SLOW ROAD HOME ~ A BLUE RIDGE BOOK OF DAYS
by
Fred First
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Trade paperback version available directly from the author
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Copyright © 2010 by Fred First
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SLOW ROAD HOME ~ A BLUE RIDGE BOOK OF DAYS
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PREFACE
Where Does This Road Go?
When it’s time, a man walks away from his job—and possibly, from his profession. When he does, he leaves his identity, his moorings and his maps. He abandons landmarks that have told him where he has belonged in the world, and may find at first that he doesn’t know where he belongs in the world apart from his work.
It was 1987 when we left the little blue Wythe County farmhouse, our first country home with the old apple orchard in the yard; a home where our son was born and learned to fly and our daughter had a horse and a secret club house hidden in the hay bales of the barn loft. We drove south, leaving behind twelve years of belonging in Virginia. We left a place we loved and were secure, so that I could change careers from teaching biology to practicing physical therapy and live happily ever after.
When Ann and I finally returned to Virginia in 1997, I had the satisfaction of having helped patients in clinics in three states. But over the years in healthcare, there grew to be more management and senseless paperwork, and less satisfaction. I suppose I could make a long list of the reasons I left my job that day. And there are good reasons that I could not have told you then. “The heart has reasons that reason does not know” and this time, at fifty four, to my surprise, I chose to follow my heart.
I cleared my office drawers and loaded boxes of files into my truck at the clinic that Friday in May, 2002, with an unsettling but strangely liberating realization that I may never return to physical therapy again. For the first time since the mid-seventies, when Ann and I pulled the U-Haul from Alabama to our new home in Virginia with such naïve high hopes, I had no Plan B. Monday came, I stayed home.
“Take your time” Ann said. “See what happens.” I decided not to look for another job or explore the possibilities of a third career right away. But as far as I could see into the months ahead, the calendar was an empty hole in time. The days held the terror of uncertainty and the exhilaration of freedom. But freedom without purpose can be a kind of bondage. What was I meant to do if not what I’d always done? The vision would come. It always had. Where was my faith?
Every morning that first month in my ambivalent sabbatical, I watched the tail lights of Ann’s car disappearing through the pines as she left for work, flickering past the silhouettes of trees, red against black, up and out of sight and sound. She was the provider now. And what had I become—the custodian, the gardener, a house-sitting tenant on my own land?
I stood there at the open door with my coffee in the dark with a day ahead of me—a day that would have been a treasure during thirty years of work when a morning-to-evening just for me was rare, and home only a place to spend the nights and weekends. And now, I had the whole day alone here—a place we thought we would grow to know well some day—after we retired, perhaps. Ann had given it a name: Here’s Home, our place in the country. I could walk the place from dawn until dusk and not see the same tree twice. I might follow along the ridges, or wade in Goose Creek or along the one that no map had thought worthy of a name, that I called Nameless Creek. And in those places, I would spend my day in utter quiet.
But when this unplanned day ended, I might have no new purpose, no point to move toward, no reason to be. When she came home tired and drained at the end of the day, what was I to tell her that I had done with my time alone? What did I do for a living now, in this uncharted space of days, weeks, maybe longer? It was a question not casually asked.
The answer came over the summer, through uneven months of anguish and hope. And it seemed so impractical, so merely poetic and delusional that when I finally knew, I was reluctant to tell it. But here it was: my work would be in getting to know my part here at home—a home where I did not fully belong those mornings as the valley took shape and its textures appeared softly in the first sun of dawn, flaming red against the barn roof. For the days ahead, my goal each foggy morning and everynight under the stars would be to find wonder and meaning in whatever kind of light the days or nights would bring.
Nothing would be ignored, no thing trivial: not the wind or the woods; not the rain or the water underground or the creeks. The garden, the forest, the sounds of summer, the wonders of imagination, the familiar unnamed smells of the seasons—all of these common elements just beyond the front steps would be objects of curiosity and importance.
I revisited stories from memories past and found them new in each new day’s reflection from some part of our valley. Alone in my own time and space, I settled here, grounding myself in my own history and in the present moment. I was both author and subject of a very personal narrative. It seemed a story worth telling if for no one else but me, and a story that only I could tell. And this was the time that had been set aside for me to do it. This would be my work.
I stopped wearing my watch; there were no schedules or deadlines. Rhythms changed from the hurry-sick pace of corporate imperative to the natural cycles of change in each hour and day, days on end. I spent time—as much as I needed—sitting still on the ridge, walking by the creek, leaning on my rake in the garden. In the slowness, in the stillness, words and images came, not every morning but most—a kind of manna I had never known. From those fragments of the ordinary, a chronicle of the seasons of the Blue Ridge took shape here—one place in all the world we seemed destined to find, and I was determined now to know.
I began to write every day, keeping a kind of field notebook—for myself, and as it turns out, for a small audience of readers who found me here and followed my account of life on Goose Creek by way of a weblog that I called Fragments from Floyd. There, I recorded whatever came to mind or to heart, gathering images, making pages for our book of days. It would become a guidebook to bring back the sound of wind in winter and the smell of pasture grass in moonlight; to remember the way it feels to watch the first fire of autumn in the stove or bring in the harvest from the garden; to lose a dog too soon, or gain the love of his successor at the edge of the creek.
