THE ROAD WATERFALL

 

waterfall road near the top

where it meets air bellows gap road

 

Waterfall Road makes a very crooked half circle that connects with Air Bellows Gap Road at both ends, it too a very crooked half circle that extends to the Parkway at one end and at the other end extends to Pine Swamp Road. One end of Waterfall Road is at the bottom of the mountain where the land levels into a valley between ridges that made rich farmland for the people of the old ways in the Whitehead Community. The upper end is at the top of the mountain just a half mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Air Bellows Drive-thru Art Museum. Air Bellows Gap Road  has houses on both sides of the road at the top. In my part of Waterfall Road is a subdivision up the road to the left half a mile and a subdivision to the right half a mile, both of them out of sight. In my little valley my land is trees and donkey meadow. The horseshoe around us is Christmas trees.

the goat rock from the lower end of waterfall road

The farm down the road, only the driveway visible from the road, still leases the land to a farmer who buys and sells cattle. It is the last functioning farm in Air Bellows. The farm I worked is all Christmas trees now. Before it was paved, the road through this valley was one of the beautiful drives on earth. Now it's just another road with a grumpy old liberal hermit that lives down in the bottom and a little ways up the road a haunted house. It's not, but it makes good rumor. The house has been let go for so long, twenty-six years since old man Tom left the body, and it was imploding in his last years. He didn't care. Since then a poacher leased it for a hunting cabin several years. All of Tom's farm land is Christmas trees now. The Pruitt farm and the Caudill farm are all Christmas trees. The next farm to mine, the one continuing to function as a farm, was the old Jim Scott place. The subdivision beyond Tom's house was the old Elbert Crouse place where I used to mow and put up the hay twice every summer for several years. I used to mow the places Christmas trees grow now.

waterfall road the upper part I drive

 

I can't say I hate to see it go. I knew while working the farm that this was the end of the old ways. I wanted to experience it before it was gone, wanted to experience farming the old ways, know people who still lived in the old ways, except for refrigerators, television, bathrooms, plumbing, lights, recliners, cars, pickups, chainsaws, have a peephole look into the old-time hillbilly way of life. The changes I've seen in my forty years tell me the direction of the changes in the future. I know a few people who have deeded their land to a nature conservancy so their land can never be used for anything in the future but let go to nature. I like the idea of it. I like better not entertaining the illusion of projecting my control onto anything beyond my demise and my will. I'd rather leave my place to flow with future needs that are totally unforeseen from today. I have fair confidence Jack and Jenny will not be separated and stand a chance of living here the rest of their lives, or for a good while.

waterfall road

The road was originally a horse trail. Then wagons came along. The back side of Waterfall Road is the old road up the mountain, running along the ridge from bottom to top. Both sides of the road run almost straight down, trees thick holding the topsoil together. The road runs parallel Waterfalls Creek below, way down there. The creek is fed by the springs of Air Bellows that run over the waterfalls to become the Little River at Whitehead that flows through Sparta on its way to the New River in the northern part of the county that runs north into the Ohio to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. I asked Tom in my first year what the old name was for this road. Then it was 1131. He told me Waterfall Road. In the year the County gave names to all the roads people along roads suggested names. Several suggestions were up for this road. I brought up that Tom Pruitt told me it's old name was Waterfall Road. And it stuck. I do love living on a road named Waterfall. The word projects such a beatific image in the mind's eye, an image of peace, tranquility, I feel privileged.

beside waterfall road

 

 

*

 

 

 

   

MEETING OLD MAN TOM PRUITT

winslow homer

Appreciation for my friends of these mountains, and the many people I know casually, has been with me mightily this week. It has been a slide show of the mind, people I have known and appreciated in the second half of my life. The first half of the life was my education, the time I learned  what I needed to appreciate the people and the culture of the mountains. About a year before I left the city for the country, I rendered a prayer from the heart that I wanted to live in a completely different culture where they speak English. Within weeks, the opportunity to go to the mountains came available. I suspected it answer to prayer, but it hadn't happened yet, and I'm not one to celebrate the light at the end of the tunnel until I'm out of the tunnel. The light might be an oncoming train. I was looking for something "real" that I never found in the city, but among a few people I knew. It wasn't until settled into my new life that I learned I'd been put into a culture very different from the one I left behind. And I said, Thank you.

 

winslow homer

 

As soon as my parachute landed me on Waterfall Road, I knew there would be no turning back. Moved in on the first of November, 1976. Some people I knew said, "You'll be back in January." Those were the ones I did not keep in touch with later. I kept in touch with the ones who said, "What a great opportunity." They were the ones that knew me. The others told me they didn't know me at all when they said I couldn't handle it. Old man Tom Pruitt, who was then exactly the age I am now, was the first person I met. Upon meeting Tom, talking with him the first time, I knew I was on my track. Sitting in his pickup, arm resting on the door, Tom in his hat, brown lines of tobacco juice ran from the corners of his lips to under the chin. He favored a ventriloquist's talking doll with those lines. He told me he'd been down at Whitehead store where somebody said they could put an A-bomb on the moon. Tom's reply, "What they want to do that for? Th'aint nothin up there. The Bible said the moon was just a light. Ye cain't land nothin on no light." That moment, I knew Tom was a God-send. I'd been looking for real people a long time. And there he was, before my eyes, a real live, true human being, somebody who thinks about things he's told and makes up his own mind.  

