NOTES FROM FAYE'S JOURNAL

 

We thought you might like to read some of the journal environmental and cultural entries made during our twenty years of living here in the mountains. Some were made while we were living at an elevation of 2200 feet with an expansive view into the park. The later ones were made where we presently live...less view of the mountains but with a branch and acreage. Reading these entries is good way to get a feel for what it's like to spend some time here. An asterisk (*) flags my latest updates of entries.

 

SUMMER

6/3/98

2nd set of flame azaleas blasting away on their trumpets. A work in progress, thanks to Webb Mt. bees. They have cross pollinated flame azaleas until we have every shade from almost yellow to almost red.

Sourwood blossom hands curve out, fingers curve up.

6/5/87

For weeks our hawk has out-whistled his rival for this ridge of Webb Mountain. Sometimes I think I'm hearing blue jays' squeaky-wheel cry, but I check way up in the sky, and usually it's these 2 hawks circling and screaming at each other. When will we see the female fly up, grab the winner's claws, and come tumbling down with him in that whirl of a mating dance?

Ronald watches the hawks so much (while he's supposed to be building) that he actually saw one make water way above him. He says the summer air atomized this spray long before it could douse him.

6/13/87

Got our record player fixed and played our Audubon Bird Calls record. Confirmed: our hawk is a Broadwing, crow-sized so he can fly through our thick woods. Makes sense.

6/26/98

Old Field Branch is definitely healthy.

We're in the middle of a stonefly flight. These shining, yellow adults, so busy seducing each other--just yesterday they were tiny two-tailed monsters prowling the gravels of the Branch. Mayflies also rise out of our stream, fairies. The females dip, dip, dip into the Branch, dropping an egg each time her tail breaks the surface of the water. Saw one Big Ugly Dobsonfly, not much prettier than its larva, what the locals call Grampus Worm--the best fish bait in Webb Creek. Old Field Branch is too small for fish, so he's king. You have to watch where you grab them and hook them onto your hook--they'll bite you.

7/22/99

Last week I counted 13 different mushroom species on our trail up to work, but I didn't take time to write them down. By the first of this week the big beefy one has slumped. I'm distressed. I missed categorizing this rainy July's bonanza. And where's the sweet duff smell from last week? Where's the brilliant orange and red, those baby buttons near the top of our trail? I swear next soaking season I'll....

7/30/93

Pipevine Swallowtail
Pipevine Swallowtail teaches Butterflying. He says, "Bottom line: I eat poison when I'm a caterpillar so nobody likes to eat me. That's why I'm partying with a couple a dozen other Pipevines here on the bank of the Little Pigeon River. All the other big black butterflies try to copy my orange spots and blue tail, so the birds will think they taste bitter also. But they never get my pattern just right. That's why you never see as many of them cooling it like we do. Except Tiger Swallowtails. Some of the female Tiger Swallowtails try to look like me, but their stripes show through their black. The rest of the females and all of the males don't even bother to camouflage themselves. Still, they throw huge parties. You know how cocky tigers are, and how easy they are for birds to snatch." I heard him say this, and that's how I finally learned about the Big Black Swallowtails (and 2 that aren't swallowtails) of Summer.

 

8/3/01

Summer Report: Still the Whip-Poor-Will patrols his borders. Mars still closes in on our moon behind our clouds which close and open, close and open, night and day. We are almost to our second species of summer asters and our third species of wild sunflowers.

8/9/90

27 Yellow-Fringed Orchids in the last curve of Scenic Trail. Best show ever. [Ronald just posted a photo of our own Yellow-Fringed Orchids in his Photo Gallery.]

8/27/96

I just twisted around to see what butterfly floated by. My brain was already talking, "Burnt yellow-orange brown, deep wings..." It landed on the Bobcat (construction machine). Whoops. It's just another poplar leaf. Every tree has a bright finger somewhere. Sourwoods, of course, swish around wine-colored. And so the air is busier every day. Like Spring. New butterflies, new leaves. Quick, which?

 

AUTUMN

9/6/98

We are hosting our best friend, the bat. We offer him any gnats on the place. He's snoozing under our bedroom eave. I look through the binoculars and see the miniscule hook hangers he stuck down between the wall boards. A leg or something stick-like projects up diagonally from one side. I find him in the encyclopedia. He's a Little Brown Bat. I'm in my bed now and my feeling is that he is our other self--more of this mountain than we are. Was he born in a bear cave up slope on this Webb Mountain? Or did he fly over here from Greenbrier Pinnacle Lead? We live on this land by day; bat dreams. We lie down next to him at dark. We dream; he takes over on this place.