Patterns form that we cannot see when we stand too close to the moments that make them. In what follows, I’ve drawn out selections from many mornings of writing, and grouped them in such a way that the shape of where I’ve been, where I live and what I’ve done for a living over the past three years begins to emerge.
I thought I was completely at sea as I was writing through that first perplexing year, June 2002 through July 2003. Looking back at that period as I sorted through those entries, pattern and purpose appeared. I could see my focus changing, as if I had used three different lenses to discover the seasonal rhythms of that year.
“Still and Still Moving” is like a microscope lens for looking in, for following the senses carefully, for discovering meaning in the fine details of everyday things. “Leaf, Feather and Fur” focuses wide-angle on nature and the creatures and landforms that share this valley with me. And “Roads Remembered” turns the telescope backwards on those people and places that are the fixed mountain peaks of my past, orienting my map along the road to the present.
The pieces in the second section of vignettes, “Rooted, Grounded, Found” are also arranged by the month in which each piece was written, though they span from Summer 2003 to Fall 2005. The lens is the full focus of one man’s vision, and they are more personal, ranging from the sublimity of falling snow to the absurdities of married life. I think of them as a celebration of the beautiful ordinary, in which I am finally at home.
PART ONE
STILL AND STILL MOVING
Stranger in a Strange Land
I don’t have a job to go to and I don’t have a plan for what comes next. And yet, somehow, I am not as anxious about this as I would have thought I’d be.
But I do feel guilty—as if I had skipped school. I pull back behind the curtains when the few cars go by the house, lest their drivers, our neighbors, see that I’m not at work on a weekday. I tell myself to relax and enjoy being here while I can. This is not house arrest. It is not punishment. It is an odd kind of time apart from work that might become more like an unplanned vacation between jobs—a strange vacation, I’ll grant you—just me here all day, every day. The place seems unfamiliar, like a bed-and-breakfast, somewhere I’ve spent many nights but not so many days. Maybe the next few weeks will be a sort of spiritual retreat, one novitiate and one big black dog in eighty acres of quiet sanctuary.
My work for now is living fully in this alien world, moving in a smaller orbit. This is a world not made or managed by man—a natural world of cold creeks inhabited by mayapples and scarlet tanagers. This is a planet where I am learning to smell the changes as the season unfolds, taste the first cup of coffee under stars before the sun comes up over the ridge, and enjoy the comfort and companionship of the pup—blessings that persist even while some things have come undone, for a while.
So here I am all at once, thrown into this brier patch, a beautiful place to be tossed, though I would not have chosen to get here this way. I still feel like a stranger in my own country, but less so than last month. Three months from now, will I be more content with my lot? Will I be by then so immersed in this place that I look like it, become invisible against it, evolving, camouflaged and part of the landscape myself? Will I become lost here, or found?
Summer Lightning
It is late, and I am last to bed, past the usual time. I step out onto the front porch into the cool, sweet air of early June, and sit on the top step quietly as if not to disturb the wildlife, whose nocturnal day I am entering.
The pasture grasses just beyond the maples are in full flower and their pollen smells like midnight bread baking, while Goose Creek sends up wafts of spearmint, wet mud and turbulence.
My eyes soon learn to see in darkness and I am aware of soundless flashes of summer lightning, and stars overhead. My night vision comes and goes with each flash and pause and flash. Rising from the dark field on the fragrance of grasses are tens of thousands of lightning bugs. Put them in a jar, shake and see them illumined with the cold translucence of memory. They pulse and rise above the field in counterpoint to the tempo of the clouds, signaling ancient syllables that we could understand, if we were more often still, less hurried, and more at home in our own pastures.
Gravity pulls me down and I lie on my back, on cool stone horizontal, before a mock-infinity of space, wondering what is my place in this world of men and of words? Do I deserve to be so blessed among Earth’s teeming humanity? What must I do in the warmth of this gentle epiphany that is revealed to me tonight and how should I then live? Maybe I will try to find the words in the morning, after the house is quiet again and the fireflies have gone to bed and the world smells of heat and ozone and toast.
What I Do I Do For a Living
“So, what do you do?” a stranger asks. For him, it’s just polite conversation. But this question makes me break out in a cold sweat. What am I supposed to say to him? Am I a gentleman farmer now; a domestic engineer; a stay-at-home husband? Am I a former teacher, former physical therapist, former income earner? I’m not sure if I’m between jobs, or out to pasture, or starting over in a new career that I can’t name. I do know that when I wake up in the morning and groggily project my mind forward into the day ahead, it’s not the biology classroom or lab where I see myself and it’s definitely not a day in the clinic full of patients in pain.
Truth is, the first thing that comes to mind in the morning, before my eyes are open and my feet hit the floor, are the things I want to say and images I want to show to my weblog readers. I’ve come to think about Fragments from Floyd as my work, what I do with my day, what I look forward to—to simply write out the days as they come. I feel no burning urgency to go back to healthcare just for the paycheck. For a while, with some frugal belt tightening, we can meet our bills on one salary. But it is her salary, not mine and hers, as it has been for more than thirty years. I’m non-productive now, a parasite, and no matter how I turn it in my mind, that shakes up my male ego more than a little.
