Fragments From Floyd

It is bound for Goose Creek. Three miles south and four hundred feet below this waterfall's base, this cold plunging flow will merge with Bottom Creek. From there, the South Fork will meet the North, and the Roanoke River will add more and more little tributaries like ours along the way, gaining volume and spreading out to flow lazily across the costal plain into Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic.

Water, wind and time have made these mountains smooth, so that when the land is so steep that it will not hold soil--as you can see here in this rock face--the stone underneath shows its history. It has been polished by time, worn away, every crag and jut, by the ages.

Sometimes in a beautiful spot like this one in the woods or mountains, I sense that there is more there than I'm seeing. ANd so I play what-if. It is a game that takes me beyond the ordinary way of seeing what my eyes alone can tell me about the place. In this mind-game, I feel free to take liberties with time and space.

I'm most often alone, so there is no one to tell of my fantasies, nor would I, mostly, as they are merely day dreams. And yet, they are dreams that help me come away from my revery with a bigger picture of the small field of view that my corporeal, time-stuck senses can perceive. An entire forest, biome or continent may be the focus of this surreal meditation, and so I might need to be suspended some distance above the earth to best see the results of my imaginary changes. Sitting beside this Floyd County waterfall this week, I mused:

What if: all the forests were shed--disappeared suddenly with no residue, so that only the bare earth of the Blue Ridge remained? It would seem in a way like a most terrible winter, only without the craggy brush of standing bare hardwoods that look from a distance like a pelt of suede or fur. Without its forest fur, these hills would be a monochrome wasteland, an alien place from another world. It is the broadleaved forest that we see when we look from a high place across ridge after ridge of corrogated Appalachian mountains. We remember mountains when we're away, but it is forest that comes up in our mind's eye--poplar and oak, cherry and locust, riding the undulating waves of granite and quartz, limestone and conglomerate below. But we haven't reached down to the heart of mountains. Not yet.

What if: after all the forest left, then all the topsoil and subsoil vanished--right down to bedrock, across all of southwest Virginia! In this naked earth, least changed to our vision would be the ridgetops. There, the soil is often only a few inches deep at best, or missing entirely from the exposed "outcrops" that create overlooks above the broad valleys below. Most strikingly altered to our view would be the valleys where eroded rock above has turned to soil and where streams over the eons have left a burden of silt and sand--tiny fragments, the crumbs of mountaintops, in layer upon layer. But valley soils can accumulate to great thickness, and when they suddenly disappear, our valleys at their full geologic depth would stand in stark contrast to the bare backbones of ridgetop high above. And in the Great Valley, there would be gaping holes in the floor of limestone--exposing the vast system of caverns and sinkholes that pock this stony mantle of rock normally hidden by the sediments of ages.

After some while floating above earth in my self-imposed phantasmic world, a bird called from a tree nearby. I shook off my daydream, and headed home. The soft humus that yielded to my steps and the trees I clutched as I slid down the steep rocky sides of the holler only moments before had been stolen away by a strange incantation. And I thought with a smile how, whenever I claim to love these mountains here, I'll know in my heart that it takes more than stone to make one.