Winter's middle finger

Sure, sure, the calendar says it's just a few more days until Spring formally arrives.  But Winter is a nasty, unforgiving, revengeful brute up here in a part of the Blue Ridge that forecasters have a hard time figure out what to even guess at.  And the light icing that was mentioned, briefly, a time or two, has settled in to its butcher's work of bending tree limbs and finding bare places on the ground and covering them with broken limbs and old trees that were unsteady on their feet. Maybe it's best that it's so foggy that we can't see far into the woods.

The Southern view....

This comes about, mind you, after a lovely day Saturday -- good warm sun, gentle breezes, plenty of blue sky.  I was working near the cutting garden, and saw the first few shoots of daffodils poking up through soil that has been frozen much of the past two months.  I saw buds on maples starting to swell, small tufts of grass just beginning to show a little pale green, and down by the old house in the hollow below us I saw the first daffs about to break into bloom.  The eastern end of that house is sheltered from a lot of the weather, and at the foot of the old rock chimney there's a spot that gets warm every day there's some sun.

And so I thought, foolishly, that Winter was about to give up.  Even more foolishly, I started picking up some of the season's fallen limbs -- tantamount to poking the weather dragon in the eye.  Shoulda known better.

Sunday morning I was up early, cutting a few more dead locust and oak for a few more fires, just in case.  We've gone through a bit more than four cords of firewood this year, and I'm out of everything burnable except for a sacred cache of red oak in the back corner of the garage.  I've cut next year's wood, split and stacked it, and it's busy drying out and starting to take on that light-gray patina of year-old firewood for this fall.  Maybe five cords in all. But I needed enough to get through the last five days of winter.  So I found three standing dead trees, enough for maybe forty billets, about 4 inches in diameter, that don't need any kind of seasoning, cut them into firewood lengths and stacked them on the rack on the deck outside our door. 

Some of those billets are burning merrily right now, about the only part of my late-winter planning that is working right. Outside this grim Monday morning, sleet is falling and fog is blowing and freezing on limbs and the windows are glazed over with a pebble-grained translucence that makes the place look eerie from the inside -- a broad expanse of dull dreary gray illumination.  If we could see through the windows, I'm pretty sure we would see Old Man Winter out in the hayfield, dressed in sheets of dismal dun, shooting us the bird.

We will, of course, have the last laugh, but not nearly soon enough.

Mountain man Martin Nesbitt, gone too fast

When I started covering the North Carolina General Assembly for the Greensboro Daily News in March of 1977, I noticed state Rep. Mary Nesbitt, D-Buncombe, right away.  Might have been because I have an affinity for retired school teachers, being the son of one, and Mary Nesbitt was a lifetime educator.  She had that schoolmarm look about her -- compassionate, but tolerating no foolishness; insistent on a higher standard but not overly surprised when younger folks fail to meet them; expectant of better things, knowing that in a legislative session small steps are often the only hope.  She died in 1979, and soon after, her son Martin Nesbitt was filling her seat in the House.

Martin and I were the same age, and as a teacher's son, I recognized some familiar things, particularly the pressure he felt to live up to expectations and do right.  He could be unpredictable, but he was always focused on helping folks. He had populist sensibilities, often raised hard, sometimes irritating questions about what otherwise good-soundling legislation might do to old folks or jobless folks or retired folks or folks who just wanted their government to leave them alone.  He sometimes made life hellish for legislative leaders with his probing questions and his warnings to think twice before rushing into something and his constant goading of the leadership to do more for schools, for mental health programs, more for people who needed help, more for rural areas that were never going to have the kind of amenities you would find in Charlotte or Raleigh.

Nesbitt moved to the Senate some years ago and with the arrival of a new Republican majority in Raleigh, found himself as the Senate Minority Leader -- a job he stepped down from earlier this week after doctors discovered stomach cancer.  He died Thursday at age 67 after coming home to Buncombe in an ambulance with a police escort.  His admirers stood along the streets as the small procession came through town, wishing Sen. Martin Nesbitt well. He went too fast.

