Another Project Completed

It is always satisfying to complete another project, especially when it is a rock wall or column.  Yesterday afternoon, I put the final rocks in place, mixed up the final load of mortar, and lifted the huge cap rock in place.  A few final touches, a heavy rock propped against a flat rock in the back to keep it in place, and by this morning it had all set up.   

And the final column, as it looks today, and as it will look thirty years from now in all likelihood, except that by then it will be covered in green moss like the wall:

Hurricane Zeta

We were expecting Hurricane Zeta yesterday and today.  The forecast called for rain yesterday morning, a brief clearing in the afternoon, and then heavy rain and high winds all day today.  I used that afternoon clearing to complete a three-mile run up in Town in very mild conditions - you could feel the humidity, as if a little piece of the Gulf of Mexico was being shoved our way ahead of the bulk of the storm.  There was no mistaking that we were directly in its expected path.

We heard rain blowing during the night, that light hurricane rain that waxes and wanes in intensity.  Sometimes it sounded like it was really raining hard.  I awoke at 6:00 to total darkness on the bedside table and knew the power was out.  I have to admit that I was a little surprised; we had expected the power outage later in the day during the heavy rain and wind, but it had come in very swiftly during the night.  We heard later that someone in Cashiers had clocked an 82-mile-an-hour wind, which is high for these mountains that are usually relatively sheltered.

We learned to be resourceful years ago and are equipped for most short power outages.  I survived a power outage of several days with our daughter Katy during the blizzard of 1993.  She was only six years old, and Martha had gone to Raleigh to visit her grandmother, leaving us stranded with a vehicle that did not have four-wheel drive.  We actually enjoyed being resourceful at the time, and I still do.  So I quickly went about filling buckets from the dwindling water supply, lighting the kerosene lantern, and rigging up the small propane burner which we have owned since before 1993 and still works well to heat up a kettle of water for coffee.  I was drinking my second cup out on the back porch - light rain blowing so hard that I was getting a little wet - when I heard that beeping and clicking sound of returning power.  I was almost a little disappointed that it had returned so quickly.  I had already planned a lunch of black bean burgers cooked on the grill.

The rain had mostly faded away by mid-morning, and I realized I had the opportunity to run again, as well as to check out any possible damage in Town.  The conditions were a little surreal when I arrived in Town.  Rain had returned on my drive to Town, but then it looked as if the sun was trying to shine.  Tiny raindrops were blowing around, so light that they almost seemed like snow flurries, and it was a balmy 68 degrees.  I saw several limbs down but no trees on my route; however, damage must have been worse in parts of Town because the power was still out here and there and power trucks had the Dillard Road blocked.  The Main Street traffic light was out and a police officer was directing traffic. There was a lot more flooding than I had expected.  On my usual route through Village Walk I found back yards flooded and a muddy, roaring Mill Creek.

It was the same along Sixth Street, and the little creek that runs beside Trillium Place near Townsite Apartments was almost engulfing the footbridge that crosses it that I sometimes run on.

This house on Laurel Street usually floods during very heavy rains, and this morning was no exception.  Photos taken earlier that Martha later showed me on Facebook showed the front yard completely flooded, but by the time I passed by it had subsided somewhat.

I am grateful that we fared better than most, especially compared to New Orleans which had reportedly taken a direct hit.  By lunch time the sun was out and it was nearly 75 degrees.  We will enjoy it while we can, because cold weather is coming this weekend.

Rock Walls and Columns

I built a curved rock sidewalk from our driveway and patio to our back door 32 years ago.  After I had completed it, I built a rock wall that follows that same curve, and in the area between them we have planted hostas and other plants over the years.  I know when I built that wall because I unearthed a picture from an old photo album that says our daughter Katy was two years old, which would have made it 1988.  I know I had just completed it in this picture because the taught string that I used to make its top level is still in place.  Katy's holding a little whisk broom that I am still using to this day for rock work.