 

winslow homer

 

Tom also believed the earth flat and the sun went around it. It's obvious. The sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west, circles around and comes back up in the east. He said in school, he finished the 7th grade, the teacher one day explained about the world being round like a baseball. Little man Tom said, "I aint never seen narry mountain on no baseball." This was his reasoning for the rest of his life. I felt compelled, but stopped myself, to explain if the earth were shrunk to the size of a baseball it would be smoother and slicker than any ball-bearing made by the most exacting machine. On a baseball magnified to the size of the earth, the line of threads would make mountains so high they'd stick way up beyond the atmosphere. The leather wrapping on the ball would be major mountains and deep valleys. I already intuited his mind could not stretch to visualizing something he could not conceive. I never tried to explain, because I don't believe it makes a bit of difference in our everyday lives if we believe the earth flat or round. To send a small tractor to Mars requires an understanding of earth's roundness, but driving a pickup to town and back, it doesn't matter. I was enchanted, a pre-Copernican man in 1976.

 

winslow homer

 

I realized Tom's religious belief system went back to Seventeenth Century, Sixteenth, Fifteenth, back to Medieval. I felt like I was in touch with a belief system that went all the way back. He had missed the cosmology of round earth and the cosmology of evolution. That put him from two cosmologies in  Western civilization's past. My role in coming to the mountains was to learn from the mountain people. I realized after some months of working with and running with Tom's nephews on the weekends that I've got nothing on these people. Their intelligence was beyond mine. Theirs was first-hand experience intelligence. Mine was second- and third-hand by way of reading and lectures. Their knowledge was practical. Mine wasn't worth a damn out here in the world among people who live by first-hand experience. Tom had his own form of the scientific method. He never believed any of the stories about spooks and haints. He said if a man looks at a thing enough, he'll find what really happened. No acceptance, at all, of the supernatural. Tom and his nephews taught me where I am in the first year. Tom came from the world going away, whereas the nephews, my age, were from that world though influenced by new trends sweeping over the land, television, radio, cars, beer. I knew Tom the last fourteen years of his life. I listened to Tom's stories as if at the feet of the Master, learning the customs and about the people he knew, the old ways. Tom was an embodiment of the old ways. I think of him as my first teacher in the ways of these mountains.

 

winslow homer himself

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

THE BACKSIDE OF WATERFALL ROAD

trees beside waterfall road

Drove to town today to pay a few bills due tomorrow. I set out on a leisurely drive. Didn't need anything from any store, my coffee shop friends don't go there anymore, no reason to stop there. I told self to spend no money in town. Don't need gas. Drive up to each of three drive-thrus, envelope in drawer, "Thank you, have a good day," never turn off the engine, drive on through town and make a circuit. Drove into town by way of Pine Swamp Road and returned by highway 18. Felt relaxed the whole time. No radio in the car, no problem. I'd actually rather listen to the tires sing on the pavement. New tires on the road have their own sound. I listen to the motor. It is a near perfect engine, the 93 Buick Century 3300 v-6, a classic motor like the Chevy Nova slant-6 that is used all over the Third World running pumps long after the bodies have rusted away. My motor is such a fine motor, doesn't burn but half a quart of oil per 3,000 miles. A healthy motor. All problems with the car are external to the engine. I love the engine as much as I love the car. It starts right now, in zero degree air as in seventy degree air. The car runs so reliably, just driving it makes me happy. I went on the one-gallon of gas round-trip to Sparta, out seeing the landscape, the slant of the light, the shadows on the ground, the trees, the houses, the sky, the mountains. Out for a drive on a sunny day. Took camera along, saw one scene of an old-time loading pen, a dozen black cows grazing nearby and a tree, stark winter shadows. I'd already passed the only place I could pull off the road and park. I'd need to turn around, go back, etc. Too much. 

 chance installation

Drove through Sparta feeling good, brief verbal exchange at each drive-thru window, pull up to the red-light in the middle of town on hwy 18, turns green and I'm on the way home. At Whitehead, I decided to drive up the back road, the beautiful road that goes through the woods and hasn't been messed with ever, but to throw gravel on it from time to time and let it wash down the roadbed in the side ditches every big rain. Big rocks beside the road that takes a ridge up the mountain, a more direct shot than taking Air Bellows Gap Road up the mountain, though rough, so rough I go slow and straddle ruts the best I can. It's an easy road to drive, just have to drive it like walking. It's a hurry slowly road. I passed some icicles hanging from a rock formation. Pulled up a ways to a place I could get off the road. Nobody uses the road, but sure as I park in it, somebody will come along. It's a natural law. I walked back to the icicles, got some pics of it, some rock and some trees the other side of the road. The road goes up the spine of the mountain. It is the old wagon road to Air Bellows. At the top of the mountain, the sides of the road are like any other. The pavement ends at the top and the further down the road you go, the sides of the road rise gradually as walls. By the bottom, the walls are as high as the car. A few centuries of erosion down wagon tracks in mud, the roadbed becomes a river during a torrential rain washing the mud away. Such a rain happens at least once a year. 

