Fragments From Floyd

Okay. Yesterday, I got started. Gaining momentum: the hardest part of a daunting task. I want a Table of Contents in the front of the second edition of Slow Road Home, and that is now in place in what will become the InDesign file for version two text.

I'd like you to have a copy of the TOC (helps if you also have the book!) and invite you to download and print the pdf file, then trim it to 5.5 x 8.5" and tuck it in the book so you can go back and find Solomon's Sheets or Slippery Slope of Winter.

Also yesterday, Fragments friend and new blogger Amy F was kind enough to send along her notations of bloopers and apparent bloopers (some will turn out to be just my weird way of saying things, or words I MADE UP!) This was enough to goose me forward, and I have created a revisions page that keeps up with the corrections found by readers (including me). I'd be very grateful if you'd email me (fred1st over on gmail.com) and I'll add your found flubs to the (I hope short) list.

My goal is to have the revised book text and cover files ready to send to Lightningsource in two weeks, so SRH could be available at your local book store by the first of December (if everything goes according to plan. Does that ever happen in real life?)

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"But what are they good for?" a student asked, when on a lab field trip we found these colorful insects in October feeding on the same species of milkweed as these I photographed in a roadside field a month ago.

I told him "ask me that question again in class", which he did, and we talked about our what's-in-it-for-me anthropocentric way of viewing nature. On the one hand, it's a legitimate question: how does this creature impact my life and why should I bother taking note of it? (Turns out, it's easier to say what chinch bugs are BAD FOR in that regard, to the extent that we understand the role in plays in human economies; it's an important pest of turf and grains.) On the other hand, an organism can impact the web of trophic and nutrient flow pathways in ways we cannot calculate into its perceived WORTH to us or to the planet until we manage to drive it toward or to extinction.

And then, for me, this little herd of immature insects in their spiffy black vests were "good for" an interesting photograph and a great question for discussion in biology class.

So what am I GOOD FOR? Hmmm? And YOU?

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Over the weekend I attended my first of the 31 annual Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative meetings at the Highlander Center in Newmarket, TN.

It is always a little awkward at first, going into the midst of a group that have a long history together with each other, and a history of only minutes with the new guy on first arrival. But the estrangment lasted maybe a half hour, and if it is any sign of how things went, I stayed up til midnight both nights, not wanting to miss any of the conversation, BS, music or general swarping.

The center of the center is the center of the circle, around which some 30 rocking chairs house anybody that wants to share, lie, pontificate or read their poetry or other writing. No signup sheet, no preferential treatment, no applause, and constructive criticism if requested.

The group, as seems common, was dominated by poets. Even so, my little poetoid essays were well received, and I found some kindred tree-hugging spirits among the group.

Had a chance to talk with lots of folks about what I have written and hope to write. One future endeavor in the near term will be to make revisions to SRH (kind readers, please send typos and other bloopers you run across ASAP!) and prepare for second-edition books from an alternate source than the offset printing of the first run.

I'll be researching LightningSource to digitally print the next books, knowing there will be some concessions in the appearance of the books (tolerable and minor, I'm hoping) but with the advantages of my not having to deal with a half-room full of books, not having to hand deliver them to bookshelves in stores, and especially to the distribution avenues that will open up with a contract with LS.

I also talked with a few folks about the possibility of color plates in books, including the idea of doing a children's nature book that would include photos of the various insects, birds, salamanders and such with the take-home lessons of nature fact, land ethic, stewardship and knowing one's place in the world. Hmmm. Something to think about.

I've hastily put up a gallery of a few SAWC images and will be adding captions over the coming couple of days. I didn't have much success using the Powershot indoors, my fault, not the camera's.

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Deary day ahead, so I need to think back to more colorful scenes from the recent past. I don't know why I haven't posted an image from this photoshoot along the Parkway from a least a month ago. But here you go: a wildflower reminder of what a beautiful world we live in. (Click for larger image, where as is the case for landscapes, the small image just doesn't capture enough of the composition's scale and proportion.)

Pictured: red cardinal flower, orange impatiens, deep yellow sneezeweed and goldenrod, white boneset and purple iron weed--planted by no one, for everybody.

(The landscape version will make a handsome print! I'm hoping to offer Fragments images for sale as prints or cards, but then, I'm hoping for a lot of things. We'll see how that works out.)

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Squint your eyes a little, let go disbelief, and this dew-covered foxtail spike becomes a city-scape at night (and with a little Photoshopping of the foreground) complete with waterfront reflections.

Goofy picture for a giddy state of mind. All the woes and wonderings about where the blog would go next in its continuing vagabondage have been answered, due to the kindness of friends. I slept well last night, knowing that, in a few weeks, blogging will be about sharing words and pixels, not fretting over the mechanics of stuff under the hood.

I can't say for certain, but it is looking like I might transition to Word Press for the blogging tool. This will necessitate moving to another server, because my present server doesn't do WP for technical reasons. I'm hoping to have comments remain intact for the present FFF which will remain accessible as archives and linked to the new blogsite. But that file is getting huge, what with more than 3000 entries and 10K comments, plus all the images over the years. I'll start off lean and clean (and probably pretty bare-bones) and grow again--Fragments 2. Will I rename the new blog? Not if I can help it. It will hopefully redirect page visits from the old url to the new one, seamlessly. Stay tuned.

So thanks to longsuffering Doug Thompson for his care-giving in the continuously-declining health of FFF over the past year and a half. His help and encouragement has been invaluable. I'll be moving just up the road, and you, the reader, should not notice too awful much of a ripple in the pond.

I had some other snippets, but was displaced to the laptop once again (she has 18 new reunion-related emails this morning at 4:30) so this may be the only post for the day. But Fragments lives on, and to those of you who wrote yesterday to offer suggestions or encouragement, your words were so helpful in this rocky transition. I do appreciate knowing you're out there, and are still stopping by for a few minutes on the FFF front porch.

