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

 

*

 

 

 

 

UNREPENTANT HILLBILLY REBEL

willis lake in air bellows

photos by tj worthington

Just now read an article from what I suppose is a blog by Terri Barger of Nashville. The Social Prejudice Against People Who Speak With a Twang, is the title of the article. Very well spoken account of the actual prejudice against people of the mountains when they're outside the mountains. I've experienced that prejudice without even leaving here. Yankees coming in here and telling us hillbilly gum-chewers how to talk right and clean up our yards. Every time I've been outside the South somebody has to make remarks from on High like their ignorance is important to me. All they do is piss me off and make me want to say something hurtful or turn around and walk away. With Southern politeness a part of the Southern way, I can't let myself just walk away from somebody unless I'm at a place where my arm is livening up and I'm ready to stop a smart mouth with Xtreme prejudice. I really don't want to make a scene and I would rather use a pipe than hurt my knuckles on some knucklehead Yankee who is prejudiced against Southerners for being prejudiced against black folk, who doesn't know whether I'm prejudiced or not.

A Southerner in Yankeeland gets treated like an American in London. After I'd spent some time in London, friends back home who were planning a trip to London asked me what to expect. I told them they will return with an understanding of what it's like to be black in America. They came back saying, Right! They were Southerners not prejudiced against black people. The English are even worse than Yankees about American Southerners.  I know so many Southerners not prejudiced, most of my friends, that it runs all over me when a Yankee tells me what's wrong with us ignernt prejudiced Southerners. The Appalachian accent is treated the same way throughout the South. Everybody likes to laugh at hillbillies; Dukes of Hazard, Beverly Hillbillies, Andy Griffith, Lil Abner. Some years ago a woman from the Florida keys visiting friends of mine here in the mountains asked if the people here are like on the Andy Griffith Show. I said there are no people anyplace like on Andy Griffith. Pissed her off and she wouldn't have any more to do with me. Another fantasy bubble popped. Oh well. I think: are you blind? We have brick houses with central heating, paved driveways, lawns, cars, 5 Walmarts 30 miles from Sparta like the points of a star, shopping centers, Pizza Huts. Everybody has television. We have universities too. Not all hillbillies live in trailers up in a holler with black teeth from crystal meth. Hillbillies were no more stereotypes in the old ways than they are today. The hillbillies I know are proud of being hillbillies. They can't be insulted for being a mountain goat. We stand on hillbilly pride. Talk down to the hillbillies I know and you'll not find an apologetic audience. Hillbillies are Southerners too and know how to tune somebody out like muting the volume.

I went to a particular pub with a name I don't remember one evening in London to carry a greeting from friends at home who knew the pub owners. I went in, sat at the bar for a beer. I didn't like bars and was way outside my comfort zone. A man at the bar, an empty stool between us, heard my Southern accent and started with, "I know about you Southerners. I've been in the South." He told everybody in the pub, speaking to me loud enough for everyone to hear, about the South of his experience, which told me he only knew about the South from television. I knew he was lying about his absence of experience, but did my best with Southern politeness to put up with him. I sat there thinking, all I have to do is extend my left arm such that my fist connects with his chin, he falls over backwards with the stool, hits the back of his head on the floor and dies: suddenly I'm the American in an English prison. I saw a guy of my generation sitting at a table. I picked up my glass, walked to his table, asked if I could sit at his table and calm down. I told him I was on the verge of breaking and didn't want to. He said, "Don't pay any attention to him. He's an asshole and everybody in here knows it." I told him everybody in there was about to find out I'm an asshole too when I deck the smart-mouth bastard. We talked pleasantly a little while, I finished my beer and thanked him for lending me a hand when I needed one. Never stepped inside a pub again.

old turd hillbilly

I've no interest in returning to London. I felt too much like a black person feels in especially the South. I don't like that feeling. It makes me want to lash out physically. I understood better than ever before how black people felt. I thought I had some understanding, just from empathy before, but London taught me that white people are really mean to black people. I'm not and people I associate with are not, so I don't see much of it, except in police behavior, public news items. I can't change social situations, but I don't have to participate. I made it a life commitment to regard people of all races with the same respect as for white people. Why not? Alas, that makes me vulnerable to "reverse prejudice." I've known a few black people since then who alienated me with their racism. Racist black people are the same to me as racist white people. I attribute racism to absence of self-awareness. If I want to convert someone from racism, I need to work on their self-awareness first. But it's not my place to fix other people, so I just stay away from people who annoy me with their particular style of egoism. That's all prejudice is, uneducated egoism. I don't mean school uneducated, but experience uneducated.

