Reflections on a beat-up bass

Tell the truth, it looked just awful in full daylight.  It was nicked and dinged and dented and scratched from its wobbly foot to its tarnished brass tuning keys.  The neck had cracked badly at some point and an inexpert repairer had tried to fill it with wood putty and touch it up, a badly botched job. Someone had dabbed shiny little dots along the neck to help them remember, I guess, where certain notes were. The strings were frayed. The bridge was missing part of a corner. The built-in pickup hadn't been picked up in ages.  And someone long ago had painted a marking that looked like some kind of Oriental calligraphy, or so I thought.

It was an old school bass, manufactured in 1946 by the Kay Musical Instrument Co., so named for Henry Kay "Hank" Kuhrmeyer, who bought the company and renamed it in the 1920s and turned out about a jillion inexpensive basses, and some expensive ones, over the years. And it was made the same year I was, so we had a lot in common. We would spend the rest of our days together, I thought.

  I had always like the bass -- had played an old brass Sousaphone and a shiny Conn upright bass in the band at Aycock Junior High School in Greensboro in the late 1950s and early '60s.

And a couple years later when Woody Allen and Fred Birdsong and I formed a little band that would be the next Kingston Trio (it wasn't), I borrowed a friend's dad's old aluminum bass fiddle, painted brown to badly resemble real wood.  Jimmy "Squirrel" Garrison joined us before long and we played all over Greensboro and a few out-of-town dates, including, of all things, a drug store opening in Danville VA and followed up with a live performance on a local radio station there.

We thought we were on our way.  We were -- one to Auburn, one to the Army, one to Lehigh, one to Chapel Hill. But still we got together on holidays and military leaves and summer breaks, and I always promised I'd get a good bass to go with the Martin guitars and Gibson 5-strings and this lovely Santa Cruz that Squirrel made sing.

It was years before I found what I wanted and could pay cash money. As knocked up as it was, it put out this amazing sound, full, ripe, authoritative and easy on these stubby fingers I inherited from South Carolina forebears.  I put a new Fishman pickup on it to put a direct injection into this dandy Bose sound system we scraped up the money to help fill Yankee Stadium in case we got invited to bring our music to Gotham. Never did, but we played some fun places over the years in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and, just briefly, Tennessee. Here's a photo of that old bass posing with me, Woody, and Squirrel one night up in the Cane Creek Valley outside Asheville in 2005.  In the dim light of that evening the bass looked a lot better than it did during the day.

That old Kay just would fit in the bed of my pickup truck, and we logged quite a few miles in it before a lightning bolt struck our new house in 2010 one June night when no one was within five miles, and everything burned to cinders.  Never found a trace of the Kay.

Three months later we were in California for our niece's wedding in a lovely, ancient redwood forest. The band was a wonderful group called the California Honey Drops, and the bass player was making this old bass with some dings and dents do things I could only dream about. When the band took a break I wandered over to take a look. It was a 1947 Kay, he told me.  "Funny thing," he went on. "I have this expensive as hell bass at home, and when I play it at performance, people come up to me and ask, 'Why aren't you playing that old bass? It sounds a whole lot better than that fancy one.'"

I knew what he meant. Some of those old Kays could make a joyful noise.

And I thought about that old Kay when this week's New Yorker magazine arrived in the mail.  The cover shows a little kid with a little violin case looking in the door of a studio, where a composer was working on a score on a baby grand, surround by seven or eight big old bass fiddles and a timpani of some sort.  Sure, maybe they were full-sized cellos or something, but to my mind they looked like acoustic basses -- doghouse basses, some folks call 'em, or uprights.  I know how that kid felt. I never really learned to play the Kay that well, but it was forgiving enough that if you could pick out the right notes often enough and throw in a little run every now and then on the back beat, you could play bluegrass, folk, blues and even a bit of what Squirrel liked to call, with a grin and a glint in his eye, acoustic listening music.

A while back I found a fellow over in Elk Creek, VA, who had  lovely looking bass for sale -- a 2004  Engelhardt, the successor company to the maker once known as Kay.  It's a beautiful thing -- rosewood neck, shiny brass tuners, flawless varnish, not a nick on it.

Shoot, I'm almost afraid to pick it up. I'm hard on instruments, and that old beat-up Kay was kind of like me -- scarred around the garboard strakes, worn about the scrollwork and not quite as upright as it once was.  But the tone's nice and the action is a bit more suited to my fingers, and when I draw a bow across those G, D, A and E strings, it makes a most satisfying bass line.  I believe I'll go see right now if I can still find the progression for "Abilene" and "Make Me a Pallet."    It was around here somewhere, last time I looked.

