MEN AND OPINIONS

ellsworth Kelly

I woke this morning entertaining the question of how many centuries it will take for men to heal from several millennia of the male role being about war, killing and being killed. I've always disliked the song Onward Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war does not define the spiritual path for me. Yesterday I saw in some brief video an image of soldiers marching in a parade. Such images disturb me deeply. It tells a belief system I don't believe, can't believe, won't believe, and really don't like being subject to. I especially don't like our time now when our corporate government attacks poverty stricken, defenseless countries for the profits of oil corporations, jet fuel, ship fuel, automobile fuel, keeping the stock market going, then loses the war against people with no allies, using weapons taken from dead American soldiers. It's shameless, but it's how police state functions. The prophesy for our time has been fulfilled like a checklist up to the big war that will make survivors round the globe set the determination to be done with war. That's the day I have waited for all my life. I dread the war that gets us there, but like it's said, All's well that ends well. Maybe. I'm not so sure about that, but it sounds good. Its like saying the end justifies the means. Not necessarily. I take them both for self-serving self-justification. All these old bullshit beliefs about the glory of killing and the glory of being killed will fade into history with nationalism and patriarchy. I celebrate it because it's not far away. It doesn't mean the solution to all problems, but it's a solution to a major problem that creates millions of other problems in its wake.

 

 

alex katz

 

I project that men will heal from a culture of obedience training for men. I ask myself what is the problem with men up in years. It seems like their brains atrophy and they go nuts. But I don't think that's it. From childhood, a boy's mind is atrophied. Little man gotta grow up and be a big man, carry a gun, shoot people, get drunk on power over women and children, define any sensitivity to others feminine, thus unworthy of consideration. In the masculine mind as it has evolved unto today, the feminine is outside consideration, not a concern, stupid because women don't know nothin. Art comes under the feminine. It means paying attention to something besides the crosshairs. Shutting off the feminine ultimately shuts down feeling in oneself. In the soul, we have both, or neither, depending on how you want to look at it. To shut down the validity of half of one's self is ignorant to start with, dumb as hell to carry on and just plain stupid to live with. A man gets up toward 70 and a lifetime of believing in obedience over conscience makes an ideologue of the negative mind; hence, Faux News. I've had to tell a few of my friends over time, Rush Limbaugh is not information. Growing up in a world of boys becoming men, I learned at a certain point, late teens, that it is important to have opinions. I tried it. I've finally come to see that opinions are the same as nothing. Someone who used to be a friend made me so tired of his own opinions being fact and everyone else's opinions nonsense, that I called him one day on his superior attitude, which I'd learned many years before was a defensive mask. He turned, walked away and has had nothing to do with me since. I mentally pumped a fist in the air and said, Yes! It's been over two years and I've not missed him a minute of that time.

 

robert indiana

 

We were both of anti-war mind. I went to the 1968 march on Washington over Viet Nam, like it mattered. The next day I learned it did not matter. That event was the beginning and end of my involvement in anything political. He went to U of Tennessee and was involved in demonstrations there, his moment of glory placing a flower in a National Guardman's rifle barrel. I remembered seeing on the front page of the newspaper in that time a photo of a guy at U Tenn with the same color hair putting a flower in a rifle barrel during a demonstration. I've often wondered if that had been him ten years before I knew him. My figuring is it was the hip, cool thing to do and hundreds of flowers were put in rifle barrels. Hippies thought flowers were so cool. They are, but not used politically. His self definition is, "I'm a revolutionary." It was another moment in life of controlling my face so laughing my ass off inside doesn't show. Our "friendship" was much like the friendship between van Gogh and Gauguin. Watching the film, Lust For Life, with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, directed by Vincent Minnelli, 1956, I found van Gogh's issues with Gauguin's arrogance very much the same as mine with friend. His two songs are: Anything you can do I can do better, and Whatever it is I'm against it. I laughed seeing the relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin so familiar it was like a reenactment our story. His opinions of himself are quite out of line with what the people around him observe. As one who never learned to trust opinions, my experience knowing him so many years has trained me to give no value to any opinion. It doesn't mean I don't have opinions aplenty. It means I don't value them. I write opinions here, and I speak opinions talking with friends, but I don't believe them, don't hold them dear as Mine.