That seems like such a long time ago!  In the intervening years, Katy grew into a beautiful and talented young woman, her dad lost a good bit of hair on top of his head, and that jeep in the background was hauled to the junkyard decades ago.  And that same wall today is covered with moss and thrift.

That's one thing I like about rock walls - they will be there for a long, long time.  They will endure.  We see the remains of rock walls, foundations, and chimneys everywhere that have survived the houses they were once attached to, like this chimney I took a photo of several years ago.  

There is a good chance that this rock wall I built 32 years ago will be there as long as that chimney.  I built it on a good foundation, and I installed "weepholes" every few feet, short lengths of galvanized steel pipe that permit moisture to escape from the bank behind it and thus prevent it from buckling or cracking.  I wrote a poem about building walls like this many years ago.

I don't know why I terminated the wall the way I did, simply stopping abruptly just outside our back door.  I may have had something in mind like an outdoor fireplace at the time, or some stone steps leading up to the compost bins.  But I am glad that I left it incomplete, waiting for the right time to come along.

Could I ever have imagined at the time that these many years later I would be building a column there incorporating rocks collected from around the country, fished from the Pacific Ocean, picked up from the desert in Arizona, or a mountain in Maine? 

Stand firm, good column.

Cast in Stone

I have had a project in mind for some time, and this week seemed like a good time to start it.  The weather is still unseasonably mild, but soon it will turn rainy and cold, so I realized if I wanted to complete it this year I just needed to go ahead with it.

During our trip across the country in 2016 in our Mini Cooper, I collected rocks in three special places out west and brought them back with us, thinking that I could incorporate them into a wall or column somewhere on our property.  I have done this in the past; the patio and walkway to our back door contains three rocks from the top of Mt. LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountain, carried five miles down the trail in a small backpack.  The rocks from out west sat on a shelf in our back room all that year until our trip to New England in 2017, where I collected two additional rocks.  Perhaps I was waiting all this time to see if we might be traveling somewhere else.  (I actually collected three rocks from England, Scotland, and Ireland last year on our trip there, but they are so small that they are pebbles, really, and as I write I can see them lined up on top of my roll-top desk.)

There they stayed, lined up on that shelf, waiting for the stone mason to get to work!  The first one, on the left, is a piece of Cadillac granite from Arcadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, just outside Bar Harbor, Maine.  Cadillac Mountain is the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard and the first place to view the sunrise in the United States from October until March. 

That was a chilly day in April in Maine!  Here was the view from the top of Cadillac Mountain, not far from where I found this rock along the side of the road.  It is probably illegal to take a rock from a National Park, so I did so surreptitiously, and I hope that if some Park Ranger should somehow stumble upon this blog he will look the other way.

The second rock from the left was lifted from the very cold waters of the West Branch of the Little River, just behind the Innsbruck Inn near Stowe, Vermont.  The river flows under this beautiful covered branch at the beginning of the Stowe Recreation Path, a famous Greenway Trail that we followed all the way into the Village of Stowe four or five miles away.  I remember that there was still snow on the ground here and there along the trail.

The next three rocks are all from out west.  That one in front is a piece of the red rock we saw everywhere near Sedona, Arizona.  This particular one was found alongside the road to the Meteor Crater.  I wrote about it in this blog on August 1, 2016.  "We stop at Meteor Crater National Monument, a crater left by a meteor that landed here 50,000 years ago.  It is here that I find a nice stack of that red rock known throughout the area, and I fit one into the boot of our Mini."  The mountains around Sedona are that same color.

Just behind that is another reddish rock, which is actually a piece of petrified wood.  I collected it on the same day as the previous one, and wrote this about it in my blog:  "Our next stop is the Petrified Forest National Park, where I watch an interesting film on the creation of petrified wood, how cellulose was displaced by silica (sort of the way vinegar replaces water in a pickle, I decide).  Unable to find any petrified wood along the side of the road, I break down and actually spend $25 in the gift shop for a largish chunk of petrified wood."  It occurs to me that this may be the only rock that I have ever paid for. 

