Fragments From Floyd

If misery loves company, then we should be pretty happy. I keep hearing of more folks who once were able to garden unmolested–or should I say unDEERravaged. But once THEY get the taste of something tastier than grass, there’s no turning back. And others I’ve heard about are going vertical so the horizontal is worth the time, expense and sweat-equity that goes into a garden.

And this garden fence will outlast us by a long shot, and others will reap the harvest of our investment–her investment, really. I would have given up. Between the above ground and below ground invaders, the insects that come earlier each year, the cold soil, the arthritic body parts and the general lassitude of the end of middle age, I would have written off the garden as one of those things once precious and productive of both gratification and groceries.

Life goes on, and as one ages, they gradually relent and give things up, rather in reverse order to the gains added in strength, skill and wit as one grows older. I was prepared to let gardening go. I hope I’ll be glad she was determined to invest in the earth–an increasingly wise place to put one’s income as banking on human economies becomes more and more a gamble. But I digress.

I’ll show additional shots over the next few weeks and the summer. This one puts the garden in context–below and nearer the house, wedged between the road (plus the county’s cussed 15 foot right of way that eats considerably into our only level potential garden plot) and the bank, which we’ve had to excavate into and then shore up with railroad ties on the house end. Exposure is long side to the southeast.

We were limited in the length and stopped where we did opposite the house because to come farther image-left brought us into the septic field. Construction offers not so many options on “mountain land” and you use what you’ve got.

You can see how close to the creek the garden is–good for using the little lawn and garden battery for pumping to irrigate if we need to (versus running a hose straight down the drive from the well’s artesian pressure to power a trickle-hose.)

Being on the creek is bad in the sense that we are in the low point of a low sheltered valley– a frost pocket–and a growth zone NORTH of the main plateau of the county a mile and a half west and five hundred feet higher than we are. Our hours of sun, of course, are also reduced here (and so is the summer heat that Roanoke will endure. We’re often 10 degrees or more cooler here in July and August.

So we’ll need season extending ideas. Cold frames, for instance. And someone emailed about “plunge pits”–I haven’t googled that yet, but will. I’m also going to put down some scrap black plastic in a few places for a couple of weeks to see if we can get the soil temps up so seeds don’t rot in our garden when most Floydians have plants a foot high.

The garden shed will cover the width of the garden and be ten feet deep, open for the most part on the house side. You can see the taller post that will support the header for the metal roof. That work may start today.

Bottom line: I’m feeling almost extinguished garden zeal again. We’ll see what comes of it. Stay tuned.

   The neighborhood kids piled in our Chrysler, front and back, all eyes fixed on the odometer. And on the 5th or 6th trip around the block, there was what we’d come to see: all those zeros rolling up at ten thousand miles–an incomprehensibly large round number. Wow!

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It is called “The British Beat Live! and was a gift recently from my wife. On the CD, the stars from the sixties–those who survive and can still stand and sing–do so before a live audience of those who knew their songs as Top 40 hits. They perform some more or less mutated version of their original music (even while the backup bands provided for the event are often decades younger as rock band members of the era probably had rather short performance or life expectancies).

I used to sing those songs and play them on the guitar, so small wonder I had to sing along with my peers (where do those lyrics live in the brain all these decades?) in their noble if not always impeccable efforts to recreate those lived moments from a time long ago. Don’t Let the Sun Catch you Crying. A World Without Love. Groovy Kind of Love.

A thousand gray heads swayed and bobbed in the swirling stage lights to the rough beat as Reg Pressly and one or more Troggs hammered out Wild Thing. You make my heart sing. I had to wonder if that much excitement might make their hearts go into fibrillation. Old people, young hearts, and the deep places that melody and memory live together. Life goes on within us and without us, another British group told us.

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I watch the miles add up, having been around the block a time or two myself by now. So adding a six on this particular date to but a single zero is just one more mile, and yet also makes for what seems like an incomprehensibly large number. Wow!

So climb on in, lets see where this thing is headed. And by all means, roll down the windows and let the wind blow what hair your have left; turn on the radio to the Oldies Channel and crank up the travelin’ tunes! Let’s see what kind of music the sixties give us this time ’round the block.

