crisp and kept the music rhythms in motion. They had a bass, too, which isn't in the picture above, a promo photo I found on internet. The computer will not upload the pictures I got last night. Found some good ones I wanted to show you, too, but it's not working. My hypothesis is that the computer has its quota of pictures. However, I thought of it, meaning it can't possibly have anything to do with the problem. I've learned that my "intuitive" understanding of computers does not exist at all. Therefore, whenever I have an idea of what is going on, that is the one thing I can eliminate, because it can't possibly be the case. Never is. It's time to download pictures to disk anyway.

Rob is one of the people I've known the entire time I've lived here. He and his deceased wife, Bet, came to the county a couple years before I did, they from southern Alabama, below Birmingham. Two people with an attitude toward life that carried them well. Bet played banjo and sang, Rob plays guitar and sings. All the time I've know them, I've felt like they were some of my closest friends, though I see them every few years or so, seldom crossing paths. It's like I knew they were where they are and never just drove over there to drop in. Felt like it many times, but never got it done. Strangely, I see them so seldom, yet whenever I look in my mind at the people I call my friends, their faces are always at the top of the list. Now that Rob is without Bet, I see him at the coffee shop occasionally, and we've talked more than ever before. We've probably visited more since the coffee shop opened than in all the 35 years before. But that's all right. It's the heart that matters and in our hearts we are friends, mutually. Everybody who knew Bet, feels like I do that it's not right with her not among us anymore. Bet was someone I could say without hesitation or fear of contradiction is a beautiful soul. Nice to look at, too, but who Bet was is where her real beauty was to be found. She was someone who the better you knew her, the more beautiful she became.

It felt something like home in the audience. I knew everyone, but maybe 5 people. It looked like maybe 40 people were there. Many were coffee shop regulars, plus people I've come to know over the years, mostly people from Away. I got so many hugs I felt buoyed up. I don't see people I know a great deal, because I stay home as much as possible. I didn't come to the mountains to be social, and I adhere to original purpose, which was to embrace my spiritual path, dedicate my attention inside instead of outside. Then, I was changing worlds, from city mind to country mind. Very different minds. By now, I have found my place, one foot in each mind. I've altered my city mind by way of what I call the good sense of country mind. But both have their shortcomings and aspects to recommend them. My city mind is adjusted to relationship with country mind, which I have learned by association. I think I've taken the best of both worlds and incorporated them into myself. That's not really so. The "best" is my own interpretation and really has no objective foundation. Subjective is my point of view. Objective is for the lab of figuring things out.

Rob has a woman now named Donna, who came here from Asheville. If I remember correctly, yesterday was maybe Donna's birthday present from Rob. She evidently knew at least one of the people in the band, and this concert was apparently in her honor, the band chosen by her request, evidently people she knows in Asheville. I got a couple of  beautiful pictures of her, and now I can't get to them. Grrr. It's refreshing to see a "couple" who are truly happy with each other's presence. Occasionally, I see a couple who are like they were meant to be together. Most of the time I see marriages that confirm my determination to stay to myself. Like everything else, though, it's a whole spectrum of the relative. I went with my friends Lucas and Judy Carpenter, who are visiting from southern Georgia near Atlanta. They've been together 40 years and have a bond that seems to me similar to Rob and Bet's. It's like they're people who belong together. We're going to see Justin and Crystal later in the day, whose relationship seems to me to be inevitable.

The band played with the musicianship of bands that play with Scott and Willard at the Front Porch in Woodlawn. Superb musicianship. On the way back, Lucas asked me, "What makes them sound so good?" I knew the answer. Musicianship. They were excellent musicians. This is what happens when excellent musicians make music together. They make Xcellent music. They would be welcome by the Front Porch audience. They had good mountain drive, too. That helps. Lucas bought both their cds at the end of the show. I'm glad to see both him and Judy developing an ear for mountain music. That's the first step, being able to hear it. Once you start hearing it, then you start hearing what the musicians are doing, and before very long you're hearing remarkable musicianship. That's where mountain music pulls the listener in. Mountain people that listen to old-time and bluegrass are listening to musicianship. Musicianship is what it's about in mountain music. Complimented or praised, the mountain musician throws off on himself, says something like, "I try to pick." That's because they all know there is somebody better around here close to home or somebody far away he'd never heard of.

Like quick-draw artists, the mountain musicians know they are not the "best," even after winning at Galax fiddler's convention. Dewey Brown of Ralph Stanley's band won Galax bluegrass fiddle. He's really good, but he knows there is at least one better. Wayne Henderson, who has the name in the middle-class of "the best," won Galax 16 times in guitar, but he doesn't win every year. Scott Fore of West Virginia outpicks him every other year. Also, among mountain musicians, best doesn't have any real meaning. Several times I've heard Scott Freeman and Steve Lewis talk about their reasons for not taking fiddler's conventions seriously. The fiddler's convention is there for fun, to give musicians a chance to get together. A lot of times the people who win are dead serious about their picking, equals dead. Some get really good on one tune and play it over and over to win. Somebody like Scott Freeman could play any song he knows well enough to at least place in the top 10. Winning and losing is so incredibly relative it can't be taken too seriously. Trophies and ribbons are nice, but secondary to making music. Bluegrass banjo picker Jr Maxwell had all his trophies and ribbons stolen and didn't even care to find out who took them. Of course, he knew, but didn't care enough to confirm it.

As almost everyone in the audience knew each other or some of the people there, the intermission amounted to a talk fest, everybody jabbering as fast as they could go, self included. Small clusters of conversation standing mid the cluster of chairs, people moving from cluster to cluster, going to a cooler for a beer. Everybody got so wound up it was like a cocktail party on the lawn in the gloaming. The band started and we kept on running our mouths like high school kids between classes. Rob made an announcement for everyone to return to their seats. We kept on talking. Finally, he resorted to going through the crowd telling everyone individually that it's time for the music. The band was a singing band, only 2, maybe 3, fiddle tunes the mandolin picker played on fiddle. He was equally good on both. The guitar picker brought to mind the bass player with Thrice, though only in appearance. The women were talking about how good looking he was. The band had a solid sound of people who have made so much music together it's like fluency in a language. They played together like a band, a unit. Knowing Lucas's ear for music, I know why he bought both their cds. They're good listening.     

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