 

*9/10/06

Our Tormentor

 We haven't managed a photograph of any of our bats, but here's our latest airbourne mammal--the flying squirrel. Alas, we had to live-trap him. He was chewing on the trim board outside our bedroom window every night. We read that flying squirrels love fruit, so we released him near Baxter's Orchard several miles up Highway 321 (see Photo Gallery). I took this picture right before we opened the cage and he raced to the neighboring woods.

 

*9/14/05

September is the time to be here. (I know, I say that day-in, day-out.) But look at Ronald. He comes up our lane from the mailbox with his camera clicking. Black-eyed Susans are still holding, and Jewelbox Touch-Me-Nots. Cardinal Flowers and their blue cousins the Lobelias are just day-glo. The kings and queens--pink Joe Pye and knock-out purple Ironweed--they nod from their ten foot stalks. They're so big, Ronald shoots them from up here in the computer room. This way he can catch at least three butterflies and ten other pollinators on each of their giant landing pad heads. And under all these show-off blossoms are sprays of white asters and two purple varieties. The purple Curtis Aster is our favorite. Speaking of favorite, Ronald waits all summer for his favorite sunflower, the largest of our roadside sunflowers. Here it is in abundance at our entrance. Long yellow petals--happy happy faces up and down on their furry stalks. The Falling-Fireworks sunflower lingers. That's our name for that busy pale yellow variety. And here come the goldenrods--the sprays, the spikes, and the cones. Forgot to mention the perfect Maryland Golden-Asters along the end of Sunshine Trail and up our lane, neat and brilliantly yellow as though they'd been bred for gardens. The not-so-neat long, falling, curving wands of yellow False Foxglove are finishing their last tip-end blossoms, feeding at the roots of black oaks. Also not-so-neat on their sprangle of branching threads the miniature Harebells bush out like blue-purple dots, quietly tolling the end of growing for 2005. Whoops, waxing a little poetic there. [See Tiger Swallowtail on our Joe Pye Weed in Photo Gallery.]

*9/16/06

Surely this fall's bloom of mushrooms breaks even our Smoky's world class record. We're up here in the woods behind our chalets. I take a step. Under my foot, inside this forest floor humus, mushroom networks push up their "flowers." I count four varieties right where I need to set my camera. And the thing about this rain forest is that this floor space is already full. The mushroom network underground doesn't know that it sent this sweetheart up right under a rhododendren limb. But the mushroom's "fruiting body" heaves, wedges, slides itself into this thick jungle.

Borne Up On Angel's Wings

*9/19/05

Just walked down to Jesse's old garden at the end of Butler Branch Road. I had a craving for a few more half-rotten white-meated peaches from his two old-time trees. No peaches, but I brought back the whir of bumblebees and that whole minor nation of pollen eaters and nectar suckers. I couldn't even hear Butler Branch, standing on its bank. But I could hear that huge buzz of Jesse's ruby-throated hummers. They're after the ruby throats of the Cardinal Flowers and the orange throats of the Jewelbox. The hollow squeezes so tight there that even in this hot, dry end of summer that Butler Branch keeps Jesse's place damp and jammed with water-loving Jewelbox, and a few Cardinals. No peaches, but extra sweet flowers down there.

9/21/02

Quiet, expectant season. Grand calendar art coming, but now on the last day of Summer--look here--Hearts-a-Bustin' wide open, red berries dangling from yellow-orange shells. Did I even see them on the roadside, zipping by at 20 miles per hour? Wiley Oakley, the most famous guide to the Smokies, always added, "bustin' with love."

9/22/00

Fall begins with tree trunks on fire right up and out their limbs and dripping flames down halfway back to the ground. It's probably poison ivy, but I think of it as Virginia creeper, since it's so consistently the color of a red bird in March in his mating excitement.

I get it: we've been hearing our Cardinal practicing his March song. The trees hear it too and catch the Cardinal's fire, not in their leaves, yet, but on their trunk.

10/3/87

First Hoarfrost (Frozen Cloud Breath): Everything is white from 2000' up to our level, 2200'. The sun is out, heating our frost and sending it up as small new clouds. The locals call these larger young clouds "wisps." The smaller ones they call "wispies." Bill Hooks, former park ranger, told me that these terms came over with the Scot-Irish from the magical fogs of the Scottish and Irish hills.