Seems fitting that this seasonal story be retold just now as the same set of characters and props congregates on Goose Creek: a mailbox, a writer with a gun and a phoebe intent on defacing a front porch lintel with moss and poop. Here’s how the story ends:

I slapped the handcuffs on the criminal’s wrists and wisked me away, sobbing. I am incarcerated now in the white clapboard house near the damaged mailbox, and will be serving a sentence of three hundred thousand words to life. I am counting on early parole for good adverbs. Please send e-cards (and if you could slip a small file in as an attachment, it’d be muchly appreciated.)

Read the rest of True Detective from Fragments ~ June 2003.

And I should add that we have solved (we hope) the lintel problem by covering it with aluminum foil that both protects the paint and confuses the bird. So far this year, no nests.

Some–perhaps many–of our virtual technologies separate us from the real events and places and times of our lives. That is exactly what so much of computer life consists of for some folks–the virtual travel, adventure, action and detachment of simulated realities that removes the X-boxer, the Second Lifer from the mundane grind of the ordinary.

Discovered this morning on my Mac a technological wonder that is like a digital knitting machine that does just the opposite of what I described above. It weaves together a tapestry of memories, experience and familiar faces using my photographs–tens of thousands of them–into a single image mosaic of another composition in time and place: a screen saver that creates an amalgam of a photographer’s life.

It begins like a normal image-based screen saver with a single image on the screen. After a short pause, that image recedes into the distance, becomes one of a thousand, and other images appear in rows and columns, also receding, growing smaller and smaller as they move into the “distance” of the monitor screen.

In the end, each of the several thousand images on the screen become a pixel in another image in the group of images I’ve selected. A first image of Ann’s Falls is joined by scanned images of our children, the dog in the snow–Buster, our dog that died in 2004; friends who visited us here so long ago I’d forgotten; various silly blog posts going back to 2002–images aggregated and oriented as needed to build light and shadow, blues, greens and golds to give shape to the “whole” of our house in the fall. This then starts the sequence again, building another whole from fragments of memory and light.

Life is like this after all–each conversation, each view out the window a metaphor mosaic of all the days, memories, language, and experience come before, nothing lost, receding into the distance called the past–pixels in our evolving grasp of who and where we are and were.

You can watch a demo of this here.

She handed me the container, a macho moment for certain, great time to be a guy.

“Get the top off for me” she pleaded. “My hands just can’t do it.”

As ergonomics go, the container’s top was out-sized for the average grip, four inches across–a bulk quantity of one of our regular daily doses. She intended to redistribute the hundreds of pills into smaller, more cabinet-sized containers.

No problem. Thumb joint arthropathy notwithstanding, I’d crank that sucker open and back to her before she had time to get back to the kitchen.

Wrong. The widest possible grip forced the thumb and index finger into a “C” around the top in a wide open arc–the wider the grip beyond tool-handle circumference, the less the grip force. The slick bottom part of the container rotated along with the top as I turned counterclockwise. Fine.

I put on the dishwashing gloves for traction. No dice.

I found a strap wrench in the closet under the stairs, its non-slip rubber grip and mechanical leverage exactly what it would take to get the job done. Didn’t. My hands were killing me by now.

I banged the top with the butt end of a heavy knife to break the seal and tried again. Thing didn’t budge.

I cussed and sputtered and did what such threatened loss of manly self-esteem required. I grabbed a serrated steak knife outta the sink and cut the flippin’ bottom out of the container. I left it there on the countertop for all the other unopened pill bottles to see.

And the ultimate irony: the medication– Glucosamine. For arthritis.

This is the second part of a four part run in which father (me) and son (Nathan, author of Parts 2 and 3) describe our variant perspectives of his long back-roads walk home in 2000–from Bar Harbor, Maine to Goose Creek in Floyd County, Virginia. Part one is here. This time, Nate tells his side of this little hike.

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In his last installment of “A Road Less Traveled,” my dad reflected back on the origins of some of his more treasured gray hairs. In particular, he was thinking of a dumb stunt I pulled–a road that I traveled–eight years ago when I’d just turned 21.