Our good friend Lynn died suddenly in her sleep last month at forty-five. She left projects that she will never finish. She had visions of things she would someday do that now will be left undone forever. She died one ordinary day in the midst of a busy life. Maybe she expected the end. Maybe she knew her treasure wasn’t in making more money. When she left us, I feel sure that she was doing with her life what she would have done, had she known. Months before, she left a lucrative business so she could create, so she could invest her energies in the things she loved. Her death has come just when my life was changing, just when I’ve been given this opportunity to dig for treasure in a different place.
I am digging, and sometimes finding, even when I’m only working in the garden or bringing in the wood. Maybe this is what I do for a living now. I put away scraps from the everyday, collect odd bits of experience and memory—strings of adjectives, strong verbs, the small revelations or perplexities I discover under rocks while exploring the creek bank. I keep curiosities that make me smile—a nice phrase here, an alliterative couplet there, or some odd voice I hear in the wind or water. I once threw away such foolish things. Now I save them all. My journal is a junk drawer—a place to save the parts I might one day need for a paragraph. I dig into the jumbled springs and strings, wires and washers and pull out the piece I want, to tie up a sentence. I don’t throw away scraps of language anymore. I am a collector of fragments from these days on Nameless Creek.
Far From it All: Solitude
While the garden endures autumn’s final indignities, we eat the last of the fresh chard, Chinese cabbage and kale. The canning shelves downstairs are heavy with Mason jars shimmering in yellows, greens and reds. The success of the garden this year has been a godsend. It has given me something to hold in my hands—a gratuity for the yardman, the caretaker, the gardener and security force at Here’s Home. Produce is my paycheck.
We give up a few minutes of daylight each day. The leaning corn browns and withers. Starlings gather and fret in the trees along the creek. Monarchs should be passing through soon while the wooly worms look for winter shelter, always across the road. For the past months, garden plants have been like children who needed my care. Now they are going away for another year, and I will be left with empty hours. That little plot of earth has drawn me out of doors since May. Working under the sky has lifted my spirits when I grew discouraged. Now I think about the coming months of being here alone—just me and Buster, the black velvet dog—housebound during the short, dark days of winter. But I have been alone before.
Dry Wells
We turned on the floor fan for the first time last night as we were going to bed, to keep the still, humid air stirred up a little. I woke up a few hours later, bothered by the noise of the whirring blades. I’d much rather hear the outside sounds coming through the open window—a trilling toad, a whippoorwill, a screech owl over by the barn. I switched off the fan, and stepped out onto the porch into the tepid night before getting back to my dreams.
The earth lay silver and still. High clouds pulled past the face of the moon like a silk scarf, flooding the valley with pulses of lavender light. The barred owl’s who-cooks-for-you, the other night so close to the house, called from farther down the pasture, near the crook in the ridge where the creek disappears up the canyon of leaning oaks and white pines. Crickets and katydids were in full evening voice, sine-waves rising, falling, their chorus mesmerizing in its repetitiveness, mantra-like and reassuring.
But something was lacking, and I did not at first grasp what it was. A layer in this night chorus was missing from its accustomed place, and I stood there in the dark with an unsettling emptiness.
Then I knew: the creeks were silent. For the first time since we’ve known nights here, Goose Creek and Nameless Creek that converge outside our bedroom window were not the dominant background of sound. That turbulent chatter has been so always-present, we have taken it for granted until now. Tonight, an entire section of our orchestra was mute, the silence itself a kind of jarring noise.
Wells across our region are drying up from the three-year drought. And it is not just the wells that are drying but the very source—the vast waters in bedrock where most of the drinkable water on Earth is found. When this source goes dry, it takes years, maybe decades to replenish. Some wells and springs will never come back after a sustained drought like this, leaving dark caves and crevices silent and dry far beneath our feet—places that have been wet with liquid sounds since these mountains were born.
Showers of Blessing
I leaned against the garden fence this morning, holding my hat in my hand as if I was standing in a cemetery, bereft. The corn listed at odd angles. Its brown leaves were curled and brittle, rustling like a November scarecrow in the parched winds of mid-August. Half-ripe Hubbard squash lay hidden by limp and drooping leaves, the fruits not ripe enough to pick but so close to ready that it seemed an awful waste to pull them from the dust. The vines would die back in another day or two of the drought.
South of us, thick gray clouds have been sagging since mid-morning, but I’ve learned that they can’t be trusted. I watch the signs like an ancient shaman examining bird bones, looking for some portent of future rain. Its falling on the horizon now is illusion, a mirage that the weathermen call virga: an unfulfilled promise. We see its gray streaks streaming from the clouds beyond the barn, but not a drop reaches the ground before it vanishes into vapor. It has been so long since the last drops fell that when they come—if they come—they will be a liquid miracle, a holy gift, the ordinary become extraordinary for its scarcity.
Later in the morning, they did come: three large, fat drops kersplatted on the walk outside the porch door. But God was not in the cloud, and those few drops were followed by nothing but a high, hot wind. Somewhere overhead, it was raining while dust devils danced along the edges of my garden, taunting and cruel. Three drops. Better none at all.