So...my choices at the moment seem to be between Blogger hosted at my own server space, or Word Press. Any experience among readers with WP? Any warnings, praise, or further ideas for FFF's future?

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So sir, you're faced with an option. Shall we take your left foot or your right? It's up to you.

Here's where I appear to be with regard to "fixing" the blog. I'm at a loss for knowing what to do, if anything. The idea of being blogless is about as comprehensible as being legless.

1-- Reinstall FFF on a new server and start a new blog. Leave the old site and its directory structure intact with a link to it for people who want to read past items. This will leave past comments intact but will not allow any new comments to old posts. You will need to use updated templates and pay special attention to keeping your spam plug-ins updated with keywords to ban, etc.

2-- Keep your present site and delete the entire comments database. This will cause you to
lose all past comments but new comments would be accepted. There is no promise, however,
that the problem will not crop up again.

According to them, these are the only two options left unless you want to abandon the blog
entirely.

When in doubt, avoidance seems to work consistently, if only for the short term. I can't say what to expect here in coming days. A bang, a blog-nova or a whimper?

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Dang I'll be glad when her high school reunion is past and I can use the desktop again--where all my images and blogging clips are stored. This morning, another 25 new emails came in and that means I'm banished to the laptop watching her backside and elbows clickety clicking the morning away. I had an image in mind for today, but it will have to wait til I'm back in the Holodeck.

I'm really having a sense of disconnect with comments broken, not that I got many comments in recent ages. I guess just the idea that I'm cut off from that kind of connectedness after more than 4 years makes blogging more like just simply jotting in a journal or scrapbook--which is basically all FFF is, but with people reading over your shoulder who can let you know you're not totally alone in your musings.

I go today for the last recording session, and then what? I've about talked myself out of an audiobook, except perhaps a very abridged "best of" from SRH. If I do even that, I'll want to upgrade sound editors, and this morning, Ian from London suggested Audio Audition. Funny. I owned this program when it costs $49 and was called CoolEdit Pro. After enjoying it for a few months, Adobe bought the company, quadrupled the price, then charged an arm and leg to upgrade--which I didn't. Now it costs $350. I may still qualify for an academic discount since my teaching contract runs through August 2007. I dunno.

Also in the reinvesting-in-the-business category (here as the tax year comes to a close): I've found a SWEET tripod and head at PFS Photo. Even my arthritic hands can operate this fine piece of equipment. Justifying the extravagance, I told Ann this would be "a lifetime investment" and she was quick to remind me that, at our age, something wouldn't have to last all that long to qualify for such anymore. Smarty-pants. I can save $50 ordering online. I'd rather buy locally. I'll call this morning and see if Mike has any wiggle-room on the Bogen / Manfrotto 458B NeoTec Pro Photo Tripod Legs and 322RC2 Heavy Duty Grip Action Ball Head. (Merry Christmas to me!)

Let's see now...I had some snippets to share, in addition to the landscape I was going to show you.

Well, I'm going to what promises to be an interesting gathering of writerly types soon, and expect there will be some blog posts to come, if not directly from the site, in the days that follow. And more than that, I am hoping to have been nudged forward by the conversation and encouragement, networking and enabling that will happen there into whatever it is that comes next. The consensus of unofficial polling and listening to what people say (especially blog readers) is that it should contain color images. One of the folks I'll spend time with at the conference is gathering specific info on full color printing in books he might publish. I gather that, while in the past couple of years, inexpensive color book printing has meant shopping the jobs overseas (in China, Korea, etc) that the same services can be had reasonable on this side of the world.

Thanks to those couple who have emailed during this comment-less period just to let me know you're still out there. I'm still hoping for a fix. And that I'll wake up one morning this week and all my firewood for next year will be cut, split and stacked by the back door by a troop of kindly elves. And a Pulitzer Prize. And six-pack abs.

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Photographically, I was unprepared for these dark-dashing spirits of the air. The only action shots I've done with this camera have been of the dog running in the pasture--a large, bright subject moving fairly slowly against a simple background of shadowed forest or uniform pasture grasses. Ravens on Buffalo were the antithesis of that: small, black, distant, and moving at great speed against the busy backdrop of autumn foliage. And consequently, out of 70 shots, few were keepers.

But it was a learning experience, and should a similar situation arise again, I'll know some changes to make in my camera settings to increase my chances of bringing back more shots worth saving--birds that look like birds, not dark smears or shadowy shapes without edges.

The best of the lot is the shot (you can see in the gallery) from which this bird was taken as he turned to look back over his shoulder, just before diving down below our line of sight into the ravine. What's most notable to me about this image is the shape of this bird's tail: tubular. I never saw anything like it, and am certain it was no fluke. A tail in this configuration offers very little lift or resistance, and in some maneuvers, I suppose that is exactly what is required in the complex aerobatics these birds were showing us.

A little gallery of raven images is here.

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I've figured out I can rip the studio recording CD audio files to mp3 using iTunes, and so have a snippet from the last session uploaded to the server this morning. You'd be welcomed to give a listen.

This is an entry from Slow Road Home called Field Notes: December Creek. It consists of short "prose poems" I suppose you'd call them, and to appreciate this reading, imagine yourself where I was as I took these little jots to remember the moment: sitting on a mossy rock in the weak sun of December, on the banks of Nameless Creek, leaning against the smooth trunk of a tulip poplar.

I've learned in the past few days of a program called Tracktion; it has been recommended as the sound editor best suited to assemble the read passages from the book into an audiobook.

Anybody have any experience with this software? It is not exactly intuitive, but does get good reviews, mostly from music makers.

UPDATE: Dang, I forgot I was going to get some creeksound files on my little pocket recorder and use that for amnbient-sound "bullets" between each of the little passages in this cluster of "field notes"...but I got sidetracked and lost my focus. Maybe next time.

