THE MYSTERY OF THE OBVIOUS

the hay barn

Perhaps the best thing for me to do is stop now. It may be best to just let it go for today. I'm in a rotten mood. Snowed in all day, didn't want to do anything. No music, no movie, no radio, little reading, minimal facebook, wanted to sleep all day and was interrupted just after I'd drifted into unconsciousness. No going back. Took grain to the donkeys in late afternoon, returning to the house immediately. I've laid about and laid about, watching my mood get moodier as the day went by. I turn on the radio and somebody is talking about cancer, turn the radio off. I don't think I have frustrated anger about anything in particular. It could be that I ate almost nothing yesterday and very little today. I tell self to eat something, have some Earl Grey tea, do something toward a new art project. I found some fir strips I did not know were here. This project will take some doing. It is nine six-inch plywood circles, half inch thick. Some plastic wood touches on each one will be necessary. Sanding them all too. Three rows of three circles held together by strips of fir three-quarters inch wide on the backside. The framework will run behind where the circles touch, rendering them out of sight. I'll have to fix each circle with screws in its place and make a system of numbers and letters to identify the locations on the framework where each circle goes. Take them off and paint each one of them, put them someplace to dry for a few months, then attach them to the framework with screws and glue. Doing anything toward it today was something I lacked the spirit for. I did find the sticks of fir, first step. 

mountain laurel

I'd so much rather put it together in my mind than get out the drill, the jigsaw, ruler, extension cord, paper and pencil. I have to be in a certain frame of mind for the construction. I need to see it clearly in my mind, and don't see this to the detail, yet, that I want to. This one is so labor intensive it stands before me like an obstacle course. It takes a certain mind to jump in. This is a particularly lazy day. Started a scrabble game this afternoon with somebody I'd played several games with. Forfeited the game this evening when I realized I really don't want to play scrabble anymore. I jumped in for a few weeks, but it took up too much time. My mind likes to make words out of letters, but it likes to do something else too. Comes a time I get tired of having all vowels. I used to search for the longest word and highest score I could get per turn. Today I put down the first thing I saw using no more than two or three letters, scoring 9 or 8 or 11, and not caring. Opponent scores 36, 28, 49, and I don't care. I see his score shoot way up past mine and don't care. Then say to self, if you don't care about any of it, why the hell are you wasting your time at it? I clicked on the forfeit button and left, promising self I won't be going back any time soon. At first, the game is about putting words together. Then it turns into strategies and numbers and scores. I can see the strategies are as endless as bridge strategies, I don't care to get that involved. I'd best stop playing it now that I see I don't like it anymore. I refuse to search for the highest score I can make per word. Knowing myself, I know when I'm done with something, it's over. No point in trying to force it, it will never come back. 

rhododendron

I have better things to do than focus my mind on making a higher score than somebody else. Why do I want to beat somebody at something? When I ask the question, Why?, it's over. I already know why. I've never taken an interest in competition. It may go back to my grandmother's wisdom she taught me with in childhood. I wanted to do something she thought foolish. She said, "What do you want to do that for? It's like a merry go round. You get on, you go round and round, you get off in the same place you got on. Where you been?" I didn't like the cold water that kind of thinking threw on what I thought was fun. But it never left me. Only heard it once and never forgot it. I don't even remember Bible verses that long I'd memorized for expectation in church. I remember Jesus wept. Woody Allen hit the nail on the head when he said if Jesus were to come back and see what all was done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up. It makes me laugh at these people who get their fifteen minutes of fame for some point of view devoid of compassion and call themselves Christian. I can only think they make Christian a bad name. Tell one that and be ready for the ensuing explosion of righteousness. I saw a funny clip yesterday on facebook of Pat Robertson, the wizened sage of the 700 (send me your money) club, warning that yoga is a Hindu trick to get us to praying, by way of mantra, to Hindu deities. We truly live in an insane society. When supreme ignorance passes for knowledge, the best place for me is at home. I'm doing facebook less, except for Daily Creative Practice page, bored by republican claims Obama is a Muslim. So what if he is. He has a Kenyan heritage. So what. The Bush family has a Nazi heritage and nobody complains about it. 

dogwood

I see how the Fake news channel has twisted the minds of half the American population, the below average half, white men, the obedient people most susceptible to propaganda, easy targets, and I want revenge. I want the world to be a better place, but it's not, nor is it going to be. It looks like globalization brought all the cultures in the world close enough together to see they hate each other. Ideally, bring everyone together in unity, kumbaya, but what happens when they see each other face to face: conflict. Beware of them Hindu deities. The Reagan Trojan Horse brought us division inside of division, divide and conquer. We're conquered. A cop kills an unarmed black man, woman or child and the video goes viral, he gets a paid two week vacation. Our government legislates against us, the judicial system decides against us. The corporate takeover of our government throughout the land regards "we the people" the enemy. Our resources are being drained from us into Swiss etc banks, shrinking the middle class into the working class, all of us the peasant class, a Mad Max world. I see this happening and what can I do? Read a book, advance an art project, have a nap, write, watch a movie? I've come to a place where I laugh at hope in myself. I can see now that civilization as we know it really is going completely away. It is at once incredibly interesting and dispiriting. Democracy gone away is not the end of it. In my lifetime I saw the pattern of anti-intellectualism in American life go all the way to anti-paying attention and then to anti-democracy. Them people up in Washington, they got things under control. Like my friend Lorne Campbell never dreamed he would live to see the Berlin wall go down, I never believed I'd see popular police state in America, though saw it coming since LBJ. I didn't take into account the full power of television. In my lifetime, I've seen television become American culture. I've seen the obvious become mystery. I warned you. I'm not in a good mood. However, I'll wake in the morning with a new light. Fare forward, voyager. Just had to ride this one out.       

home on waterfall road

*

AN HONORABLE ROGUE 2

vincent van gogh

This morning, having coffee, sitting at the desk with computer, I heard what sounded like mouse scratchings in the wall to my right. I saw this small table with a drawer I keep a lamp on, thought I'd open the drawer an inch or two if a mouse was maybe inside the drawer; I've heard mice won't stay in a drawer that is open. I pulled the drawer open about two inches and saw the business card of Lorne R. Campbell. It felt like he was speaking to me after the meditation on him last night writing. It wasn't spooky; I don't find such coincidences spooky, rather quite natural. Taking it for spooky comes from interpreting it from outside self, whereas I see it coming from inside self. Can't explain it, but I'm so used to it, I take no special note of such coincidences anymore. If it means his spirit came to visit me, I doubt it. His soul would be well established in a new body. He's been gone twenty-four years. I'd guess he's at least twenty, someplace unknown to me and anybody else. Last time, he was born in British Columbia to Scottish immigrant parents. They moved to San Diego, California, when he was eight. He grew up on Coronado Island the other end of a long bridge from the city, played tennis in high school. His senior year he represented his school for the city-wide tournament. For the final round, city champion, he was put up against a kid with some sort of physical impairment, and Campbell could not allow himself to beat the kid. Where's the honor in beating a cripple? He gave the game to the kid and let him be the champion. After school he took a merchant ship from San Diego to New York by way of the Panama Canal, late 1920s, was delayed in Panama for a six-month jail term, more than likely for something involving liquor and a woman. I forget the actual reason. I felt a sense of visitation when I saw the card, felt like he was thanking me for the consideration I'd given him writing about him, for the trust. I felt it almost as if he were in the room speaking to me.