I lay down shirtless on the stone walkway outside the back door and watched a dry wind draw exaggerated demons and cherubs in shades of slate and pewter; but a gray, flat and featureless rain cloud would have been the most angelic and beautiful vision of all. I barely noticed the commotion rushing up our valley from the south. Another dry wind, I thought, as the warmth from the stone walkway sedated me into a dehydrated daydreaming torpor.
Then, sudden, sustained and smelling of dust and ozone, the blessed rain came. It swept in sheets up the valley, toward the house, passing over me where I lay—supine and supplicant in baptism. It is raining still.
This afternoon, we have walked in it, waded in it, rejoiced in it. How frail we are in that the cellular seas inside us, plant and animal alike, are filled by rains and rivers that we do not own and cannot invoke by word or law. We live on a Water Planet, but it is all too easy to think of this miraculous liquid as ordinary. I hope that I never will again, or complain about it when it comes once more in glorious excess.
Heart of Darkness
How wonderfully still it is this early morning before dawn. The rush of the creek, the sound of a distant screech owl, my own breathing—everything there is to hear in the dark. The pasture is visible only in the way that its blackness is somehow different from the black of the forested ridges. And up above and all around me, as my eyes adjust to the absence of light, is light—ancient, otherworldly, heavenly. My old friends, the constellations, like the seasonal flowers and garden vegetables, are right on time to mark the march of days into one more autumn.
The procession of the constellations back to their winter posts has begun. The Summer Triangle still appears overhead, but later to rise each night, and Aquila the Eagle and Cygnus the Swan are migrating too, as are their earthly feathered kin this season. It is dark enough to see the Northern Coal Sack, that immense cloud of light-absorbing dust that cloaks a mere billion lights of the Milky Way. Here is darkness upon darkness that few city dwellers ever see.
I haven’t spent as much time under the dark night sky as I used to. Maybe we would be the better for it if we spent more time out of doors at night, so the stars could speak to us of eternity and the darkness make us whole again.
Of Moderation, Mice and Men
I have given my middle-aged self a stern lecture about the need to undertake hard physical work in a more risk-aware way this year. Gathering firewood I consider strenuous physical labor and it seems I hold this opinion more strongly as each wood-burning year passes. What I once was able to do for endless hours in the wood lot, I limit myself now to no more than twenty minutes at a time. Then, I switch to another part of the task, giving different sets of muscles and joints a chance to rest. This is what therapists call “task rotation.” I should listen to my own best therapy advice. So this morning’s wood gathering was more ceremonial than practical. The dog and I went through the motions to ease our cycles back into the rhythm of early winter, even if we might not bring home a cord of wood, cut and neatly stacked.
And sure enough when it was all said and done, we didn’t bring home much wood. But it was high times together, just us two guys—and between the two of us, I think Buster had the better day. He is convinced that the whole process of wood gathering is, after all, about him. Every log turned is for the purpose of exposing a mouse nest or a mole’s tunnel. He can barely wait for me to lift each piece off the ground until he begins digging furiously in just that spot. He is, after all, a champion mouser.
In the dog-belly-high pasture grass, he sniffs them out, and finding the scent, freezes in a classic point, with one paw raised, leaning forward, quivering. Then suddenly he springs like Tigger, leaping vertically with his paws pulled tight against his broad chest until at the last instant, he sticks his landing, front feet hard into the prey, real or imagined. You can tell he thinks himself terrible and fierce, and very wolf-like. You see, I have told him about Farley Mowat discovering that wolves feed heavily on mice; since then, his canine confidence has bordered on unrestrained lupine arrogance.
I sectioned up a spalted maple log I had been saving for my friend Lynn, who wanted to use the lumber for furniture making. But the log had “gone to the bad” after two years on the ground under the gnarled old apple tree by the creek, and Lynn left us unexpectedly with a vast wealth of chestnut and walnut stored up for projects she will never start now. So, we did our work mindfully, Buster and I, sawing up that old maple for the winter ahead.
This wood will heat me twice, maybe more, as wood cutting is said to do. It warmed me as we worked to think of the lives of my friend and the fallen maple and the standing wizard of an apple tree. I gave thanks that, at least in short bursts, hard work still warms me, too, and feels mighty good on a late September early morning, until the sun comes over the ridge, and the sweatshirt and cap come off. Those tough chunks of maple that we brought to the house today will heat me again, come December, when we will stay indoors much of the time, and I will read to Buster more inspiring tales of northern adventure.
Warming to Winter
Ann, the dog, and I took our walk early this morning. With the shortening days, the sky was coal mine dark save for the waning light of a gibbous moon. Shadows of the ridgetop forest fingered across the western half of the valley pasture. Moonlight and shadow set worlds apart—the worlds of silver-gray moon-lightness and of deep cobalt darkness, a diorama in monochrome.
In the dew, leaf and bough glistened and winked as we walked wordlessly. But moonlight was not the only light, after all. Tiny glow worms made their own from deep in the lifeless grasses, the insect’s glow just perceptibly amber, the dewdrops crystal-silver with moonglow. We watched our breath rise in a vapor ahead of us. Winter was very near.