You don't miss your water 'til the spring runs dry

Tucked into the folds of the Patrick County countryside is a springhouse that has served generations of Connors and Woods and other families that lived in the little frame two-story farmhouse a few feet away. The springhouse, now nearly hidden from view by greenbrier, blueberry bushes and a lush growth of stubborn vines and weeds, was not just a water supply but also the refrigeration for families who farmed the high pastures and rocky bottoms, raised a few dairy cows and cultivated apples for the better part of a century.  And the spring would have been a good place for native Indians to hunt game as deer and other creatures of the woods came to water in the long times before the springhouse went up.  My father-in-law once told me he had found several arrowheads along the little creek that flowed down from the spring and the nearby seeps that helped feed what is know as the North Prong of the North Fork of the Mayo River. 

You can't see the springhouse, hidden in foliage in the picture, above, that  Dave Bennett took in August. But at some point in the 20th century the spring was enclosed in concrete half-walls, and a gabled roof was built atop -- just about the size of a modern dormer -- to keep vegetation and leaves out and to provide shelter and shade to the cool waters that burbled up from the ground. Eight years ago my father-in-law asked me to pick up some roofing material because the old shingles were falling to pieces. I got some green corrugated fiberglass roofing from Lowes and commenced to have an awful time fastening it down to the ancient oak purlins.  They had dried and weathered to approximately the hardness of cast iron, or so it felt, and nailing those roofing sheets down was a miserable job.  But the roof went on and the springhouse looked good.

Buford Wood, who died a few years ago but who lived with his family in the nearby house many years ago, once told me that the spring ran low a few years but never dried up.  My father-in-law, who died last year, had poured a small concrete basin in the floor of the springhouse to collect enough water so that he could run it through a half-inch flexible pipe down to the garden, a couple of  hundred feet downhill.  He had a wire mesh intake for the water, and connected the other end of the pipe to a wooden sink with an old bronze faucet at the garden end. There they could wash the garden produce in the sink or get a drink of cool water on a hot day without worrying about creek mud, bugs or things that ought not be in the water.  In a dry summer they ran hoses from the sink to irrigate the tomatoes, corn, broccoli,eggplants, lima beans and half-runners.

A few weeks ago as we were putting the garden to bed or the year I turned the faucet on for a quick splash -- and got nothing but air.  While the nearby creek was still running with a steady trickle of water, nothing was coming down the pipe. A quick walk up the hill showed why: the intake pipe was out of the water because the water level itself had dropped to barely half an inch in the bottom of the basin.  This was no huge cause for alarm. After all, the growing season was over, and we had had a mighty dry period his summer that ended only when the remnants of a tropical storm blew through and dropped five inches or so of rain.

The other day I checked the spring again and the basin was dry this time, although I could hear the creek the spring fed as water hurried downhill. It's hard to see where that water originates, but it has to be close by under the thicket of weeds.

This is our first fall living full-time on the mountain, and I don't know if this represents a permanent change or merely a seasonal shortage.  But as I put away the hoses for the year and brought the last of the buckets and watering cans inside the old house for storage, I sent up a hopeful prayer that in the spring we'd see springhouse water running again  -- on its way down the mountain in time to help feed the Dan River and the Roanoke River and, a couple hundred miles east, Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

Ice storm in the Blue Ridge

When the temperature dropped to 32 Friday night on Belcher Mountain, it iced up fast.  We have more than 1/2 inch of ice on some limbs and a lot of trees are bowed over nearly to the ground.   Reminds me of that early December ice storm in Raleigh in 2002, but with fewer limbs on the trees, we don't have anywhere near the damage.
Thing is, it's only Oct. 29 -- and winter's almost two months away. Yikes!

When Northern Lights come South

It was about this time of year in that fall of 1960. I was 14, and Troop 2004 from Greensboro's First Presbyterian Church was taking its second camping trip that October.  A lot of troops in my hometown took maybe one trip a month; we went every other week, fulfilling our Scoutmaster's vision of seeing one end of North Carolina to the other -- and a lot of South Carolina and Virginia as well.

We had left after school that Friday afternoon and it was pitch black by the time we got up to the area where we could camp for the weekend somewhere near Table Rock in western North Carolina. I think we were in a state forest, though it might have been federal land. It was so dark we barely found our way in. There was no moon, and we had to hike in near total dark to find a campsite for a dozen tents. We had already had dinner along the way, so at least we didn't have to cook. That night the wind came up howling, and more than one of us found ourselves waking up in collapsed tents.  We were on a steep slope, and a few found it hard to stay in place.