 

vincent van gogh

 

I'm recalling something he passed to me leaving the body. He had spoken a few times of my weak self-confidence, something he saw I needed to work on. I heard him. By chance, I was staying a few weeks in Miami, painting, when he had his collapse in New Smyrna Beach, just south of Daytona. His wife was wheelchair bound, he called and asked me to drive up to take him to a doctor's office, a four hour drive. He asked me to stay with them. I saw two helpless people needed a hand. I drove to Miami, picked up my objects and returned to take care of things like going to the grocery store, whatever comes up, to have someone in the house who could function and drive the car, to pick him up from the floor if needed. It was pretty clear to both of us these were his last days. He needed rest, time to sleep. I helped to keep everyday life necessities out of his head while his mortal frame was waning fast. I knew this was his final days and knew just as well that the shit would start the moment of his demise and I'd be in it up to my eyeballs for at least a few days. It was one of those times I said I-can-handle-it with a fair certainty I could not. As long as I had my keys in my pocket, I was free. Pushed past my limit, all I needed to do was turn the key in the ignition. Having such a clearly defined exit I was able to handle it fairly well when the buzzards started flying in, two of her brothers, one a fraud of a chaplain in the Navy, the other one a vacancy with the television on and nobody home. It was obvious from the start they were there to be sure I did not confiscate the South African Krugerrands Lorne kept in a little safe in a closet anybody who wanted it could easily carry away, and it was never locked. I didn't give a shit about his damn Krugerrands. I didn't want anything, which nobody believed about me, because they, themselves, were there wanting. It was funny being under suspicion for what they were there to do. I could see it, they didn't know I could, and they kept me in stitches by simply being fake in everything they said and did, pretending sincerity like bad actors. Lorne's daughter arrived, who was my friend; we supported each other under the gaze of the buzzards. Her brother arrived and I left, given that she had support in him. They were the children of his second of three wives.  

 

vincent van gogh

 

The buzzards offered me Lorne's car, wanting rid of the nuisance of its negligible market value, which I declined, an old land yacht Lincoln with an excellent motor, in good physical condition, a good highway car, but I wasn't going to be driving about in Sparta in a Lincoln. The wrong people look. I didn't want to pay taxes on it. Didn't want to pay for repair parts, expensive tires. I just wanted what I had, a 78 Toyota pickup that stayed with me until the frame rusted away. I didn't want a land yacht. The time came very soon for me to get on up the road. My heart was heavy with grief after losing someone I respected way high up, and my reason for being involved was over. The buzzards were there to wrangle over money and things and a will. Not me. I was there to get the hell gone from there. I hit the road for Charleston, about half way to home, and visited my friend John a couple days on the way home. Next day we walked to a small movie theater that showed art films to see a film, I forget what it was. Walking back to the house, John was talking and my mind was reeling from recent experiences, deeply occupied. I really wanted silence. I let him talk while I noticed I felt something new in my walking. I felt something in the way I was walking I'd never felt before. I went within and felt the walking, asked self what was I feeling. Answer: self-confidence. I realized this was the mantle Lorne had passed to me, his student he had gifted his knowledge to and love for the people and culture of these mountains. I walked paying attention to the feeling in my gait, feeling the self-confidence in self that was conducting my subconsciously new manner of walking. The buzzards got their things; I was the one he gifted in his passing, a boost in the self-confidence he saw I needed. His thank you in spirit, for giving him the chance to rest when his energy was waning, came from the same place that called me to open the drawer this morning to see his name on a business card. The self-confidence never faded away. It continues. I drove home from Charleston in a new spirit, though in a state of sorrow, too. Nothing like the highway for processing a logjam in the head.  

  

vincent van gogh

 

I was grateful for the opportunity to be an assist to Lorne in a real way in his last days. My prayer for his passing had been that he would see it coming with enough time to come to terms with his life, the passing be painless, and that I be with him to perform prayer within. I drove home with the satisfaction that his soul had found its home in the light. He chose cremation, so there was no body left for the soul to cling to, though I knew his soul would cling to nothing this side of the veil. He'd reached a place in his life at age 80 where nothing was left for him here. His mind was on the verge of gone. His secretary, who was his mind and kept his law practice going, came down with cancer and died. The end of his practice. He knew he didn't have a lot of time left and moved to Florida to rest and get away from here, break all his habits, go out in peace, no funeral. He didn't want a funeral. He didn't want anybody at his funeral wanting to see him dead. He had a long list of people who wanted to see him dead. He wanted to trump them all and not allow them the satisfaction. I saw him dead, but didn't want him dead. He asked that his ashes be put in the New River, though I don't think any of them made it there. That was not my concern. The self-confidence was not the only gift he left me with. My fear of death fell away in that time. It just went away of its own, I noticed one day a little bit later that I wasn't afraid of dying anymore. I suddenly understood why, concerning the question to kill or be killed, Jesus would go with be killed. I believe if I were put into a kill or be killed no-way-out situation, I'd go with be killed. I also don't know that automatic self-preservation sees it that way. Do I really have that much rational control? I don't think so. I prefer not to test it. I doubt my mind has much influence on so basic an original instinct as self-preservation. Surprise doesn't allow time for rational thought. Like Peter Tosh sang, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. My friend, Lorne, who just about everybody assessed to be bound for hell on account of general excess and never going to church, I saw go into the light.      

 

vincent van gogh himself

 

 

 

 

 

 

AN HONORABLE ROGUE

 

van gogh

A reminder came today that I do not always function by reason. I'm glad of it. The only person I know who lives as much by reason as possible talks like a robot. Always, everything he says is right, a matter of fact. The bland, non-emphatic voice that is always right. My reaction: Lord have mercy, may I go on flexing my emotional self, getting mad when it's the irrational thing to do, finding my joy feeding carrots to donkeys, doing nothing and feeling no guilt. In this time of the life I feel uncomfortable around men so clean shaven they look diseased and women so perfectly attired and coiffured they look like politicians' wives on tv. They strike me as people who bought the television package. On days the local arts group has their "gallery crawls" where people drive from one studio to another around the county to see the latest in crafty items, have wine and talk, the cars going down my road on their way to Allan and Gary's stained glass studio are all new cars. Every one that goes by, I think, Not anybody coming to see me. My friends all drive used cars and pickups. The only time used cars go by anymore is when a house is being built up the road, having renovations done or additions put on. A new car stops and parks beside the road. They're going to the waterfalls. A used car or pickup stops and parks by the road, it's somebody I know. My friend of years gone by walked into my mind, Lorne Campbell, lawyer. He was generally disliked by the town people and just as generally loved by the country people. A reflection of his attitudes toward town people and country people. Nobody from Whitetop Mountain, Virginia, ever paid in his office. They were the people he loved as his own.

vincent van gogh

 

Lorne is one of the people who has gone to the other side whose memory is always welcome. Since the moment I first met Tom Pruitt, my hillbilly sensei, teacher, I have studied mountain culture as closely as I now study donkey nature. I let people of the culture be my teachers by paying attention when they talked, thereby encouraging them. Over a period of five years, Lorne told me his life. It was the same as reading a biography, a sitting at a time, his memories told in more or less random order, like leaves falling from a tree, one at a time from different parts of the tree, every leaf an experience told. Not long after he left the body someone I know, who had taken Campbell on in a money deal and lost, spent over an hour telling me the sins and crimes of Lorne Campbell. He figured I only know Lorne's "good" side, like Campbell would only tell his past to me in self-serving ways. I laughed all the time, more within than without, because I knew every story he told. The best was that I could have told him some really bad shit that makes what he told like nothing, but I cannot disrespect my friend even when he's not here anymore. I did not even allude to knowing implicating stories about Campbell as a rogue. He liked having the name rogue. It gave him freedom. When he played poker, he played to win. He played golf to win, gambling on the golf course like at the poker table. When he did money wheeling-dealings, he played to win. He regarded life a game and played to win. Saying he played to win does not mean he was passionate about winning. It's the nature of gaming. A game is a competition. Somebody wins and that's what you play toward. He said court was the only place he was passionate about winning. Winning in court was what he did.