Gossamer Days
It might have been a heavenly invasion I saw on that calm, late-September day as I walked up toward the house from the woods. As it dropped just below the top of the tulip poplars, the sun shone brilliantly in the dry air of early autumn. With my eyes barely in the shadow of the dense foliage, beyond the treetop I could see dozens of dazzling specks suspended in the sun’s rays. They might have been slowly westward-moving daytime satellites, or very high-flying reconnaissance aircraft. They might not have been from this world at all.
This unexpected visitation was unsettling, and I watched uncertain what it was that I was seeing. Then, a speck with a tail floated by! And another, with an even longer undulating silver thread streaming behind the mote of light, a tail that appeared to be of fantastic length. The filament was shining from within—a floating fiber-optic strand visible a quarter mile away. The webs came in waves, moving passively in the currents of an invisible sea. Flying things with silver wings, beetles perhaps, swam frantically against the current but all were swept along westward and out of view.
The silent procession continued for a short while, until the sun’s setting toward the horizon by a few degrees shut out the lights of the shining wings and webs. There was no one but the dog to tell of this amazing thing, this epiphany that I had received most accidentally, unsought and unexpected. Wondering how universal my private vision of the floating spiders might be, I found what is called the “Spider Letter” written by a twelve year old Jonathan Edwards to a judge, a friend of his father’s, in 1723. It was as if young Jonathan had been peering over my shoulder, as he described precisely what I had seen:
“In a very calm and serene day in the aforementioned time of year [late August to late September] standing at some distance between the end of a house or some other opaque body, so as just to hide the disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays, and looking along close by the side of it, I have seen vast multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings, brightly reflecting the sunbeams, and some of them of a great length, and at such a height that one would think that they were tacked to the vault of the heavens . . . making a very pleasing as well as surprising appearance. It is wonderful at what a distance these webs may plainly be seen in such a position to the sunbeams; some at a great distance appear several thousands of times as big as they ought. . .There appears at the end of these webs spiders sailing in the air with them, doubtless with an abundance of pleasure, though not so much as I have beheld them and shewd them to others. And since I have seen these things I have been very conversant with spiders.”
A revelation of radiant webs like prayers floating unseen above my head for fifty autumns has made me forevermore conversant with floating spiders. Perhaps they are angels. What wonders hide beneath my boots or hover in air just above my skin, I cannot imagine. Look up. Miracles must be everywhere.
Fortress of Solitude: October Rain
From the front porch this morning, it would be hard to tell if any remaining fall song birds are singing. The drip drip plunk on the metal roof, the soft hiss of tiny drops as they fall, and the blessed gush of a creek from bank to bank dominate the audiosphere. We’ve more water headed toward the Atlantic today than we have seen since April.
The damp dreariness of the day has washed yesterday’s fall color from everything. Tree bark and leaf, rock and grass appear like photographs overexposed—colorful but not vibrant, sharp but lacking the depth that sunlight brings. Rhododendron leaves are lacquered and stiff-black under gray sky; their surfaces mirror what little light there is. Buster leaps over and I high-step through the torrent that rushes down Nameless Creek, bustling once more. Its volume of flow and of happy wet noise are welcomed after the awful drought of three years and an especially parched summer and fall. Last week’s ankle high water is puppy-back high today. Creek water, usually crystal clear, has color from topsoil washed from a pasture up the ravine a mile or more away.
Goose Creek Anniversary
Last night we celebrated our third anniversary here. Three years ago, for the first time in the one hundred and twenty year history of the house, the john could be visited indoors—and in the light—in the coldest wee hours with the flick of a switch! After the six hardest months of our lives, the old shell of a house was warm and bright on that first morning here in November, 1999.
But the silence was frightening. We had lived in quiet places before, but there was an intensity to the calmness here that we had not imagined during the six months of noise and confusion to make the house livable. Now that we, in fact, lived here and the carpenters and painters and plumbers and delivery trucks were finally gone, I’ll be honest: the serenity and remoteness of our new home was a little unsettling.
Just the night before we moved, still in our place on Walnut Knob, we had slept high on the edge of the Blue Ridge, up in the clouds. I wondered during the first days here if I might suffer claustrophobia, sunk beneath ridges, looking up at them rather than perched atop one looking down.
The crunch of a car passing on the road in the dark was startling; all who passed then were rank strangers, potential intruders, passing close to the house on the road just beyond our bedroom window. Those few who lived on our road were nice, hardworking folks, but rougher cut than the retirement summer home people who drove past our cabin near the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Often, cars would go by very slowly or even stop near the house with their engines running. It was only months later after meeting some of those neighbors that I learned they had stopped to admire the improvements in the old place that most thought would never see another coat of paint, much less the modern amenities it now possessed. But cars even stopped at night. Now I know why—to admire the valley that is open pasture once again. It is a wonderful sight at night, when moonlight turns the thin fog an opalescent blue and a silhouetted pair of deer browse in the tall grass. I can’t fault those who passed for stopping here; I would, too.
Home is not just the house, with its new windows, wiring, freedom from outhouses, and its comfortable black porch dog. Our home is all of this, where we “live and move and have our being.” Home is the high inaccessible ridges where the deer go during the daytime; it is the plot of redeemed pasture where the grasses swirl in the wind and the woodchucks chuck wood; we live in the reaches of two rocky creeks whose waters rise and fall predictably with each rain. Our new home is even the sad timber-harvested berry patch up behind the house, where the white pines are making new forest for our children’s children.