Finally, to the far right, is another rock fished from water, this time not from a cold New England Stream but from the Pacific Ocean behind our hotel in San Simeon.  We had been to Las Vegas a week before that and renewed our marriage vows in the Tunnel of Love, accompanied by an Elvis impersonator, which sounds cheesy but was actually very touching.  We were given a rose during the ceremony and Martha had carried it with us since then.  I wrote:  "Our hotel in San Simeon, the Cavalier, was directly on the ocean, a big wide lawn and then a steep bluff, and then the cold Pacific Ocean, into which we waded.  Martha left her rose there, given to us at the renewal of our vows in Las Vegas.  And I took away a large rock, worn smooth by the Pacific (which I somehow managed to lodge in the boot of our Mini), which will go into a stone wall I am building in Highlands."  Here we are, our bare feet in the waters of the Pacific Ocean for the very first time.

As I went back through my blog, looking for those photos I posted long ago, I remembered all of those places so clearly, as well as all the other places in between.  I remembered that chilly day atop Cadillac Mountain, that frigid Vermont stream, the rock formations towering in fantastic shapes all around Sedona, that hot day in the desert when we stopped at the Petrified Forest, and the cool Pacific Ocean into which we waded after a day of driving down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to San Simeon.  

What wonderful memories!  And now, when this little stone column has been completed, I will see these rocks every time I come out our back door - all those memories literally cast in stone.

Japanese Black Lacquer, Highlands Black Bears

It was another gorgeous day in Highlands for my Saturday morning long run, clear skies and a light breeze.  At 42 degrees, I don't think it was the coldest day we have had this fall, but it had been cold enough during the night to leave frost on the windshields of cars parked outside of Townsite Apartments when I did my warm-up run - our first frost this year.  

I was glad when I returned to Founders Park to find Karen and three young people chatting together, waiting for my return.  The visitors were two young ladies from Atlanta and a young man from Columbia, SC; one of them had run with us before and had remembered when we met on Saturday mornings.  "Here's our President-for-Life!" Karen said.  I laughed and explained that we had formally dissolved our running club on June 1, but we still met and ran informally.  "So I'm the Ex-President-for-Life of the Dissolved Club," I said.  I stayed behind to run with the young man from Columbia, who seemed to be struggling with the altitude - "No runner left behind!" - and then caught up with Karen later, who ended up completing five miles, more than she has done so far this year.  "Days like this just make you feel like running farther, don't they?" I said.  I completed eight miles myself, then came home for lunch.  

Martha arrived five minutes after I did, backing into the driveway, so I knew she had something to unload.  I never know what my thrifty, sharp-eyed wife might discover at Mountain Findings, our local thrift store, or one of the many yard sales popular this time of year.  I went out to help her and discovered it was a beautiful Japanese black lacquer cabinet and a companion mirror.  We already have several pieces like this in our home that we have collected over the years, including a beautiful desk and a large bureau that Martha uses.  This cabinet so closely matches the bureau that we think it may have been part of the same set.  Such beautiful details!

We found a place for it right away, just above the spiral stairs to the basement, a space that we had recently cleared and that seemed to be calling out for something beautiful to fill it.

The 19th century designer William Morris once famously said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”  We're not sure exactly what this cabinet will be used for, but it unquestionably satisfies the latter requirement.

"Guess how much I paid for it?" Martha asked.  I have learned not to question my wife's judgement in such matters and had not even asked.  I was thinking $100? $500? More?  "How much?"  She grinned.  "$25, for both of them."  I was incredulous.  She had found the two at an estate sale in Town this morning, and said that the woman running the sale, seeing Martha was interested, had told her "You can have both of those for $25."  No further negotiations had been necessary.

After lunch, I raked leaves again, for the third time this week.  We have a very large tulip poplar tree in our front yard that produces a massive crop of leaves, more and more each year, and it usually takes three or four rakings to get them all up.  It was so dry and clear that the leaves seemed weightless.  But unfortunately, I was not the only one in our neighborhood doing this kind of work today.   Unlike on Wednesday, when I had enjoyed no other sounds than "a few afternoon birds singing high above and my rake gently scratching the pavement," the roar of a leaf-blower was at work, and then a big plume of smoke ascending into the air.  So it goes.  