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It was the first long solo morning walk I've taken in a while (the pity) and cool enough I had the urge to warm up by climging up the contours of our western ridge above Nameless Creek. And the verb climb is accurately chosen, for one cannot walk where I went. Holding onto saplings for a pull up each step toward the top is the means of travel. It is slow going--moving, resting, taking in more and more treetops in view as you gain altitude. It's a great cardiac workout, I thought. I entertained myself with the notion of creating by hand a switchback trail from creek to ridgetop. Both building and then walking that traverse of seldom-visited hillside would be a great form of outdoor workout-meditation for the cooler months.

I was carrying my jacket by the time I reached the top. I sat on a stump long enough to let my heart rate come down, and then a few minutes more beyond that, and it came to mind how often I used to tell our kids that "if you sit very still for ten minutes or longer--and alone--wildlife will come out of hiding, and you will see and hear things you'd miss if you're in a hurry. Be still."

And I followed my own advice. But as my awareness of the details of that particular resting place grew more clear and familiar (and there were several notable wildlife sightings in this stillness), what suddenly caught my attention not 20 yards away startled me.

I was well within the confines of our property. The adjacent piece was surveyed a few years back and the orange tapes still hang conspicuously from saplings. But there, in a 12 inch cherry that leans slightly out over the shallow wooded swale below it to the west, a canvas and metal deer tree stand, 15 feet up in the tree. I felt violated. And angry.

We've already suffered the dog getting sick from eating deer guts this year from deer killed somewhere on our land. He brought home a hind leg that had clearly been severed with a knife. We walk this land often. The dog ranges along the ridge at times. We have others who come here--with permission beforehand--to hunt. I'd hate for them to be injured. I'm not so carrying about what happens to this person who so blatantly has trespassed here, and I want him gone.

Three straps secured foothold steps to the tree in the first 6-7 feet of the trunk. I unstrapped them, with my first impulse being to throw them high in the tree above the stand, or carry them home and toss them in the dumpster.

But in the end, I took the three straps and fashioned a N, an O and an exclamation mark on the leaves about twenty feet from the tree where this person would find them and know he had been discovered. If he doesn't get the message, next time on the hill, I'll carry an axe, cut down the stand, and leave it for him in a wad of twisted metal.

This is not okay. We have a bad history here on Goose Creek with the disregard of hunters so that the word is not one that conjures up anything but dread--of far more trash on the road; of trucks parked illegally on private property in the dark, of fences cut, deer shot from the road, bloated carcasses dumped in the creek.

I doubt such a person is a blog reader, or even knows how to turn on a computer to get this message: Do not hunt on our land. Your disregard puts my family and others here at risk. You cannnot simply come and take what you want, especially with weapons involved. Find another place to hunt. And ask permission before you go. Pick up your trash. Respect the property and lives of others. Thanks.

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A changing of the guard. The manual transmission of winter--a slowing in the work of the hands, the transition in rhythms and seasons of gardening and woodgathering. It is an in-between season of dark mornings, from this room the smell of woodsmoke, and beyond the window, forest vistas open like a curtain pulled aside.

There is a spareness and skeletal simplicity about winter that bare trees conjure for me--an essential core of being that both comforts and unsettles. I make my peace with its call this morning in what feels more than ever like the autumn of our lives here.

Our leaves are turning, falling. Sap sinks below ground. Molecular gyrations slow and water turns hard as iron. And one hopes for spring, knowing if one comes, it will be from a vanishing supply, each day more precious than the last, from a smaller stock of them, sands through the hourglass, more visible and terrible-wondrous when the leaves have fallen.

Winter is a naked time, and we are exposed not to the elements cloistered here next to the woodstove, but to self, to the core of who we are apart from the roles we play under a warm sun and the leafery of summer, all the easier now to feel the winds of time that surge past and through us, warm and firmly planted in this one morning of time.

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No Comment

As you might have noticed, comments are disabled the past few days--a temporary condition, I trust. While I don't get many these days, your responses matter, and being effectively DEAF to hearing what you say makes what I say seem sort of like silly talking-to-myself. And especially this morning as I don't seem to have much to say anyway. So consider this the "morning pages" done for the sake of keeping the writing muscles flexed and fingers in practice at the keyboard.

No Dates

I've entered a bit of empty space on the book-talk calendar, with nothing scheduled for the rest of the month. Early December, I'll be keeping a table at Chateau Morrisette a few hours on a couple of open-house Saturdays. In February, I might be doing one or more presentations back in Wytheville, still TBA and also for a Roanoke writers' group. And maybe in March (still waiting to hear) there's the Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, where I submitted SRH a few months ago. April, I'll do some version of the book talk in Birmingham for my mom's Sunday School class and will repeat the photomemoir for a Roanoke church group as The Virginia State Parks visitors center is considering the book for 2007, as is the Blue Ridge Parkway I just heard this week. So some good things happening, but at present, they are scattered across a rather long expanse of months.

No Mistakes

Speaking of the book, dear readers: I'm getting close to thinking in very specific terms about a second printing. Here's where you come in. I'd like, of course, to expunge the new books of the old errors. If you have found the punctuation, deleted word, verb tense errors that lurk(in reasonably small number) in your copy of the book, do me a huge favor and send page number and a quick descriptor of the mistake. I'd be forever in your debt. I will also plan to include a Table of Contents to guide the reader to any specific piece in the book, and may make changes to the back cover text. That shouldn't be hard to do.

No Cat

Hard choice, but unavoidable: I'll have to take the cat to the vet to put her down. She has gone from partially to completely blind this week. An outside cat, I can't stand the thought of her freezing to death because she can't find her box on the porch, or being eaten by a fox or bobcat in her own yard because she could find her usual hiding place. I've taken badly injured family cats over the hill in a burlap bag and euthanized them with a shotgun back in the old days, but I can't even think of doing that for CJ after 16 years, as unaffectionate and plain an old cat as she was.