vincent van gogh

There was a time I entertained thought to write something about his life, but I don't want to disrespect his memory. I feel like what he told me, he told me. He didn't tell it on television. I was the one he chose at the end of his life to tell his life to. He was totally honest about himself. And what I told him of my life, in turn, was equally honest. I know he did not tell me "everything," but I didn't want to know everything. I have a rule of thumb for myself that I don't want to know anything about somebody that whoever it is doesn't tell me him or her self. Of course, I hear tales on people I know from time to time, but don't pay it any mind and don't want to hear it. It may not matter at all to me, but I'd still prefer to have heard it from the subject. I feel like people open to me when they trust me, trust me not to tell it around, not even to anybody. I feel it my responsibility to honor the trust. Trust is important in these hills. I made it a conscious point never to tell any of his dark side stories to anyone but my friend, Carole, whose trust is absolute. Two days before his spirit left the body, he said to me, "I've been looking at my life. It's been half good and half bad. I've forgiven everybody everything." My immediate thought was, he found his balance and signed off. Sayonara. Since the day he learned about Elvis dying sitting on the toilet, that was where he wanted to die. He got his wish. The nurse said, "That bowel movement was very important to him." I had to force a straight face and a funereal nod. I wanted to tell him so bad I got with him in spirit and told him. I don't mean anything psychic. I mean I focused my mind on his spirit and told him what happened. It either reached him or not. Doesn't matter. It was more for me than for him. He was more involved in the light he was rocketing into than the launch pad he left.

vincent van gogh

I met him in a time I was doing whatever-came-up, handy man jobs. A call from friend Lizabeth who sold mountain laurel with roots in dirt. Somebody had bought four and needed somebody to plant them. Much of the time I was digging the holes and putting the laurel in place, he sat on the deck reading. After awhile he called to me to take a break, sit in the shade, have some iced tea. He was reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Blew my mind. Somebody in Alleghany County reading Knut Hamsun? He was a Hamsun enthusiast without making literature of it. Just a writer he liked to read. Right away we identified each other readers. He read mostly presidential and political biographies, accounts of jail-breaks, stories of rogues. He turned me on to The Falcon and the Snowman. He knew by experience politicians were rogues. I asked him toward his later weeks if he had a guiding purpose along the way. He said he took up the practice of law to keep mountain boys out of prison. Mountain boys don't belong in prison. He said, "Our prison system is cruel and unusual punishment; therefore, unconstitutional. I can't change the system, but I can keep mountain boys out of prison." Everything else was little more to him than what you do to keep the office open. He was known all over Southwest Virginia as the lawyer who will hold your hand all the way to the prison door, meaning he will exhaust every possibility to keep you out, up to the very last second the door slams shut. I remember two guys he told me about in the prison at Bland, Virginia, wanting him to appeal their case. They got forty years for rape that was not rape. He said they went to him first and he quoted a price he'd do it for. They thought it too much and went to a lawyer who charged less. He could have got them a not-guilty; they got forty years. My head has so many good stories of people from Southwest Virginia, all different kinds of people. He taught me another level of understanding mountain people, a deeper appreciation.    

vincent van gogh himself

 

 

*

 

 

THINGS FALL APART

Going by reports I've seen, the march on Washington, the 50th anniversary gathering, amounted to not much but another reason we did not want police state. I found a video of Al Sharpton talking there, but turned it off after half a minute. He grates my nerves. At least he followed some sound counsel on changing his hairdo. He's impossible for me to take seriously after the Tawana Brawley non-incident that occurred several years ago. Young black girl had shit smeared on her and claimed she'd been raped. Sharpton was in on the ruse. Sharpton and his zealots made it up, set the whole thing up and made a big racial issue of it, accusing and ranting. A preacher. I'm surprised to see he evidently has enough credibility for a tv network to pay him to be a news commentator, and he was given a slot to talk at the Washington civil rights march 2013. The police presence was all the way up to military, taking hand-held signs from people handing them out, threatening them with arrest. The first civil rights march in 1963 made a great wave in the ocean of collective human consciousness. This memorial half a century after was not even a ripple in a virtual pond. The reports I read indicated that the speakers only had two or three minutes apiece. Then I saw Al Sharpton had 20 minutes. Whatever.

In Raleigh this weekend, some people who had been feeding the homeless on weekends were told to stop it or be arrested by police. No citing the law or statute or reason. Stop it or you're arrested. Another reason we did not want police state. Our national government is telling third world countries to allow peaceful demonstrations if they want to go on receiving billions in aid from USA. Occupy has been shut down. The people peacefully protesting in North Carolina and Wisconsin are arrested routinely for peaceable protesting. It's on international tv and no one seems to get it. Enforcing democracy on destitute countries while arresting demonstrators in USA acting out democracy makes the same kind of sense as locking up "whistleblowers" while calling this a free society. All I know of that's free about it is the polluted air to breathe. Next we'll be sold oxygen like in Tokyo. We've become like a literal herd of sheep controlled by television, believing uncritically whatever we're told, because we're supposed to. In every herd is one that stays off to itself. It is with the herd, a member of the herd, stays with the herd, but stays apart from the herd to itself. I've been the one to stay off to itself in every herd I've been associated with. I'm with the herd, but like a little space around me.

Because I don't have a head full of commercials and sitcom canned laughter, I don't believe it is necessary to make my life a pipeline between Walmart and the landfill. It's actually kinda creepy being the only one, but for less than a handful of the people of my world who does not partake of the daily propaganda ingestion. I don't mean just political propaganda, though there's plenty of that too. In my lifetime I have seen it shorten the American attention span down to nothing. I remember years ago being alarmed when I saw the people around me had an attention span of a cat. By now, it's not even that. It's nonexistent. Zombies, the living dead, are popular entertainment. In my case, it doesn't matter that I don't watch tv, because the entire culture I live in, the larger American culture, our way of thinking is created by television. I don't mean this show or that commercial. I mean the steady flow of flash, both visual and auditory, vey little of it, if any, anything more than flash, devoid of content except to sell something subliminally. It seems like the people who watch television the most have become televisions. I've known a few people that I think of as televisions.

 

The US Navy took me outside my life for two years. I resented that about the draft. I am not soldier or sailor anything but fodder. The first six months living in barracks broke my television habit cold turkey. My head would clear of television images when the ship was at sea, and then I'd have another extended spell on land with television. At sea, the television images would gradually drift out of my head. On the ship I read as much as I could to use the time for something beneficial to myself since I was bound by involuntary servitude for being born a boy in a militarist society, a militarist civilization, a universal militarist mind set. In childhood I wanted to escape to Tibet where they lived in peace. Then Chinese militarism put an end to that. Who gave a shit? Some did. Some gave a great deal of shit, but not enough to stop the oppression of a people unable to defend themselves militarily. It's like what happened in USA, Australia and Latin America; when the outsiders move in by military or economic force, the local people become the outsiders in their own land. The Tibetans staying behind are regarded by the Chinese like the Indians are regarded on Turtle Island in this time. What's to be done? Go to India, the last place where peaceable people have a chance. India has nukes, and India has military. And India is engaged in perpetual terrorist war with Pakistan like Israel with the entire Arab world.