 

rufino tamayo

 

Isn't it curious: Mine as possessive, ownership, connected to self, and mine, a deep dark shaft with tunnels under the ground. I'm wondering if the cold dark mine makes an image to define the possessive mine. Among the first things we teach babies is "mine" and the next thing is "share." Does this mean I need a miner's lantern to go into what I mean when I say mine. I see a cd case for Santana I call mine, because I paid for it and I possess it. Is it that the idea of ownership mine could be a root system into my own psychic interior made of dark tunnels? I'm thinking that since they are the same word, there must be some connection. It's awfully easy to make a connection, which makes me suspect I'm bullshitting myself. However, I look at possessive mine the way a baby uses it, holding the blanket close to her heart, "Mine." Those roots go straight to the heart, encase it like a net. Then we grow up into the world of everybody having opinions, and the opinions I hold dear to my heart I call mine. A network of root-like shafts around my heart like a net around a glass ball. Much of our language comes from pre-logical times. whoever called a deep hole in the ground a mine might have seen inside self a deep dark place where memories of experience lurk. Yet, in other languages the words are not the same. For me, that settles it. I'll take it for two different approaches to the word as two separate words for reasons to be found in the evolution of language. Somebody can answer that question easily, like somebody can answer where the lightning comes from. Just a passing curiosity around the nature of the ego, which looks awfully much like a net around the heart.  

 

 

tony smith

 

 

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NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT

howard hodgkin, fisherman's cove



A drive to West Jefferson for lunch today at the Latin Friends Cafe. Have wanted to go there all through the last year. Rafael, Selma's husband, cooks Cuban food there. It's his place. A young woman from El Salvador was a waitress, and the other waitress a young woman whose parents moved to the mountains from Winston-Salem, her dad the "holistic chiropractor" in Sparta. I know him as one of the regulars at Selma's. I stopped at Selma's before going to meet Jim at Food Lion parking lot for the drive in one car to WJefferson and back. I wanted to drive. Haven't driven the road in quite awhile. There had been a period of well over 5 years that I drove that road every week. Jim had a span of time when he drove over there daily, if I remember correctly. For both of us, the highway itself was an enjoyment to see how different places have changed. He had not seen the concrete bridge over the New River where Hwy 16 dead-ends into 88. Not thinking, it had been so long, I made the turn to the right in Jefferson with 88 passing the old courthouse, to a stoplight where I had to wait to turn left. Just after that turn is a road that eases off to the right bypassing old town Jefferson that comes to a stop sign. Easy to make a left turn there.



We found the Latin Friends Cafe and parked. The camera was with me, but it never entered my mind to take a picture of at least the front of the place. Also, in the back of my mind remembering I was with someone as intolerant as a Baptist preacher---like the Groucho Marx song, "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" I'd get a lecture on ego for sure, and, again, would need to repeat that I do not care. I'd like you to see the two waitresses, charming girls, and the interior. The walls are 1950s knotty pine. A single painting hangs above the dessert bar. It had good feeling. Pear and apple and flowers in a vase still life painted by somebody's grandmother, aunt or mother. It was serve-yourself mini-cafeteria style. What you see is what you get. Good choices. Black beans. I love black beans. I ate them like it was cereal out of the bowl with a spoon. I figured they went on the rice, but I didn't care. I hadn't had any black beans in so long I saved them for last and ate them as dessert. In south of the border restaurants I always have to stress I want black beans, because their collective experience is that Anglos don't like black beans. They also know Anglos like cheese, which I don't. I like it, but in moderation and not smeared over everything and melted. Doesn't trip my trigger. I see cholesterol bomb.



Jim talked with the ElSalvadoran girl en espanol. She appeared to be enjoying talking Spanish with an Anglo, all the more when she learned he'd lived in Ecuador several years with peace corps and traveled in Honduras and Guatemala. I remember his return from that trip. Went to stay 3 months and was back after 1 month, more or less freaked out by the militarism of army vs rebels, lawlessness, the constant threat of getting blown away by a machine gun in the wrong place wrong time. The greatest grievance he felt was the our government created the civil wars in Central America to keep labor cheap for American factories, not to mention the United Fruit Company, the Halliburton of Central America in the time of the Reagan Junta. Look to who has the most to gain and all arrows point to United Fruit Company that pretty much rules Central America. Efforts for governments to unplug from American influence get death squads and collateral damage in abundance, Americans funding their adversaries to bring them down.



Jim understood what was happening back in her homeland from the Latin perspective. He talks with Latin people here from all over especially Central America. He and she both had a good time. He asked me once if I'd rather he talk English. I was enjoying what was going on between them. It wasn't flirting. It was simply two people, one 64 and the other 18 or so bypassing the generation gaps, the language gap, the nationality gap. He appreciated her culture and who she was, which isn't a regular thing in American small towns, certainly never to be expected. It must have been refreshing for her to be talking with an Anglo who didn't talk down to her or look through her. He enjoys the Latin people, has traveled in several countries in South America too, likes to speak the language.