No Sound Editor

I'm looking to spend some money (as little as possible of course) for an audio editor after finding that free open-source Audacity doesn't work with the sound files from the radio station. My needs are simple; no multitrack special effects here, just cut-and-paste, fade in, normalization and such of the 7 hours of reading of Slow Road Home. I'll need to listen through it all, mark those pieces that need to be re-recorded, add musical bullets between pieces, some ambient sounds (like water falls to the Ann's Falls piece, for instance) and such as that. Anybody got ideas? Sound Forge? Audition?

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This image brought to mind how monochrome the winter ahead will be compared to the riot of color here in the peak week of foliage changes. The next storm will wash away every tint but the blues and grays of frost in shadow, and soon, the white of snow.

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I'm a step closer--but not close enough yet--to having the audio files from my Radio Readers readings at WVTF into a form I can use. Some technical difficulties still remain, most of them no doubt, mine, though the first CDs I brought home from the station failed due to glitches at their end.

I did get the name of a contact person at the station to talk to about getting the 7 hours of reading of Slow Road Home into an audiobook, and I'll give him a call at the appointed time.

Meanwhile, the cda file on the CD from the station ripped to wma on my hard drive, but opened in Audacity, the twelve-minute segment shows as an 11 mb file that is compressed into about 4 seconds. That's weird. I'll figure it out, eventually.

Meanwhile, thanks to Floyd Countian Lee Chichester, four audio essays can be heard from a single link on her growing audio-collection of local voices, The Rest Of Us Media Project. Check back often as her site grows to say more and more about us, and from those of us who live, create and enjoy community in these hills.

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Part of the magic of our encounter with ravens on the Buffalo was that we were looking down or out at elusive birds previously seen only when looking up. I'm not sure I've ever observed one of these creatures as anything but a stark black bird shadow against the sky--more often than not, against gray clouds, it seems in my memory's eye.

But from almost 4000 feet, these birds appeared to me in both a different relationship (watching one bird interact with other birds in the group) and in a different light--literally--as these two regrettably imperfect images reveal.

Never in my wildest imagination would I have expected to see any color whatsoever in the feathers of a raven--the epitome of blackness. And yet, both in this image and several others, when spread full, the primaries of wing and tail show this ruddy-rust color so clearly.

I would have missed this color-fact, except for being able to bring back the images saved by the eye of the camera, and I was amazed when it first opened up on my computer monitor back warm at home Saturday evening. I had learned something useful in the sense that it increases my knowing an illusive but favorite creature a little better for the rest of my days.

And then--perhaps it was the very same bird--seen with the afternoon sun glancing off the sheen of its oiled feathers, the bird can appear positively platinum.

This shot was, I had imagined, one of the best of the bunch because it was taken while the bird hovered for a second at the end of the air-tunnel game, suspended as if it were painted against the rocky spires behind it. I could tell in the camera's viewfinder that I'd gotten the ghostly bird well-framed, but couldn't tell in the full daylight that it, like most of the images I brought back, was not sharp. But look at the contrast, this view compared to the one above. Here again, a new way of seeing a familiar, if typically very distant, old friend.

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It didn't take long to see that these black birds were far larger and way more acrobatic than common crows we thought them at first to be. There were five of them (we see them over our valley only in ones and twos, and usually distant from each other) and they were obviously enjoying one another's company, if you'll forgive my attribution of human emotions to other kinds of creatures. I don't think this is entirely in error in this case, nor would you, had you seen the performance.

Dennis, who carried the binoculars, was first to notice as we stood on the highest point of the mountain, our daypacks resting on the metal rod that benchmarked the spot for map-makers. "One of them is carrying something" and the rest of us shaded our eyes with our hands to see, and I attempted to stand up for a photograph with my 200 mm lens--about half of what I would have preferred to close the distance on my swift, black subject.

The raven who carried the dark object was "it" and the others followed nearby--usually below, in case the lead bird were to drop the parcel, which I can easily imagine would be a rule of this game. I drop it. You catch it. Then we chase you. Looking at the fuzzy image (as alas, most of them are) you can make out a tail to the dark object carried raptor-like in his talons. This fact alone was new to me--that ravens use their feet to carry things aloft.

Five minutes later, a bird appeared with a conspicuous white package, first in its beak, then in its talons. It seemed to have indistinct edges, and I am almost certain it was a downy white feather. Again, at least one more bird pursued the carrier, and if birds know joy, we were seeing it in their interactions on the Buffalo.

If not bird joy, then I can speak with certainty of mine. To be looking out and even down on five ravens--a reclusive bird seen usually briefly and at great distance--and to have them doing what they do in the very wild from such a magnificent vantage point--was an unforgettable pleasure, failed photos notwithstanding.

To see their rolls and tumbles, spins and dives gave me belly rushes. I had the sense that they could they could see the stronger currents in the constant 30 mile west winds like we see a trail clearly in forest, seek them out, and jump into them the way a surfer takes the best wave. First one bird, then the next followed those turbulent tubes of air up the rocky channel below and west of us. Then it would find the still point at the end of the rocky ravine, hover briefly, and fall with wings pulled tight, disappearing below our line of sight, only to reappear a few minutes later when it became his turn again.

We watched until we realized our faces and fingers were going numb from the cold wind. The ravens didn't seem to understand cold, or fear of heights, or hurtling at great speed toward rock walls. They were in their medium, and for a moment, we were able to share it with them. What a memory!

NOTE: Comments have been temporarily disabled due to some persistent spam-related problems. I hope to have this figured out soon and comments reinstated. Sorry!

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You let the force of your opponent work to your advantage. Typically, if you're a mushroom or other fungus, wet weather means your spores won't go far in the wind, and your odds of spreading fungus genes into the wild go way down.

But a few members of this odd Kingdom of living things use rain to serve their purpose. The familiar "puffball" type fungus is an example: a fallen twig hits the swollen hollow bag of spores, and POOF! out the hole at the top come tens of thousands of gene-packets, and a few that will survive to become future puffballs.