In the late 1980s, Independence attorney Lorne Campbell would comment on the news from time to time, "It's time to move higher up the mountain." Hearing the news in this time, yesterday, today, tomorrow, gives one a visual and a story that brings to mind a working out of the WB Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, the center does not hold. We don't seem to have a center in this time.

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
     the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, at the end of WW1. Here it is again. The center is not holding any longer and things are falling apart. It's a cycle we're going through again. America had it's center in being white dominant middle class in the Fifties, Ozzie and Harriet, whose rock star son died in a plane crash free-basing cocaine. We have on the one hand a television fantasy, and on the other hand the in-person version steps out into our world in a plane crash. The Yeats poem is a  beautifully composed vision of the time around the Second Coming. It tells a cycle so well it reads like prophecy. You can find it googling yeats second coming.  I go about thinking much of the time the center does not hold. Like Campbell, I say to myself, Time to move higher up the mountain. I'm already as high up the mountain as I can go, so that's kinda redundant. My center seems to be holding. Every day I look at the green world outside in gratitude to God that I am not caught up in television mind manipulated unconsciously. I pay attention to current events not by tv news, but by newspaper and magazine articles. I'm not Noam Chomsky. I couldn't read it all, due to not being that interested. I like to follow threads of the unwinding of the world as we knew it and see / witness / observe the new world coming on. It's a head game, totally a head game.   

 

 

*

 

I'M COUNTRYFIED

     pine swamp, alleghany county, by tj worthington

Since Friday night hearing the Highlanders sing Countryfied, that song has been in my mind almost all the time. I couldn't be a city slicker even if I tried, I like the country way of life. Every time that line comes to me I feel the appreciation of what it means to say I like the country way of life. I was trained to believe all through my early life that country people are backward and none too bright. From the city perspective, it's true; country people don't do well in the city unless they want the city way of life enough to go for it. It's true the other way around. City people in the country are ridiculous. Who can operate a chain saw? Who can plant a garden? Who can use a hammer? Who can build a house? Who can take the car engine apart and put it back together so it runs better than it did before? In the country way of life people share the produce of their gardens with neighbors and friends. In the country way of life you're respected for who you are. In the city way, you're respected for what you are. In the country, what you are has little to no meaning. In the city, who you are is of no consequence. Who you are cannot be sold.


The first thing I love about the country way of life is the trees, the green things that grow everywhere, rhododendron, mountain laurel, mountain azalea, not even the particulars, just the living green world. This year the trees are especially full of leaves, seemingly more than ever. The leaves are big and happy looking. The summer has been seldom above 75, rain about once a week, as we need it, the green world vibrating in the quiet breeze. I love to be among trees, to walk in the woods, or just to look out the window and see trees. Trees are important for my mental health. In the mountains the landscape is always different. Every particular spot in the mountains is different from any other particular spot. The curving roads make good drivers of mountain people. Driving to the grocery store is not a matter of 25 lights, all of them red, each way. Depending on how I go, it's 4 stop signs and one light in 9 miles, a 20 minute drive through beautiful country I know as my own, every place I see familiar, home. I pass houses of people I've known a long time and appreciate fully as the very people I want in my life.


In a way, I regret the influx of urban mind into the mountains, but inevitable it is. Independence lawyer Lorne Campbell and I talked about this subject at length in the last half of the 1980s. He had lived here since he was 19, came here from San Diego, where I was born some time later in the hospital where his sister worked as a nurse. I met her years later when she was in a nursing home. It charmed us that we'd been in the same building at the same time one time before in our lives. Lorne had come to see it that the mountains needed new blood. I took me a long time to see what he meant. I don't know if I can articulate it very well. He knew it better than I, a whole lot better. He committed wholly, 100% to the mountain way of life. He dove in and swam in the current. I'm more the one to sit on the bank and watch the river go by. I'm natured more like Mr Sammler in Saul Bellow's novel, Mr Sammler's Planet. Lorne met life face-on. I meet it kind of sideways, like in a duel. What he meant by the mountains needed new blood had to do with the nature of a community with little to no influences from outside, like standing water stagnates and loses its vitality.


The mountains are getting plenty of new blood in this time. If a shutdown of the economic system locked everybody in place, such that we would stay for the rest of our lives where we are now, not by choice. By random. Then the mountains become isolated again for several hundred years. Maybe from polar meltdown when the ocean rises, the mountains will be a chain of islands like Japan. All the people that happened to be there when the water came in would be the foundation people of the population of those islands thousands of years into the future. Cultures would emerge. It being in the period of a thousand years of peace, the people would not be suspicious of each other, arts would flourish. Mammon would no longer be the god we call Jesus. People would still be as nutty as they are today, just in different ways, less violent, less radical, less hateful. The spirit of God will be glowing in humanity, individually and collectively. It's happening now. When all that is getting cleared out now is gone, we'll have the spirit in abundance. Nobody hanged or burned for being witches or heretics. Very few people in prison and the prisons humane.

As it is, the country way of life is my preference among the alternatives. There might be places "better," but I don't think any are better for me at this time. I don't mean it's sweet and lovely all the time. It's not. But it's real. There is ground to put one's feet on. Ground that has a history. Ground farmers worked and children played on for a few centuries. Before that, several thousand years of Indians walking the deer trails, fishing the native trout, never to extinction, realizing they were in a paradise world, which the Europeans came over and destroyed making it into money. I like living in a piece of the paradise world that is left. I like hearing doves, crows, bluejays, cardinals, wrens, song sparrows, chickadees just outside my door and open windows. I love everything that grows in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Long before I ever knew of the mountains here, I saw pictures of them blue under a pink sky. I thought I would never see those mountains. They seemed far away, almost mythological. And to the south of them, the Smokies, where clouds rise from the hollers. The Carter Family, the Clinch Mountains, WPAQ-AM, seemed as far away as Wordsworth's Lake Country. Now I live in it as home and it is better than I ever might have imagined, had I guessed it in my future.


*

CURTIS TURNER AND LORNE CAMPBELL

Have been in a reading logjam again. I'm in three books, all interesting, went from one to the other after coming to a standstill about half way through each. Then just came to a standstill. Wanting something to read that makes me anxious to open it again and read some more. These three just dried up on me. Finished one a couple days ago. I will finish them, just needed a break. At the library I saw a biography of early NASCAR driver, Curtis Turner, FULL THROTTLE, by Robert Edelstein. Thought I'd give it a go. First thing I did was look in the index for my friend Lorne Campbell, who knew Turner, was one of his closest friends and his legal mind. His name was not there. I laughed and sent a note to him in spirit telling him he was free. He'd told me this man Doc Morris, involved in early NASCAR, wrote a small biography of Turner years ago. He talked to Campbell about Turner and Campbell told him if he puts his name in the book, he'll sue him. His name never appeared in the book. I doubt it was a fists on hips declaration, rather a conversational notation between men who knew each other well and were friendly. Knowing Campbell, I imagine he told him he'd like his name not to be used, and to seal it with certainty, added the PS, in good humor. It didn't need to be spoken as a warning, because Morris would have known Campbell well enough to pay attention.