merlin the shop cat

In Whitehead, before driving up the mountain, I stopped at Maxwell Equipment to see whoever was there. Ross was on the phone. It was cold. The building is made of wood framing and tin-roofing walls and roof. It's merely a windbreak. The temperature outside and inside are the same. Ross had the stove going. It made a pleasant zone in a radius of about five feet. Chairs around the stove. Merlin the shop cat was in there staying inside the stove's aura. He sleeps in a stack of insulation in a high corner of the building. Merlin is a good old neutered Tom cat with a white hairs sprinkled randomly through his black pelt. He likes the shop for the mice. Must have left wherever he lived before. Ross and I sat by the stove talking and somebody came in for some minor work, and the three of us talked awhile. Harry came in and the four of us stayed near the fire and talked. Harry lives up the hill behind the shop. Merlin took up with him a few years ago. Harry and Ross needed to drive to Wilkesboro for some steel or a part. I came on home, driving slowly along Air Bellows Gap Road looking at landscape in afternoon winter light. This is where I decided to go up the mountain on the back part of Waterfall Road. The part of the road houses can be built on are at the upper end of Waterfall Road. From the point where the pavement ends, on down to the bottom, the banks are almost straight up on both sides of it. There are so many trees, it's not a concern leaving the road. I have walked the road with dog and photographed it many times. It was one of my favorite walks. In late winter when the two roads coming up the mountain are so rutted that getting stuck is an in-yer-face issue, I take this back road. People with new cars don't know they really can drive over it easily, so none of the new people ever use it. 

icicle and rock

In winter with snow and ice, when the other two roads are nearly impassable, I use the old wagon road. It's like a bobsled run going down it on ice, a slow, very slow bobsled. I drove Ted Stern, whose farm I once caretook, down the the wagon road in his new Cadillac. He was mortified, but I never scraped bottom one time. I'd walked the road so many times, I knew it intimately. One winter, I drove preacher Millard Pruitt down the bobsled run in good packed snow in my 78 Toyota pickup, blue with the driver's side door red. He grew up on the mountain and this was the road he grew up on. I wanted to show him the old road of his childhood. I knew I could easily make it. It was just snow and ice. His eyes were bugged out all the way to the bottom. Never lost traction one time. It was the smoothest the road ever is. A few people like to four-wheel on it in winter. They pack the snow down good to make an easy road to drive. One of my favorite memories happened one day in winter, several inches of snow, walking along the road with my dog Sadie. A crow flew up over the ridge from one side to the other, passing just a couple feet above my head. I heard the wings, thought of the hymn, Come Angel Band, "I hear the sound of wings." In a world of white, one crow, appeared, flew over my head and disappeared down the other side. I felt like that was one of the most blessed moments of my life. The waterfalls are down the very steep bank beside the road. I decided to go to the waterfalls by that way one day years ago. Took a fifty foot rope to tie on a tree at the top. The first thirty or so feet was sheer rock covered with leaves, slicker than ice to try to walk on. It was a fun journey. At the bottom, close to the waterfall I came upon a huge area of jack in the pulpits. Big ones, maybe two feet tall, covered the bank above the water. It's an ideal a Japanese garden designer reaches toward, natural, the way God flung it.  

rock and growth

*

A RHYTHM OF PEACE

I've fallen into a continuum of being awake, being asleep, days go by and from time to time I need to know the date. This is what calendars are for. I keep one with big numbers on the kitchen wall to consult when I suddenly need to know the date. It becomes a nuisance to look up the date and a bigger nuisance to keep up with it. It seems like there comes a place where alternating states of awake and asleep make a rhythm of their own and it's all one nameless stretch. Awake and asleep become like waves on the beach; water advances, water recedes. I like this rhythm. It feels like the rhythm of the old-time days, working on the farm, working by seasons and daylight. The calendar has its place on the wall, a document that keeps us in sync with everyone around us by way of agreed upon time. The Atomic Clock is civilization's official time keeper, gives us divisions of the earth's rotation so we can coordinate time in a way that is agreed upon all the way around the globe. The clock is the closest device we have to being able to see time, as far as I know. Like gravity, time is invisible. Gravity is measured in weights. Time is the spinning of the earth spiraling around the sun, the moon going around the earth, and the bigger transit of the sun spiraling in the Milky Way galaxy. Hence, astrology, given that cosmic arrangements of planets are in a continuum of change, never two nanoseconds the same. As in our lives where change is the nature of the continuum. Like cigarette smoke rising into spirals, the spirals in turbulence, the spirals in water flow. Another vision of as-above-so-below. 