Mt. Cammerer
We stand at the windows. I'm writing fast but I can't keep up with Ronald. And Ronald can't keep up with this one wisp of fog that rises: "One going up Mt.Cammerer (locals call White Rock). Pretty bright, Mom, pretty bright. All right, we're into Low Gap. White line--trrrr--gone. Look out, don't miss it--this one's going over the top of the white line. It's being eaten up from the right by the wind. Is it gone? Now look, now look. It's going up the next hump as a white line. See, if I photograph that it'll just be two white dots."

At 6:18pm the sun spots on Greenbrier Pinnacle Lead have enough gold in them to pick up the autumn color on the trees, soaking through the hoarfrost.

10/3/96

Our best Fall migration ever, for monarch butterflies and warblers. American Redstart (maybe), Northern Parulas, Black-and-Whites (are ours among them?), Yellow-Rumped, Hooded, many olive confusers.

10/21/04 Whistle Pig Town Revisited

Jesse Mathis lived here most of his life--forty years or so before Cobbly Nob was laid out. He was still here to be our guide 20 years ago. "You been to Whistle Pig Town? I'll take you." We walked up the old Black Gum Gap Road five minutes. "Shhh. Climb down off the road so you can sit and watch them whistle pigs."

I was not prepared for this. Cobbly Nob is thick woods, like the rest of Webb Mountain. But we had just entered a world of kudzu. It was early spring then, and looked like dead vines covering everything, from where we sat all the way down the hollow and up the other side almost. Where did this kudzu come from? Jesse whispered, "The county planted it along this old county road, back in the 30's. This is the best time to watch the litt'luns cavort about." Way down at the bottom of the hollow I could pick out black holes in the mat of vines, and paths. And sure enough, I saw a fat mama groundhog waddle down to the branch. Guess who followed her and drank from the stream? You got it--two fur-ball babies.

Whistle Pig Town

 Today, Ronald and I are back again on the old road. We're writing a Cobbly Nob Trail Guide to include in our "Owners Manual" for our chalet guests to use. "1st Stop: Whistle Pig Town." Can Ronald capture it with his camera--the enormity of the kudzu? Now, before the first frost, we see an emerald drapery--this whole hollow green and frilly with billions of lovely leaflets--all the same optimistic, robust kudzu leaflets. And at the top of the far slope of the hollow, maples that the kudzu has not yet reached. They sing out in their brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows, oblivious of the emerald competition so near. We don't have time today to entertain ourselves with whistle pigs, way down there near the branch. You, yourself, will have to sit as quiet as Jesse in this dreamscape. And, like in a dream, you'll hear them whistle to each other.

10/22/04

Just read in the local newspaper that the whitetail rut is beginning, so the majority of does will be bred in the next few weeks. Where are our deer? Two walked up our driveway the first week we lived down here in the hollow. Politely they excused themselves. They didn't want to disturb the wild flower seed beds, vegetable garden, and orchard we were planting. More probably, they have all the way from our home and chalets to the top of Webb Mountain and down the other side to forage. Let the raccoons have our corn.

*10/24/06

Largest bear we've ever seen--350-400 pounds. We're hiking about a half-mile in on the Henwallow Falls Trail, off Cosby Campground Road. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a big blob about 25 yards away. It blacks out a lot of undergrowth. Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? I motion to Ronald to stop and look. Big Bear stops, turns, and looks at us too. My feeling is that he's not concerned, just making sure we're not interfering with his foraging. How lucky can I get? He--I say he because males are larger than females--he acts like he's posing to have his picture taken. And here's the picture I clicked. I never think one thing about changing my camera settings for this dark forest floor. (We'd been shooting up at bright leaves.) I just feel blessed that he doesn't spook when he sees me raise the camera.

Our Biggest Bear

Meanwhile, Ronald whispers, "Push your flash button. If he starts towards us, we'll flash at him." Ohhh, OK. But I don't look for my flash button. I take another picture, because now Mr. Big turns to the tree behind him, raises up on his hind legs, and claws the tree. Just like on the nature programs. Is he challenging us? Is he fixing to charge us? But he turns and nonchalantly walks away through the laurel.

Maybe he was going to mark this territory anyway, but my feeling is that he thumbed his nose at us.

