Ode to some old boots

These old boots have a lot of miles on 'em.  Bought 'em years ago in Asheville, when our daughter, now 36, was in her first or second year in college up yonder.  Best boots I've ever had.  Comfortable, lightweight, mostly waterproof, and I could walk in 'em all day without getting the wobblies or the barking dogs. 

Hiked in Idaho and Maine in 'em, built an outhouse, a workshop and a garage in them, plowed the gardens, tramped through the ashes of our burnt-down log home in them, hauled timberframe parts for the replacement house, picked  asparagus and the blueberries, mowed the dam and the hayfields, hauled cars stuck in the snow and put nearly 200,000 miles on my pickup truck with 'em on. Great boots.

Trouble is, I've worn them out two or three times. Soles are all but slick. Went through  innumerable sets of laces and at least two tubes of Shoo Goo, but now they come apart in a matter of weeks, the sole flapping like some talk radio host that loves to hear his own voice rattle on, the damps seeping in along the stitches and the toeboxes rising up like elf shoes.

They're going into retirement, because earlier this fall I finally found some replacements -- reasonably lightweight clodhoppers with good ankle support and soft grippers that let me climb on the metal roof without slipping. Liked 'em so well I thought about buying an extra pair, and using the old Army boot trick to tell 'em apart.

I don't expect anyone does this anymore, but when I went off to Ft. Bragg for basic combat training in April of '69, the quartermaster issued us two pairs of black boots -- the old black shoe Army gear.  And the drill sergeants of Company B, 10th Battalion, 2nd Basic Combat Training Brigade ("Bravo, Bravo, B-10-2, First you see Rest, Now you see the Best!", we used to chant whenever drill sergeants ordered it up)  required us to wear one set of boots on odd-numbered days and the second set of boots on even-number days.  They could tell which pair of boots we were wearing by the white dot of paint we had to put on the back of one pair of the boots. You'd wear a white-dot pair one day, the no-dot pair the next. That way, the boots would get broken in equally.

Well, the recruits of Company B didn't want the toes of both sets of boots to get torn up by the constant scraping and grinding and hopeless struggle of being made to low-crawl the machine gun course, the company street, the parade ground and anywhere else those soul-less drill sergeants could think of to make us miserable.  If you've never been made to low crawl, it's exhausting and filthy and hateful. You can't rise up even an inch. You're suppose to drag yourself over whatever terrain is in front of you the same way a snake would -- stretching and reaching and pushing forward but staying in full contact with the ground. There was a point to all this -- not just breaking down the troops in order to rebuild them, but also teaching soldiers how to crawl as flat as possible in order to avoid being shot by an enemy looking for anything moving that they could shoot.

So to avoid ruining both sets of boots, we'd rise in the night during lights out and change the white dots from one set of boots to the other.  This allowed us to continue wearing one set of boots while keeping the other set in perfect unworn condition. 

We thought we were so clever.  And it wasn't until a few days before graduation after eight weeks in basic hell, when you could actually have a human conversation with the drill sergeant, that we learned the truth. It might have been Drill Sergeant Glenn Warner, a tough little bantam of a soldier, who clued us in with something like: "Y'all probably think you invented the white dot trick and were fooling your sergeants. You didn't. We knew what you were doing and we allowed it because you all were starting to work together.  That's what basic training is all about. And now you got a decent pair of boots for your graduation parade.  Outstanding. Now drop and give me 50 pushups."

So I thought about Drill Sergeant Warner and his colleagues back at Ft. Bragg a lifetime ago, and I bought that second pair of new boots. About to put 'em on for the first time.  And I won't have to resort to the white dot gimmick to tell 'em apart, either.  They now come in both brown and black, and today is going to be black boot day. Outstanding!

Winter arrived way too early

So far we've had three nights in the 'teens in November, and today the forecast is for a warmup of sorts -- all the way up to 31 F.   Well, take 'em where you can get 'em. We've had lows at 17, 13 and 14 at night recently, and all day yesterday the digital thermometers struggled to get to 24, so 31 looks positively balmy. Take a peek at Mabry Mill over on the Parkway, from this morning:

We had a little bit of warning this was coming. Our young'uns out West told us of foot-deep snows and frigid temps sweeping south and east, so last week we dashed to the garden and pulled the last of the broccoli, chard and kale.  We polished off the broccoli Sunday and took care of the kale last night, so we've pretty much consumed the winter garden's bounty.

The garden was a great success this year, and not just for the little critters and birds who got the eggplant, the okra and the corn. By the time we figured out how to tighten up the bottom of the new fence, we had so many peppers, tomatoes, potatoes that we were having to think up places to put them.  The squash was fantastic -- yellow and green and good.  The asparagus patch as usual put out hundreds of pounds, and the blueberries were enormous.