That next day was absolutely gorgeous. We hiked around the forest, found places where we imagined we might be able to see foxfire or maybe even the Brown Mountain Light -- probably way too far, but we had no clue -- and worked up huge appetites.  That evening the winds did not drop, and Broadus Troxler, our scoutmaster, worried  that the wind would carry sparks and set the woods on fire. It had been a dry fall, and the last thing anyone needed was a forest fire.

That afternoon we had hiked along a short stub of an old logging road, flat enough and wide enough and just protected enough that we could make cookfires. So we hiked back to that site in the dark to collect firewood and cook a hot meal . It was good to be out of the full force of the wind, a relief, actually, and we enjoyed the heat from the fires as we had the usual deep conversations carried on by 12 13 and 14-year-old boys.

Until, that is, someone looked up the mountainside that was blocking the wind and saw an awful sight.  The sky above the mountain was red and orange and pulsing, and we knew what it was right way. "Good Lord," someone hollered, "the mountain is on fire. We've got to get out of here."

There ensued a mad scramble to collect food and frying pans and coats and backpacks and make a mad dash for the cars, parked way down at the bottom of the mountain, so we could get out of the forest before the winds blew the fire down on top of us.  The Scoutmasters wanted to make sure we didn't panic, so he had us fall in by patrols, dress right and cover down in the dark and set off on route step. We would make an orderly, if hurried withdrawal.

Halfway down the mountain we ran into a lone figure, a forest ranger who knew we were camping in that area and who knew we'd be anxious. No, it wasn't a forest fire, he said, but it was an unusual event. What we were seeing, he told us,was the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights,  that on some rare occasions could be seen in the South.  We hiked back up the mountain and spent the rest of the evening gazing at that nearly incredible phenomenon.

The other day Jorge Valencia's story in The Roanoke Times brought back that half-century old memory in his lead paragraph -- referring to skywatchers "who may have mistaken it for a mountain fire in the Alleghany Highlands."

I can vouch for any skywatchers who thought it might herald a fire. Indeed it was a fire, but in the sky, a solar storm that Monday night was seen as far south as Arkansas, the paper reported.   I have been told that on some occasions the Northern Lights have been seen as far south as Florida.  Maybe so. But I can tell you for a certainty that seeing the Northern Lights on a cold windy night on the side of a dark mountain is enough to make your jaw drop -- and make you want to run for safety.

Bringing back the American Chestnut

For those who still mourn the loss of the American Chestnut and who hope researchers can come up with a way to revive that lovely tree, Hanna Miller's story in the News & Observer and Charlotte Observer Monday was good news indeed. Here's a link. The good news is there's lots of promise and early signs of progress. The bad news is that we won't know, perhaps for half a century, according to one researcher, if they've really succeeded.

As Miller reported, "You can only declare continued optimism rather than victory at least for another 50 years or so," says Dr. Fred Hebard, staff pathologist for The American Chestnut Foundation's research station in Meadowview, Va. "When those things are 100 feet tall, you can definitely declare victory."

It's important in so many ways, particularly to the mountain economy.  Life in the Blue Ridge was made especially hard when the blight struck in the late 1920s and began killing off a noble three that provided so much for mountain families: food for the family, mast for animals of the forest, a cash income, lovely wood that was easy to work yet made strong furniture, and as one book once described it, was so light that even "porch babies" could move it around.

When the blight struck, the government advised land owners to cut down their chestnuts and salvage the wood before the blight ruined it. That turned out to be a terrible mistake, because the blight would not have killed every tree. In fact there are many hundreds of survivors spread over the Mid-Atlantic states. I know of one not too far from where I write, and have read of many others. Scientists have taken samples of these trees in their efforts to figure out why some trees are resistant to the blight -- and how those samples can be used to develop hardier trees.

Some years ago I discovered that the old outbuildings on our farm were made of chestnut and cherry planks. Outside they are weathered silver and gray from decades of exposure to the winds and sleet and snow and rain. But if you can get the nails out and run those board through a planer, a gorgeous rich tan board emerges that looks good and takes well to woodworking. I've got a few of those planks set by. When when time allows I'll harvest a few more off old sheds and small barns that, as I watch out the morning window, seem to lean away from the prevailing winds more each day. It won't be long before they lie down again in the soil that nourished and gave them life in the early part of the 20th century.

