Southwest Mountains (9 June 2004)

Conté crayon on paper, 4 x 6.This was done on the trail with Flint the foxhound, which usually means one has only a minute or so before Flint becomes irked by the evidence that you’re not really serious about helping him find deer and foxes to chase. (Which wouldn’t matter except that an indignant hound becomes much more difficult to direct off leash.) And this was about a one-minute sketch as I stood in what we call the Power Line Road – that’s the eroded track to the right of the fence – facing the Southwest Mountains.

The Southwest Mountains are a chain of small peaks to our east, parallel to the Blue Ridge. I believe they may have gotten their name because – just like almost every other range in the entire Appalachians – they run from northeast to southwest, and these would have been the first mountains encountered by colonists moving west through the Piedmont. This view is from about a mile or so east of where I do most of my sunrises, and these are the mountains you can see in many of those sunrise paintings.

If you’re half as fanatical about geography as I am, you might like to know that the area known as Stony Point lies on this side of the mountains, with Barboursville off to the left. Over the mountains: Keswick and Cismont. If you were to turn perhaps 30 degrees to the right, you’d be facing toward Shadwell and Monticello.

Along with Monticello there’s a sad thing – a big hill – called Pantops Mountain. Where Monticello has been celebrated and preserved, Pantops, just across the way, has been repeatedly paved until it’s basically like a shaved head. It’s the home of car dealerships, shopping centers and office parks, with most of the construction seemingly designed to take out the maximum amount of natural vegetation. Monticello and Pantops, I think, reflect a kind of split personality in our area, and I sometimes imagine the two mountains having conversations just trying to figure the whole thing out. Usually in these scenarios, Monticello proves to be too aristocratic to empathize very much with poor little Pantops’s plight.

John, hope you had a nice 37th birthday.