I recall running into Nesbitt in a convenience store along I-85 a few years ago. We had both stopped for a tank of gas, some coffee and a chance to use the restroom.  Nesbitt's face and white shirt had grease stains on them -- not what you usually see in a veteran lawmaker.  He smiled and explained he had been working on his son's race car for a big upcoming race somewhere nearby, and spoke avidly of all the places they had raced and how much joy he took in helping out with the pit crew.  I was amazed -- here I knew only of a man whose life was dedicated to practicing law and debating issues and working on legislation, but what he really liked was spending time with his son, with a wrench in one hand and a spark plug in another. He had a life outside politics. I admired that.

I had one last interview with Nesbitt just before Christmas. I was working on a Business North Carolina cover story on Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger, and I asked Nesbitt how he saw Berger's performance.  He was gracious about Berger's personal style, his reputation for keeping his word, and some good procedural things Berger had done in the Senate.  But he was also worried, he said, about what was happening to the state with the changes Republicans were making.  He understood the GOP wanted less government, less regulation and fewer taxes.  But he fretted about the direction.

"I expected solutions from Phil," he said. “I expected him to make goverment better and leaner, and there are plenty of places to do that, but what we have seen instead is a lot of dismantling."

What there was not, he thought, was a cogent plan about how that would help improve things. "I asked them on the floor, 'I know what you are doing, but can someone tell me what the plan is? When you destroy the university system, who is going to lead the Research Triangle Park? When you cut the sales tax by 1 penny, how many jobs do you create? When you gut community colleges 10 percent, how many more people do you train to do the jobs?"

And he thought this: "When they started doing all this stuff, their polling looked pretty good.  But as all of us know in politics, you better keep listening.   You might look around and find out nobody is following you."

A mule, a bugle and an ill-fated political career, shot to pieces

   Earlier this week I saw the sad news that Winnie Wood, widow of one-time N.C. gubernatorial candidate George Wood of Camden County, had died.  Mrs. Wood was an accomplished woman with a wide array of interests in education, the arts, history, children, politics, the Democratic Party and the Presbyterian church. She served her state and her country well, as did her husband, a former legislator, farmer and education leader in North Carolina.

And yet I had heard the following story for many years -- first printed, I believe, decades ago in Richard Walser's book "Tar Heel Laughter."  I always thought the Mrs. George Wood referred to in the story was Winnie Wood, but that couldn't be, as the story has her being deceased years ago, while our Winnie Wood lived to be 85 and died just last week.

Still, I can't help but pass along this story about Horace the mule, a certain hunting bugle, a misplaced dose of medicine and a bridgetender on the Intracoastal Waterway whose hopes for a political career ended on strange afternoon.  It features a woman, sometimes referred in story-telling as Fan Lamb, proprietess of Greenfield Plantation.  Perhaps "Fanilamb,"  as she was sometimes known, was married to another George Wood of nearby Chowan County.  I don't know. 

But I do know the story -- reprinted in newspapers all over the Carolinas and Georgia for many years -- goes this way:


Mrs. George Wood, now deceased, of Chowan County, had a mule who was named Horace. On Christmas Eve, she called up Dr. Satterfield in Edenton and said to him, “Doctor, Horace is sick, and I wish you would come take a look at him.”

Dr. Satterfield said, “Oh, Fanilamb, its after 6 o’clock and I’m eating my Christmas Eve dinner. Give Horace a dose of mineral oil and if he isn’t all right in the morning, phone me and I’ll come out and take a look at him.”

“How’ll I give it to him?” she inquired.

“Through a funnel,” replied the good doctor.

“He might bite me!” she protested.

“Oh, Fanilamb — you’re a farm woman, and you know about these things. Give it to him through the other end.”
 