Lorne Campbell was a wild man just like Curtis Turner, but more in a mental way, while Turner acted everything out physically and emotionally. He had a good mind too. Campbell told me Turner was one of five conmen he'd represented. He missed them. Only one was living then, Hugh Rakes, in Floyd, Virginia. When I say represented, he was their legal counsel and courtroom representative. He had the best conman mind of them all, as he was a conman by the law. They would tell him what they wanted to do, and he would would do the legal work. Campbell made a lot of money in timber over the years. Reading about Turner's timber deals, buying a mountain of timber and selling it before the closing for double or triple what he put into it. This is how Campbell told me they operated. There is no mention in the biography that Turner was a conman. He's called a businessman. If I were writing the bio, I wouldn't call him a conman either. I don't say that in blame. Reading about Turner's charisma with other men for his rugged masculinity, and with women for his rugged masculinity, he was somebody who had to have something going at all times, several at the same time. Brilliant mind with minimum school education. Campbell only went through high school. He studied law for one year with an elder lawyer in Independence, who was also a state senator from SW Virginia, Senator Parsons. He passed the Virginia bar in the last year it could be done before a new law required a law school degree.


I had the opportunity one time to see Campbell in a courtroom. This was in his years between 75 and 80 when his driving was good enough, but he didn't have the endurance to drive all day. I drove him around SW Virginia to courthouses in the different counties where he was representing clients. In Roanoke, in Federal court, he was representing Hugh Rakes before a judge. I usually stayed in the car and read. It wasn't all courtroom. This one day he asked me to come inside and see the proceedings. It had to do with Hugh Rakes selling a mountain of coal to Exxon, which was having, what seemed to me, a legitimate dispute with Rakes. I had never seen Campbell's face so stone-like before. He looked like a marble bust of a Roman general. His face was rectangular in straight lines, deep lines like in Roman likenesses. The face never changed. It was the ultimate poker face carved from stone. He was a good poker player too. He informed the judge of this law and that law, precedents, and had the judge in his pocket from the start with the charisma of his intelligence. In the courtroom, his intelligence had a powerful charisma. It was all intelligence, too, because no charm went with it. It was the same as a speaking Roman statue in a light blue suit. He preferred to go before a judge than a jury, because a jury required theatrics; whereas with a judge, it was straight the law.


Campbell stays in the front of my mind reading about Curtis Turner. The Turner I'm reading about accords perfectly with Campbell's memories of him. We drove by a place near Thomas Bridge, Virginia, somewhere between there and Marion, where Curtis ran on a dirt track in his first years racing. We stopped at a mechanic's shop to visit an old buddy from that time, one of Curtis's mechanics. He showed me a bridge Curtis did his 180 turn on. He showed me places and told of experiences at the parties Curtis gave. It was wide open. I mean wide open by today's standard. The bio, I knew before I opened it, wouldn't go into some of the detail Campbell told me. Babes at all times. Liquor at all times. He told me of a time Curtis landed his plane on main street (hwy 58) in Independence, before they had electrical wires. He said the most memorably beautiful sight he ever saw in his life was in the plane with Curtis on their way to LasVegas, flying over the Rockies. Two horses standing on the peak of a snow-covered mountain. I think it was about age 36 that Campbell experienced the march of the pink elephants in a Marion hotel room. He'd come to his own limit. Had to cut out the liquor. But that was all.


Campbell's spirit left the body 1989, days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Boris Yeltsen standing on a tank announcing the end of the Soviet system. He said he never believed he would live to see the day. He was at the hospital at New Smyrna, Florida, the next town south of Daytona, city of memories for him. Reading of those times at Daytona with Curtis Turner, I know Campbell was there some of the times, and this well-told account of an American life gives me a broader look into the world Campbell told me about in the hours we spent on the highways of SW Virginia. I asked him one day if he felt like he had a life purpose. It wasn't out of the blue. We talked about these sorts of subjects. He said it was to keep mountain boys out of prison; mountain boys don't belong in prison. And that's what he did. He was known as a lawyer who would "hold your hand all the way to the prison door," meaning he'll keep working every angle he can twist to keep you out, right up to the very last moment. He was good in court. His legal representation was pro bono to anyone from Whitetop mountain in Grayson County. He loved the people of Whitetop. They were his people, the people he loved in his heart, the people whose spirit he identified with as his own.

A rogue, a rounder, a lowlife to the town people, the country people loved him. I learned long ago in Grayson County never to mention his name to town people. Country people light up every time at the mention of his name. It was the country people he loved, loved them so much that in his heart he was one of them. And he was honored that they thought of him as one of them. The town people are about appearances; the country people are about who you are, your character. Rogue he may have been, but his character was exemplary. He told me, meaning it from the same place he meant he was about keeping mountain boys out of prison, the only man he respects is a man who will not rat on his friends. He said it is a rare man, indeed, who would not rat. In Abingdon, Virginia, he called me into the courthouse another time to see a man in the witness stand ratting on people he'd worked with in the drug trade, them sitting there looking at him. The man's eyebrows brooded so low over his eyes that his eyes looked out from dark shadows. It taught me much, just to see his face, what ratting was doing to him, to stay out of prison. It's mighty tempting. Campbell, when he was 19, spent 6 months in prison for refusal to rat on a friend in court.


While reading Curtis Turner's life is a page-turner, a very well written page-turner, telling about somebody who was a friend of a friend of mine, brings my friend who has been gone from this world for 22 years back to mind like I could get in the car and go over and see him right now. When it comes to character, Lorne Campbell was a model for character in my life. He had lived in these mountains his entire adult life, coming here from SanDiego when he was 19, went to jail first thing, came out and took up studying law with Senator Parsons after deciding he wanted to be a practicing lawyer. In his own mind, he was the same as the people he worked to keep out of prison. The guys that skirted the edge of the law were his brothers in the spirit. That was the road he liked to travel. In words he said to me, he believes the American penal system is cruel and unusual punishment, therefore unconstitutional. He couldn't change the system, but he could give it all he's got to keep mountain boys away from its dehumanizing intent. I mentioned this to lawyer Donna Shumate some years later and she said the rub is, it is indeed cruel, but not unusual. He thought it was unusual where basic humanity was concerned. Campbell, himself, was my idea of a full human being, one who lived his life fully.

The day before his spirit left the body he said to me, "I've been looking at my life. Half of it has been good and half of it was bad. I've forgiven everybody everything." I heard balance and knew he was on his way. The view out his hospital window was the bridge from the mainland to the beach where Curtis Turner used to race on the beach and Lorne Campbell had some of the best memories of his lifetime.



*

COMFORTABLE WITH WINTER

        location for the film noi the albino, iceland

This morning I went out to feed the birds, it 25 degrees. I noticed when I stepped through the open doorway into the cold, I didn't brace against it, walked into it relaxed, thinking of the people living in Scandinavian countries, not the least bit shy of cold air. In an Icelandic film, Noi the Albino, I saw a high school girl putting gas in a car, wearing a tshirt, acting like it's the same as summer, and it snowing. In Danish film, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Smilla tells of growing up in Greenland until her mother died and her dad moved back to Copenhagen, where he was from originally. Smilla could not stand the heat in the house. She lived outside the house in a tent until she became acclimatized. In The Sea, I saw a woman in mini-skirt, no shoes, lying in the snow, passed out drunk. I see those people going into the cold like we go into a summer day, here at latitude 36. Iceland is latitude 64-67. It's northern extremities touch the Arctic Circle, where it is only cold to Xtreme cold. Iceland's latitude is the same as the northern parts of Norway. For time measured in millions of years, this island in the North Sea was washed clean of soil a long time ago. Fishing is how they live, not agriculture. Rock and ice everywhere.



