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Blue Ridge Parkway

Mabry’s Then and Now

by fred on June 20, 2011

Ed Mabry's Grave near Meadows of Dan, photo 2004 by Fred First

I can’t remember the trail that led me to it, but browsing across it brought back a number of pleasant memories from 2004. The piece I happened upon in the Blue Ridge Country Magazine online was about the Mabry’s  who operated the mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan Virginia, the couple after which the most visited attraction along  the four hundred miles of Parkway was named.

I contributed a sidebar to this piece, including the color images and some text included with this web archival version. I had a good time hanging out in MOD and happening upon Ben Harris, who, when he warmed up, was a pleasure to chat with and a treasure of information. He died not too long after that summer, I think I heard.

I shot the cemetery and other images for that assignment with Doug Thompson’s Nikon he generously loaned me because my D70 had not arrived on time. I collaborated with Elizabeth Hunter on the piece.

I got to know Elizabeth as a result of my first-ever writer’s workshop at Radford University in the summer of 2003. The workshop leader for the week was mentor and former prof and friend of Elizabeth (my good friend Jack Higgs, prof Emeritus from ETSU), and he encouraged me to attend a “nature writing workshop” Elizabeth was conducting at J C Campbell. Funny how things work out.

And while you’re at Blue Ridge Country, also see Rick VanNoy’s Guest column in the March-April edition that expresses a sentiment quite familiar to Fragments readers and those who have read What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader, and perhaps also to a lesser degree, Slow Road Home. The subject is nature deficit disorder and its antidote.

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A Mill By Any Other Name

by fred on November 30, 2010

A stroll in the December archives finds this image [click to enlarge] from early December, 2007. I had been manning a book table at the Chateau Morrisette Winery Wine Club members banquet (what a nice invitation, I met lots of nice folks and sold 50+ books).

Somebody asked if I’d seen the mill pond covered with ice. Soon as I left (in my fancy clothes) I headed a few miles west on the Parkway and came home with the shot you see above–one of my personal favorites of the thousands I’ve seen of the “most photographed place on the Blue Ridge Parkway: Mabry Mill.

By the way, google searches find this and similar images at Fragments from Floyd most often searching for “Mayberry Mill”–a logical misspelling since it’s only maybe 25 air miles from Andy Griffith’s Mt. Pilot (Pilot Mountain near Mt. Airy) and the fictional sleepy village by that name.

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NexRad Puts Terry’s Fork on the (Wx)Map

by fred on October 29, 2010

Sitting up on a TEE, ready for a giant 7-iron

I was living alone on Walnut Knob, MP 152, off the Blue Ridge Parkway, in 1997. On an afternoon walk to a high point above the cabin, I spotted a white object on the horizon far to the north. That afternoon, I brought back my binoculars to figure out what it was. It looked to the naked eye to be a perfectly round sphere, up above the treeline–like a golf ball sitting on a 50 foot tee.

It was the NexRAD tower that, although we didn’t know it then, marked the vicinity where we would someday (since 1999) live, in the northeast corner of Floyd County, and the only such tower in the entire western part of Virginia. We live a few miles east of it, and some 600 feet below the ridge on which it sits, just off Coles Knob and Stonewall Road.

Here’s the Wundergound page that offers data from that tower–including a 24 hour loop of radar, which will come in handy after an overnight snow storm, to see how it tracked when planning the day’s travels while it is still dark, windy and cold. I can hardly wait.

The other thing this giant golf ball brings us is fighter jets. Daily. Usually in twos and threes. And flying at treetop level. They sight on this tower as part of a regular mission over southwest Virginia, where the sparse population I suppose reduces complaints of the dishes rattling on the wall.Enhanced by Zemanta

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Mountain Home: Parkway Symposium in Roanoke

by fred on October 13, 2010

"I need me some mountains to rest my eyes against."

Okay. I’m getting “journey proud” as an old co-worker used to say of one anticipating a trip.

I could be wrong–in which case, I will, after all, feel disconnected from the crowd, disengaged from the topics, and anxious to just get back home to Goose Creek. But I don’t think this is going to happen in Roanoke over the next few days at the Parkway Symposium.

I know several of the speakers–including Ricky Cox, Rupert Cutler, Woody Crenshaw. And two of the keynote speakers–Richard Louv and Peter Jenkins have places in our family history.

My son, a few of you know, walked across America, from Bar Harbor to Floyd back in 2000. No small degree of his being emboldened to do so came from his momma’s reading him Jenkin’s book back in the early 80s.

And the notion of “nature deficit disorder” made the hair on my arms stand up when I first read the term in Orion magazine back in 2005. Louv’s work arising out of “Last Child in the Woods” gives energy and purpose to no small number of words in my own writing since then. And nature appreciation and understanding is something towards which I can, in a very small way, contribute.

The meetings will be at the Hotel Roanoke, a place I very much enjoyed getting to know at the SEJ conference two years ago this month. One of my roles this time will be as a “reporter” for the Star Sentinel; my press pass hopefully will put me in a position for both images, digital recording, and perhaps interviews. We’ll see.

Image: a panorama of five shots showing the Floyd County skyline viewed between town and home, October 11. Click to enlarge. The caption is a quote from Lee Smith, of her father, on asking him why he didn’t move from Grundy to live with her in Chapel Hill.