My friend Carole and I have come into a place of living by light, dark, weather. When things are going my way and I have no appointments in town, I like the rhythm of awake awhile, asleep awhile. I sleep when I feel like it, night or day, am awake night or day as I feel like it. It's not very ambitious living. It separates me from the rhythms in everybody I know. Add to the list television that separates me conceptually from everyone around me, given exceptions. I can go with the core of the religion around me, but not the trappings. That I have to swear to believe immaculate conception, I cannot. I don't care. I don't care if Jesus was born biologically or mythologically. His life is more important to me than his death. His message of love is the only reason to know about Jesus. That he walked on both land and water is cool, but love was his only reason for being. The trappings make the followers into a herd of sheep. Love frees one from the herd and sets the seeker on one's own pilgrimage, whatever form or path it takes. Each one is unique, leaving no room for s'posed-to, and no being held back by a committee. I see a headline about Joe the Plumber saying Obama girls are promoting gangs. It doesn't annoy me anymore that ignorance is front and center. When I look at the progression of American public education and the progression of American politics, I'm surprised by no extreme degree of ignorance. Our politicians are corporate stooges. They are not put in place for any reason but their ignorance, they truly do not know right from wrong, people easily told what to do and eager to go along, fame and money, glitz and glamour, face-lifts, looking like a mummy in old age. 

My purpose leaving the world of commerce and committing to rural life on a remote road in the mountains was to find a way to live "in the world, not of it." First thing, I had to define for self what is meant by "the world," which took some years. Finding the place to draw the line between world and not-world gets subtle and at once obvious. I gradually came to The World is the world created by human mind, the not-natural world. This includes everything from architecture to music to religion to spiritualism to art to getting up in the morning. Everything. Duality. Ok, this is the world I want to live in, but not of. I can see I'm in it, the playing field. Then I had to figure out what OF meant. Attachment comes to me first. Ego. It's ego that wants to attach to things, ideas, agendas, purposes, and again, everything. I took it that letting go of attachments is a way to not be of the world. I didn't know why it was important to me, but that it is universally said to be the way, the path. I had no idea of why, except figuring there must be something to it. By now after years of mentating on the issue and allowing the super-conscious to search on its own while mind is distracted by the world of commerce, getting basic bills paid, I feel like I have some insight, a little bit. It's about inner peace. Attachments of my past have fallen away due to waning interest. Turns out attachments worry the mind. 

I used to want stuff for myself, paintings on the walls, books, music. Now I have more than I want. I want to get rid of stuff, wants of the past. Like I want to keep a copy of Pinocchio in the house, knowing I'll never read it again, but love it so much as a story I like seeing the spine of the book on the shelf. It's a reminder of the story within. I like seeing the spines of books on shelves, titles I've read and remember in a nanosecond my feeling about the content. I see the poetry of WB Yeats and feel a soft glow in the heart. Three months in London in 1972, I carried a paperback of Yeats poetry in a pocket, reading in it every day on "the tube." In that way, a book is, indeed, a friend. I want now to keep the donkeys comfortable, Caterpillar comfortable, and want the well-being of my friends, want them all to have a good life on their own terms. I have to pull back from wanting a reasonable government. That hope is over. Learning from the nature of the world to step back and let it go by, the world of treachery and me-first, I let the people that want to partake of it have at it. I see news about police brutality, killings and mayhem in general, and look out the windows at the green world, the birds, the squirrels, the donkeys, the meadow, thinking, this is peace. I see the occasional car go by on Waterfall Road out the windows, the road of peace. I tell myself none of the nonsense in DC applies here, nor do the Koch brothers, except in destructive ways that apply to the future. As long as they're not bombing Waterfall Road and a SWAT team isn't breaking down my door with guns blazing, the wrong address for a meth lab, I live in peace. Waterfall Road can exist in a condition of peace because the road, like the country Costa Rica, has nothing of value to corporate mind.  

*

   

HIGH ON THE MOUNTAIN

find the spider

It has been a rainy week. Saturday evening a torrential rain with lightning and big thunder tore through here for about half an hour, the kind that runs dogs and cats to hiding places. We haven't had a gully-washer like that one in several years. I'd almost forgotten what they were like. A few minutes ago I posted on Rambling Revolution in facebook some pictures I took at the open doorway in a pouring down rain. I wrote a comment to my friend Darlene. It grew into too much and I came over here to continue. The greens are vibrant, happy with the weather this summer, never too hot, plenty of sun and plenty of wet overcast. It has been a delightful summer for the green world, or anyway on my mountain. I understand it's not quite like this in New Mexico and parts of the western half of the continent. Rather than feel guilty for having a wet summer when others do not, I'll enjoy my wet summer this year, because next summer could be so dry forest fires might be an issue. I'm grateful for the wet we have. I slipped in mud and fell to my knees on an uphill incline in a place Jack and Jenny spend a lot of time in front of their shed. It looks like an old hillbilly barn lot now. I'll see about getting some pictures of it. I love about the donkey shed and the fence and gate that it is the old hillbilly way of doing it. No new aluminum sheds or any eyesore like that. My neighbors surely are not enamored of it, but it's original. It's the way I remember it in my first years here, late 1970s, when some of the old farms continued to exist before 1980 when all that changed. The old people with farms were keeping them going out of habit while everything was changing around them. They died and their land was divided, sold, cleaned up and no trace left of anything that went before, but for what can be found by metal detector. The donkey shed and fence continue a vanished way of life. I regret seeing it go, so I carry some of what I remember in myself. 