This little fungus is called, for obvious reasons, the bird's nest fungus. Each nest is perhaps a quarter inch across, and once it unfurls from its ball-shaped beginnings, you'll see inside the silver-pebble "eggs" that are the spores. Notice here there are from none to four inside, with some spores already splashed out onto the mulch, making more nests.

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I have a couple of ends in mind for the mental and digital images, events and memories from our hike up Buffalo Mountain on Saturday. So you'll probably see and hear about this excursion more than once.

It was one of those outtings we set on the calendar, and were determined to go no matter what. And almost always when this happens, there is a mixture of the good and the bad about it, leaving a kind of elated ambivalence about the impending adventure. On the plus side, a cold front had come through the day before our planned hike. Temperatures on Saturday would be crisp but not cold, and with the humidity fallen so low, visibility would stretch to the farthest horizon. What a great day to be on that high spine of rock near the peak of the leaf color change season, and with friends!

But while the weather folks were calling for west winds of 10 miles an hour, I didn't tell Ann before we left but the internet wind gauges from Blacksburg were showing a constant wind of 30 with higher gusts--and that was not even at almost 4000 feet where we would be at the bare rocky summit of the Buffalo. The gale would be brutal, with wind chills in the thirties, and we'd need to dress for fall at the start and winter at the finish of our climb up. Ann had never been to the top, and I wanted it to be a good experience for her. She's no sissy, but I've been miserable on that mountain more than once. Pack wisely, I told myself.

And the trudge up was uneventful. We wondered why we had brought so many layers of unneeded clothes! Even when we reached the first of the open summit, it was really quite pleasant. The wind seemed to be blowing OVER us rather than AT us, and we stood there for the imperative, reflexive 360 survey of the horizon some 30 to 70 miles away, taking our bearings, taking it all in. Dennis brought his binocs, and with his familiarity with the NC terraine, we picked out the tallest buildings in both Winston-Salem and Greensboro, plus four tall stacks of a power plant he could name but I've forgotten. And of course, Pilot Mountain was conspicuous to the south. From the top, to orient to home, we could see without the binoculars the white ball of the NEXRAD tower just two miles west of Goose Creek. What a day!

And yet, having carried my camera bag and tripod to the top, I didn't expect much, photographically. The cloudless sky was uninteresting, the colors were honestly pretty unimpressive a week short of peak, and we'd have to leave before the late afternoon lighting began to add shadows and interest to the scenes below. And then we heard the sound that changed everything.

"Raven!" I said immediately. Dennis spotted them through the binoculars just beyond the steepest end of the mountain--the head and shoulders of the resting buffalo. There were five of them. "I think they're crows" he replied, as I shielded my eyes to watch them rise and fall in the stiffening wind.

"I'll admit I've never seen more than two ravens together in the same place at the same time, and those may be crows, but what I heard was definitely a raven."

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Yesterday morning was the first hard freeze, and overnight, all the non-woody understory plants have gone limp and blanched, and you can see the ground in places where it disappeared back in May.

There was a scattered frost in places open to the sky, nothing back under the cover of the overstory of trees. So the photo opportunities were limited to those things along the ecotone between pasture and woods, like this spicebush.

Now here's a "weed" tree that is pleasant to have around for three seasons: first, the wispy yellow tufts of tiny flowers make it glow along the creeks in spring; then the leaves bead water all summer, every time there's a shower, giving the pasture margin a sequened look.

And finally, in fall, there are the brilliant and pungent-spicy red berries (image to come) and later, these parti-colored leaves in such typical fall color combinations, here just before Halloween.

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Another image from the temporarily out-of-service Floyd Barber Shop, downtown Floyd, next to the Country Store, home of the Friday Night Jamboree.

Like a shroud over a departed loved one, a sheet hides the empty and silent space within.

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Found, side of a Floyd County country road near home. Photographed. Collected. Consumed.

These are Inky Caps, Coprinus comatus, and are one of the few wild mushrooms I feel confident enough to eat, but have only found a few times in sufficient quantity (and obtainable without trespass) to eat. This past weekend on the way home from the Parkway, this little cluster was growing at the edge of a county road.

This was along a deserted stretch of gravel road and I could easily pull the car off and go back for a closer look. Some of the first to emerge had already started to liquefy (a method of promoting spore release, not an ignominious, disgusting demise) but there were a dozen 4-5" tall specimens that had just pushed up through the soil.

After taking a half dozen images and packing to go, I went back and collected a good pound of the fresh ones. We had them that night, sauteed in butter, with whatever we were having for dinner, and the rest, the next night in spaghetti. They're mostly water, so a pound of 'shrooms made about a half cup of edible fungus.

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My little Olympus DW90 replacement brain (shirt-pocket digital recorder that travels with me in the car for those must-not-forget snippets of pithy prose or honey-do shopping items) occasionally picks up some ambient sounds from around here. But it is time to clean the digital memory of them and make room for other things. So rather than lose them, I recorded from the recorder into Audacity and converted two of the little sound clips into mp3 files. Both are bird-related, and both are against a noisy background of creek noise--a generally pleasant problem to have.

This is a crow call that I'm interested in knowing the "meaning" of. I call it the ah-WhahWhah! call, and it always is offered by a bird perched in the tippy top of a tree. I think it is a call of contentment and pleasure, not their raucous alarm call or nasal caw-cawwing call that says simply "here I am" that they often issue while in flight. Does anybody have any information about this call in the sound clip?

The second is from springtime. I haven't been able to make myself erase it, and sometimes will go back and play it for me alone in the car, when I'm having a trying day of home patient care, et cetera. It is a whippoorwill chorus from just out the back door--in May, I think.

So I guess this makes FFF a multi-media blog now. Right?

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You were probably thinking I'd gone too long without posting a bug picture, now weren't you? One can only take so much of that lovely mountain-autumn imagery, after all. (More to come later this morning, actually.)

