Fragments From Floyd: Field Notes ~ 21 November 03

To Roanoke/RadioStation/Mill Mountain and back along the Blue Ridge Parkway

image copyright Fred First

At 9:00 a.m in mid-November, the sun is a rising promise hiding behind the ridge. Already its warmth is brightening raggedy peaks. Through one deep cleft in the Rhododendron cleavage, filaments of extruded platinum light pierce the the soft fog like a spotlight falling on a small stage at the edge of the creek. There are no actors, and only one in the audience.

Our reclusive neighbor by nine o'clock had washed her clothes in the creek and hung them like coonskins on crude lines strung haphazardly between trees in the cold gloom.

A hunter's happy meal skeletonized, its styrofoam remains have been tossed overboard as if the man were far at sea and only he in the world to know flotsam.

I prepare myself for the ascent out of Goose Creek, up into the world. Who am I today as I climb to high ground? Jack climbing the beanstalk? Or perhaps a deep diver bulging in his round helmet rising slowly on a tether of air that is Shawsville Pike, lifting carefully to avoid the bends. Near the top, light shatters the surface in a thousand spines of sun through pines as my bubbles rise above me.

So much death comes from our travels. Grim greasy spots and a smear of hair, enough to name the deceased only to type. Raccoons, possums, groundhogs, squirrels. Nameless vagabonds, their mother does not even mourn them. There near the Feed and Seed lay the north half of someone's German Shepherd just on the edge of the hiway--a red rag of raw hide wrung where a tail once wagged and strong legs frisked when the back door opened. How numb and callous of me, of all of us, to drive past, swerving slightly, in a hurry. The dog had a name. Later today in a black moment someone will find what is left of him and be undone.

A black and white cow backlit by morning sun stands in Back Creek in water just up to its cold teats

The woman I see in the rear view mirror at the first traffic light in Cave Springs is speaking in a most animated way and gesticulating wildly. She is alone. There is no phone held to her ear. Her left arm is extended and her hand holds a small something that must be a recorder. How odd. Odder: I am saying all of this into my small handheld recorder as I wait at the light, studying the lady behind me who sees me speaking into my hand.

It has been several weeks since I passed this way (Electric Road in Roanoke) and so a few more vacuums are being abhorred and much needed consumer opportunities are being provided to the deprived citizens of Roanoke, bless 'em. More fast food, cheap gas, and the mandatory baubles and tinsel without which urban life would not be worth living. And the construction is universally of metal studs so that a new building under construction looks like the mouth of an adolescent just home from the orthodontist.

A miniature mountain encroaches into the heart of Roanoke. My my magic maps I discovered a way to leave the center of town over this (Mill) Mountain and travel 40 miles to home without a single traffic light! No way this was the shortest route but I wasn't keeping score of miles. I stopped at every scenic overlook on the Parkway and had every one of them to myself. What a blessing not to be dogged by hurry.

As the hand of God caresses the good earth, mountains are his Braille, as if he could not see it all. The Appalachians are raised pages of praise most pleasant in their gentle relief and covered everywhere with a soft velvet of forest.

Mute walls of fractured rock rise mile upon mile of the Parkway as the mountains like some great Leviathan that has crawled long ago out the basin of the Great Valley, a bony ridge laid down end to end-- the vertebrae of a great unmoving spine.

Old barns dying in decay along the parkway are cliche. To stop for a picture is so tourist. And yet there is something that calls out to me from this dilapidating barn. It once held the lives of my geographical ancestors here. Doors gape like empty sockets, framed in a tumble of briers like razor wire, fences separate the present from a living past.

There is in the posture of woody things in winter-- in vines and low trees and spreading branches a certain kind of symmetry and form . . . a carefree sort of exuberance but not entirely free-form. That there should be the rudiments of order in what appears to us as disorder is no surprise. Laws of chaos among winter branches have to do with the same sunlight and gravity and winter wind that makes us, too, hold ourselves against cold in predictable ways.

Comments

I don't know what else to say about this composition other than it reads like fine prose. I found myself saddened by the last few sentences. How could we?

Posted by: Clarence | November 22, 2003 11:32 AM

what a lovely picture...
Poor, sweet dog...

Posted by: michelle | November 22, 2003 5:39 PM

Fragments From Floyd

Personal journal of Fred First from a remote valley in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia

Field Notes ~ 21 November 03

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