Since a subdivision happened up the road, the road my dog took naps in is long gone almost even from memory. She sometimes curled up in the center of the gravel road and rested in the sunlight. In that time, the only traffic on the road was old man Tom's pickup. People turning land into money came in as old hillbillies died out. Waterfall Road is a highway now, all new cars but for the maintenance and construction workers' pickups, UPS and FedEx trucks that zoom up and down the road like dirt bikes. Everybody drives a new car but me. Everybody is making payments and paying a lot more taxes for their rides than I do. Now I'm the old man Tom of the mountain. Tom was a friendly sort of feller people dropped in on to visit with. Now I'm the tail end of the hillbillies on the mountain, Tom again, and I'm not so friendly. Word went around to all the new people, one by one, through the exurbanite grapevine, to stay away from that grumpy old bastard TJ. They leave me alone and that's how I like it. I'm grateful to them all. He doesn't go to parties. He doesn't participate in anything. He likes to be left alone. He thinks he's Henry David Thorough or something, bless his pea-pickin heart. I really did not commit to this my home believing it would one day become a highway to a subdivision. It's ok. We live in peace. My purpose in committing to what was then a remote place was to be away from all that. I came here for solitude. Then I needed a job and kept on needing a job. That was ok. It was part of the experience. 

It's been my rule of thumb, no parties. I've broken down in the last several years without regret, but also have been pulling back from involvements, again. I'm mostly taken for aloof and arrogant, and that's ok. Gonna be taken for something, it may as well be benign. I'm not throwing nails under anybody's tires. It's just that I have a life and it takes knowing me awhile to see it. Every time I meet new people they have a list of people I gotta meet, things I gotta do, gotta see, gotta join. They think he's sitting up there on that mountain all by hisself. He needs to get out of there and stop watching so much television. Nobody ever sees him. If you drive by he doesn't look up. He's a stuck up old shit. I've heard he's an asshole anyway. They say he came here because he was running from the law. For somebody who doesn't do anything outside my own world, there's a lot of good stories going around about shit I've done. The doyen of the exurbanite soap opera gossips lived half a mile away for a long time. She spun some good ones. I don't refute any of it. Yeah, that's me. I tend to like the company of rogues in the world of people I know. They're people with the life spirit turned on in them, every one I've known. Totally unpretentious people. Want to find somebody you can trust? Look for him or her among the rogues. By rogue I don't mean mean. I mean people who can't not act out their feelings. I'm so incredibly inhibited, I like the balance in people I know who jump right in and mend fences later. I tend to think of the fences before acting. I call it foresight, though the one who knows me better than anybody calls it hyper-vigilance. I don't know what to call it. It just makes sense to me to think about what comes next, because something always comes next. Say I get pissed off at somebody and want to burn his trailer down. Instead of flicking the Bic, I look at how many years I'll spend in prison over this, the trial and hoping the lawyer can work out a reduced sentence. So I don't flick the Bic. I deal with it. As it is, I'm just a rogue of the mind. 

I encouraged a forest between the house and the road to pull the woods in around me. I let everything grow beside the road. The state took my land, destroyed it to put through a paved road without a thank you, kiss my ass or even flipping a cigarette butt at me. So I grew up a forest between my window and the road. I love it that people have asked neighbors if that little house nobody lives in is for sale. No. It will never be for sale in their lifetime however long they live. After I'm gone it won't be for sale for a very long time. Letting woods grow up is my idea of gardening. I've planted a lot of ferns dug up over the years. I've placed rocks and found things around. Even some graves of dogs and cats. Only I know where they are. By now, these loved ones have completely returned to earth. They continue to live in my heart. Walking from the car to the house, I step under a canopy of trees so by the time I reach the house their calm has swept over me. It gets kind of eerie when I look way back into the early years, the woods were where I felt safe, comfortable among the trees and rocks. I had no privacy then. The woods were where I was with myself without the energy of others directed at me with ambition to control. In the woods among the trees with a dog my mind was its own. No outside forces. It wasn't that I did any structural thinking. My head was wound up in so many knots, a few hours in the woods untied some and came to terms with others, mostly resignation to childhood under somebody else's power, waiting, counting the long, slow years. The woods were a meditative place for the kid, a place to get away from the unreal and bathe in the real, the quiet patience of trees. For a great many years I had places in the woods here where I'd go to spend a day with a book, some writing paper and drawing paper, a thermos of hot tea and two apples. I don't do it now that I know I live in the territory of bears and coyotes are everywhere. I don't feel comfortable in the woods anymore without carrying something with stopping power, like a .45, and I don't want to do that. Hunters I know won't go into the woods without a heavy duty firearm. Now I have my meditative spot in the woods at home.  

find the spider

*

FOLLOW THE FLOW

 

 

 

all pics by tj worthington

 