I had recently developed an obsession with all things Northern. North for me, was no mere cardinal direction. It was, instead, a fabled place where adventure thrived. Somewhere up north, and soon, I’d move into some blustery hut and write bad poetry and eat snow till spring. Then, plump on whale-blubber and weeks of cheap wine, my real adventure would begin. I would wander to the roadside, put out my thumb, and like a poem scrawled on the back of a napkin, I’d blow away.

With Mom and Dad waving handkerchiefs behind me in Floyd that January of 2000, I drove a thousand miles northbound to Bar Harbor, Maine. For the next three blizzard-ridden months, I holed up in an attic and did a lot of the safe, sane things I promised Mom and Dad I would do. I brushed my teeth; I slept indoors (and sometimes in my car). I worked at a deli a couple doors down. And on the wilder fringes of things, I hiked Mount Desert Island for hours a day. And back in my room, I wrote hundreds of pages of excited babble that all boiled down to three words: Youth! Life! Possibility!

Dad seems to think that all along I was secretly scheming to walk back home to Floyd. But here he gives me too much credit. In fact, at that point, the idea had never yet crossed my mind. What I conceived early on was less a “plan” than a recipe: no money, no agenda, just an open road and a willingness for … well, whatever.

But on April Fool’s Day (fittingly enough) I put all these other ideas on hold. Late that night, wandering alone on a pitch-black road a few miles outside of of Bar Harbor, I stopped with exhaustion and laid down, looking up at a frigid, starry sky. And there, feeling my body heat leech into the asphalt, I knew that my plans had changed. I would have no more visions of hitched rides and freight trains: these only made the roadsides a blur. I wanted to see everything – the good, bad and sprawl alike – and that meant moving slowly, taking it in with every step. I had driven from Virginia to Maine in two days, and since had forgotten nearly all of it. I knew I wouldn’t forget a walk back home.

Ten days later, I hefted my dad’s creaky old Jansport on my back and headed out of Bar Harbor. I could still hear Mom’s voice ringing in my ears–recounting on the phone, the day before, how much she’d cried, how little she and Dad had slept in the last week, how sure they both were that I’d “learn the hard way” the fallen state and dangers of a modern world.

That night of the first day on the road, with some twenty miles now behind me, I was hiking yet again on a pitch-black road. The occasional headlights of logging trucks flashed through sleet and freezing rain. Each time a truck roared past, I stumbled to the roadside, often into puddles, my eyes forced down by the light’s blinding glare in the blackness.

This time, I had no attic to return to, and a warm bed in Virginia was still some thousand miles away. What on earth had I done? At one point, a passing pair of headlights silhouetted a roadside picnic table just ahead. Ready for any relief, I fished out my flashlight and hurried to the table. “No Camping” read the sign nearby.

At this point, I didn’t care. Gathering a small heap of fallen branches, I put a small pile between myself and the road, and covered my pack with the rest. Under the table, I climbed clumsily into my sleeping bag, and prayed for sleep.

For the next two weeks, as I walked my first two hundred miles toward New Hampshire, many of Mom and Dad’s lesser fears were realized. The temperature seldom rose above 35 degrees, and ten days of rain sought to kill me before I ever left Maine. There was also plenty of the foretold bad traffic, sprawl, and even some butt-nipping dogs, sure enough.

But what none of us expected–myself included–was the outpouring of kindness from the roadsides. In the first twelve days on the road, nine different strangers took me in. And suddenly I realized that my long walk home would be far less about the days walking and more about the late evenings talking with monks, cowgirls, and dying old tycoons.

…more in two weeks.

When our son, Nathan, brought home a 1940s-vintage manual typewriter at Thanksgiving break our first autumn here on Goose Creek (in 1999) our curiosity was aroused. The muffled tick-tick-ching of the keys and carriage return upstairs rattled late into the night, long after the old folks had gone to bed. What could be going on with him?

Just before he left to go back to college, we learned his plan (we suspected that he might have a plan): to take a semester off that year; to find a cabin on a frozen lake he imagined in the far north (Canada someplace, he said—what his plan possessed in enthusiasm it lacked in particulars) and to write a book.