I've been enjoying the films primarily because they are so well made; excellent writing, excellent directing, acting awfully good, good story. Now I'm finding these Scandinavian stories are giving me new insight into winter. Before, and I mean all my life, I've braced against the cold and waited for it to leave by end of May, worn out from waiting. About mid February I am ready for winter to be over and it's just the half way point. Looking at these stories of people who live where it is cold all the time, I see them relaxed with it, flowing with it. At this time in the life I'm paying attention to my own flow, feeling my way with it, and found this morning feeding the birds and later walking to the mailbox without putting on a jacket, that I flowed with the cold, didn't even shiver like a dog when I came back into the house. The cold amounted to a sensation, neither pain nor pleasure, neutral. It never occured to me to use these films going into winter to subconsciously acclimatize self to cold all the time.



Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo, latitudes 59-61 are up there with the latitude of Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Bering Strait at latitude 65, the land of the midnight sun. Sweden is famous around the world for its suicide rate, which I've attributed to year round cold. But, here in Alleghany County, between latitudes 36 and 37, we have the same suicide rate as Sweden that is way up north. It's not the cold or the midnight sun. Possibly a Protestant belief system the two places share and a certain pride, a mixture of possible "causes." Only the individuals know the causes, and they're not telling. Twice I've been asked by psychotherapists if I'd ever thought about killing myself. I said, "Of course." Did that ever set the pens in motion. Right away they wanted to get me in treatment. I'm then obliged to explain I have never thought about it to do it, but it naturally is one of those subjects we humans think about and wonder why other people do it, wonder if there really are advantages to it. Of course I think about it. I've never met anyone who hasn't thought about it, same as we think about what it would be like to be killed. I'm not one to entertain that kind of thinking, but the curiosity has arisen. What would I say? "Oh shit." "Gawd-damn." "Fuck." I'd go into Eternity laughing like a monkey if one of these turned out to be my last word, or all of them. Steve Jobs saw the light, saying, "Oh Wow," three times. Like my friend Lorne Campbell thought it hilarious that Elvis died on the toilet. That was how he wanted to go. And he did.



I appreciate very much how seeing these films has relaxed my attitude toward the cold. I've looked up information about the Sami people, the indigenous people that live in the upper regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and over into Russia. They drive vehicles not built for speed, but for driving in deep snow all the time. They're boxes, Hummers without side windows that look like square box vans. Big snow tread tires that set the car body way up off the ground like a mud-sling pickup from around here. They look like they could climb up and over a snow drift. The Sami look like some rugged people, too. I look at the faces and see a variety, like everywhere else. Where do they get firewood? They need to keep a fire going year round. Snuggle into a bed of polar bear fur. Let it snow. The Sami would be the European continent's counterpart of Alaska's northernmost people, what we call the Eskimos. These are the kinds of places I'd have to be born and grow up in to tolerate the summers, let alone the winters. There are people who spend their lives going about in arctic water in a kayak, water so cold that if your kayak flips over, you're dead. That's dangerous water. Wait with a spear at the blow hole for a seal to surface for air, to eat its body and wear its skin. It's rugged living, but when it's been done for so many thousand years it has no beginning, it's just how we do things around here.



Actually, I had never given any thought to the weather in the Scandinavian countries, just thought of it as cold and snow. One of the aspects of the cold in these films I'm seeing--I've noticed a casual attitude toward the door like in America. In Noi the Albino, he goes in the house, snow and freezing outside, and leaves the door open. Today I saw the Swedish film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In a scene with a little old uninsulated house with a wood stove. The Girl with the tattoo walks right in and gets with her computer, leaving the door open and it below freezing outside. I saw it another time in another film. It struck me a very casual relationship with the cold. When I saw the man carry firewood into the house, I wondered what he wanted for a fire. Three little logs that wouldn't last an hour in a house that had been vacant that it would take a few days to get the walls warm. That little bit of wood he put in the stove wouldn't put a warm spot on any wall in the house. That I took for something a director decided not to waste time on, getting a good fire going and heating the place well.



Evidently, the people of those latitudes up north experience the cold very differently from how we feel it where winter is not with us all the time. I can imagine the coldness would get old to the point of acceptance and go on being old. Yet the people that live in it seem to have no issue with the weather, the same as we don't here, except for complaining about its extremes. I'm glad every day that I've pursued a Scandinavian film festival from netflix. It used to be Bergman was the only Scandinavian film maker I knew of. Now, I see he is one of many. One of many truly Xcellent film makers.  

*

CRIMINAL MINDED MEN

by joan mitchell

Following 3 days of painting nearly all day, a day today social from 30 minutes after I woke until 6 when I came home and put on the movie of the day, Goodfellas, the 1990 Scorcese gangster film that is one of the great gangster films with Miller's Creek, Once Upon A Time In America, Godfather. I didn't recall seeing Goodfellas, but there was one scene I remembered, only one. The guy Tommy, I think his name was -- so many names to keep up with, they all ran together like French words in a sentence -- getting in Ray Liotta's face, "You think I'm funny? You think I'm funny? What's funny about me? What's funny about me?" That was the only scene familiar. Liotta's wife seemed familiar in her role, but only distantly familiar. Now I'm thinking I saw it something like 10 or 15 or more years ago when the first corporate video store opened in Sparta. That, I think, was first chance to see it since it came out in 1990. It was several years after it was new. Now, 21 years later, it's easy to say the film didn't date one minute. It is as fresh today as it was in 1990.



If I had to pick a favorite among American actors, it would most likely be Ray Liotta. He has a style. Not many white men carry style like he does. He's almost Latin in his awareness of style. He's a good actor too. In Something Wild, with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith, Liotta took a good movie to greatness. That movie brought all three of these people to my attention. Jeff Daniels has been a disappointment ever since, and so has Melanie Griffith. She made a few semi-good movies, got her lips puffed up, made a few ordinary movies and vanished. Like Patti Smith, her best was in her beginning. Ray Liotta I've seen in several movies since, and he's a satisfying actor in every one. He brings a character to life. He becomes the character like only the best actors do. Robert deNiro playing alongside him was a good equal for him, actors sparring verbally like martial arts sparring between Steven Seagal and Anderson Silva.



Toward the end, when Liotta's character, Henry Hill, was on the stand in court testifying against his gangster colleagues, it brought back the time I watched a man rat on his drug world partners in a courtroom in Abingdon, Virginia. It was some time in the late 1980s when I was driving Independence, Virginia, lawyer, Lorne Campbell, around SW Virginia from courthouse to courthouse. In Abingdon I was sitting in the car reading while he was in the courthouse. He came out to the car and told me to come inside. There was something he wanted me to see. It was a man ratting on his friends to send them off to prison and keep himself out of prison. What I saw was the dark shadow his eyebrows made over his eyes, dark, dark shadows, the shadows of internal despair. I resented our government for the phony drug war, which Gore Vidal rightly called the war on the American people, putting American citizens into such fixes they hate themselves the rest of their lives for what they were tempted to do and took the bait. I felt sorrow for the man testifying and equally for the ones he was testifying against.



I've never forgotten their faces. I saw what Campbell wanted me to see. Liotta's eyes had the same shadow of overhanging brow as the man I saw on the witness stand in Abingdon. Campbell had the same regard for a rat as a serious criminal has. He was a serious criminal. He used the courtroom to do his criminal work. Did it by the letter of the law. When he first came to these mountains, he was 19 and went to prison in Wilkesboro 6 months for refusal to rat on a friend in court. He told me the only man he respects is the man who will not rat on his friends. He said there are very few. He was talking real manhood talk, manhood from the world of people with prison credibility. His life purpose was to keep mountain boys out of prison. "Mountain boys don't belong in prison." He saw himself a criminal just like the men he defended. He decided to take up law while in jail. There was a time he was legal representative (mind) for 5 different con men in SW Virginia. When I knew Campbell, only one of his con man clients was living, and he was in his early 90s. Campbell was in his late 70s at the time, able to operate in court, but unable to drive all day.