It is good to be here. I wonder what I will say about our lives on this November morning three or five years down the road. Already, we are deeply rooted here, and I like to think our grandchildren and their children will love it just as we do. We will make this ours, and as I have said on many occasions, Lord willing, when we move from this house and this home, it will be in a simple pine box.
Rise and Fall
The north winds, gusty and erratic yesterday, are steady and predictable this morning. A raven takes advantage of the uniform current, faces into the wind, wings adjusted just so. He hangs motionless against the gale as if painted on the sky. Then, when he takes a notion, he turns round with the flow and tucking his wings against his body, falls like a rock, pulling exuberant out of the dive at the last moment.
I watch him repeat this rough ballet several times before I come inside, jealous of his world view. That I should learn to ride the currents of my own life with such art and joy!
Near the Source
Nameless Creek comes from darkness underground, beginning in a dozen springs a mile south. In its past, it has raged back and forth between the ridges, swollen and angry, carving our narrow valley from Appalachian stone. Today the little stream purrs along peacefully enough, cold, clear as liquid glass, on its way down mountains. It carries the smell of snow to a sandy beach on the sea. Tonight our little creek will freeze along the edges. In a month, we will hear a river embryo calling faintly from under ice and we will walk on water.
Winter Walk
The sun will be up soon, and we will be heading out for our morning walk, this week after Thanksgiving. We are now one season removed from summer and our lives have taken on a different character, a seriousness not familiar in June.
A June morning walk is a casual and spontaneous amble, and we are in no particular hurry to go or to come back. We follow our usual loop down the pasture road. We step across the creek on the dry backs of boulders in the shade of the lanky rhododendron.
We amble home north along the logging road, and use our hiking sticks to keep us from slipping in the wet grass. Now and then we stop to note a new arrival in the calendar of budding and blooming things. The air is still, heavy with the familiar smells of warm earth, fields and woods. A hundred birds sing about themselves from high in tulip poplars that are sprouting tiny leaves. At the end of our walk, the path leads downhill toward the meadow where we cross the creek once more and return home.
When winter comes, our morning walks don’t end, but they are no longer a casual tiptoe through the woods. Winter walks are a deep-sea dive into cold and dark, in a submersible of wool and down. Peeking out from stocking hats like diving helmets, we trudge heavily against the stern and biting currents of polar air that wash over us like waves. Without our swaddling spacesuits, our frail pink flesh would turn blue and brittle as December leaves, and our expedition would never be heard from again.
A summer breath, outdoors or in, is little different. But with the first breathing in of winter air outdoors, you know that you have stepped out into a world that is remarkable for things missing. Winter outdoors is a play on a stage vaguely familiar, from which most of the props have been temporarily removed. Heat is only one of the absent characters. Diminished too are color, smell and the sounds and motion of living nature. Even molecules move with lethargy.
Come the play of winter, all the best lines have been spoken by autumn; and, except for the wind, there are no words.
Summer is soft, yielding and supple. Winter is hard, unyielding and brittle. You feel winter through your feet and hear it in your steps. Cold dry air has its own smell, and there is a sound that belongs to the cold of winter. It is the sound of breathing, ears muffled, holding the beat of your own heart in wool like an echo in an empty shell. No birds call; insects sleep frozen solid under bark and sod.
Winter smells of wool and of wrapped humanity inside. From beyond the thick shroud of winter clothes there is only the near-fragrance of frost. No motes of aroma escape on warm currents from spicebush, sassafras, white pine, from dank soft creek mud or pasture clover. There should be an olfactory adjective, like monochrome, to describe the lunar-stark aromasphere of winter.
Edge of Winter
Something is not right with Buster, the dog-king of Goose Creek. First one limb, then another goes lame. One day he limps and whimpers and can’t stand or walk normally. Then, the next day, he seems fine.
He’s not quite four years old yet—not middle aged for a Black Lab—and should be in his prime now. This morning when he came down the single step into our bedroom to wake us, as he does every day, his legs came out from under him, and he fell in a sickening thud on the bare floor. He seems so bewildered by it all and we can’t tell him—or each other—that it will be alright soon. Part of his problem is pain and some is weakness in front and back legs; even his neck seems to bother him at times. The ticks were unusually bad until earlier this month, and Ann wonders about tick-borne diseases as a cause for his symptoms. I don’t think this would account for the strange migrating weakness.
The pup was born within a few days of the day that we put our money down on this place. He’s been part of the whole of this household on Goose Creek since it started. It doesn’t seem right doing anything without him along. I miss his company when he doesn’t have the energy or the will to go out with me to bring in firewood. Some days he barely lifts his head to watch me pull on my boots and jacket. This isn’t like Buster.
As Ann and I notice our own slow physical decline, we live vicariously through the strength and vitality of the dog. When he races across the pasture rousting the deer from the shadows at the end of the field, our hearts run with him. We joy in his strength and agility as he pulls effortlessly up the sheer banks above the pasture road just to chase a squirrel up a tree. When he is down, we are diminished.
We got our first snow two days back—a wet one that broke branches and littered our one-lane road with limbs. Rather than drive home in the storm, Ann spent her first storm-night at the hospital where she is able to stay in an empty patient room. She has some but not all of the comforts of home there, while home grows empty and time passes oh so slowly when it’s just me and the dog within these walls for days on end.
