Sunset, Thursday, 25 June 2009

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

I’m doing some homework on a local issue, but one that reverberates in many other places – here it’s the construction of the Meadowcreek Parkway in Charlottesville, and the fate of McIntire Park. Much of this is covered in an informative, energetic, lucid and confusing-as-hell website, savemcintire.com.

I wasn’t going to mention any of that today but I bumped into an old acquaintance and magazine interview subject this morning – he may not have remembered my name, we just smiled at each other – John D’earth – and then I saw John mentioned at the top of the McIntire site. Superstitious cat that I am, I took it as a sign. John is probably too young to appreciate my using this term, but if he isn’t the spiritual godfather of the Charlottesville music scene, then I don’t know who is. (More here.)

Development and transportation issues in Charlottesville are kind of funny. It’s a town filled with environmentalist liberals (if I lived there, I’d be one of them) but, for a small place, it has a really vicious urban heat island effect. I live only 10 miles out, but to drive down 29 into town in late spring, summer or fall is often to hit a wall of heat. Leaving, you cool down by very noticeable degrees.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s story about my walk and ”Pancho and Lefty” – which of course was a true accounting right up to the pistol shots – I wanted to share this little paragraph buried way down in the Wikipedia entry on Townes Van Zandt. As a preface, I might mention that Bob Dylan reportedly always had a very high regard for Van Zandt and the esteem was mutual.

Anyhow:

Van Zandt has been referred to as a cult musician and “a songwriter’s songwriter.” Musician Steve Earle, a close friend, once said Van Zandt was “the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” The quote was printed on a sticker featured on the packing of At My Window, much to Van Zandt’s displeasure. Van Zandt responded: “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”

Tonight I just want to be a fan and call this my Michael Jackson sunset.

Sunset, Wednesday, 24 June 2009

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

Out with Flint, it was a normal day. 

Oak leaves, green and glossy, stuck out everywhere into the trail, above last year’s layers of brown fallen leaves, some still whole, some broken down into recognizable pieces, then the litter, then blackish-brown dust, then oak dust turned to clouds. Many’s the highly decorated sunset I’ve seen with oak leaf cloud cluster. 

As usual, the ground and air refused to be entirely separated from each other.

As we crossed the section we call Middle Earth (so named because for years our trails encircled the large area of woods but Laura and I never actually went through), it was evident that trees supported the sky, or to put it another way, without the trees the sky would fall. 

In clumps of large ferns I saw fossils of the present forming by the instant. Soft deep cushions of moss grew faster than my understanding of moss.

I took the trees’ lower limbs, some with sharp broken ends and ready to fall, as a palpable warning not to make living woods into poetry or anything undead.

*    *    *    *

When we came out into the open the “Mexican guys” the landlord uses to cut the fields had just finished the last section and were taking a break at the edge of the woods. Flint ran up to them like he usually does with anyone in these situations and starting circling the tractors and barking like a maniac. I assured the guys he would follow me after a minute or two; they were both at one of the tractors, one sitting in the seat, the other standing as if on a sort of running board on the other side near the front.

“That’s O.K.! It’s O.K.!” they said.

I kept walking and, thankfully, Flint did stop and followed me in short order. I waved and without looking back yelled out “Buenas tardes!” in my best casual, I’m-really-not-trying-too-hard effort at Spanish.

That’s when they shot me four times in the back with their pistolas.

In my anxiety to avoid stereotypes I had failed to notice the fully stocked bandoleers across the guys’ chests. Not to mention the sombreros, big mustaches, and menacing smiles with gold teeth.

My dying thought, if only I can get Townes Van Zandt to commemorate this ... could he be bothered to split the difference between Pancho and Lefty?