The memory of those days comes to me easily now; it was this time of year—in the bleak mid-winter of 2000—that we reluctantly wished him God speed, waved goodbye and sent him off for Maine, as he would have it no other way. The plan had finally morphed into this final form:  he would take the ferry from Bar Harbor over to Nova Scotia some months later in the spring when the ice broke up.

There, he would hike the entire coast of the island, and write about that experience. At least that is what he lead us to think his journey would be about, and we could only see the cost of this hole in his college career. Only he alone could see then all that was to be gained from it.

He found a barely-heated attic room for rent in Bar Harbor and took a job in a local deli there in town. On his days off, he hiked the mountains and shorelines of Arcadia National Park, and in winter, pretty much had it all to himself. Every couple of weeks, we got a request for first one bit, then another of my hiking and camping gear. He’d never shown that much interest in backpacking before, but of course now, he’d need it for Nova Scotia.

And as the first of April arrived, he called us to explain what he really intended. The horror.

“Mom, dad, I’m not going to hike Nova Scotia after all. What I’m going to do—and I know you’ll tell me a hundred good reasons why this is a crazy idea, and I don’t blame you but you just gotta trust me on this, I know it’s what I’m meant to do—I’m going to hike home along the back roads from one small village or town to the next, every step from Bar Harbor to Goose Creek.”

Stiffing wails of protest, his mother and I exchanged stunned and disbelieving gazes from our respective phones. Nate continued, with our full attention.

“I’m going to cast my fate on the kindness of strangers and show America that there are still good people in this country, caring and trusting people who will take me in and show hospitality to a kid just passing through. I’ll not be taking the Appalachian Trail—except maybe a little through New York and New Jersey.”

“If nobody offers to put me up for the night, dad, I have your tent and backpack and lots of warm clothes. And if there’s ever anything I don’t have and need, I’ll never be more than a hour or so away from a phone, and I’ll call you and tell you what post office to send it to. I’ve thought it all through. I’m not an idiot. Besides, it’s spring. I’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

We were far from convinced, but with our only son a thousand miles from home, we offered him as much support as our parental angst would allow. With no small despair, we prayed for road angels and good Samaritans.  We waited every day that first week for his calls as we anticipated his progress south on the map south from Maine, step by small step.

But to return safely home would take tens of thousands of steps—down empty, nameless roads, past junk-yard dogs and pickup trucks with gun racks in the back window with near-misses by reckless drivers; breathing exhaust fumes; hungry, exposed to the cold, wet wind and lost. We imagined the worst. What did he imagine? What did he know about the world and would his naiveté and trust be his undoing?

After writing this, I called Nate in Missouri (yes, he survived)  and convinced him that he owed his long-suffering parents a retrospective as to what had been going on in his young mind as he concocted and carried out his hair-brain idealistic plan. He agreed to write. And so for the next two installments here, I will sit back and let him tell his side of the story. This should be interesting. (This series began in the February 20 edition of the Floyd Press.)

Here’s the best garden we’ve had–in 2002–and it’s been downhill since then.

A quick update for the 2 or 3 who may remember the ordeal of last summer’s non-garden, an enclosure we referred to with no small resentment and regret as our “Deer Salad Park.”

Frankly, given the less than ideal microclimate combined with the greater than average wildlife appetites, I would have chosen to give up and say NO GARDEN. She would not hear of it, even though it has necessitated taking desperate measures. Those measures thus far have been on paper. Soon, the Fortress Garden will go up. I hope she knows how absurd this thing is going to look. She says she doesn’t care. I’m betting otherwise, but only once it’s too late to relent.

We’re putting up 6 x 6 posts on which we will hang two tiers of cattle panels. The posts will be a bit more than 8 feet above ground. It will have smaller mesh panels at ground level to keep out rabbits (the groundhogs seem to stay over at the barn.) We can bring electricity down if we need to but will leave that for when Plan A has failed.