After we pulled up the last of the fall garden, we hauled mulch and compost to the asparagus patch to help it through the winter and jump-start the spring.  In about eight weeks we'll go into the blueberry patch and start pruning the insides of the bushes, and also the outsides.  They've badly overgrown, making it hard to pass up the row to pick the high stuff, and we're trying to bring some order to the patch. We also plan to transplant some more rabbit-eye blueberries from down near the creek to the patch on the western slope, where we hope there will be more blue and less green than we've been getting on the eastern slope.

And sometime in late winter or early spring we'll put in another half dozen apple trees somewhere -- perhaps on the same western-facing slope where the blueberries thrive.  We'll be watching the mail for the first of the garden catalogs and plotting where we'll plant what -- something to look forward to in what evidently is going to be a long, cold one.  We're burning our way through the first cord of firewood at a pretty rapid clip, so unless there are some long thaws, I'll be in the woods scouting up the deadfalls and standing locusts to help get us through.  Winter in the Blue Ridge has arrived here at the Rocky Knob Tractor & Yacht Club.

Remembering Uncle St. Clair, lost in the War to End All Wars

This flag hung on the front door at 805 S. McDuffie Street in Anderson, South Carolina, for several years a century ago.

It's a Gold Star Mothers Flag.

The Gold Star was for Anderson Machine Gun Company Private Victor St. Clair Minor.

He was a Blue Star until early on the morning of Oct. 17, 1918, when he went over the top and disappeared in a bombshell explosion somewhere near the border between Belgium and France.

My grandmother, Olive Patterson Cochrane Minor, sewed the Gold Star over the Blue Star when word came down from the Army that St. Clair had died in action.

She had sewn on the two Blue Stars when both her sons went in and over there.

The top one was for St. Clair, the bottom one was for Charles S. Minor Jr., her older boy.

Charlie was in the cavalry, and came home from the War to End All Wars.

Years later, St. Clair's few remains came home, too, and he was reburied in Anderson.

So on this Veterans Day 2014, I remember Uncle Charlie, who lived into the 1960s, and I think about Uncle St. Clair, who died 28 years before I was born, and I send them my thanks, my respects, my admiration and my salute.

Spec. E-5 John M. Betts Jr.
RA 12816683
U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1969-72

The Pumpkin Man of Connors Grove Rd.

These pumpkins look, um, ripe

October sky in the Blue Ridge

Monday morning, Oct. 20, 2014, 7:17 a.m., over the Blue Ridge Escarpment

A fiddler's show of courage after a bad fall

Saturday night's concert of the fabulous bluegrass group the Steep Canyon Rangers was terrific -- great musicians playing beautiful music against a stunning backdrop of Autumn finery at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  It was the final in a series of 20 weekly concerts sponsored by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation in alliance with a number of local and regional sponsors that have made the music scene along the Plateau District a don't-miss stop along Virginia's Crooked Road.  Here's a scene from up on the hill above the outdoor amphitheater:

The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation has had a nearly year-long association with the Steep Canyon Rangers (which has toured with banjoist and comedian Steve Martin and singer Edie Brickell in recent years) in support of Parkway-related matters, most particularly the foundation's grant for new facilities at the Parkway's Graveyard Fields site in North Carolina.  The Steep Canyon Rangers' 2013 album Tell The Ones I Love featured a lively instrumental named "Graveyard Fields," and the group worked with filmmaker Paul Bonesteel, a member of the foundation's Advisory Panel, to produce a video to help raise money for the Graveyard Fields Project. That project included a new parking area and a restroom, both a huge benefit to fans of the area who have had inadequate parking and no facilities.

Rangers move on to their final song of the evening. From left, bassist Charles Humphrey, fiddler Nicky Sanders, guitarist Woody Platt, banjo player Graham Sharp, mandolin player Mike Guggino and percussionist Jeff Sipe, sitting in with the Rangers lately.

Last night's concert was in its closing number with fiddler Nicky Sanders clearly a crowd favorite.  He strutted and pranced and danced about the stage as he was virtually burning up his fiddle with hot licks you wouln't believe on a great song called Auden's Train (I think), when disaster struck. He missed his step in the evening damps and pitched over the edge of the stage and onto an asphalt-surfaced apron between the stage and the audience. Fiddle attachments went flying as Sanders sprawled on the ground awkwardly, and banjo player Graham Sharp jumped down to see if he could help.  In a show of guts and gumption and courage and, no doubt, a rush of adrenalin, Sanders bobbed back up, began reassembling the fittings on his fiddle, started tuning up, checked a nasty-looking wound to his left knee, then rejoined the band -- still playing its final song -- and got back on the stage for another few minutes of dancing and fiddling and making amazing music while the crowd came to its feet and applauded.   Here are a few pictures taken a few moments apart -- and then the Rangers' final bow, as band members linked arms while the crowd cheered and clapped.