The power went out about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, during my second day here alone in the storm. I read by candle-light for a couple of hours and heated up a can of soup on the gas stove. The radio was nice until the batteries went dead. I called one of the kids on the phone just to hear another voice. By seven o’clock it was dark, my eyes and brain were tired and I was ready for bed, or at least ready for the numbness of sleep. Going to bed felt like waving the white flag of surrender. So instead, I got dressed for the cold and took the dog for a slow walk in the snow.
A half-moon was lifting through bare trees, above the eastern horizon behind thin, pink clouds. The ink-black dog cast an otherworldly shadow against the blue lunar light. In the beautiful moments here, time alone is the most wholesome and nourishing solitude.
If this new reality of mine is a journey, then I am approaching the edge of a featureless tundra just ahead—the unknown terrain of the coming winter in isolation. To get to the other side of it, I choose to be an explorer embarking on an expedition, not a lost soul wandering aimlessly in the frozen desert.
But I don’t know what lies ahead. Explorers have a destination, a goal, some reason for crossing unknown lands. And a map. What are my reasons? What are the landmarks on my new map to give me bearings, and what is at its farthest edge?
January Thaw
Today we enjoy the mixed blessing of the January Thaw. It is a bit early, but why not? Every other aspect of the weather has thumbed its nose at the predictions over past months. A weatherman’s air mass, we have seen, can be mutinous and surly as a spoiled teenager, and without warning, aim a high-powered wind that brings down the roof on unsuspecting Wal-mart shoppers in Texas. And in a different mood, that same bubble of air a few days farther east may decide to just sit down over Virginia as it has this week, tepid and tame as a housecat, and purr contentedly until the jet stream tickles its sensitive underbelly, and it moves lethargically on toward the Bahamas.
The January Thaw is a teaser, a complimentary packet of pretzels on the agonizingly long flight to spring. After more than a month of deep freeze and ice in December, the subsoil is still hard as iron, down to the frost line. But this week’s thaw has temporarily softened the top few inches that slip and slide around under foot and tire like chocolate pudding on a rock. Pastures and fields are rutted with brown swerving parallel scars from trucks feeding livestock; cattle stand around in muddy boots, up to their elbows in pasture muck. Should the seasons relent their rebellious tirades and decide to play by the rules, the Mud Season will start for real, more or less predictably, sometime in late March.
The streets of downtown Floyd are outlined in cinders and salt, marking where the gray mounds of snow have finally vanished. The January Thaw this week has sent flake and crystal down the city drains, heading now for Little River, and from thence north through the New, and the Kanawha and Ohio, then looping back south to the Gulf of Mexico where they will retire on a beach on the Mississippi coast.
Meanwhile, a few short-sleeved human types busy themselves in the tiny heart of town on this warm January day, finding excuses to step outdoors onto solid and temporarily dry surfaces of sidewalks in the comfortable afternoon. They greet their neighbors before the real winter comes on the heels of these brief days of duplicitous temperance.
Cars and trucks along the street during the Thaw are gray-brown, the color of lost dogs, embarrassed to be seen looking so forlorn. But what’s the point in taking a bath, they ask. In this short, in-between chapter that falls between pre-winter and real winter, the mud falls on the godly and the ungodly alike, so the Subaru and the farm-use truck next to it don’t look all that different, mud being a great equalizer in Nature’s homogenizing democracy.
Wind in winter
Last night the wind screamed overhead like a great circling bird, back and forth from ridge to ridge. Every now and then it would swoop down to clutch at our porch roof and ruffle the metal, making a strange rumbling studio-thunder sound effect. Then it would lift again and circle a thousand feet above us, coursing the high places round and round, sounding like a great locomotive caught in a switching yard right over Goose Creek.
Now summer winds throw angry tantrums like this just briefly, and only when performing the accompaniment to a summer thunder storm. A million green living leaves modulate the pitch and timbre of the wind, so that even in the summer gale there is a softness, a lifting and cleansing quality that is altogether missing from wind in winter. Summer wind appears at the height of the storm, strutting and fretting about briefly; and then it exits stage left and its pitch falls off, Doppler-like, and only a cooling breeze is left behind. I have no complaints to register against summer winds.
But winter wind arrives here irritable and there is no cheering it up. Dense and gray, heavier than air, it sinks into our valley like a glacier of broken glass, pushing down against hard and frozen earth, and it will not relent. When the wind howls at midnight, I dream of the Old Man Winter of children’s books, his cheeks bloated full, lips pursed and brow furrowed, exhaling a malevolent blast below at frail pink children in wet mittens.
If you listen, you may think you hear a tone to the roar of January wind, a discrete pitch of a note that you could find on a piano keyboard. But this isn’t so. In the same way all rainbow colors blend to make white light, January wind is the sound of all tones that nature can create, at once together as the Old Man overhead blows through a mouthpiece formed of ridge and ravine, across reeds of oak and poplar trunks.
Winter wind is the white noise of January that won’t go away.