He leaves us with blurred pictures of him scratching the tree and walking. Now we're whisperng to each other, "Why didn't we think to punch the movie button? The camera would have focused perfectly. We'd have the whole thing." Will we remember next time we have wildlife put on a show just for us? Or will we forget everything except how the wilderness is granting us its brief, live presence, and, photograph or not, we'd better be taking it in.

11/3/04

On a road trip, driving up through northeast Georgia. Good time to pretend that we are our chalet guests driving from the South, driving north, hunting Fall Color. Where are the vivid splashes? Where are the maples? A smattering of yellow maples from Tallulah Falls into Rabun County. A maple or two hold onto their color up the North Carolina side of the Smokies. Now down our Tennessee side of the Smokies. WOW! The Sugar Maples of the Sugarlands Valley dazzle our eyes. Ahhh, driving up our lane our own maples are still dazzling, and some are just beginning to turn.

The wonder of this Tennessee Smokies Fall is the length of it. Some of these dogwoods, sumac, black gum and sourwoods reddened in August and are still holding red. Even some yellow birch, hickory and beech leaves cling. Scarlet oaks are scarlet; other oaks burnish copper and rust. Pile on this "New England" brilliance of the maples and we've got three and a half months of shimmering color. That's why Leaf Peepers find their way here.

Dogwood Tree

11/9/93

4:00am: In two hours I might see Venus and Jupiter, the brightest planets, shining only one-half degrees apart. Spica, much fainter, will be to their upper right. Got that? Might not get to see them, though, because of our haze in Low Gap. But, no matter what, I'm seeing Orion right now over the oaks just under the roof. Orion the Hunter wears the belt of three bright stars in a row. Off of his belt to the south-east is Sirius, his faithful Dog Star. Sirius follows at Orion's heel. I see Sirius, then up to the Little Dog Star, Procyan, then back to Orion's arm pit, Betelgeuse. Now you know what's called the Winter Triangle.

11/15/98

Witch-hazels shooting sparks! Thirty-one of them blooming from the golf course to our house.

*11/20/05

Sure that Susan, my artist friend, would miss the height of the color, coming so late this fall to Allure. But no, she hit the peak, and painted it--me giggling over her shoulder and offering tips on watercoloring. Even with the Faye-handicap she managed to capture the Persian rug that lies over the mountains and the clear reds and yellows of the maples on Chestnut Ridge in the foreground. Next, get it framed and hung in Allure for the rest of you who missed the latest autumn miracle.

 

*11/25/05

This fall I've taken out-of-town friends and family to the shops of Turtle Hollow in the Gatlinburg Arts and Crafts Community. The stone work and sculpture garden are worth the visit, not to mention the museum quality of some of the art objects--practical and/or inspiring--inside. Off 321 halfway to Gatlinburg from us, turn on Buckhorn Road. They're at the second big sign. Our old neighbors, the Proffitts, sell their turned wooden vases, etc. at The Cliffdwellers, just up the road.

11/29/93

3:45pm: Raking leaves. Old Mr. Greenbrier Pinnacle Lead keeps me company. 4:15: Greenbrier's western slopes are still bright and warm. The eastern slopes are darkening, like this driveway. I'm cold in the shadows of these woods. Greenbrier's ribs are starting to stick out from his backbone, the more oblique the angle of the sun, and the closer it gets to suppertime.

Greenbrier Pinnacle

12/21/96

Snowed all afternoon. One minute an overcast gray out there and the next minute it was white. By mid-afternoon the ceiling of cloud was still three-fourths of the way down Greenbrier Pinnacle Lead. One minute we were asking when's it going to lift. The next minute ghosty white whales, those first foothills rising on the Greenbrier side of the valley, were swimming across the valley and right into this greatroom. The first three layers of humps have shaken off that lead blanket. December is our snowiest month. White Christmases up here. One crystal Christmas, ice shimmering on every tree.

12/27/96

Dried sunflowers, the bushy clump kind, gasp and wriggle ever so slightly. So warm I don't know whether it's bees or breeze?..Now I see, goldfinches, the seed-eaters? Good Christmas company.

 

WINTER

1/13/89 [To imagine this, click on our homepage and look at the profile of the mountains. Mt. Cammerer, called White Rock, on the left, anchors the eastern end. Greenbrier Pinnacle

4:43 pm-- Cloud lifting. There's that perfectly straight, thick chalk line a quarter of the way down White Rock. The cloud took her finger and smeared hoarfrost along White Rock's flank to show us where she had sat all day.