From there we went to the Arts Council gallery to see whatever was showing there. It was a guy who paints landscapes with a dark-haired Barbie doll wearing a long white semi-sheer dress walking. Sometimes she's nude holding a banjo so the pubic hair looks like the banjo's shadow. First glance around the room was impressive. Upon closer examination they lost their zip. The trees, the upper half of almost all the pictures were done in the manner of the tv painters who paint a whole landscape in 30 minutes--you can too! No more wasting time painting. If you dislike painting that much, why paint at all? The lower part of the pictures, the ground level was painted with careful exactness. The woman never had any life to her or movement, not even breathing. In one where the feet were prominent, they were Barbie feet with red toenails. Most often she was flat. She had round features, but they had no depth, flat like one plane, like a cartoon. Once I said to my contrarian friend, "They're a bit sentimental for me." He said, "I don't mind sentiment."



The drive back from there was a riot. I set to telling him about a friend of mine who has been learning and living the natural law that everything comes back. When somebody does him wrong, he'll rage awhile and finally settle down and say, 'It'll come back to bite him in the ass," and be done with it. Case closed. No revenge necessary. The act created its own revenge that will come from anywhere. Jim made certain I understood the initial rage is ego. Of course it's ego. This is an American man trying to make his way in the working class, not a monk sitting cross-legged in a Buddhist temple in Thailand. It's not about ego, anyway. It's about dealing with shit that's given you to deal with. Jim started about what's good and bad, good and bad, good and bad. I said something to the effect that good and bad are determined according to conditions. What's good in one circumstance might be bad in another circumstance, according to intent and a host of other variables. Naw, it's either good or bad, black or white. There's nothing but gray between black and white. I said all the colors of the rainbow are between black and white. B&w are only imaginary poles.



That didn't set with him worth a damn. He wasn't going to accept that morality is relative. From there I'm told we'll never agree. I'm thinking: So what? Who needs to agree? I said, "There's all kinds of ways of seeing everything." It would be like being expected to agree with old man Tom Pruitt and his preacher brother Millard that the earth was flat. They didn't care that I didn't agree with them. Old time mountain people I've known understood that everybody has their own way of seeing. The college educated middle class doesn't see it that way. We're all to conform to one right way of seeing everything, the way we're supposed to, and everybody knows what that is. There's only one right answer to every test question. Give the wrong answer and you are Wrong. Fail. It's been my experience that everyday life is not about true & false, multiple choice, memorizing dates and names of generals. He can live in a black and white world like a Republican scientist (isn't that an oxymoron?) all he wants. I'll never convert.



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EGO

sail on silver bird



Earlier today I went out with camera to get some pictures of the greenery at its peak, locusts in bloom, mountain laurel blooms coming on, multiflora in flower, the varieties of green seemingly more luscious greens this year than I remember in the past. Maybe it's the wetness. I'm most inclined to say it's my memory. The green things this year appear to be happy. I was looking around, some locusts in a stand of trees that favored trees in African wildlife documentaries that giraffes eat from. The varieties of green were interesting, but not. Unsatisfied, I looked upward at the clouds. That's where the action was. The sky was such variety of clouds it was overwhelming. I saw a straight line in the midst of a sky full of curved lines. One of the reasons I think the human mind has such a difficult time comprehending "nature" is that God creates with curved lines. The human mind in civilization creates with straight lines.



I was told at lunch today that grief is an expression of ego. What could I say? Of course. It was my friend Jim Winfield. He approached it gently, not wanting to make me think he's judging, because he wasn't. It was a legitimate concern. But, hell, I've known that for a lot of years. In Dr. Jim Jones's American lit class, it was the subject of John Crowe Ransom's poem about the chicken, Clucky, dying and the little girl crying. She cried for herself. Then, it was a new concept I had a difficult time grasping. I'd cried over pets dying, thinking it was about the pet, not about me. Then John Ransom told me it's about me. Good insight. I've grieved the loss of friends and pets since then. Knowing it's about me doesn't ease the anguish for me. And I don't believe that knowing it's about me is good reason to make myself feel nothing. I miss my friends. Friends are valuable to me, the most valuable. My friends occupy big places in my heart. When one drops out, for me, it's a serious loss. Sure it's ego. So what. Ego motivates everything. I didn't want to start the game I-know-more-than-you-do, so I didn't say something like, Getting a haircut is ego. Talking is ego. Eating is ego. And that's what we were doing, talking, eating and both of us had recent haircuts. Ego was everywhere. Everybody coming and going was motivated by ego, just like me. He's become hyper-aware of ego in this phase of his spiritual path. I've had my time of worrying over ego in this and ego in that, until I saw there's no way out of it. It may grow less demanding over time, but it doesn't go away, that is until Enlightenment, which I'm not holding my breath for. After Enlightenment you're not fit for anything in this world, so might as well go on and leave the body, be done with it. In this world, there's ego.