So Fanilamb went out to the barn, and there stood Horace, with his head held down, just moaning and groaning.

She looked around for a funnel, but the nearest thing she could see to one was her Uncle Bill’s fox-hunting horn, hanging on the wall, a gold-plated instrument with gold tassels hanging from it.

She took the horn and affixed it properly. Horace turned his head, but paid no attention.

Then she reached up on the shelf where medicines for the farm animals were kept. But instead of picking up the mineral oil, she picked up a bottle of turpentine and poured a liberal dose into the horn.

Horace raised his head with a sudden jerk. He let out a yell that could have been heard a mile away. He reared up on his hind legs, brought his front legs down, knocked out the side of the barn, jumped a five-foot fence and started down the road at a mad gallop.

Now Horace was in pain, so every few jumps he made, that horn would blow. All the dogs in the neighborhood knew that when that horn was blowing it meant that Uncle Bill was going fox hunting. So down the highway they went, close on Horace’s heels.

It was a marvelous sight! First, Horace — running at top speed; the horn, in a most unusual position, the mellow notes issuing therefrom; the tassels waving; and the dogs, barking joyously.

They passed by the home of Old Man Harvey Hogan, who was sitting on his front porch, well “into the cups” as they say down east. He hadn’t drawn a sober breath in 15 years, and he gazed in fascinated amazement at the sight that unfolded itself before his eyes.

Incidentally, Harvey is now head man of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Albemarle section of the state.

By this time it was good and dark. Horace and the dogs were approaching the Chowan River Bridge. The bridge-tender heard the horn blowing and figured a boat was approaching. So he hurriedly went out and uncranked the bridge.

Horace went over the edge, straight into the river and was drowned. The dogs jumped into the water after him, but they could swim and climbed out without much difficulty.

Now, it so happened that the bridge-tender was running for the office of Sheriff of Chowan County, but he managed to get only seven votes. The people figured that any man who didn’t know the difference between a mule with a horn up his rear and a boat coming down the Intracoastal Waterway wasn’t fit to hold any public office in Chowan County.

"... To watch his woods fill up with snow."

Robert Frost spoke these words 90-some years ago, and I thought about it as I watched our woods fill with snow over the past 22 hours.  The yardstick shows 13 inches had fallen by about 8 a.m., and minutes after I snapped these photos the snow poured down so hard we couldn't see the ridge to our east.

Looking down toward the barn

Facing SE. That's not the sun, but reflection from camera flash on the inside of a sliding door.

Looking NE along the path I cleared for Sadie, who mired up to her hubcaps when she needed to be outside.

Here's what Robert Frost wrote in full:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Murky flows the Dan

MEADOWS OF DAN, VA -- More than anything, I want to believe Paul Newton when he says his company will fix the damage it has done to the Dan River.  News reports say Newton, Duke Energy's president for utility operations in North Carolina, has apologized for the company's ash pond leak in Eden that has polluted the river for many miles. “You have our complete, 100 percent commitment to do it right,” Newton said. “We are accountable and we will make it right.”

Write that down. I have no doubt Newton means it when he says Duke will make it right. But Duke itself doesn't know what making it right will mean -- just as it did not know that it had a metal drain pipe underneath a large ash pond full of leftover coal ash from a closed power plant -- or that that metal pipe had corroded to the point that it allowed an estimated 82,000 tons of toxic coal ash slurry to flow into the Dan. The company knew pipes were there, but thought they were of reinforced concrete, not metal. The flow of waste into the river contains toxic metals including arsenic and lead.

In the news business, the 214-mile-long Dan has not previously attracted the kind of attention that New York's Hudson once got for pollution,  or Eastern North Carolina's Neuse River, where nutrient levels have been way too high during some periods, or Tennessee's Clinch River after a coal fly ash pond gave way a few years ago and sent an estimated 1.1 billion gallons downstream.