At the far end (still some 40 feet from where the old garden began) we’ll put up a shed the width of the garden (20 feet) though I thought 10 would do. It will contain a lockable 4′ door. Why 20 feet? We are constrained to use the available space between the septic tank and the county right of way. And lengthways, we can only build length as far as the septic distribution lines for sinking posts. We’re looking at other options for supporting the shed roof at the far end than sunk posts.

On the plus side, the new location is closer to the house (not that today’s deer give a rats acetabulum about people proximity. They look up from their grazing in a bored sort of way when we get closer than 100 feet–sometime less than half that. We will get more sun-hours so maybe the soil will warm a little sooner. Still, we live a growing zone north of most of Floyd County. We’ll need short season varieties because we really can’t get much growth down here until the first of June. The seeds just rot in the ground.

So. In addition to other life features this busy spring, we have a Fort to build. Pictures, as the Vegetable Stockade happens.

It’s a floor wax! No, it’s a dessert topping! You’re a physical therapist! No, you’re a writer and photographer. You use a PC. No, you use a Mac. The computer is on your desk. No, the computer is upstairs.

But wait–you’re both right!

Suffice it to say I am in a state of flux between what was and what will be. I live between.

I have a single (99 year old) patient to see today, and I’ve not had much work since September. I’m between doing what I’ve done for income for two years and doing what I’ll do with the rest of my so-called professional life. Looking like it might be time to move on, but on to what?

February: between the packed calendar of last fall and the busy calender of the coming spring. All I had hoped to get done on the book has pretty much been sacrificed to the computer transition, the newspaper columns and blog and the holidays and general lack of focus.

Today I have my first meeting of the Earth Day committee that will distract me until the 19th of April. A few days later, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative will be visiting Radford and Floyd and I’ll be involved with that. The spring months are always too busy, so anything I get accomplished before July will likely happen before March.

We’re between the end of this year’s wood supply and the beginning of next years. We’ll have some left over, but not enough. Yesterday, we carried the chain saw a quarter mile up the middle path, down onto a relatively gentle grade that until last year was so overgrown in blackberries (after the logging of 1994) that you couldn’t go there. Now we can see and can get to quite a bit of downed wood–mostly locust–that once cut will be 100 yards away and 30 feet higher than we can get the truck to pick it up. And did I mention each piece also has to be carried across the creek and up the bank? We are between cutting wood for heat almost all our adult lives and whatever comes along to replace that wonderful, labor-intensive source of winter warmth.

I’m composing this morning on a free version of VoodooPad (oops forgot that Camel Case words invoke another page in wiki-like fashion) and the hyperlinked document is not altogether unlike MS One Note that I am going to install and use but hopefully wean from as I go to all-mac.

I’m in-between being a total Mac moron and a devoted and capable user–oh so heavily skewed toward the former. Things still happen I can’t explain (some of these accidents have been for the better–like a rat randomly pressing levers may eventually get a pellet of food.

Now I am between the morning calm and the morning rush. I have kitchen duty with a crockpot recipe laid out for me. I have the dog to walk and paperwork to get in order before stopping by the Bank of Floyd (Save at the sign of the sock, as Garrison says of Bob’s Bank–it’s pretty much like that.) And I am between the calm of the morning and the calm of having arrived back home to my blessed muddle of a life fixed temporarily twixt the cradle and the grave. We are, all of us, between.

The low this morning was 0.3 degrees here. It is extraordinarily cold, but this is not altogether a bad thing. We found a tick on the dog earlier this week. We need the cold to wipe out those vermin finding their way further north each year as the seasons advance toward the warm side.

It is so cold that the wall heater in the bathroom off the Ann-ex is coming on automatically at its lowest-possible setting. The only way to shut it off is to fire up the propane wall heater in the larger room. That’s screwy.

And I am experimenting (since the more cold-natured one is away today) with draping things (the thin cotton window curtains on a variable tension rod and a wool lap throw hung on two hangers) across the exits to the room where I type and the wood stove does its best to throw off sufficient heat to keep me in the mid-sixties.

Theoretically, these drapes will keep more warmth captured where people (me) live and less lost to heating the empty parts of the house. Come time for SHMBO to come home, I’ll take down my experimental heat-holders and let the dark parts heat up for a while.