In addition, I could hear the loud sounds of rifles being fired in the distance.  Bear hunting season began on October 12, and this was a perfect day, I suppose, for releasing your hound dogs with their GPS dog tracking collars, waiting until you heard them treeing a hapless bear, and then tracking it down and shooting it.  Each to his own.  I realize that the names of two mountains in Town (one of which I climb regularly) - Big Bearpen Mountain and Little Bearpen Mountain - originated from historical fact.  But I prefer seeing these beautiful creatures out on the road from time to time, at a safe distance. 

Watching Out for Each Other

Yesterday when I was running, I rounded a corner and saw a Town of Highlands pickup truck stopped at the bottom of Big Bearpen Road.  I recognized the driver as one of the guys from the Electric Department's Trimming Crew, and he was putting up a sign in the road.

"Uh-oh," I said.  "That looks like trouble!"  He laughed.  "No, we're just going to take down some trees that are about to fall on an electric line."  

"Well be careful," I said.  "Oh, don't worry," he replied.  "We watch out for each other."  That is certainly something that a crew taking down trees near an electric line has to keep uppermost in mind, and I know from my own work with the Town that these men train all the time on how to safely work around trees and high voltage.  They even have to periodically pass a test showing that they are able to climb a pole and rescue a fellow worker who is injured.  It occurred to me that "Watching Out for Each Other" is a pretty good philosophy of life.

This morning, we drove to Town together, and when we returned we were proudly wearing these little stickers.  Yes, early voting began in Highlands today, and we wanted to vote as soon as possible.  We had seen on the news that voters were lined up for hours and hours in many locations, but we didn't have to wait at all.

It felt especially good to cast our ballots this year.  The past four years have been tumultuous ones in our country.  I don't think I have ever seen a time when there is so much divisiveness, so much hatred and bigotry and racism on open display, and I am old enough to remember the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War demonstrations, and Watergate.  I never thought that I would see Nazis and White Supremacists marching in our streets, nor that our President would refuse to denounce them.

I know that this blog is ostensibly about running and I don't often let politics intrude.  But I was thinking this morning when I cast my ballot about the idea of watching out for each other.  When we watch out for each other, we don't let children be separated from their parents and put in cages.  We don't let millions of people lose their health insurance.  We don't tell the unemployed that we're not willing to provide them with some assistance.  We don't let a pandemic rage out of control because it might hurt the poll numbers.

I think it's pretty clear how I voted.  I voted to watch out for each other.  And I voted as if my life depended on it.

Raking Leaves

Downtown Highlands was pretty quiet at 9:00 a.m. this morning when I started running, so I took a turn down Main Street.  Parked in the center aisle opposite the coffee shop were six or seven exotic-looking sports cars.  There are a lot of sports car enthusiasts here and the beautiful fall weather often attracts groups coming through Town headed for the Blue Ridge Parkway or the Tail of the Dragon.  I slowed to admired them and saw the name on one - a McLaren.

I looked these cars up on the internet when I returned (where I found this photo) and discovered that the starting price was $200,000.  So I was looking at over a million dollars worth of automobiles preparing for a nice fall drive, cups of fresh coffee in their cup-holders.  Many people in this country are not doing well economically these days, but some can still afford to drive cars like these.

As I ran down Main Street, traffic increased, a steady stream coming up the Franklin Road.  I realized that I did not want to be around this kind of traffic, so I circled back and found some quiet roads, Chestnut and Fifth Street.  It was early, but a few walkers were already out.  It was another beautiful day for running, a little cooler than Monday but still comfortable, and I completed six miles, including a couple of 400-meter intervals, which I had not done in a month.  I could hear the roar of leaf-blowers everywhere around Town.