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Quietude: A Sweet Fragrance to the Ear

by fred on June 22, 2010

Tuggles Gap ~ Blue Ridge Parkway MP 166
Image by fred1st via Flickr

From Road Less Traveled column, Floyd Press, 17 June 2010

Can we sustain in our corner of southwest Virginia those amenities and virtues that make it a highly-livable place? We want to perpetuate the abundance of healthy local food, untainted and ample water, and a clear, odorless and breathable atmosphere. We’re very careful and concerned about what we eat, drink, inhale and see.

What we don’t think about so much as an environmental quality to be protected is our acoustic commons or “audiosphere.”

In mine just now there is sound from outside. Two things have to happen before I fully “hear” it—an initial objective perception followed by a subjective processing.

First, those sound waves have to reach the working parts of my middle and inner ear and be converted to nerve impulses that travel along the auditory nerve to the temporal lobe of the brain to be registered in my awareness as simple sound, as a “raw perception.”

Sounds too intense for too long result in hearing loss that is a mounting problem in our noisy world, especially among our ear-budded young people. But it is more the impact of those sounds on our internal state beyond mere hearing that I’d like to focus on here.

Okay: my sound from outside is a bird. Do I recognize the pattern and quality? Is it threatening? Are there good or bad memories associated with this sound? Does it make me fearful or happy? Every sound we hear sets off a series of complicated judgments and decisions, reflexes and emotions.

Unwanted sound we call noise, an insult of civilization nineteenth century writer Ambrose Bierce described as “a stench in the ear.” Even low levels of secondhand sound produce a variety of hormonal and nervous changes in our bodies that can be bad for our health and quality of life.

Noise is a “non-specific stressor” triggering changes in our hormones and the working of internal machinery in what is called the “fight or flight” response. Our systems respond to noise as a threat to our well-being, health and safety. It interferes with a fully working thought-world.

Think about it. Complete this sentence: “When it’s noisy, I can’t __________.

Your responses might include: Sleep. Relax. Rest. Think. Focus. Concentrate. Read. Remember. Heal from stress, injury or illness. Meditate. Study. Write.

Children in noisy schools don’t learn well. Testing after airport runways or train traffic is reduced show significantly higher scores and measures of well-being.

We may sleep through the night, but our brain waves register traffic sounds that don’t wake us up but still trigger stress responses in our brain waves and leave us less fully rested. Noise incidents and related aggression are high on the list of civil complaints and crime reports in our cities.

Noise—unnecessarily loud or persistent or ugly sounds, and especially auditory pollution that could be avoided or is used intentionally as a means of annoyance—is as bad for our health as second-hand smoke. We need freedom from noise to be fully healthy and fully-functioning humans.

They go together, as Forrest would say, “like peas and carrots”: Peace. And quiet.

Quietude is a prerequisite to clarity of mind and soul. We claim it as a right yet we can deny it so easily to our neighbors by our indifference. Like smoke from a careless fire, noise passes unimpeded across property lines. We can close our eyes, but we can’t close our ears.

It takes so little to shatter another’s peaceful front-porch moment. And it is all the worse when it happens in places we go to for respite from busyness and the racket of everyday life. Un-muffled engine noise along the Blue Ridge Parkway or a passing car’s full-volume boom box through open windows at midnight as we sleep can accost us like acoustic litter tossed into our lives.

So the moral of this tale of good and bad decibels is to do acoustically unto others, and respect the quietude of your neighbors like you’d want them to do for you. We have a good thing going here. Listen. Read more on this topic in Fred’s annotated web pages at Diigo.

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Alligator-back Formation: I’m Glad I Asked

by fred on April 28, 2010

A shale-like rock in the Blue Ridge: What's going on?

Why do the rocks at 3200 feet at the “very edge” of the Blue Ridge look as if they were laid down by water, layer after layer, when it is from harder, igneous rock that this geological province is formed (at least in my limited understanding?) Horizontally-layered dark mica-flecked rocks jut out across the ridge-tops like the vertical ridges along an alligator’s tail. What’s with that?

I asked a friend who asked a friend who knows, and who explained it nicely in his reply. I think he’d approve of it’s use for educational purposes. I know I learned something!

It’s detailed. I imagine eyes crossing. But for some nerdy types like me, this was immensely informative. Still not interested? Okay. You’ve forced me to talk dirty: metamorphic schist. So there.

I’ve put it up on my posterous page, just click the link.

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Nature. Photography. What Else Is There?

by fred on April 12, 2010

Okay, it’s a GO! We’re into the final stretch, and there are still places 1) at the B&B for the weekend Nature Photo-Workshop Weekend ($60 per person—contact Claiborne House at link below to register), or 2) to sign on for the morning and afternoon hikes only ($35 per person, contact me to sign up and pay the morning of the event.)

These will be dual-purpose outings: 1) to identify and talk about the plants in (or out of) flower that we see along Rock Castle Trail—a very rich and diverse cove forest setting where we will see possibly 25 or more species in flower, including Virginia Blue Bells and all sorts of spring lilies.

Concurrently, we’ll be talking about photography challenges in the natural setting—close ups mostly in the morning, then longer vistas possible after lunch at Saddle Gap as we take a forest trail that opens into clearings along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

All the details are here. Be the hare, not the tortoise. Times getting short!

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