4:45-- Here's the line on Greenbrier's Hump. Cloud getting up off of that narrow bridge from Greenbrier over to Old Black.

4:46-- Our whole stretch of the Appalachian Trail is in the freeze line------------ta-da, the cloud leaves our highest top, the flat top of Mt. Guyot ("Gee-yo" hard G).

4:47--Look west. Hello, LeConte! Frozen, yes, but violet in the sunset.

*1/15/06

Curtis (one of our sons) and family just here and showing videos of their sledding in Cosby Campground, at the foot of White Rock. Their metal runner sled for the frozen road and their luge for the snowy slopes. Had our eastern end of the park almost to themselves. Only one set of hikers braved the road and the careening sled. By 11:00 all was slush; time to come eat with us.

1/20/97

8:00 am 19 degrees

Cloud fills Cosby Creek Valley all the way from Low Gap north to Gabe Mt. and as far as I can see. The arm of Snake Den holds the cloud in the Gap on this side and White Rock rides along above it on the back side. Now right through the center of the Gap shoots the first sunbeam like a movie projector's light, only creamy and not flickering.

Slow-motion froth top of the cloud. Horizon of White Rock bumps and pitches above this lace.

Now I can't see anything. The whole sun herself jumps up--from behind what? We haven't had a clear sunrise in so long I've lost track of her. I shield the big spot with my hand. Sooo, she's right over Inadu Knob.

Gee, she's journeyed in this first month. At the winter Solstice, Dec. 20th, she sat on Old Black.

She walks our section of the Appalachian Trail--slower than our winter hikers. She's made it up and down the Unnamed Knob, and now up Inadu [Cherokee word for Place of Snakes]. It's all down hill for her now. She'll slide off Snake Den into the Gap, then up and out White Rock.

The mountains of Cocke County are so far away from here they're just gravel under Grandmother Sun's sandals. She spends our summers hiking out on them and back.

2/2/87

5:00pm--The late light reflects the same bright yellow-gray on the clouds and on the mountains.

2/28/87

6:30 am, pre-dawn-- Each mountain wall stretches out on her side this morning. Burmese cats, all so deep a brown velvet they look black. Each locks her head in its upright position with her ears up, missing nothing, nursing her kitten ridges.

* 2/28/87

5:29 am

I raise my head and take in the silhouette of Greenbrier Lead, 3 miles across the valley. It weighs ten thousand times more than it will later today. That's because there's no haze or clouds yet. I have learned this much from the two-and-a-half months we have lived up here. No matter what willy-nilly wildness this theater delivers today, it will release this monolith. This whole chain of mountains will bob on water, even dissolve into water itself, and, if it hazes, flicker in blue-tipped flames and evaporate.

I'm ready. I have one eye on my digital clock and one out the south window.

 

* 3/11/94

8:00 am, 23 degrees

I can't wait to open my butterflies and moth guide books, so here goes. Who's the first butterfly to emerge? I write this with a pink Mt. LeConte snow ghost looking in this window, and snow on our trees. But we had 60 degrees last week, so I'm not pushing the season. Where was our Comma butterfly. He winters over as an adult. Winter-before-last, on a warm February day, he stretched his wings for us like a bear coming out of hibernation then disappeared for another month. This was down at the spring in the ramp hollow. He bluff-charged us. We aren't supposed to be in his domain, even when he's sleeping. He charged at a chickadee as well. Then he was gone--back inside the bark of some tree, according to this book--to sleep some more. So, Comma, are you snoozing inside a tree right now, close to the spring? Just look at you in this book. You're more orange than Jewel-Box [Touch-Me-Not] flowers. The Jewel-Box flower is a good simile for you. Jewel-Boxes are just as aggressive and showy. And they have already pushed up their round basal leaves at the spring. So where are you? It's Spring at the spring, for crying out loud.

 

 

SPRING

 

Vernal Equinox '97

Don't you feel the heavenly bodies balance and the earth teeter on its axis? Day and Night shake hands. Moon bows to Grandmother Sun for an extra second and, with that extra second, Spring begins------------ 8:55 and 2 seconds a.m.--Spiders wave their handkerchief webs. Dogwood and Sassafras blow their white and yellow bubbles.

