There Are Places I Remember

An old hiking buddy Dave sent me some snapshots from a recent overnight excursion to a place full of memories. For me, most of them come from the view along its crest--from the rocky summit of Table Rock, Hawksbill or Shortoff Mountain--whose bare shoulders stand high above Linville Gorge in the North Carolina Blue Ridge. This is some of the roughest terrain I've ever backpacked in. It’s a place like a love affair: easier to fall into it than to get out of it. I was down in, just a couple of times, when we lived in Morganton. I remember a spring hike. I stood midway in a crossing of the cold Linville river, looking up far above to the rim of mountain all around. It felt prehistoric, as if I had been swallowed up by the earth. I have been farther from civilization but never felt apartness quite like I experienced in Linville Gorge.

For a while, the pictures my friend sent put me in a blue reverie for things lost. My backpack is in a landfill somewhere after a quarter century of fitting so well against my shoulders. Trail music--that rhythmic torque of the metal frame, the creak and strain of leather straps and the mantra of Vibram against the path, mile after mile--I will hear no more. I miss the banter and jibes of my buddies, the old duffers whose snores and visceral noises punctuated nearly-sleepless nights on the ground. I remember the first-light camaraderie of arthritic whining until somebody got up and built the fire; then the smell of pine, coffee, wood smoke and yesterday's wet wool.

We say goodbye to some things and hello to what comes next. I stand on the porch in the darkness this morning, blue-black save one lone star low on the south horizon above the pasture. The air is so clean and sweet. The music of the creeks is scored fortissimo across a page of stillness and utter calm. We are alone in this place so far from city lights but not lonely. We are camping on the bank of a rocky creek not unlike those over the years where I have pitched my tent and propped my old pack against an ancient hemlock. The sound and smell and feel of the air is the very same as I have known so many times before in so many remote and inaccessible places after struggling cross-country and fording cold rivers only to lie down in those landscapes under the stars at night and wake to them in first light.

Gone Where the Weather Suits My Clothes

They say that clothes make the man. I do hope that this is not so. I think my family would tell you I've never been a slave to fashion. Like Gilda Radner, most of my fashion sense has been based on what doesn't itch.

But in the approach-avoidance waltz through my various careers, I've chosen my path with wardrobe very much in mind. I've tended to travel only where the work has matched my very generic, very comfortable preference in apparel. If I have to dress fancy, I move on. Why should the cover be any better than the book inside? I follow Mr. Thoreau's thinking that one should be suspicious of any event or setting that might require one to buy new clothes.

Even the fact that my first profession was in biology had much to do with the relaxed-fit dress of my professors. They worked in comfortably worn khakis and flannel shirts. They wore heavy boots to class. They could appear behind the podium in the same clothes that they would wear to collect mudpuppies in a swamp. My stodgy economics professors, or history-well, that was another sartorial reality altogether. So, in my first job as a young biology teacher at the community college in Wytheville, I was able to wear the field-ready wardrobe of my mentors; and for me, as Goldilocks said, that was just right.

Years later as I was preparing for my second career-in physical therapy-I realized to my horror that there could be work settings (hospitals, mostly) where a therapist would be required to wear a starched, suffocating, long white clinic jacket. No thanks, I said: I don't do costumes. I will dress for function, or for comfort and modesty, but not for mock- authority or pretense. So I avoided hospitals and gravitated to home health and to outpatient clinics where clothes-sports shoes and loose-fitting shirt and slacks-were practical and matched the very physical work.

But every week there has always been the recurring dilemma of what must one wear to church: the only place I felt any pressure to conform, to don the expected "uniform." Even those few years when we attended a "high" church on the fancier side of a North Carolina town, I held the line. If my clothes were clean, I reasoned, they were probably good enough for God. To the horror of the deacon in charge of pomp and ceremony, I was the only elder greeting new members in (clean) khakis and a sport shirt. At first. Soon others became corrupted with the deadly sin of casualness.

But don't we dress up when we go downtown, you might ask? And if you ask, you have obviously never been to our county seat. In the town of Floyd, you'll see farmers in Carhartts and mud-spattered boots. There will be the alter-natives dressed in all manner of colorful ethnic-wear, assorted hats and beanies and tie-dye. And of course, you'll see a few lawyers and bankers in suits. (Oddfellas window art pretty well sums up this range of attire you can expect to see on a visit to town.) My wife and I fall comfortably somewhere in the middle of this eclectic mix of wardrobe. We just wear to town whatever feels right to us at the moment. If we've come straight from playing outdoors with the dog, from a long afternoon in the garden or a morning in the woodlot, not a soul will think the less of us for our come-as-you-are disregard for style.