I'm seeing in this time the people who watch television, everybody, have been dividing up between conservative and liberals, hawks and doves, though by now it's breaking down into stupid and not quite so stupid. The problem I have with teapartiers is not so much that they're confrontational, but they never shut up jabbering republican parrot talk, "What about Benghazi," like they're inspired by original thought. I find them too boring to be around, so I just stay away from them. I don't even look at short utube quips by Hannity, Beck and Limbaugh. Even though I turn on one of their videos to see what the parrots are saying, half a minute into it I can't tolerate hearing the egoic ignorance and turn it off with a vengeance and a short run of cuss words. When I was a kid I believed adults were intelligent, had knowledge, had experience and maybe even some wisdom. Did I ever find out that was a fantasy with no foundation in anything but maybe a child's hope that he is ruled by people able to make intelligent decisions. Growing up into the world of adults it's depressing to see how wrong I was. Then deal with the depression. Prozac Nation. I tried it for a few years and really liked it. I was in a good mood all the time. After some years of being in a good mood, I missed myself. I felt like I was existing apart from myself. My self was like in a box and I was living sort of separate from myself.

It wasn't like an identity crisis, just that I take the wave of a period of feeling "good" and a period of feeling "bad" for the flow of forward momentum. I just missed the part of myself that was not necessarily happy. So what if I don't keep an artificial level of bliss going? I want to deal with my own issues as myself, not just a part of myself. I want to live my whole self. It felt like my light side was getting all the attention and my dark side left in the dark, something like the moon that doesn't rotate. It's the rotation that makes the heat of the sun bearable and the cold without the sun bearable. The moon cooks on one side and freezes on the other. I want my planet to turn. I don't mind it when I get in a pissy mood. I don't care to be around anybody much when I'm feeling low without explaining I'm in a mood so I won't be any fun, and I don't want to pass it on. But I do want to live it. If I want to go around here cussing under my breath, depressed over seeing what I see everywhere around me, people trading in their humanity for the promise of a little bit of money, I feel like that's as important a part of self as the side that smiles a lot. At a friend's house I see kids on American Idol desperate all the way to the soul to become a corporate product. I think: Why? Fame and money? And when they get it, it aint as pretty as they dream it when they don't have it. Then I tell myself it's the nature of the arts. It's like auditioning for a role in a Broadway play. Many audition, few are chosen. If you want to play the game, you have to be able to take rejection. Artists understand rejection very well. Then it gets kind of interesting and I understand why so many people like it.

These Blue Ridge Mountains pulled me like an electro magnet. Air Bellows Mountain it turns out is the home of my soul. I'd rather live with hillbillies than any other kind of people I know of. I had to rethink the nature of intelligence, just out of the American educational system that taught me school is the only legitimate source for knowledge. NOT. Right off, the hillbillies I worked with and came to know as neighbors showed me that these people got a whole lot more on the ball than I did. I found everyone I met with fast, retentive minds, people who can do a lot, like fix automobile engines, raise cattle, market cattle, weld, shoot a gun impressively, know how to clean a gun, figure out how to do something they've never done before, cut a tree so it will fall exactly as aimed, drive really fast on mountain roads, like really fast. Nobody I went to college with could drive a mountain road at 140mph and drift the curves at 100. I began to redefine intelligence away from the white middle-class version of it I'd learned all my life. In 1983 I volunteered at the high school as a tutor to help a kid having a hard time. They gave me a senior in last semester. He needed the credits to pass so he could graduate, illiterate. Everybody in the office and some teachers told me he was just dumb. On sight I saw he was not. Walking down the hall to our room to work I said, "What's up? You're not dumb." He said, "I know it." Continually failing in school, unable to read, he took a Mustang motor apart and put it back together so it ran better than before, unable to read the manual. That's not dumb to my way of seeing things. There was no time in my life I could have done that.

freaked out fish

 

 

*

CATCHING THE FLOW OUTSIDE THE BOX

all photos by tj worthington

Yesterday some horoscope analysts and a friend who is an astrologer told me that Tuesday the 28th would be a day to do something outside the box. In the evening I went to a softball game in Wilkesboro, sat and watched two games. It was already scheduled. I didn't go to the game for the specific purpose of doing something outside the box, but felt like it fit the call of the day. Two of my friends were on one of the teams. Our team lost both games. It seemed to me like our pitcher threw a lot of good hits. It looked like he was throwing the ball so the batter could hit it easily. It was like he was throwing for practice batting. The other team's pitcher was not an easy one to hit and he didn't allow a great many really good hits. Afterward, the team felt like they didn't play a good enough game. It looked to me like the teams were equals and the pitching had a great influence on the game. I don't mean to imply it was great pitching by any means. The ball arches so when it crosses home plate it is descending to hit the plate or not far behind it, close to straight down. I sat with my friend Sheena and her boy Seth on a small aluminum bleacher with a half dozen others. Driving home after midnight I saw the rising half moon in bold orange.