This shot of a Praying Mantis comes from outside the Jacksonville Center a few weeks back. I just happened to have my (excuse me: Ann's) camera handy when this 6 inch aerodynamic disaster came fluttering by. (And they say bumblebees are poorly designed for flight! Mantises fly about like turkeys: only in emergencies and for short distances.)

And it occurred to me, as I was taking this picture, that of all the insects, Praying Mantises seem somehow aloof. Holier than thou. With their ramrod-straight backs, distainful turning of the head as they look at you with their unfixed gaze through knobby cold eyes. Whilst praying. Who do they think they are, anyhow?

They should, however, get the award for good posture--don't you think?

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There is a small circle the size of a BB on the human retina, and within it, a pit. And it is here--and only here--where light entering the eye results in a tiny area of very sharp vision. This region of the retina is called the macula lutea, the pit, the fovea centralis, and this tiny depression keeps us from having to process the entire field of vision in focus and precision all the time. To do so would overwhelm our neural circuitry.

You can confirm this fact of narrow focus by fixing your view on a single letter in this sentence for five seconds. Only a few words will be clear enough to read, the rest remains a blur until you scan your eyes together across whatever is just out of your field of focused vision.

The fovea centralis came to mind in the wee hours last night, because I was wishing I had a one for my poor brain even with my eyes closed, as not one thing came to mind, but all things at once. A brain can't focus on all things at once, said brain objected, and yet there they all were competing for that one small shaft of light called attention that illuminates a single task until the force called execution can make it happen.

Wow--a longwinded way of saying I have lots to do today--all do-able, mostly innocuous, but noxious when it all piles on top of a sleepy brain at two o'clock in the morning.

So what does this have to do with the picture from the foggy Parkway bikers? I haven't a clue, but of course I can always concoct a way to segue into something related, don't you know.

Fog. I love taking pictures in the fog. It serves as a fovea centralis for the aesthetic eye, hiding things in the periphery and depth of view, calling into focus a single rock or tree or barn while the edges go soft and cloudy.

While there isn't enough morning fog in it to isolate in the way I just mentioned, I'm happy to find a fog-moody image (of the barn and pasture) among the four of mine used for Cara Modisett's piece on Floyd in the Decenber 2006 issue of Blue Ridge Country Magazine (p. 61-63) that arrived here yesterday. Blogger David St. Lawrence also has a few images of artists at the Jacksonville Center for the piece. Altogether, a very nice treatment of "Floyd, Virginia: The Newest Arts Capital in the Blue Ridge".

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Sunday home alone, mopey and dull. The drizzle ended by noon but not the pallor of low cloud. Clouds broke up just the least bit by 2:00 and I remembered it was the weekend of our friends' annual cider pressing over on the Willis side of town. With the drismal weather, the crowd might be sparse, and that'd be a shame for all the effort of setting up the press, getting the apples, and inviting folks.I felt obliged to go, but really just wanted to crawl in bed and wait for spring.

But in the end, I decided that, after a glass or two of sweet, fresh cider, I would assauge my guilt of having burned two gallons of gas for this travel by extending my trip on beyond a bit. So I took Canning Factory Road to Black Ridge, and climbed up into the sun, to the Parkway. If we aren't at peak fall foliage, we're getting close, and there might be a few early shots waiting for me. I was toting all the gear, just in case.

Heading east, I'd make a loop from mile post 171 at the Parkway to 159 at the old Wormy Chestnut (For Sale!) and home. As I reached the crest of the mountain and the parkway, I could see that fog was still hanging heavy in Rock Castle Gorge. It lifted and spilled through the gaps, making a wonderful mix of blue sky and color against gray monochrome blindness of a rising vapor. I'll show you four shots brought home from that little excursion.

I was lured off the trail into the spotty sunlight that filtered through the stunted oaks on top of Rocky Knob, pulled between reaching an opening where the fog might spread for a dynamically lit vista and this subtle display of autumn sienna and cinnamon, low to the ground. (Image is clickable for larger version.)

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Apologies. But when your entire fruit harvest consists of a single fruit, you have to make a big deal out of it.

Ann (whose idea and insistence last summer led to the planting of two pear trees outside the kitchen window) hasn't decided yet if we will eat the blessed thing, or have it bronzed.

I've chosen to put it into orbit.

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I grabbed this picture one sunny morning last week when the newly-opened Mums at the top of the drive were buzzing with activity. Literally buzzing. And all coming from one species of visitor: the Virescent Green Metallic Bee--a sporty little job whose name and taxonomy have pollinated some word sleuthing here on a rainy morning before sunrise.

First, I confess I had to look up "virescent" and then was puzzled (learning it means green or becoming green) why someone would compound green on top of green when naming this insect. At any rate, I'll appropriate "virescent" into my working vocabulary, because as much as I wax wordy about the woods and such, surely this term will come in handy some day.

And I note the little green-green bee's family name: Halictidae. A halide is typically the salt of a compound like chlorine. Like for instance, sodium chloride. Which is like, table salt. Which is also exuded in our perspiration. Halictidae is the family of "sweat bees". But since I don't sweat, they've never bothered me particularly.

The genus and species of this busy-buzzy is AgaPOStemon virescens. There was probably a time I could have broken down the genus name to some of its derivative roots and figured out why the name came to be in the first place. Now, even with help from a Greek and Latin Roots cheat sheet, I can't get anywhere. But I do love the sound of Latin binomials. They so often make me imagine a druid incantation way better than hocus-pocus. Help in pronunciation: it is often the antepenULtimate syllable that gets the EMphasis. Though not with virEScens. Go figure.

Curious. Yesterday not a single green bee visited a single mum flower at any time I checked. The day was overcast, sometimes misty, coolish. But why no bees? My guess is that it has something to do with the biology of this flower--that perhaps under those conditions its flowers don't produce pollen or nectar, and so there's nothing worthy of a Virescent Green Metallic Bee's time.

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We made our loop around the pasture path as the fog rose up from warm earth, lifted and tattered, then hugged the ground only to lift and spread once more--a thing coming alive as the day gave way to night.