My response was that I'm not denying my feelings. So my feelings aren't educated about ego. I believe my feelings are too reliable a guide to regard them irrelevant because ego sets them in motion. Writing this blog is the biggest ego event of all. I thought about bringing that up, but didn't want to talk about it. We have different ways of seeing things, as is natural for individual egos. We both accept that. Therefore, we can talk at length about anything that comes up without getting mad. Gerald Leftwich and Gary Joines passed our booth on their way out. Leftwich said to Joines, "Everything's all right. These 2 got it all worked out." Jim asked about Gary Joines, what he did. I said he plays fiddle and bass. He also works at the bank. That's where Jim knew him from, the bank. I told Jim I said first of Gary that he plays the fiddle, because that's what he does. The bank job is making a living. Both of them, Gerald and Gary, have an ongoing sense of humor that is wide open, in the old-time mountain tradition. Humor is another aspect of mountain culture taken over by television the way Walmart took over small businesses throughout the country. Both of them keep me laughing all the time when I'm around them.



So ego has been on my mind all afternoon. Thinking mainly about how casual I've become about it when I remember a period of time I was thinking like Winfield. Early on the spiritual path, it's very serious business, when farther along one finds it's not serious at all. There's nothing serious about it. Serious logjams the flow. If God wants me to have less ego, God knows how to diminish it. I've had several diminishments along the way, for which I'm grateful. I like not believing I'm the most important, and I like not demanding that I always be first, that my will be done, that you pay attention to me because I know what's best for you. NOT. Not me. Though I cannot say there wasn't a time in my life when I thought like that. It didn't get anywhere. Not a very cooperative mind.



I have chosen out here in the world for my spiritual path, which is where I believe it's really about. Every kind of experience anyone could want is available somewhere in the world, from the highs to the lows, everything in between. I take my path in the Christian world as that is my own personal heritage, among the people of the mountains, again my own personal heritage, surrounded by the green world for harmony and clarity of spirit. I have to allow God to guide me, because I don't have a clue. I have to let God take care of the ego. When I came to the mountains I made it a point to myself that I would meet people as God gave them to me. I would seek to meet no one for any reason. I have to say I'm happy with the people God mixed me up with. Very happy. It keeps growing, like welling up in the heart at the thought of how happy I am with the people I know. I've learned to know people as who they are, not what they are. I've found people of such great inner stature they leave me in awe. I've known people who have convinced me by their very being that old-time mountain Baptist religion is a very real path. Two names I can give who come to mind instantly, Bessie Brooks and Tom Pruitt. There are others. Both of these people had a brilliant inner light. In my sight, Bessie glowed. I have seen Tom with light radiating out of him, his face baby pink, talking about his Savior. I was drawn to Sister Bessie's light. We had a special rapport, like friends who hadn't seen each other for a very long time.



And there was Sabe Choate. Black farmer, spiritual man, lived in the sight of God. I felt I had a special rapport with Sabe too. We always stopped and talked as friends when we saw each other. I mowed the lawn at the church for several years that was surrounded on 2 sides by his meadow. When he'd be out on the tractor, he'd ride over to the fence, I'd turn off the mower and we'd talk. Every time, he said to me, 'The Lord's gonna bless you for what you're doin." Sabe was as humble a man as I've ever known. Jr Maxwell was a good example of real humility, but old man Sabe was humble down on his knees, a man with only good will in his heart. I couldn't help but honor Sabe whenever I was around him by speaking up to him like I'm speaking to a man I respect, because that's what I was doing. He and his wife both came down with "old-timers," she taken away first to the nursing home.



One Sunday morning Sabe appeared at the open door of the church, standing at the threshold holding his hat down in front with both hands. This was the church Sabe grew up in. It was sold to white people after he was grown. I could hardly stand it. Elder Millard Pruitt, Tom's brother, said, "Come on in, Sabe." Sabe stepped delicately to the very same seat I sat in my first time inside that door. I could see that he was gone. It was tremendously sad for me. I spent the whole time praying for him. During handshaking time, no one shook Sabe's hand. I did. I was actually stunned that no one shook Sabe's hand. They all knew him. These were the people I loved and they didn't have it to shake Sabe Choate's hand and it so obvious his innocent condition. I threw it off at the time, but it didn't go away. After the meeting, Sabe's car wouldn't start. He cranked it and cranked it. Nothing happened.



I went to see if I could help in any way, not being a mechanic, but to offer support. A preacher and a deacon were standing talking about 15 feet away, not offering any kind of assistance, not even offering notice. I didn't want to let it, but the experience amounted to a knife in my heart. I couldn't understand that all of them were able to deny this humble man who grew up in this church house, whose family was buried across the road, who lived in sight of the church house. He was the church's nearest neighbor. Something inside me died that day despite telling myself not to let it be a bother. This is their world. I was ok with them doing what they had to do. I wasn't comfortable with them any more. It wasn't about politics and civil rights. It was about basic humanity. Or so I thought. I can see now I had come up on a wall in Southern mountains culture I didn't know was there. That's all it was. They were ok with me doing what I did.

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.