The influence of this planet arrangement went over into today. I got a call from Justin in the morning wanting to know if I wanted to go fishing on the Willis Lake, the next farm up the road from my house. Fishing is not something I do. I don't care to prepare them to eat and I have no interest in catching them to throw them back. I thought: outside the box.  I took my camera to get pictures from the lake. I was thinking of landscape pictures taken from the water. On the water, the landscape became boring for photographing. I spent possibly the first half hour in the boat watching Justin catch fish, impressed by how he can throw the line so it goes to the exact spot he wants it. He likes to catch and throw them back. He gets a charge from catching fish. It's the same as hunting. Hunters know the addictive thrill of hunting. I experienced the hunting thrill once, felt like I got it why so many people like to hunt. But I don't like killing. That doesn't mean I have issues with people who do kill. That's their business if they want to hunt the same as it's my business that I don't want to. That one experience gave me an understanding of the thrill. I understand my friends who are hunters, understand what they like about it, a little bit of what they like. There is much more to hunting than just squeezing a trigger or pulling back a bow string. The hunters I know keep meat in freezers to get them through the year with meat they don't have to buy, meat that doesn't have growth hormones etc in it.

 

 

The water was perfectly clear today. I surveyed the sky, the land, the water, the boat for some idea of a theme to photograph. The landscape bored me. I thought: I have landscape pictures. Everybody takes landscape pictures. It's beautiful when all the leaves are fresh in their yellow-green of early spring. Big white clouds in the flow-lines of the gaps around. I saw a row of clouds over the gap where Hwy 18 to Wilkesboro enters the mountains. Parallel to that row of clouds was another beyond it passing over Twin Oaks gap at Hwy 21. Those clouds were flowing west to east. Flowing south to north over Roaring Gap a row of clouds moved around Bullhead over Glade Valley to join the other two flows eastward toward Mt Airy. I looked at all the land I knew intimately from walking on it over a number of years. I've worked the farm in the past and know the owners and the people living there. It's "next door," about a third of a mile from my house. I felt at home. I felt my love for the mountains and Air Bellows Mountain where my love enters the mountains. The wind was blowing just enough to make active ripples on the water. The boat was in slow motion with a trolling motor and the wind. Sometimes the boat went slowly in a circle. I watched sunlight sparkle on the waves, began seeing the range of colors on the surface. I've tended to think of the lake water as brown from the mud on the bottom, though the water is clear, and blue and white surface from the reflection of sky.

 



I started seeing the continuously changing patterns of colors on the water's surface. Tree reflections were refracted among the images of clouds and sky, their colors making patterns in constant change, fast change, no two ever repeating all over the lake's surface. I began to look more into the patterns and found the camera makes a rectangle of abstraction in it's manner of stopping the motion. I could never get an image as I saw it when I pushed the button; by the time the camera clicked, a split-second later, the patterns in the water were changed altogether. The slow turning of the boat showed me the colors in the reflections were different all the way around according the angle the sunlight struck the water in relation to my location. I pointed the camera to the water maybe three to four feet from the boat. The image in the rectangle of the camera's monitor was extraordinary every moment. I clicked over a hundred pictures, fascination increasing as I found in our movements around on the lake that light was different and reflections different all over the lake. Finally a short video of five minutes or less came to mind. I held the camera still looking at the water just a few feet from the boat and let the motion of the boat be a part of it. I felt like the sequence of photographs are among my very finest photographs. I don't mean I'm something special with a camera, but I get a picture the best I can, learning by experience.

The video holds my visual attention almost dramatically. Sometimes it goes slow, sometimes fast when the boat is turned by the wind. Colors changed, patterns changed; the patterns changed extremely fast. On the laptop monitor the colors and shapes are flying. It's a constantly changing abstraction, like something Clifford Still might paint that never stops changing and never does the same thing twice. Every pattern I caught is unique in the life of the lake. It never happened before and will never happen again. Something like an action painting by the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. None of the pictures was composed. I just pointed the camera where the visual activity was at the place between looks like water, and at the same time does not look like water. I was getting my kicks walking that edge. It was simply a point and shoot experience, composition merely that zone between is and is not water. It was the flow I was attempting to photograph in a still image, and then a moving rectangle of constant change. I fell into a zone where the surface of the lake became for me a sparkling wonder of moving colors and shapes flowing in and out of each other. I spent a few hours in silence lost in awe by the changes of colors in a spontaneous dance of speed. I like to make photographs of nascar races from the flat-screen tv, looking for a still image that catches a sensation of speed. The images on the water moved and changed so fast, they became another challenge to fix speed in a still image. Outside the box I found what I can't help but think is the first art moment of my life.

 

 

*