After lunch, I tackled the massive amount of leaves which have now fallen onto the driveway, dry enough to rake at this point.  This is what happens to those leaves:  I rake them up into a big pile, run the lawnmower over them to shred them, then pile them on a tarp.

Then I carry the leaves to our compost bins, which I constructed several years ago not far from our garden shed.  There they will sit, usually shrinking in half over the winter through decomposition, to be taken in the spring by wheelbarrow and spread on the garden beds below the house.

It's a lot of work, but compost from these leaves has improved our garden beds over the years.  And on a day like this I didn't mind it.  I would stop from time to time to breathe deeply that wonderful musky fragrance of fallen leaves, the only sounds a few afternoon birds singing high above and my rake gently scratching the pavement.

Yes, I am perhaps the only person in Macon County who actually uses a rake, not a leaf-blower, for this enjoyable job every year!

October Light

Two days of rain, Saturday and Sunday, did little to dissuade visitors from coming to Highlands and walking its brick sidewalks with umbrellas in hand.  Everybody is still complying with the face mask order, and as far as we know there have been no new cases of Covid-19 in Highlands.  The visitors flock to Mountain Fresh, across from the Episcopal Church, and the new little cafe in the Creekside Village Shops, the Blue Bike Cafe.  

The leaves in our yard are starting to come down now, but it is so wet that we cannot rake them yet; they plaster our cars in the driveway and have to be unstuck from the windshield.

Monday morning, the rain stopped, and in warm, overcast conditions, I rambled all around Highlands on a wonderful eight-mile run.  The maples are at the very peak of their color right now.  We are having such beautiful, warm weather now that it is difficult to believe it is October, and last night we were able to eat dinner outside on our deck.

In weather like this, it is hard to stay indoors.  After lunch yesterday, I drove to Cashiers to do some grocery shopping at Ingles, taking my time along the way, enjoying the Whiteside overlook where before long we will see people lined up at the guardrail in the evening witnessing a well-known phenomenon known as "The Shadow of the Bear," where shadows form the outline of a bear out in the valley below.  In fact, the perceptive reader of this blog may notice that the license tag on the front of the leaf-plastered car above features the iconic Shadow of the Bear:

I always wonder what the Cherokee thought when they first saw this phenomenon generations ago, before tourists with cameras arrived.

This morning, I walked a mile or so around Town, taking photographs along the way.  The tree planters in the middle of Main Street have all been decorated and they look very nice.

And the trees in front of Townsite Apartments are also just at their peak.  This is where Martha's aunt Anne lives during the summer months, but alas she was not able to come this summer, and as we have told her in phone calls and e-mails it just didn't seem like summer without her being here.

This is the view looking north on Fifth Street, just around the corner.  What a joy it is to run under that canopy of golden trees this time of year!

Is there a better time for running in Highlands?  I think not.

Defying the Radar

Hurricane Delta made landfall in Louisiana today, the 30th named storm of the hurricane season.  With global climate change, these storms are becoming more numerous and more powerful; there were so many this year that they ran out of letters in the alphabet and had to begin again with the Greek alphabet.  Looking ahead at the forecast, most of the rain was expected to arrive in Western North Carolina on Saturday and Sunday, so I decided to re-schedule my Saturday long run for today.  So I was surprised when I awoke to light rain on the roof this morning.  The radar showed something I have rarely seen - a long, thin arm stretching out ahead of the approaching system, directly over Highlands, as if deliberately trying to intimidate a runner like myself who no longer enjoys getting drenched in "character-building" runs.

 

I decided to defy the radar and drive to Town anyway.  It was warm, and the rain was the type that would grow in intensity and then in a few minutes almost cease entirely.  I had several errands to do - post office, bank, grocery store - and I went ahead with them, conscious that usually the radar does not lie and that arm extending out over Highlands was not likely to disappear.  It seemed to be moving due east, with even more intense rain to come.  But as I sat in my car, it seemed as if the rain was diminishing more and more, and finally there was nothing but a light mist on the windshield.  I headed out for my "long" run, thinking that at least I might be able to complete a mile, maybe two, staying close to shelter in case it began to pour.  Martha had asked me to report on conditions so I texted her:

 

"Light rain.  I've done all my errands.  Seems to be letting up although radar shows more coming.  Think I'll try a couple of miles."  She immediately replied:  "You're not right in the head."