Focus this week is on my relationship with nature, the natural world, the uncultivated world, the wild things, the four-leggeds, the winged, the ground, the green things, earth. This world, my mountain, is my refuge, my home, my need. I know this region of the mountains so well it gets taken for granted, but not too much. I went out on a small lake in a boat fishing with Justin. It was his day off and he had to get some fishing in. Fishing recharges his internal battery. He catches a fish, kisses it and throws it back. He stopped by to pick me up and I rode with him to the next farm down the road, turn up a long gravel driveway to the lake. It's called the Willis lake. The owners live in Winston-Salem, my neighbors Allan and Gary have a stain glass studio where they support themselves selling their wares. Allan takes care of the land, a few hundred acres of largely meadow. It was the old Jim Scott place. Their boy, Sherman, went to school and revival meetings in this house. Sherman has been dead quite a while now. He was a humble man. In NC he did not need a driver's license to drive a tractor on the roads. Sherman fixed a small wooden box to the back of his old Ford red-belly to carry groceries. He drove the tractor to town for the bank, the doctor, the lawyer, the drug store, leading a long line of cars snaking slowly  toward town, temperatures rising, road rage in abundance, but nobody made a problem. Sherman's going to town day. It was excruciatingly maddening to fall in behind Sherman. Couldn't pass. There you are, 10-15 mph and can't do nothin about it. Sherman was a little bit slow and had a good mind too. The people I've known who went to school with him said he was a whiz with numbers. His mother and dad wouldn't let him play with the other boys, retarding him somewhat. The lake was put on the farm after Jim Scott sold it.

 

 

 

 

The temperature was mild enough, but the air had a chill in it and a constant wind. Three guys from town we knew were on different banks fishing. Three geese swam together out in middle of the lake. Putting the boat in the water did not scare them off. They continued to swim and watched the boat as a curiosity. The wind on the water was cold. Justin threw the lure toward the bank letting it splash into the water like it jumped from the bank, then wiggles to the bottom and swims. He did not catch one fish. He said the water was too cold. I don't care anything about fishing. I go along with camera. First time I had camera in the boat, I went for landscape pictures, none of which was ever worth looking at. This time I sat and waited for It, whatever It may be. Sitting quietly in the boat, gazing all around, even the sky, nothing took hold of me. Suddenly, I saw the surface of the water like I'd never seen it before. It was familiar. Everything about it was familiar, but I was seeing it the first time. I found a zone five to ten feet from the boat where the water made changing patterns with light so fast the eye sees colors in motion. The camera stops the motion. I zoomed the camera down pretty close and pointed at the zone where the patterns were flowing and clicked. Could not see the viewing screen for the bright sky all around, so I'd point the camera at the zone I wanted and clicked. Most often had no idea what I was getting. Some were out of focus, some so blurry it was nothing, and some with sharp clarity. I made pictures of the lake's surface from distance and up close. Sunlight was dancing on the water in sparkles in certain places. The only one I aimed was the goose. Couldn't aim it but by landscape around it and zoom in from there.  

 

 

  

 

Tapped into the zone close to the boat is a very different experience from gaping at the surface of the water. Out a little ways it turns into waves on water. In this zone five to ten feet from the boat I found continually changing abstract patterns that move so fast the eye cannot see the patterns the camera stopped. Following the patterns in swift change, I'd think of how fun it would be to stand in front of a painting by Clifford Still and watch the colors change patterns so fast the eye couldn't follow. Right away, the eye understands there is no keeping up, eye relaxes and I relax. It's like watching a fire, the changing shapes and images, a quickened flow of the clouds. My Swiss cheese memory is recalling that I believe it was Pablo Neruda said the bridge between matter and spirit is water. I can't affirm or deny it, but it's awfully poetic. I think about such ideas gaping at the water in a minor trance, a meditation, fixed on the rapidly changing flow of light reflecting on water. Every living thing grows by principles of water flow, water being the earth's blood. I stand in Spring Lizard Creek that runs beside my house and someone stands in a creek in southern China, we are standing in the same water. Maybe not the same molecules, but water everywhere on earth is connected. Our blood that runs through a vein in a finger is the same blood that keeps feet warm. Justin sat at one end of the boat and I at the other, almost never talking. Not keeping quiet for any reason but we just didn't feel like talking. He was working the fishing reel with what he had on his mind and I holding the camera taking pictures of reflections on the water with what I had on my mind. We don't talk a lot. Something I learned from country people and Justin learned from mother's milk, that presence is the same as conversation. Conversation is about enjoying the presence of the other. Talking does not always have to accompany presence.

 

 

My old friends, Tom Pruitt and Millard Pruitt, brothers, grew up in what ended as Tom's house, visible from the boat. They went to school and Regular Baptist revival meetings in my house. Both have been dead about twenty years. I went to Millard's church for fourteen years. He lived in another part of the county called Glade Valley. Tom and Millard were less than ten miles from each other and had not seen each other in a number of years neither one of them knew. I suggested I take Tom in his later years to visit Millard. He liked the idea. They sat in their chairs and never spoke for an hour. Tom stood up and said it was time to go. A year or so later, I took Millard to visit Tom. They sat in silence for an hour and Millard was ready to go. Both in their late 70s. Snow was on the ground, quite a lot of it, though the paved roads were clear and the gravel roads had the snow scraped off them, snow scraped off the ice on the bottom. Both roads up the mountain were terrible with ice. My 78 Toyota pickup had one-wheel drive in the rear. Not proficient on ice. But I knew what it could and could not do. I suggested I take him down the mountain on the old wagon road that ran the ridge parallel Waterfalls creek beside all three waterfalls. Couldn't see them from the road, but can hear them. I went down the bank once looking for how to get to the third waterfall from there. I tied a 50 foot rope to a tree and used it like a stair rail walking down it backwards, leaving rope in place for the return. It was steep and sheer rock under layers of old leaves. I knew the back road would be in good shape. It doesn't melt during the day and freeze at night. I knew it would still have the snow pack on it. I know the road from driving it a thousand times and walking it a hundred times. It's bad. But I've driven a new Cadillac and a new Honda down it, owner sitting beside me chewing a hole in the seat, and we never scraped bottom once. In snow the road looked like a luge track. Millard's eyes were big as Ping-Pong balls, and we never lost traction. At the top he didn't believe I could do it. At the bottom he didn't believe I did it. It was a smooth ride compared to the others. All it took was following its flow.