He taught me respect for the criminal mind and to leave it alone. I see these guys in movies bossing each other around in a hierarchy like the pecking order among hens. I don't have criminal mind and am glad I don't. People of a criminal mind right off see I'm not of that mind and they don't offer to take me there, because it's of no interest to me. But I have some friends of a criminal mind I admire and appreciate. I feel like I understand why in many cases. In the mountains it comes from a culture of poverty over a few centuries and having their only way of making a living rendered illegal by liquor corporation lobbies. You kept your mouth shut and didn't rat. Rats tended to have a short life span. It wasn't d-con that did it, either. This is pretty much the law of the mountains. No rats. It's serious business, too. This whole movie, Goodfellas, was focused on rats by threats, by paranoia, by revenge. In Scorcese's if-it-bleeds-it-leads style, rats usually got their blood sprayed over the wall, the furniture, the floor. I'm glad I saw it again, especially because I didn't remember it. It was new twice.



*

DUKE BLEDSOE OLD PILOT

wassily kandinsky, several circles, 1926 



In town this afternoon, I stopped in at Selma's for a moca. Duke Bledsoe was just inside the door. Duke has been living in Florida for several years. He drives back here a few times a year for real estate deals and other business he keeps going. Duke is one of the county's raconteurs I enjoy talking with. Duke is entertaining when he talks. He's a good story teller and I like to listen to him. I don't mean he tells Jack Tales or anything like that. Duke's stories are memories of something somebody did in the past that was particularly funny or poignant. Duke knows the history of the county. His dad was the Ford dealer on Main St. He grew up in town, son of a Sparta businessman. Starting in his early years he was an adventurer. Adventure is in his blood. Not long out of high school he was in Japan learning judo, knife fighting and other martial arts. He flew crop-dusting planes in the deep South, made good money. He's always flown planes and had one of his own. He's a clever and savvy feller with a fascination for that narrow line between focusing full attention and death. Attention wavers and he's gone. His favorite saying, There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.



Sparta is Duke's base of operations for much that he's been involved in over the years, but at age 83 he's been free for several years from having to make quota income. He brought Karen up here from central Florida in the summers and they went to Florida condo for the winter. About every year they'd take a cruise somewhere. I think they like the dancing and the party atmosphere in the evenings, the social meals around big tables. They like the places the cruises go to, but from knowing them at least a little bit, I suspect they enjoy the carefree atmosphere of everything is taken care of, visiting with people by day, dinner and dancing by night. Vacation from the land of concerns. I was shocked when Duke told me he was 83. He looked maybe like 73. He got around extra good for 83. Got around good for 73. He hand builds airplanes for a hobby and sells them.



Buying and selling is Duke's primary talent. He told me once, years ago, about a learning experience with two men in Independence I knew, the attorney Lorne Campbell and dairy farmer from Volney, Joe Osborne. Lorne and Joe bought and sold real estate together. Joe did the selling Lorne did the legal paperwork. Joe told me that they'd get somebody here from Florida and Joe would take them out and be the one to do the selling. He let them think he was an old hillbilly that didn't know much and they could get a really good deal off of him. He sold them the land at 2 and 3 times its value. Campbell told me there was a time he represented 5 con men in SW Virginia. In the time I knew him, only one of them was still living. He did all the wheelings and dealings in their names with their money. They made and lost bundles of money at a time.



Duke got in with these two fellers when he was young, just getting going at real estate and wheelings and dealings. In these mountains, if you're going to make it by wheelings and dealings, you better be slick. Duke went in with them on some land deals and it worked out they ended up with everything and Duke with nothing. He told me that, I don't recall the details, like he was telling me something about Campbell that would help me see he was a low down scoundrel. But I already knew. I could have told Duke a whole lot more than that Campbell did that he told me about himself, including the story Duke told me about. But I couldn't disrespect Lorne Campbell in death any more than I could in life. Duke sat me down not many months after Campbell died to tell me all the dirty things Lorne Campbell had done in his pirate manner of con operations. I knew all the stories Duke told me, because Lorne had told me, himself, and I knew ones that were a whole lot worse that Duke didn't know about. I had the good fortune that Lorne Campbell chose me to tell his life story to in his last years. It was a full life.



When Duke started his story about Lorne and Joe, this was back around 1990, I saw it coming. Young real estate man wannabe jumped in the deep end with the big dogs and got an expensive for-profit education. Duke is the kind of guy who knows his way about, wherever he is. He bobs back up. He likes buying and selling because it takes some slick thinking. He's liked flying a crop-duster since he was young. I believe he loved the controlled dare-devil aspect of it. Keep your focus and you come through clean. And if you go out, it's clean: Bam--you're dead. It's not a matter of lose your focus and you're dead. It's more like you just don't lose your focus. A moment's loss of focus can snag a power line by not lifting up soon enough. Oops. Hark the herald angels sing. In that way, I see Duke as something of a tightrope walker without a net, somebody with a skill I can't even think about learning. I've always appreciated Duke's quick mind and his open mind. I don't mean to imply he doesn't have his own way of seeing things. Duke is a man of these mountains who is uniquely himself, as is the rule, and makes his way with a quick and retentive mind. I have a great deal of respect for Duke and all he's able to do.



We sat at Selma's coffee shop today for about half an hour, he with a smoothie and me with a moca, talking about whatever came up. I learned he has a Ferrari 4-wheel drive tractor with a Lamborgini engine. Only Duke Bledsoe would find such a thing. I asked where he found it. He said, Italy. Karen is out in Utah this time of year. Has to do with post-cancer maintaining reasonable health. Duke takes care of the place in Florida, comes by Sparta, goes out to Utah. He and Karen recently returned from cruise of Southeast Asia. He told me a great deal about Singapore. She's planning the next cruise. I miss Karen. Last time I saw her was maybe a year ago for half a minute, or even a quarter minute. That's better than not at all. Duke and Karen are very different people, like Republican and Democrat, in so many ways it's everywhere, drawn together and held together by a very real love they have between them. Both Duke and Karen I name among my favorite people.



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COUNTRY LAWYER

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Driving yesterday on two 4-lane highways and a couple of 2-lane highways, it felt on the 2-lane I was driving in the landscape. Landscape up to the road either side of the road. When it was forest on 16 heading to Marion, forest floor on both sides of the road pulled at me to park and go walking. Whenever I pass a wooded scene like that I look deep into it to see the individual trees, last year's leaves the most beautiful carpet ever. I can only do that a second at a time, especially with front wheel drive that tends to go where my eyes go. My landscape gawking is a snapshot view at a time. That's ok. I still get to see it. I love the highway from Mouth of Wilson to Marion, every mile of the way, every time of year. I pass roads that I've been down and remember them as I go by.



Hwy 72 in Virginia has its own quality similar to that of hwy 16 along that stretch, Volney, Grant, Troutdale, Sugar Grove. People live all along the way. Homes in landscape. Every time I pass Joe Osborne's farm, Joe dead at least 15 years, I remember the time I went to the house to tell him and his wife of his friend Lorne Campbell's passing. They knew he'd died, but I knew they would want to know the circumstances around it. Their primary concern was, was he saved? It was an expression of how much they cared about him. They were afraid for him because of his absence of interest in religion. It was a beautiful moment seeing how much they cared.



