Entries in Blue Ridge (1722)

Monday
Aug102009

To a Mountainside (Blue Ridge at Bucks Elbow)

Sheltering, descending, extending, wide
Shouldering, climbing, flying, steep
You are the wave of evening tide
You are the sound of morning deep.

Sunday
Aug092009

Sunset, Sunday, 9 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Following Thoreau, in Walden, I might compare the Blue Ridge to a sort of universal music.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

That’s the sweet sort of sound I’d noticed, as a child, when we stayed up on the side of Fox Mountain – a filtered music rising from the valley floor and off the opposite massive wall of Pasture Fence Mountain. Now, each night, all sounds between here and the mountains, from Fox Mountain and Pigeon Top to the hum of U.S. 29 a mile away to the birds in the nearby woods, merge into one twilight tone.

L’heure bleue, the Blue Ridge, a blue note.

Saturday
Aug082009

Sunset, Saturday, 8 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Clouds apparently aren’t approaching storms but steam rising off an oncoming heat wave. Peeps just west have been sending stifled, gasping distress signals like the last telegraph transmissions from front-line outposts just as they’re overrun by an overwhelming enemy force.

Meanwhile, much farther west, in southern California, a woman named Regina Jones is writing ... and writing ... with a book due soon ... and with no idea how beautifully and naturally she writes. Regina once gave me a critical opportunity to write, and to interview some of the greatest people in the music industry.

Among the things I owe you, girl (if I may), is the truth. Let me tell you something.

YOU

HAVE

GOT

‘IT’

Friday
Aug072009

Sunset, Friday, 7 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Thursday
Aug062009

Sunset, Thursday, 6 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

So I’m chopping some really potent onions from Integral Yoga, and this doesn’t usually happen but tears are flooding down my face, the sunset (meaning the image I will want to paint) is happening unexpectedly early and is one of the strongest sunsets it seems like we’ve had in weeks, and the iPod has decided to throw down one of Don McLean’s major I’m-killing-you-softly ballads (“Crossroads,” as it happens), but I’m actually laughing because the tears have nothing to do with the beautiful sunset, or the song, or even with the following:

Oh, I’m scared of the middle place
Between light and nowhere.

                        “Hope There’s Someone” – Antony & The Johnsons

 

The sun goin’ down, boy
Dark gon’ catch me here.

                        “Cross Road Blues” (Take 2) – Robert Johnson

Wednesday
Aug052009

Sunset, Wednesday, 5 August 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I guess, having written about sumac, of all things, which probably only a handful of people in the world care about – none of whom read this blog – I’m forced to keep writing about it, just to get my story straight.

Turns out that I was wrong twice (and counting?). I was wrong from the age of 12, let’s say, until last week, while I assumed that the sumac around here was staghorn sumac. O.K., no disgrace, I think I got the idea from my Boy Scouts manual, which was probably written by Yankees. (Staghorn is what they have.) 

But I should have paid more attention to detail when I said that what we have, in profusion down in the Scrubby Field, is scarlet sumac. I think I liked the name. It isn’t. Apparently, it’s what they call shining sumac, or something close to it.

This I know because the leaves have ‘wings’ – as seen here:

The stem has a narrow band of green leaf running up along it, from leaflet to leaflet – those are wings. And the leaflets don’t have stalks. Botany is tough.

And it’s probably not over. I’ve previously described the fruit as clusters turning from the color of gold grapes to two shades of magenta. Well, maybe that’s only the female plants. The field is also filled with what looks like the same sumac, except the fruit clusters are flowering much more yellow – each flower with (I think) five bright gold stamens. We’ll see how both types of plants turn out.

Perhaps the only way I can ever make all of this up to you is to paint the field at some point.

On a different subject entirely, I made an interesting musical discovery tonight while cooking a sauce, for gnocchi, of zucchini, garlic and tomato. The first 67 or 89 times I played Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” from Love And Theft, I was just glued to it; it pretty much killed me. But then, maybe because my frame of mind was brightening a bit, the next 23 or 31 times I played it, it seemed kind of oppressive. Great, of course, but a little oppressive.

What I discovered while cooking is that if you sing along with Bob, and sing around him – almost doesn’t matter how – and sing the lines more loosely than he does, perhaps making them a little longer, it seems to transform the experience. Makes it like a new song. Of course, the people who know “Mississippi” may be the very same ones who care about sumac.