 

 

 

larry

 

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ALPHA DONKEY IS FIRST

rain dance

I saw a little bit of the Olympics on tv yesterday visiting friends. The downhill men, the ski jump men, the snowboard women and cross country women. Enjoyed them all. Snowboard fascinates me. Not that I aim to attempt to stand up on one. It's funny to see the American corporate network's absence of humility make the event into commentary on how backward Russia is compared to USA. I can't help but think of the obvious decline of America. We're passing Russia on its way up as we're on our way down. I've seen it for so long, it doesn't bother me anymore. The arrogance coming through the television disturbed me. I remind myself it is corporate press, corporate image making, sophisticated mind-control. I look around at what it is like to be in the American working class and look at what the tv is telling us about ourselves. The confusion becomes so complex it shuts down thinking about it. I see my friends, both working, skimming the surface of poverty. Seeing television puts me into this kind of thinking. I see such a contrast in television to what I see happening around me. I don't mean corruption. I mean the working class has been in Depression the last thirty plus years. Government doesn't acknowledge it, television doesn't acknowledge it. Corporate self interest has bled the working class unto the living dead. Why do you think zombie and vampire entertainment is connecting with the American working class? The tv is overrun with commercials for images of destruction and the death of everybody, but they don't quite die, they just keep on. It's the best ever! I saw something a few days ago of some CEO from the ruling class saying the one percent work harder. My first thought: try working in a West Virginia coal mine for the rest of your life if you're so proud of hard labor. He'd rather kill himself.  

 

 vada faye

 

It brings to mind the word declared the most annoying word of 2013: Whatever. Just whatever. I keep on a-keepin on just like everybody around me. Miss one paycheck and bankruptcy looms, except the corporations have made the laws so only corporations can declare bankruptcy. What happened to corporations are people? I guess it means except when they don't want any of the plebeian responsibilities, like paying taxes. I don't even want to be writing this. I set out not to, thought mentioning the Olympics could divert my mind away from this thinking, but it took me straight into where I did not want to go. I'm ill of this thinking, but it's all I see anymore of the greater world I inhabit, what the corporate takeover of our democracy has done to the American people. This is why I remind myself every day to keep my mind out of that toilet bowl. I can't change it. I can only take care of my own interest in my own space and time. I'd like to see less mean-spirited politicians. They make it too obvious they regard we the people the enemy. I look out the window and see Donkey Jack looking at me. I took a break and went out to feed the donkeys and calf. Jack brayed. Jenny knows I keep carrot chunks in the two pockets of my outdoor shirt. She pokes at the pockets with her nose when the carrots run out. I hold my hands open to show her what I mean by "no more." She's in a friendly, though assertive mood this morning. She was pushing me a little bit. She stood in front of the gate. I pushed it gently until I was able to get through. She just stared at me like to say, I don't want to move. Vada was in the same mood yesterday. I don't know how many times I heard her say, I don't want to. Jenny put her nose into the hay I was carrying and gave it a push like she wanted to push it out of my hands for the fun of it. She wasn't menacing. It was like she just wanted to give me a hard time for not having another carrot. She wasn't rough. She followed me into the meadow, ears back tight, gaze backward at Jack and the calf, ears telling them not to crowd in. Alpha donkey is first.

Martha

 

In the front of my mind at the beginning above, I wanted to tell y'all about the blog's purpose that keeps me going day after day since May 1, 2009, closing in on 5 years. I set out to make myself write something every day that might be worth reading. It is an exercise with intent to improve my writing. The only agenda is to write every day. The blog is a subjective account of one individual's experience in one place in one time. In this case, I am the individual, Air Bellows is the place and today is the time. In my own way of seeing reality, subjective experience is closer to "reality" than objective experience. Consciousness is subjective. Therefore, I write in first person personal experience, mental, physical and emotional. The blog was conceived in conversation with my friend Lizabeth. I was telling her about some old-timers I know and she said, "Have you thought about writing a blog?" I said, "What's a blog?" She explained briefly and gave me the web address for BlogSpot. I looked it up and it stayed in the front of my mind overnight and into the next day. I thought I'd give it a go. I'd been wanting to do some writing in a journal, but journaling attempts in the past would end after second or third day. I don't write to myself very well, tend to make notes. I thought if I put it online, made it an open journal, I'd have maybe somebody on the other end reading, someone to write to. One, two or three readers would do, just somebody to write to. Years ago, I knew a man who had been a well known writer in the writing time of his life. I was just starting out, freshman year in college. I mentioned, "I write for myself." He assured me nobody writes for himself. The act of writing automatically means it is for somebody to read. Not many years ago talking with someone I knew at lunch, he said he wrote for himself. I brought this up that the act of writing implies a reader. I was the subject of a brief lecture on naïvete. Whatever.