I told them that he'd told me when he first came into these mountains of SW Virginia, age 19 from San Diego, California, he rode with an old traveling preacher, who rode a horse from community to community through SW Va for several months, close to a year, if not a year, Lorne taking care of handling the Bibles he sold at the different meetings. Distributing Bibles is what he was doing. I couldn't imagine Lorne Campbell with the mind he had, riding with the Old Baptist preacher, who surely instructed him and I have no doubt Lorne made his profession with the old preacher, whose name I can't remember. I didn't see any way around it. He was learning the mountains, the mountain people, mountain religion, mountain belief systems, and he dove headfirst into this world without electricity. They'd had electricity where he came from for a long time. It was his introduction to the mountains, about 1930.



I'll tell you a little bit more about Lorne. On the way to the Atlantic from the Pacific, he went through the Panama Canal, age 18, just out of high school where he'd been the tennis champ. He landed in jail for 6 months for I don't remember what, probably nothing more than being drunk and doing something stupid. He went to New York and got a job as swimming pool guard at a swank hotel. In New York he met Spencer Parsons, from Grayson County, Va, who was driving a trolley car at the time, him about the same age as Lorne. They became friends. Lorne followed the harvest across Canada from east to west putting up hay, earning some money to operate with. Back in New York, he and Spencer went to Grayson County.



While they were in Grayson, Spencer married his cousin, which was against the law, and had to get out of the state. He went back to Baltimore, if I remember correctly, and went into debt buying some apartment buildings and paid for them and lived on the rent. That's what he did the rest of his life. He never had another job. Done as he pleased. Retired and died outside Elkins, West Virginia, beautiful country. Back in Grayson, the law was looking for where Spencer went. Because Lorne was his friend, in court Lorne testified that he would not tell. Contempt of court, 6 months in the Wilkesboro jail.



Out of jail, he took to learning Virginia law from a lawyer in Indepencence, John Parsons (I'm not 100% about the John, but close), who tutored him for a year. He passed the bar in 1932, the last year he could take the bar exam without going to law school. Age 21 he's a lawyer, no college, no law school, and by the end of his life had the name the best lawyer in SW Virginia. They said he would hold your hand all the way to the prison door, meaning he did everything he could to keep his clients out of prison. His reason, mountain boys don't belong in prison. This was also his purpose as a lawyer, to keep the boys of SW Virginia out of prison.



One got him, however, the son of a hunting friend. The boy had got into some really bad shit with another guy. The other guy went right off to prison, while Lorne was working to keep his client out. It was about the hardest trick he'd ever pulled. He jumped through a lot of burning hoops for it. Right up to the last minute he kept at it until he prevailed. Had to go to Atlanta. The boy was free to go, but he wanted to go to prison. He and the other guy were lovers and wanted to be together. Campbell had a heart attack. It made him so mad he blew a gasket. Yet, it was convenient to be in Atlanta where the hospital could take him right away. Every time I pass the driveway to Joe Osborne's dairy farm that used to be, these are the thoughts that occupy my mind several miles down the road.

FUNNY TIMES

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Looking at the picture of yesterday's entry, the Phoenix Mountain Band, I saw Leo Tompkins in the background in green shirt talking to a man I know by face, but not by name. I started thinking about Leo and laughing with his sense of humor. His sense of humor is all I know about Leo. I don't know any gossip about him and don't want to. We've spoke a few times over the last 33 years, but not to say we know each other. The only time I talked with him, I asked what happened to his Roadkill Cafe poster with menu that was on the wall in a room where they kept parts. When I go into Choate to get the annual inspection sticker, I'd look at that poster, saw it once a year, had a good laugh every time, appreciated the sense of humor behind it. One day I was in there and Leo was there and the poster was gone. I asked him what went with the poster. He didn't know it was missing. He saw it was gone and got concerned about what might have went with it.

We set to talking about the poster and how funny it was. Of course, he had it there because he thought it was hilarious. It was. That was several years after he'd retired from working at Choate, running the place, whatever it was he did there. It must be a good place to work, because the people working there, work there for life. No turnover except when somebody dies or retires. Leo was a county commissioner for a few terms. He is a man who could drive the most exotic car in the county, but the last time I saw him on the road, several years ago, he was still driving the (maybe) 58 Plymouth, not one kept for a show car, but because it drove well and he loved it. On the bumper was the sticker that was there back when he was commissioner, which tells you what years it was. The picture was Mickey Mouse standing up shooting the bird. The text: HEY, IRAN. Back then I didn't know anything about county politics, and still don't, but I voted for Leo Tompkins because of the bumper sticker. I see a man with an active sense of humor.

This is a reason I'm glad Agnes Joines is on the town council. Agnes has a sense of humor that's busting out of her all the time. This is something else I love about the mountain people, that their sense of humor is alive. Old-time humor was very different from today's humor, though similar in where humor comes from. Old-time humor was situational, seeing funny in something that's happening or just happened. My first spring here, Don Pruitt and his brother Bill were showing me how to make rails by splitting a locust log lengthwise using 2 wedges and a sledge hammer. They both hammered several times and I got the hang of it. My turn. My first swing hit the edge of the wedge and it went flying straight to the right, end over end, like a ninja bullet. It went straight at Bill's ankles and he jumped out of the way on full alert. Don broke out laughing and said, "What kinda daince you call that?" Bill laughed and I laughed. They laughed at me and I laughed at me. It became something hilarious.

I realized that a sledge hammer requires some practice. You don't just start out knowing how to swing one. Over the years I improved a great deal, but always went by one thing I learned early. There are only 4 possible directions the wedge can fly, straight ahead, straight back at me, off to right or off to the left. I would place the wedge and stand between two of the directions so when the wedge took off in whatever surprise direction, spinning end-over-end in rapid flight, I would be out of the way and didn't have to do a dance to keep from getting hit. The distance of a sledge hammer handle's length doesn't give much time to escape. About the time I noticed would be when it hit my leg. Like they say in Ireland, Shite!

They'd make great weapons in medieval warfare. Rows of men skilled in hitting a wedge to make it fly exactly where they want it to go, like a golf ball. That would clear the way. But they could be picked up by the other guys they missed and used as a hand weapon. Better to use arrows. Like the war between Italy and Poland. The Polish army threw firecrackers over a wall at the Italian army. Italian army lit them and threw them back. By comparison, that's "today's" humor. Polish jokes are old by now, but in the evolution of humor from old-time situational humor among people who were each other's entertainment to the age of hi-tech pop culture, jokes by professional joke writers for late nite tv shows are consistently funny. They've dampened our joke telling by being so much better that they're intimidating. If you tell a joke now and it's not up to the tv bar, rejection, not funny, keep your day job. It looks like television has made our collective sense of humor dependent on tv for our humor. But humor is malleable. It's not going away. It's always with us in one way or another. Humor is like music and other art forms in that way.

The jokes that go around now in the hallways of schools are very different from the time I was in school. To the school kids now, my humor is old hat, like Hee Haw humor is to city people. Probably by now mine is 3rd and 4th grade humor. Going by a few I've heard over the last few years, the jokes are more racially and culturally demeaning than ever in an anti-politically correct kind of way. A trend springs up among adults to suppress smoking and it becomes a trend among teenagers to smoke. Grayson county lawyer, Lorne Campbell told me our jokes that go around from person to person come from prisons. The prisons are fountains of humor like these mountains are fountains of music. One of the aspects of Campbell I liked was he regarded people in prison and ones who have been in prison as people. They did the crime, they did the time. That's it, cat shit. It's all over. He's karmicly clean as if he'd never done the crime.