And so in Floyd County, I have arrived in wardrobe nirvana. To work, to town or to church, I wear the very same shirt, pants, and hiking boots. As my friend Doug Thompson says, "In Floyd, dressing up means tucking in your shirt tail." This matter, I think, is merely a symptom of the general tolerance for self-expression and freedom from pretense we have found in the quiet, rural realm of Floyd. And I feel certain that Gilda would be proud of our fashion sense.

This piece appeared in the Floyd Press, February 03, 2005 in the biweekly column, The Road Less Traveled.

Vernal EquiNuts

I stepped out on the porch yesterday morning and was overcome by a sense of impending spring. Titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers, chickadees, and white throated sparrows all called from or clambered in the bare branches of the maple at the edge of the driveway. Some equation has changed such that the grand reversal of winter has begun. We won't see many visible signs of it for another six weeks, but it goes on, nevertheless.

The signs of spring were once much more tangible. Every March, my friend Ed and I would take a weekend trip somewhere, backpack in a few miles, set up camp and have our Rights-of-Spring Vernal Equinox ceremony (which we made up as we went along.) Sometimes we took our cameras.

I cannot name this creature, yet unknown to science. However, I do know that he still has (and wears) the blue Eddie Bauer 'backpackers sweater' pictured here that he got at the Wetumpka (AL) factory outlet down products sale for $23 in 1974. Beyond that, there have been no recent sightings and it is feared that, while not yet quite extinct, the species is restricted to one small valley in northeastern Floyd County. Which is probably a good thing.

Fixing Things: Planetary Health

The quote below is from an early morning email, author anonymous, since I won't be able to get approval to post this before I have to leave for school. It comes on the same morning when there is mail about future plans for Ecotone where any number of writers responded to a writing prompt with our very unique perspectives on the subject of the day.

I will be thinking about a response to my emailer's question today as I am able. I'll try to write a response tomorrow, maybe just as a comment to this post. I'd be interested in hearing how YOU would make the world a healthier place--going back, or going ahead. Think about it, at least. Write a few words just to get the juices flowing.

Hello fred,

Say you were given the power to fix or right all the eco-wrongs, rebalance the equation between man and earth, Grand Viser of Gaia for a day, which would you choose?

1. To turn back the clock to a less technically sophisticated, less populous time in history when vast sections of the world were untouched, if so which time span?

2. Leap forward into a future where technology resolves ecology issues and produces the needs of mankind without natural resources.

Each has it's appeal, doesn't it? No trick or agenda here, just wondering.

I am not sure I would leap forward, I'm reading John Julius Norwich's final volume of his trilogy of Byzantine history and I might choose the Florentine Renaissance or early Byzantium. Or Mars.

The Aging Peanuts in the Gallery

Say, kids: What time is it?

If you know the answer, welcome to the back nine. I guess my earliest TV memories were of the puffy pioneer, the leather-spangled Buffalo Bob Smith and his articulated friend, Howdy, (who, I appreciated, made it cool back then to have freckles (until Alfred E. Newman sported them on the cover of MAD Magazine. Then it wasn't so cool.)

I had a cousin that looked like Dilly Dally. And I remember, just when I was figuring out what made a dog a dog and getting straight the differences between frogs and turtles--along came the odd creature called FlubADub; I decided the world was a weirder place than I even imagined at age five. I was a little frightened of him. It.

Say. Did you ever notice how much Howdy and Alfred E resemble each other? And wait! What's this?

Howdy morphs to AE Newman, and the "What me worry" character into a head of state!

Well, Kowa-bonga, boys and girls. I gotta get back to work.

Virginia's Biological Bank

Life has always been full of odd twists and surprises, of course; but since the advent of email, Google and anyone's easily-found presence on the internet, the chemistry of serendipity has taken a quantum leap. A road less traveled, indeed. It seems like someone unexpected travels down this way about every week lately. Just after Christmas, I got an email that began with these words:

"By way of your green snake discovery, passed on to me through a regular bucket-brigade of communicants, I stumbled into your series of essays, sermons, and homilies illuminated with stunning color landscapes and leafscapes."

The writer went on to say that my name, unusual as it is, sounded too familiar for he and I not to have crossed paths some time in the past, though he couldn't quite place when or where. Perhaps it was at Radford where he was on the biology faculty for almost thirty years. The writer went on to tell me a bit about himself and invited me, if I ever had a day free, to come down to Martinsville and he would show me "Virginia's best kept secret." He signed his name: Richard Hoffman, Curator, Recent Invertebrates, Virginia Museum of Natural History.

Oh yes, I remembered Dr. Hoffman. If there were trading cards for the world's experts in invertebrate taxonomy, his would bring a high dollar indeed. He is too humble a man to tell you (even if you ask, as I did) the number of species of spider, millipede or other tiny creature he has discovered or that have been named after him. He is among a small and vanishing number of true naturalists, and coming from where I've been, that makes him a sort of hero. And so there was never any doubt I would take him up on his offer to visit. I saw my chance on February 4 on the heels of a winter storm.