But the Dan is a fine river that deserved better than to have the accumulated waste of years of coal power generation polluting its bottom and clouding its water. To me, it's personal.  The Dan River is a constant up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia.  The Dan rises as a little trickle, a seep, really in a cornfield one mile east of us on a farm once owned by our neighbors Euwell B. Handy and his wife Oma.  Within 1/4 mile it is flowing as a small stream, and another half mile west the creek that becomes the Dan backs up into the second pond on the Dan's upper reaches in the backyard of Barnie and Debbie Day.  All around us are other rushing, vibrant streams that begin as small springs or seeps or just wet places in a hollow, and all of them eventually wind up in the Dan somewhere down the way.

We live just over a ridge from the Dan's origin.  We have the second spring on the North Prong of the North Fork of the Smith River, which merges with the Dan in Eden. A mile or so south of us the Mayo River emerges under U.S. 58 and also flows into the Dan somewhere down the hill.

The Dan is not just a geological feature. It's the inspiration for the names of a number of villages and towns along the way. Start with Meadows of Dan, at the junction of the Blue Ridge Parkway and U.S. 58, which carries traffic to Norfolk in the East and Bristol in the West.  Follow the waterway down to Danbury, North Carolina.  And then miles east, through Mayodan, memorializing the confluence of the Mayo and the Dan.  And further downstream to Danville, where Dan River Mills was a major textile company for generations of Piedmont workers.

The Dan is picky about its route.  It crosses into North Carolina and then back into Virginia several times on its way before it eventually joins the huge Roanoke River Basin, which drains much of the Middle Atlantic Region before flowing into the Albemarle Sound and helping create the Atlantic.

Not many people realize that the upper reaches of the Dan provide power for the City of Danville, Two lakes and impressive concrete dams up in the Blue Ridge provide the water for a six-foot-high raceway down the mountain to Danville's hydroelectric plant in the Kibler Valley.  That flume once was made of wood, and you can still see segments of the old wood pipe in various places, including the grounds of the library in Stuart.  It's all steel now.

We've seen parts of the Dan up close. Felicia Shelor, the savvy businesswoman who owns The Poor Farmer's Market in Meadows of Dan, each March organizes a hike from the lower dam on the edge of the Blue Ridge Escarpment down the mountain to the power plant.  It is like hiking in one afternoon from the gray landscape of winter into spring, where green leaves and wildflowers are popping along the river as it roars and splashes over its rocky course. It is gorgeous.

 All along the river, the Dan River Basin Association conducts hikes and canoe trips and promotes the health of the river and the best recreational uses.  It can show you ancient Indian fishing weirs as well as other spots along the river that mark fascinating chapters in history.  We've marveled at that even up here in the high reaches.  Alongside our creek two years ago, I pulled out of the dirt a stone axhead that I expect is thousands of years old. It was barely 200 feet down from from our springhouse, where bubbles up some of the best drinking water we've ever tasted.  It is a reminder that after thousands of years of human habitation up here, starting with Native Americans in antiquity and continuing in recent centuries with European settlers and their descendants, the water still runs off this mountainside fresh and clear on its way to the sea hundreds of miles to the east -- or was until the pipe broke. I hope Duke Energy means what it says about fixing the coal-ash pollution it has caused to this fine old waterway.

Living down to the hype

Worst Super Bowl ever -- unless you're a Seattle fan. Then it probably was a lot of fun. 

Worst Super Bowl ads ever. Period. Really. 

Most ridiculous outfit since Joe Namath wore panty hose decades ago: Joe Namath in that getup for the coin toss.

Best game of Super Bowl weekend:  Syracuse v. Duke men's basketball.  One writer said there'd never be as good a game ever again.  Probably won't -- at least until March, maybe April.  Having seen at least a dozen Games of the Century I expect there will be more to come.   Just keep Joe Namath's new coat out of it.

Midwinter sunrise

7:18 a.m., Jan. 25, 2014, 16 degrees at 3,184 elevation, Belcher Mountain VA