As we reached the barn, we turned to look behind us at the changeling fog. The moon had risen over the ridge suddenly, as if the earth had lurched a notch on its great cogwheel while our backs were to it, and brilliance startled and thrilled us as we turned to admire it, moonstruck.

As if on cue with our turning to attend it, the chorus began. First, and close, a single screech owl offered his staccato lament near Nameless Creek. Another further down the valley answered and the two comingled their sad duet a half minute before another joined in from some dark tree south along the ridge.

As our ears adjusted to the rhythm and resonance of their conversation--a kind of night-hearing not unlike night vision in its slow adaptation--we began to pick out at least a half dozen of these small night-feeding raptors together in antiphonal song, a community of screech owls in union-- six that we could hear, the last of them so far off it was barely audible to us, but loud and clear to six more to the south, and six more beyond that.

Perhaps we were standing at the very edge of a collective song as wide as Floyd County; bigger than that, perhaps, as owls are not respecters of human municipalities or maps.

Connection. The feeling of being connected to the orbit of moons, the turning of the earth and it tilts to a new season, joined with a fraternity of owls whose conversation consisted of a single phrase, over and over. I am here. So am I. And on and on across our valley, the world, and the cosmos.

Click here for larger image.

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Rolling Stone, it ain't. But Tsuga is happy with it. We're trying to get in touch with his momma to send her a few copies. She'd be so proud.

Many thanks to Sandra Kelly at Prime Living for the nice write-up of the blog-to-book story, including some very hig quality color Fragments images that go along with the article.

It was late to press, but arrived in time for last night's very nice event at the Meadowbrook Library in Shawsville, and there were lots of questions about the dog. I'm sure his ears were burning.

Copies available at area libraries, grocery stores and a few restaurants, and other places as well. The price is right.

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I'd Call KEN -- for odd jobs well done. Our neighbor Ken is ready to let it be known he is available to get up and do what needs to be done at your place in Floyd and nearby parts. We are recent customers, and I have no reservations telling you that you'll be more than satisfied with Kens' beyond-the-call-of-duty service. He'll come when he says he will, do what he tells you, charge what he told you, and leave you happy.

Well, while you're here, let's see what we have in the Friday grab-bag of websites...

Roanoke Sierra Club * In case you were thinking about coming next week for my "Personal Ecology of Place" photographic memoir, this link has the details.

Give a Listen * My buddy Jim Minick does today's WVTF radio essay, worth a listen. You can scroll down for a couple more of Jim's essays, two of mine, and several by Michael Chitwood, also highly recommended.

Keeping up the Pace / Frail Elderly * Move it, move it faster, and be positive. This is a great article for folks in mid-life who want to know what they can do to remain active of body and mind in the seventies and beyond.

New Dark Crystal * The original back in the early eighties was one of our kids (and their dad's) favorites. Now, the technologically-enhanced next installment of the story is about to come to light.

Dinosaur Soft Tissue Preserved * This is the kind of gee-whiz stuff I'd love to have run across when I was teaching. Even some FRESHMEN would sit up and take notice (before going back to their instant messaging in class.)

AccuRadio * For those with radio reception (we get ONE channel) this won't be such a great find. But for us, this custom music channel selector was a great find yesterday.

Festival of Trees at Hoarded Ordinaries * If you find topics of interest at Fragments, you'll find lots of kindred spirits each month at the Festival of Trees, this month hosted by my buddy Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries. Take a look.

SnakeTracks * For those who can't get enough snake. Here's the "World's Largest Snake Enthusiast" website, recently new to the web.

ERRATA: The Pace/Frail Elderly link has been fixed. Thanks for the prompts. My Control-V isn't working consistently of late. Think it might be the effects of spilled or spewed coffee on the keyboard.

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There was never anything fancy about the Floyd Barber Shop there Locust Street next to the Country Store. It did, at one time, have a spiralling barber pole outside the door, but it just stopped working twenty year ago, Ralph said. And there were at one time new shock-absorbing floor mats behind the worn old swivel chair, but it wore through to the ancient lineoleum long ago and hadn't done the barber's bad hip joints any good for years, though he swore they still helped.

I passed the store on Tuesday and saw the sign on the door--had to go back to the car and grab my camera. Here's the way one Floyd story ends. And life goes on.

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It never fails that when I'm in a hurry, or when I don't have my camera something shows up that I really want to photograph. Or if I am not in a hurry and have my camera with me, there's often NO PLACE to pull off the country roads for a half mile past whatever it was that caught my attention. One such photo-subject I have told myself was a MUST this season is the wonderful purple (not exactly purple--help me name this color) asters that one only sees occasionally as compared to the common light blue asters that are everywhere.

The dark, rich aster is called New York aster, and looking at distribution maps, it's found from New England to the deep south, but is more of a coastal plain and foothills plant than one that belongs to the mountains.

Tuesday, I carried my camera, just in case. On the "pig path" (local name for what used to be a sleepy little back road but has become a hurried if tortuous connector to the interstate) I spotted my quarry and staked out a stopping place nearby where I could pull off the road. That afternoon, I forgot my little photo-project until I'd past, but made myself pull into a driveway and turn around and go back. The day was windy for close-ups, and the composition was a bit cluttered. The best vantage point for some framing would have had me kneeling in the very middle of the road: not worth that risk!

So, I now have a half dozen images of New York aster, Aster novi-belgii. And I have twittered away some little bit of time wondering and then researching its other name: Michaelmas Daisy. Must be some commemorative like Christ-mas, and Michael is a biblical angel, so my guess was that it had something to do with a religious holiday. Yep. I'd just missed it: September 29 was Michaelmas Day--not big on the southwest Virginia liturgical calendar--in our circles, at least.

But it has had an interesting and peculiar history. It is the eve of the bringing in of the carrots. (?) It is the eve when neighbors steal each other's horses without compunction, and eat oat and barley cakes cooked on a lamb skin. Say what?