Nicky Sanders, left in front of the stage, puts his fiddle back together as Graham Sharp watches, and plays, from nearby.

Sanders back on stage, band still playing, and starting his moves,

.

That knee has to hurt, but the show goes on.

Nicky Sanders takes another look.

 

And the Rangers take their bow.  What a night. And a helluva show!

Parkway's Midday Musicians take a bow

   An interesting thing happens every day during the warm months at the Blue Ridge Music Center near Milepost 213 on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  At noon, from May through October, a group of musicians, many of them professional players of considerable note, assemble in the breezeway between the museum and its intimate auditorium next door, and begins to play a variety of music reflecting the culture, history and lore of the mountains.  It's free.  People come from all over to listen. And it's the toe-tappingest place you'll find anywhere in the hills for the next four hours.

And on Fridays, something else happens. On Friday's it's an open jam, welcoming anyone who walks up to bring an instrument, or borrow a spare, or just join in or even lead the singing in a song.  I've sat in this Jim Marshall and Friends Jam for five months now (bass fiddle), and we've had visitors from around the globe.  (Mr. Marshall started the jam years ago and now resides in a nursing home; Mark Raynes and Renee Igo lead the Jim Marshall Jam in his absence.)  A few weeks ago visitors included a fellow from Spain who lives in London and who came forward to sing some compositions of his own.  A month ago, a woman who sings in a choir back home somewhere in the Midwest did a gorgeous version of Amazing Grace.  Two weeks ago, a couple from Argentina came up and sang seven or eight Argentinian folk songs in Spanish -- just superb music, though I recognized maybe one word in 20 or so. They stole the show, as Mark Raynes put it.

But that's the beauty of the free Midday Mountain Music program that runs every day for six months of the year: you never know what you are going to hear or who you are going to hear it from, but it's always interesting.  Some folks expect mostly bluegrass, yet what they hear is a mix of American roots music with a lot of influences from around the world.  Bluegrass, yes, but also traditional mountain music, folk music, blues, gospel, country, olde timey music, new timey music, funny songs, sad songs, train songs, cabin-in-the-hills songs, moonshine songs, lonesome-for-the-Blue Ridge songs -- even a 19th century Josef Wagner march, "Under the Double Eagle," popularized by John Phillip Sousa's band before Benny Goodman and later all kinds of bluegrass players jumped all over it. I wouldn't be surprised to hear some R&B and beach music once in a while.

And here's the most amazing thing: This daily offering of music is played and sung by volunteers who put in more than 100 hours of performance time each every year.  Add in travel time -- some come from two hours or more each way every week to perform -- and jam groups that can grow to more than 20 musicians at a sitting, and you've got thousands of hours donated to the Blue Ridge Parkway and the enjoyment of its visitors.  Four hours of music, by the way, is a pretty long gig.  These folks play because they want to. It is a service to the public, and judging by how many people come every day to sit and watch, they appreciate it.

So it was entirely appropriate and gratifying that the National Park Service recognized the volunteer Midday Musicians at a luncheon the other day at the Folk Art Center near the Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina. The annual gathering honors volunteers all along the Parkway who do a terrific job as interpreters and maintenance volunteers.  My friends Mark Raynes and Renee Igo accepted the Parkway Partner Volunteers of the Year Award on behalf of all the musicians who play at the Blue Ridge Music Center.

From left, Richard Emmett, Renee Igo, Mark Raynes, Mark Woods. Photo from Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation website.

With them were Richard Emmett, music program director at the center, and Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Mark Woods.  The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, the private fund-raising partner of the Parkway, agreed to operate programs at the center after the Parkway requested its help several years ago. The Foundation named Emmett to operate those programs, which include the Midday Mountain Music as well as the weekend concert series, which concludes today with the Steep Canyon Rangers.


At the awards ceremony Tuesday, Superintendent Mark Woods had this to say:  "Through your service, visitors to the Blue Ridge Music Center have the wonderful treat of hearing authentic, live music seven days a week, every day the Music Center is open. This service over eight visitors seasons [since the opening of the Music Center] likely represents a contribution of over 30,000 volunteer hours. How wonderful to consider how many tunes have floated from instruments during that time."  Amen.