And then the clouds parted....

We were spoiled by a long run of good weather and spectacular mountain scenery, and what I'm convinced was the prettiest fall foliage in memory, when the clouds closed in Tuesday and brought heavy rains to the Virginia mountaintop.   We rarely saw the other side of the hayfield while the heavens were going forth and multiplying -- over 4 inches, according to my $4.95 Farmer's Hardware rain gauge on the deck.  We thought the weather was clearing late Thursday, but more rain came in the night -- and then the northwest winds started blowing. With them came the sun, slowing drying out sodden fields and puddled roads and revealing some lovely sights we were afraid had blown away with the gale.

What a difference.  The winds keep blowing and the leaves are falling -- or rather scooting sideways, coming from the direction of Blacksburg and by now landing, I'm pretty sure, in Winston-Salem and stations south.

But by golly it's still gorgeous out there on Belcher Mountain Road, and that part of Black Ridge Road between the Blue Ridge Parkway and Canning Factory Road is one eye-popper after another. I hate to see those lovely leaves blow away, but the end of the leaves also means that things are clearer. We can see further into the woods, and well beyond. From our front-porch rockers in summer we see lush maples and oaks and chestnut oaks and thickets of mountain laurel and rhododendron. But when the leaves retire for the season, we see the highest peak in Patrick County, where once our friend Judy Burnett Davis once thought of building a home, and which we still call Judy's knob.   We can just begin to see the profile of that noble hill as the leaves come down.

Had to sail north to get warm

We're back from a 12-day trip up the East Coast and on Maine's Penobscot Bay for a week of sailing on the Schooner Heritage (www.schoonerheritage.com) and found the dadgummedest thing: warm weather. It's howling here in the Blue Ridge with temps in the low 40s; the week before we left for the Frigid North the daytime highs were in the 50s, so we loaded up all our heavy clothes because we knew if it was chilly in the South, it would be frozen in the north.

 Wrong.  It was warm in Maryland, where we stopped off to see old friends, and warmer yet in Boston, where we took in the last Red Sox home game of the year during its late-season collapse and ultimate failure to make the American League playoffs.  The Sox pulled off one miracle in an otherwise lovely evening at Fenway: they made the Baltimore Orioles look really good.

Then two days later we were standing on the wharf at Rockland, Maine's North End Shipyard, getting ready to board the Heritage, a lovely topsail schooner built and commissioned in 1984 by Capts. Doug and Linda Lee, who figured out how to make a living by taking people sailing on a genuine replica of a 19th century sailing vessel.  They did it right: There's no engine to propel the ship, but there is a yawl boat with a Ford six-cylinder engine, hung on stern davist, that can be lowered into the water to push the ship along when the wind has died. And there's an elderly make-and-break donkey engine (named Joe, of course) to raise the anchor as well as to raise the sails.   Meals are cooked on a big cast iron woodstove, fired by billets of oak and hardwood that have aged three seasons, and the ship's cooks rise before dawn each day to put on the coffee and begin baking the day's fresh breads, pies and cobblers before the anchor comes up and the day's wind draws the 5,000 square feet of sail over to port or starboard.

We've made this trip three times now and it's among the most fun things we've done on vacation. Doug Lee is not only a ship's captain but also a marine architect, a cabinetmaker, an author, a blacksmith, an expert mechanic and a pretty fair businessman, but also a crackerjack teller of tales -- all of them true stories, of course, including hilarious tales of his father's best friend Archie and his various deeds along the Maine coast.

And, of course, it was hot up yonder. We were down to tee shirts and flip flops in the middle of the bay, and shedding jackets every day after the cool morning fogs burned off.

There's a fleet of these coasting schooners, as they're called, up in Maine, and Doug and Linda Lee like to sail at every opportunity. Watching them handle the ship as they ghost along under the Deer Isle Bridge spanning Eggemoggin Reach is fascinating. The ship's mast, jutting 102 feet up, is higher than the bridge's superstructure, and to pass underneath requires lowering the ship's topmast a few feet. That mast is on a track built especially for the purpose, and seeing the crew scamper up the ratlines to let the topmast down is quite a show. It looks like you're going to hit the bridge, but there's just room to slide along beneath and go on to other sailing grounds in Blue Hill Bay, Fox Thoroughfare and other old waters that have been home to sailors and lobstermen for years.

Memorable -- and toasty.  The thought of that Maine sun warms me on a raw early fall day in the Blue Ridge.