Now this kind of time-consuming word-sleuthing is a time-sink that seems a waste on the one hand, but so enriching for the writer's notebook of trivial facts about human behavior and culture and our names for things. I'm glad I stopped for the picture, and glad I followed through to learn more about it's place in natural and human histories through time.

A larger image of the one above is here. (Can anybody name the tall, spikey plants there among the yellow goldenrod and white boneset? Yes, I know it--this is a nature quiz!) And a picture of this same purple (dark lavender?) flower from about 1978 is here. It seems Michael's daisy has haunted my back road travels and aesthetic sense now for decades. And now I know a little more of the story of its name. And so do you!

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We're into the pre-Christmas season and I know you're all hoping to strike that balance between doing enough and too much in regards to gift giving for friends and family--in only about 10 weeks. Please consider what a lasting, comforting and appropriate gift Slow Road Home will make for those you care for. By check, you can have three delivered to your door for around $50 (a few cents more per book if you live in Virginia.)

I'll sign all books I send, but let me know if you want your copy or copies of the book inscribed to someone in particular.

I'll make it easy and give you the information below so you won't even have to go to the book website. (Paypal customers can order single books via the website. Also, locations for purchase off the shelf are listed on the book website.)

For orders from outside of Virginia, books are $15.95 each. From within Virginia, add $0.80 per book state tax.

For one to three books ordered by check, postage is $3.00 (more for larger quantities but still not expensive as media mail.)

Send your check made out to Goose Creek Press, 1020 Goose Creek Run N.E., Check Virginia 24072

Do it now while you're thinking about it. You'll be that much closer to having your Christmas shopping list already done!

Answer to writer's block: post an image. This recent one, starring the dog, is for Ann whose book order I received yesterday. She heard the "Long Way Home" radio essay a few weeks back on WVTF, and sent along a touching piece, dog related, that I'll have to share sometime soon here at Fragments. And Ann, by the way, tell your sister that Slow Road Home is available at Anything Southern Bookstore in Rutherfordton!

And thanks to Cindy at the Coffee Mill, Main Street, Radford, for putting Slow Road on the shelf for her customers.

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From Field Notes -- November Creek in Slow Road Home: a Blue Ridge Book of Days. Image from Nameless Creek, October 2006 (Hey! you think it's easy to get a camera looking DOWN on a water strider?!)

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Yesterday I was writing along on what might turn out to be a Floyd Press "Road Less Traveled" piece for mid-October. This is the month my mind goes back--way back--to the fall we discovered Virginia and what even then seemed certain to be where we would be "from" for most of our adult lives.

And here's where I'll lose a lot of readers in my tale: I describe my solo travel to Blacksburg in 1974 to go canoeing with a friend from Auburn. There was such a sense of freedom and adventure in the day I drove up here for the first time that I say in the piece that "I could hear the theme music from Route 66 playing in my head" as the lure of mountains pulled me north.

Now if that perky road music comes easily and pleasantly to mind when you see the name of the show, you're my audience. But there will be a whole mess of folks who came along after us boomers who won't have a clue what I'm talking about. (There's always Google if they really want to know.)

Route 66 was an influential series for me in those years, running from 1960 to 1964 during the years I grew from a freckled 12 to tall-and-freckled 16 year old. Man, that (red? who could tell in black and white?) Corvette convertible sure got my attention. And now as I read back about the plots and characters from the show over the years, it sounds like some of them, if not most, went right over my young head, as they were fairly sophisticated (as TV series go) and had substance and depth beyond the grasp of a 12 year old. There was, however, that hot car and those free spirits of Todd and Buz to admire during a stretch of years in which I became a driver myself. And discovered girls. (Somehow, driving our spiky-finned powder-blue Chrysler Newyorker at 16, I never achieved the illusion of being Buz Murdock like I did in 1974 heading to Virginia in our baby-poop yellow Datsun B210.)

So, if you remember the show, take a listen to the theme music and see if you can't feel the wind in your hair like I did that October day thirty-two years ago.

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It's Monday before sunrise and I don't feel like I've got much traction, can't find the handles on the day or the week just yet, can't quite catch the beat of the music. Nothing a little more coffee won't fix.

Let me extend an invitation once more to those who live nearby to come to the Meadowbrook Library in Shawsville (on hiway 460 between Christiansburg and Salem) this Thursday at 7:00 for a Slow Road Home "book talk" and an opportunity to meet (a few or a lot of) readers and neighbors from Montgomery and Floyd counties whose Friends of the Library organization is hosting the event. Visitors welcomed, refreshments served, books signed. What more could one ask for in the pulsing heart of downtown Shawsville on a Thursday night!

Also for those in the Roanoke area, you might find a bit about this slow road in the October 1 issue of Prime Living magazine, free in your local Walmart or Krogers store (or sent to your mailbox by subscription for just $10 a year.) I never heard the final word, but it might be you'll even find a picture of Here's Home plus local dog and mortgage payer on the cover. Let me know if you run across it. I suppose I'll see a copy of it before long. The piece in the magazine is the result of a very pleasant conversation with the magazine's editor, Sandra Kelly, a few weeks back.

Now regarding the image du jour. The dog and I were outstanding in our field yesterday (one of a very few places we can be outstanding) and the sun was disappearing behind the western horizon of forest in the cleft above the creek and road along about five o'clock, rays slanting across the pasture in a striking way. Face into the sun, the fleabane stood out against the grasses that are dying back for another winter's dormant rest. The barn is just off-image left, the garden just below the dark blotch of pines to the right. And (this one is for Gary wanting to see some fall color) at 90 degrees to this shot, the house was already in blue shadow, framed by the first bit of color in the maples along the road and grasses backlit in the foreground. You'll have to go to Flickr to see the image of the house in a larger format than will fit on the webpage to do it justice. More fall foliage images coming, the season seems late to arrive.

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Tethered by a spider silk to the porch ceiling, one maple leaf postpones its inevitable end on an October afternoon.

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