After a mile, it had stopped completely, replaced by fog.  And after another mile it was still clear.  So I tried another, and another.  It was so warm that I changed into a sleeveless shirt.  Still another mile.  And the autumn colors seemed to be even more brilliant in the fog!  The burning bushes near the Highlands School track were absolutely gorgeous.

Finally, my watch showed six miles completed, just as I returned on another loop to the car.  And just at that moment the rain began again, as if on cue.  I called it a day, and gave thanks for finding a window of opportunity despite the radar.  Sometimes we are rewarded by defying what seems inevitable.  I've experienced the opposite often enough!

Glorious Fall Weather

We have entered a week or two of glorious fall weather, the kind of weather that brings visitors to Highlands and makes them wish they lived here.  The rains of this summer are long past, the leaves are beginning to turn, and the sky is that deep blue of early fall.  And the forecast shows several more days just like this:  sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny.

This is ideal weather for running, of course.  It's cool enough (42 degrees this morning) that gloves and a long-sleeved shirt feel good, but I can still wear shorts.  The streets were filled with visitors, most of them on the sidewalks downtown, but many of them in big groups spread across the road outside of the commercial area where we usually run, carrying cups of coffee and dressed a little more warmly than we were.  They all looked as if they were enjoying this glorious day as much as I was.  "Beautiful morning!" I would say, which would always elicit a friendly reply.

Some of our running friends have been going to races, which have started up again in our area.  In fact, our Mayor and another friend completed a 5-K in Suwannee, Georgia last weekend and both set PRs, not an easy thing to do for an aging runner (the Mayor is the same age as I am).  There is a 5-K in Tallulah Falls, Georgia, tomorrow that we would love to run - the Autumn Breeze 5-K - staged on one of the most beautiful courses we have ever seen.  But we just don't feel ready for a crowded starting line with the Covid-19 pandemic still raging (this week even extending to the President and top officials in his government).  Here we were two years ago at the race, the beautiful lake created by Tallulah Falls Dam behind us.  Martha won first place in her age group on that day.

But we won't be running any races anytime soon.  I have been working on increasing my weekly mileage, as noted in previous posts, and in the absence of any races on the calendar not completing any speed or hill workouts.  Instead, I have increased my runs in the middle of the week from three or four miles to six miles, with a long run on Saturday.  Today I completed eight miles for a weekly total of 22 miles, the most weekly mileage for me all year.  Gone are the days when I would be training for a fall marathon this time of year and completing 22 miles in one day.

This cool, gorgeous weather has inspired us to turn to heartier meals.  Last night I prepared vegetable lasagna (shittake mushrooms, onions, and spinach).   And Thursday night, Martha surprised me with her take on that British standby Fish and Chips.  Instead of the traditional deep-fried fish (usually cod), Martha substituted flounder dredged in a delicious parmesan-based crust and baked in the oven, and instead of the chips she substituted roasted fingerling potatoes.  She even served it on the traditional newspaper.  Healthy and delicious!

Soon it will be time for soup, grilled-cheese sandwiches, and rich, hearty stews and seafood chowders.  I think I look forward to eating this time of year almost as much as I do running!

But this weather won't last, and as November turns to December the cold gray rainy days will move in, and then the snow and the ice.  That is when we begin to long for those warmer conditions we find in Atlantic Beach.  Martha's Aunt Lizette has been generous enough to let us stay in her condo there for the past five years, as readers of this blog will know, where we have enjoyed pleasant runs out to Fort Macon and sometimes even out on that flat, wide beach itself at low tide.  We have been able to stay active on those annual sabbaticals, and we have also been able to read and write.  I am working on a book of poetry right now, in fact, which will include many poems written in that beautiful place. We are looking forward to going again this year!