Apart from a quick lunch at the local diner where the regulars get to keep their personal coffee cups in the cupboard, we spent our time together downstairs below the public floor of the museum. Here is where the larger work is done--preparing the specimens for display; cataloging the various collections that have been donated, scavenged or accumulated over the years, now stacked to the ceiling in every conceivable corner and hallway. For Richard Hoffman, this is where invertebrate samples from pitfall and funnel traps and sweep nets from all over the state are studied to find out just exactly what kinds of life constitute the biota of Virginia.

As we walked the basement corridors, I had the sense of being in the bowels of a vast bank--the Fort Knox of the state's biological heritage. Dr. Hoffman stopped from time to time to illustrate his point in our discussion with examples. The heavy metal doors of a museum case opened and Richard pulled out a sectioned tray, each section housing an assortment of specimen jars containing smaller vials labeled by location and species. In one jar, each vial contained perhaps two dozen barely-visible spiders thought rare until Hoffman lured hundreds to pitfall traps somewhere near the coast. Many of these lock box treasures contained Virginia creatures new to science, waiting their turn to be named and scientifically described.

The museum has weathered a boom and bust cycle with each change in the political climate over the years. While the staff has recently been reduced another thirty percent, Richard showed me the new 89,000 square feet facility that is under construction just across town. I wondered: If we build it, will they come? We lamented how our schools and universities are no longer educating students "in the field", to recognize and respect the life forms that share this place with us. What we don't know about, we cannot value and will not sacrifice to protect.

On the drive home I had the strongest sense that I had just spent three hours with someone very like Seuss's elephant, Horton, who is the only being on Earth aware of the presence of an entire civilization of tiny people living on a single dandelion. We need to know what Horton can tell us about the world beyond our short-sighted vision. And Dr. Hoffman's millipedes under our feet have more to do with our long-term well-being than we appreciate.

Visit the Virginia Museum of Natural History on the web at http://www.vmnh.net/, then spend an afternoon there soon. It is truly one of the commonwealth's best kept secrets.

Tree With the Lights in It

Do you know this--the twinkle of rainbow in frosted branches? There are times when, walking along the creek in winter, I remember dreams of childhood, of finding chests overflowing with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds. And now they are hanging from the very trees, and it is not a dream. But it is an unspeakable beauty, though some have tried. And even less is it a gift to be captured in the eye blink of a camera. Though some have tried.

...one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. --Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974).

Blue Door

Got the scanner going on some ancient slides. This was always one of my favorites (although somewhere there is a similar shot with purple New England asters against this same odd door to nowhere that is quite striking.)

As I have said before, the act of considering, composing and capturing an image through the viewfinder is a wonderful adjunct to memory. This image is one of a dozen taken on one of the only paid photoshoots I ventured out upon in my early years. A fellow faculty from the community college commissioned me to get him a picture of Grahams Forge. It was an historical site once belonging to his wife's family and something he thought would be meaningful to her. Somewhere, too, are the pictures of the forge buildings. The brick building with the blue door was, I believe, a store associated with the forge.

Wisdom with Courage: From Iraq?

Thanks to Ian at Panchromatica for the link to this article from The New Yorker excerpted below. And read Ian's take on this turn of events as well.

"During the early weeks of the Iraq war, the television set in my office was tuned all day to CNN, with the sound muted. On the morning of April 3rd, as the Army and the Marines were closing in on Baghdad, I happened to look up at what appeared to be a disaster in the making. A small unit of American soldiers was walking along a street in Najaf when hundreds of Iraqis poured out of the buildings on either side. Fists waving, throats taut, they pressed in on the Americans, who glanced at one another in terror. I reached for the remote and turned up the sound. The Iraqis were shrieking, frantic with rage. From the way the lens was lurching, the cameraman seemed as frightened as the soldiers.

This is it, I thought. A shot will come from somewhere, the Americans will open fire, and the world will witness the My Lai massacre of the Iraq war. At that moment, an American officer stepped through the crowd holding his rifle high over his head with the barrel pointed to the ground. Against the backdrop of the seething crowd, it was a striking gesture--almost Biblical.

"Take a knee," the officer said, impassive behind surfer sunglasses. The soldiers looked at him as if he were crazy. Then, one after another, swaying in their bulky body armor and gear, they knelt before the boiling crowd and pointed their guns at the ground. The Iraqis fell silent, and their anger subsided. The officer ordered his men to withdraw."

Blessed Peculiarities

Idiosyncrasy: A physiological or temperamental peculiarity. Quirkiness or eccentricity. An unusual individual reaction to life events, things, or ideas.