 

caterpillar

 

So far, I've written 1,466 entries. If I'd set out to do that many, it would not have got past fifty. I'd have been worn out by the thought of  writing that many. Each day I make myself write. Most of the time I have a blank mind, nothing to say. So I start wherever I feel like starting and let it evolve of its own. Before long I have a theme begun and then follow it to see where it goes. Almost never do I start with a theme in mind. I like this free flowing way of writing. I think of it as "organic," using organic the way poet Denise Levertov defined it, letting the writing grow from inside itself. By the way, her collected poems has recently been published. Like today, I set out with a mind toward telling you about the process of writing these entries and their purpose. The purpose is to write. What happens from there is whatever happens. Keeping it decent is about my only rule of thumb. I give myself the freedom not to write any given day if I don't feel like it. Probably average something like 25 a month. It's all about feel. As I feel what I write about, I allow the feeling of not wanting to or not finding time in the day for writing. I believe my favorite part of the process is writing when I have a blank mind with nothing I want to explore. I'll write a sentence, then another, then another and find it starts flowing, subject revealed, next sentence, next and next. Even better than that, I like it when every sentence takes a long time to write. I push it and push. I make myself go. It wears me out so much that when it's finished I post it and go to bed, exhausted. On the way to sleep, I regret posting it, thinking it the worst thing I've written, shouldn't even have let anybody see it. Get up in the morning, look at it to see what a horrible mess I ruined whatever credibility the blog might have had with. An email or two saying it's one of the best. I read it over and am shocked at what I'd written. It really was one of the best. I laugh at myself again. It's a friendly laughing at self. The point is that it doesn't matter if they're good or bad. I like to make them the best I can, but want the freedom to allow the whole range of possibilities. It seems like willingness to allow the worst with the best frees inner blockage. Freedom from holding myself to an artificial standard really does allow creative expression. Writing these daily entries has freed up the storyteller within.  

 

old-time string band

the crooked road ramblers

 

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THE ROAD WATERFALL

waterfall road, the back side

If your computer will do video, here is a drive down Waterfall Road from where the pavement ends at the top of the mountain to the stop sign at the bottom. It's the unpaved part of the road. About the same distance is paved. That's the part I live on. It used to be the most beautiful road I'd ever seen anyplace. They paved it and it's like any highway. My dog took naps in the road 30 years ago. It's no longer safe to have pets. Any time one of the remaining cats, Tapo or Caterpillar, is outside I'm pleading with them in my mind to stay out of the road. They know to, but I still am concerned. The unpaved part of the road is much better that it was back then. Then, I couldn't have driven down it with only one hand on the steering wheel.

When they paved the populated half of the road, they smoothed the back part of the road, which is the old wagon road to Air Bellows, for the people with new cars at Deer Track. The road has gone back to about like it was before, rutted by rain that toward the bottom makes a torrent that eats canyons out of the road and the side ditch. Toward the bottom you can see how the road is 4-5 feet below ground level. Ruts the wagons made in the mud must have flowed like a firehose by the time the rain water reached the bottom. Every year was at least one gullywasher rain. We haven't had one in several years. It must have been a river at the bottom of the road where it washed away. all that earth.

Tom Pruitt told me the name of the road was Waterfall Road. He called that back part of the road The Waterfall. The road had a number then, 1131. In the time when the county roads were given names, Louise Farmer told me the road had 3 possible names under consideration, one of them Tom Pruitt Road. At the time I was thinking it will be different in a few years when nobody at Air Bellows remembers who Tom Pruitt was. I suggested the name Tom had told me was the road's name, and it took. I've regretted sticking my nose into it many times since then. it identifies where the waterfalls are and my parking space at home a public parking lot like it's a state park. I don't mind it to a point.

A few years ago it got so out of hand with Chamber of Commerce and b&bs sending people there. There would be a dozen cars on weekends. It was still ok until it started turning into a teenage hangout place. Things came up missing around here, so I had to put a stop to it. I was advised by people I knew who had a place on the beach at Jacksonville. Their yard, their driveway, their water hose, were all public property. They told me there comes a time when it will be so far out of hand it's too late to stop it or slow it down. It's picking back up again, but it's not objectionable. I've often thought it would have been better to leave it as they had it. At the time I was thinking about the beauty of the name, not for identification to make my home a state park.

I've messed everything up. I tried to upload a video of driving down Waterfall Road, but it didn't take, An "error" of some sort. Now I can't get a single picture up because the video thing is still running for some reason, though it didn't take. Whatever. It thinks it's uploading a video. This could go on all night. I'm at a loss for what to do, so I'll do nothing. Will go read for awhile and come back in a little bit to see if the computer has stopped whatever it is doing that has me blocked were getting an image is concerned.

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