4/3/94 Easter, 6 days after the flood

We went back to Cosby Creek Nature Trial at the Cosby entrance to the National Park, for the third time this Spring. Hepatica and Spring-Beauty started blooming a month ago. Two weeks ago they were at their peak. Today, for Easter, all these are beginning to open, finally: Trout Lilies, False Anemone, Crowfoot, Dutchman's Britches, Spice Bush, Bishop's Cap, Longspur Violet and Wood Violet, Trillium. The flood washed new trails, but most of the flowers held tight and waited. [See Trillium in Photo Gallery.]

*4/19/03

Planting corn, okra, etc. on our garden ridgetop, near noontime. I think about one of my favorite subjects--the Greens. They built two houses, at least, and a barn in this Old Field Hollow in the early 1900's. Why can't I get our grandchildren to be the Greens with me? I know: I'll call it a ghost story. Two of the Greens, a mother and child, are buried up in the woods.

I hear one of the Green boys making up a jingle. He sings: "Sow the corn, hoe the corn/ Listen for the dinner horn."

Maybe the oldest daughter, down on our branch, has a fire going. She dips up water to mix with her corn meal. She washes off her hoe, heats the blade over the fire and rubs fatback on it, drops batter on the blade. Now she blows through an old cow horn.

That little brother runs down, washes his hoe, splashes everybody around him, greases his blade and drops batter on it. By the time his batter cooks, he's ready with his second verse.

"Hoe cake, ham meat/ Something good enough to eat."

These verses come to my head from reading "The Peddler's Pack," by May Justus. She grew up east of our end of the Smokies at the turn of the 20th Century. That book is full of rhymes from her school days, and superstitions, etc. She says a boy came out with this verse during their Poetry Recitations. I'm just sure he made it up hoeing. Wish whomever I loaned that book to would give it back.

I look up the rhododendrun slope to the Garden Ridge. But my head is still with the Greens, and all the slopes are furrowed with corn rows. The kids and I could follow that ridge north to the Black Gum Gap trail, then along it down to the Sutton Graveyard. We could be this whole community of subsistance farmers, moonshining with most of that corn to keep these younguns in winter shoes.

4/21/98

Our Frazier magnolia (deciduous) is blooming away whether anybody sees her or not. Some day we'll have a path to her. Ronald calls these blooms rags, they're so big and floppy. They're more delicate than their cousin, the Southern magnolia. What a show.

 

4/30/93

8:00 pm. Ronald says, "I don't know what's happening to me. I must be on drugs. There's Fujichrome behind my eye lenses. We've been maligning the Smokies, saying they're not as green as the brochure photographs color them. But we just forgot. This poplar [tree] green is as strong a green, in spring, as any maple is strong orange in fall." Big smile. [At 6:22 AM, I had recorded that these green poplar stands were embossed with that milky pink light. We are consumed entirely by Green.]

"They're like that moss that you can't keep your hands off of. You look out there and you are so proud of your mountains. They just look so good now, you want to lean over and pat their haunches, like you pat the rump of your horse or rub your dog's neck. You take such delight in them.

"In Winter, you look over there--you know how cold they are. Now this."

 

5/27/98, dusk

Sitting in our new orchard waiting for our Promethea, the Spicebush Silk Moth, to rise up on her wings (4-inch span) with her eye spots and exotic bands. Evening Bird Song: Wood Thrush down in Whistle Pig (Ground Hog) Town Hollow, then up Old Field Hollow. Black-and-White Warbler squeaks. The male Phoebe chases Hot Mama. She's got to start that second brood. The mystery crazy bird shoots up over the tree tops, executes an inside loop and a zigzag, with a song to illustrate these aerobatic moves. Or does his flying illustrate his exploding song? Is he just a Scarlet Tanager? Great Crested Flycatcher, maybe?

 

Promethea Moth
 

 

 

* 5/31/95

8:43 am. Greenbrier is as clear as the Little Pigeon River. We're looking deep into his riffles through light shafts. These shafts are not sunbeams from cloud to mountain surface, but from the surface of the mountain down. He isn't producing chartreuse as much as reflecting and moving the green around. He's freckled and patched with dark schools of evergreens, dark cloud shadows, dark north-western hollows.

6:00 pm. Ronald says, "Somebody is playing out there, dabbing in a paint set. 'What will happen if I apply a strip of dark and a strip of light green above it?' That last low ridge on our side of the valley is black green.

"Somebody pushed the ends of Potato Ridge together--just smushed it in a compactor. It's never crinkled in so many places."

8:30 pm. Ronald: "Look, the painter is still fooling around and there's no sunlight."

 

 

 

PREVIOUS PAGE
HOME PAGE
NEXT PAGE