Rivers Below
When the kids were small, we turned page after page in the amazing picture books by David Macaulay, including one called Underground. I don’t know what the kids thought of it, but I was mesmerized by the author’s architectural cross-section of a big city. The vantage point was looking up at a downtown cityscape from its roots, showing the detail of what was underground below it. His images revealed a world of pipes and pilings, tunnels and sewers, and processes that go on under our urban feet, day and night, to keep a city working—a world necessary and real, but out of mind and sight. I never saw any city the same way after experiencing the new reality from the pictures in that book.
Years later, we moved to a small farm in Wythe County where we had a pasture fenced in for cattle but no water for them to drink. The old spring sat against the edge of a shallow bowl that long ago had filled with mud and more recently had been invaded by willows and overgrown by alders. Over the course of a month, with a mattock and shovel and long metal pole I gouged and clawed further and further back into the muddy bank, until finally one day, I struck the limestone bedrock. But there was no water there. The next day, that spot was darker than the dry soil around it. With more digging, this wet patch showed a slow visible seep. I abandoned the pick and shovel for a hand trowel and heavy screw driver as I worked back into the soft limestone. After weeks of teasing away the rock and mud, I arrived at the excavation one morning to find a miraculous flow had appeared! Soon this underground water filled a pond where our children floated on rafts on a summer day and ice skated on its mirrored surface in winter. Water out of stone—the nearest thing to magic I have known.
There is a “city” of structure under my feet here in this very spot where I write, many miles from civilization. Carry Mr. Macaulay’s camera down a thousand feet below our pasture on the banks of the headwaters of Goose Creek, and above the impervious core of ancient rock you will see a vast blanket of stone full of tiny pores and cracks. Through it run creeks and rivers in the dark. Contained by it are canyons, caves and lakes filled with ancient rains.
In places this water-filled layer comes to earth, to the world above ground, and cold subterranean water oozes and flows from clefts in the side of snow-covered hills. Finding each other in low places, united by gravity, ribbons of mountain spring water merge and flow together and cut their way through the very rock from which they were born.
See this water of Goose Creek, rushing past with such hurry. It will someday rise from sea to cloud to move again over mountains. From under these ridges will pour light and sound into creeks flowing past those who will stand on these banks, careless above river worlds underground.
ICE: Figments and Formations
You hear of remote country places where so little goes on that the locals sit around and watch the grass grow. I’m here to tell you that I have experienced the winter counterpart of that mindless rapture, and of this fact I am not ashamed. For the past two months, I have watched the ice grow and morph in our creek, and it has been a most beautiful, amazing and confusing hobby. I do not know what I am seeing, cannot explain it, and lament the fact that I have missed fleeting opportunities to capture rare photographic images to remind me of all the wonders I have and have not seen.
Witnessed: crystal stalactites of ice that look every bit as if they were formed from the roof of a limestone cave. And sharp transparent shards like snowflakes that form a visible fringe along the edge of the creek. I have seen the results of something like snow that forms overnight, six inches deep, right along the water’s surface in a zone of supersaturated frozen air. This magic leaves a white-spongy pad of airy creek-snow on the rocks, even on mornings when it has not snowed on land the night before.
Fluted. Filigreed. Lacey. Cancellous. Clear as crystal glass, blue-green as a glacier. Granular and rough over here at the top of this rocky ledge; and just there in the shadow of the bluff, a smooth, flat sheet protects itself by reflecting the pale pastel light of a weak winter sun. Ice buttons and balls, goblets and goblins decorate the drab grasses at creek’s edge with bright colorless ornaments. Air bubbles under glass move rodent-like downstream, in a warren of liquid and crystal.
Seeds in the Snow
It is the time of year, in some parts of the country, when a body can begin to lose hope; a time when the White Witch of Narnia rules, and it is “always winter but never Christmas.” This is a season of gray mud outside and gray walls inside, of too much knowledge of the same rooms since early December. Snow by now is no longer beautiful or exciting, blue skies and the sound of songbirds are not even a memory.
I felt foolish in my rubber boots as I stepped over the fence wire that the deer have broken down around the garden. I stood there in the mud yesterday in the falling sleet in the middle of our garden where once there were living things, thinking:
Let me have life about me that is green. Resurrect in me the knowledge and hope that things will grow in rows and clusters, will flower and fruit in gold and red, will spill yellow pollen into the air and smell like bread baking. Let me have hope that here, where I stand in frozen mud and slush around my ankles, I will feel the warm sun on my neck and hear bees buzzing in the corn tassels above my head. Give me rich, crumbling soil beneath my feet and let me hold a handful of sweet earth, fragments of the composted remains of last year’s harvest—a better soil than when we started this little patch. Days are longer now, if not warmer. Gardening season is not a cruel myth. Plan. Anticipate. Plant seeds in your mind.
Honor of Wood
Yesterday, in the weak sun of mid-March, I split kindling, standing in a thaw of mulch that squished like a soggy sponge under my rubber boots. The day was warm enough that, after a few minutes, I was down to my flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Here in the heel-end of the winter woodpile are remnants of wood dry now for more than three years—sassafras, dogwood, sourwood. I relocated all of it here from Walnut Knob, truckload at a time, when we moved from across the county in the fall of 1999. Now we’re dipping into the wood archives, and I know the history of every piece. I burn it with some reluctance and much reverence.