I don't feel that I have to hide my idiosyncrasies here--my peculiar way of seeing. These oddities are the traits and habits and points of view that distinguish me from you, and you and me from the common denominator core of human sameness and make us part of it as well.

Finding your voice is about coming to peaceful acceptance with those things in you that seem larger or deeper to you than to most everyone else. You will be misunderstood or ignored by many, but your visions will resonate with a few who see at least some of the invisible angels and truths that you do.

I show my eccentricities by the subjects of the pictures I post here. Because I have been struck by a certain light or pattern in the pasture grass or an eddy of the creek, I bring the image home. The subject and its light or color has meaning for me, and I know that not everyone will see in it what I saw. Not everyone will approve of how I've displayed it, what I've said about it or explained it. A few will. And that resonance with the few is amazing to me.

Yesterday: snow falls against the dark hillside. I set up the tripod on the front porch because that is where I could go without changing out of my slippers. The hemlocks on the ridge are dying: that this makes me sick with sadness is one of my odd sensitivities, I suppose. Yet here is one that still has needles enough to hold snow. See the regular, graceful way they hold their dark arms just so? And snow falls flake by flake, in such depth of distance, so matter-of-factly, each crystal a creature of its own predictable unpredictability of form and beauty.

Over Hillary and Dell

This is being billed as a 100% Bi-Partisan Political Bumper sticker. It is said to be the hottest selling bumper sticker in New York State:

Democrats put it on the rear bumper.

Republicans put it on the front bumper.

Better Than a Stick in the Eye

"It's not a nest egg. It's a loan" said Peter R. Orszag, a Social Security analyst at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton White House economist, speaking of the Bush Social Security plan.

And you can count on a pretty sorry return after forty years if you are the borrower in this loan from the Fed.

Under the system, the gains may be minimal. The Social Security Administration, in projecting benefits under a partially privatized system, assumes a 4.6 percent rate of return above inflation. The Congressional Budget Office, Capitol Hill's official scorekeeper, assumes 3.3 percent gains.

If a worker sets aside $1,000 a year for 40 years, and earns 4 percent annually on investments, the account would grow to $99,800 in today's dollars, but the government would keep $78,700 -- or about 80 percent of the account. The remainder, $21,100, would be the worker's.

With a 4.6 percent average gain over inflation, the government keeps more than 70 percent. With the CBO's 3.3 percent rate, the worker is left with nothing but the guaranteed benefit."

Duh, yeah, I'd like to put $40K in savings and draw $21K out. What's not to like?

My favorite part of the plan is that a would-be furture retire can put his or her investments NOT in any fund or stock of their choice, but only among a select few. And who does the selecting? And do you think there might be some politics involved in who gets picked as one of the selected investment markets? Hmmm?

The Way We Were

The year: not certain. Circa 1977. Before our son was born. Before we moved to the farm on Greasy Creek. Here, we're visiting a friend's rural acreage for a bucolic backdrop for our Christmas card that year. We lived "in town" in an older neighborhood. We longed for the country.

Ann made all our clothes then. Because she could. Because we longed for self-sufficiency and a connectedness to the source of our needs. If we could have grown our own fiber, we probably would have.

I remember how it felt to have finally settled somewhere, with good jobs, good friends and neighbors, a child, a dog and lots of hair. The hippy biology teacher stalking the wild asparagus.

This is a warning: I just purchased my first scanner. Let the backstory begin.

Virga

The radar shows a light blue swath already spreading over southwest Virginia. Snow is falling overhead, but at the moment, it isn't reaching the ground. The weatherman's name for this dishonest precipitation is "virga".

I remember two summers back, in the midst of a terrible drought, I watched the radar for signs of rain. In late August, the creek had shrunk to isolated pools, and then to dry depressions full of tiny dead fish. Then, one day, the radar-green promise of rain began creeping into Virginia from the south. We were parched, tinder ready to burst into flames, and here at last was hope. It crept closer and closer, almost over us. I hurried out the back door and lay down on the hot pavers of the walkway, ready for full immersion as the raincloud would soon sweep over me.

It never did. It was virga. It looked like rain. It spoke of redemption but never delivered it. Rains formed that day in high places, but they never hit the dusty ground.

Virga. Oh yeah. The State of the Union Speech is tonight, isn't it?

Truthout Comes to Floyd

What a crazy world. Today, I got a blog comment from new reader, Betsy, in Arkansas. She's a Red State Refuge (in spirit; in body, someday perhaps) and discovered, as Chris Hume of TruthOut said, that Floyd was a bubble of blue in a sea of red. Hume traveled across the state the week of the inauguration interviewing the man-and-woman on the street.

The short segment THREE has bits with J.from Farmers Supply (hardware), K. from New Mt. Merchantile, and S. from Cafe del Sol. Didn't recognize the gentleman in the earflaps.

Thanks for the pointer, Betsy, and way to go, townfolk!