Of saloon boats and fiddles and things that fly off the handle

A few years ago we were helping our friends Theresa and Brian Palmer bring their 42-foot Khady Krogen    trawler "Intermission"back up the intracoastal waterway from Vero Beach, Fl.  Brian is a Scotsman and a furniture designer, and I very much admired a little doodad he had put together that I immediately recognized as a handy thing.  I've forgotten what he called it, but I knew I was going to steal his idea and make one of my own.

Boat owners and recreation vehicle owners know that one constant of life on the water or on the road is that things are nearly constantly in motion -- from waves, from winds, from uneven roads and the swaying and heeling and corkscrewing that comes from rounding corners, trimming sails, speeding up, slowing down and sometimes even just walking around the vessel or the RV.   And because those vehicles move in unpredictable ways, the number of items that will slide off a table, or take flight during a bumpy ride, or otherwise vibrate to the edge of the known world and fall off, is endless:  Cups of coffee, paperback book, cell phone, wallet, glasses, bag of chips, a pencil -- you name it, if you put it down carelessly, it will soon be airborne.  And possibly broken or lost or worse.

What Brian made is a little wooden tray with a rim around it that sailors call fiddles. The rim keeps object from sliding off the tray or table.  And the tray has a little keel under it, a strip of wood attached perpendicular to the bottom, that fits in between the cushion of the settee in the saloon and holds it stead..  That's what sailors often call the couch in the main cabin.  So I call the tray a sofa boat or a saloon boat, and for our Forest River motorhome our saloon boat fits right in the slot between the settee cushions of our saloon, and holds all manner of things that once went a-flying at even the merest hint of a sway or a bump or a swerve.  I made it out of some leftover cherry and walnut that was on its way to the kindling bin.

Genuine authentic not quite exact knock-off of Intermission's saloon boat

Brian and Theresa are down in the Bahamas right now on Intermission, and we have been in Florida.  I felt compelled to tell Brian that I had stolen his idea. So I messaged him:  "Brian: I have stolen your sofa boat idea and adapted it to our RV. I have instructed my accountant to figure out what would be a reasonable royalty for a one-off such as this. I am happy to report that it works as well on a land yacht as on Intermission.  Cheers! Jack"

Truth to tell, I had in mind a glass of Macallan whiskey for a suitable royalty, as Brian is a Scot, but I was willing to consider anything up to, say, $1 in cash.  A glass of Macallan would be several multiples of that, so I was sure he would opt for the Scotch.

And Brian messaged back: "Very interesting, an excellent copy. My attorney will be in touch with you. This is a flagrant abuse of my design copyright #XYV 001-2645. Mind you attorneys are tough to find down here in the Abacos. It may be awhile before you hear anything.  Capt. Brian"

So if you hear of me being hauled into court and sued for stealing Brian's idea, you'll already know I have confessed from the get-go and offered what I consider a handsome royalty.  No need to get the lawyers involved. Anyone else drink to that?

Packing in the bivalves at Blue Dog Oyster Roast, Richmond

Baker Ellett, political consultant and real estate broker, has held for 11 years the annual Blue Dog Oyster Roast to benefit the local food bank in Richmond.  Friday he was joined by hundreds of friends and acquaintances toting donations for the food bank.  It was held behind his business, Blue Dog Properties in the Scott's Addition area of Richmond, and they stayed for hours, throwing down hot steamed oysters and cold Founder's IPA and sampling Barnie Day's wrap-cooked ham and all kinds of other goodies.  Here are a few scenes from the festivities:

Baker Ellett rakes oysters off the cooktop that have steamed for about 8 minutes under wet burlap.

Old friends former Virginia Del. Barnie Day, ink-stained wretches Jack Betts, late of the Charlotte Observer and columnist Jeff Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and political consultant and real estate broker Baker Ellett, organizer of the annual event.

Some of J&W Seafood's finest oysters from down somewhere near Deltaville. Not sure if these are Rappahannock or Yorks, but they were all good.

 

A new use for some old logs

Back in 2007 we built a log home on our property in Patrick County, Virginia.  The logs were milled by Southland Log Homes at its mill near Elliston and delivered on a cold rainy day in May '07. They gave us plenty of materials -- including about 10 percent more logs than we would need, just to make sure there was enough in case some were ruined during construction.

 The house went up pretty fast during construction, but not as fast as it went up three years later after it was struck by lightning.  The house burned to the ground in June of 2010.  We rebuilt with Hardy Plank siding -- tough to burn, or so we are told -- and never got around to using the left over logs.

Not until the other day, that is, when our son John was visiting.  I had rounded up some stone and a fire ring, and we pulled back the tarps on the unused eight-tear-old logs and brought a few of them into the little patch of woods east of our house.  Had a bunch of Ollie Screws -- the long skinny screws log home companies use to torque down on the logs -- and we screwed them into some leftover six by sixes that we had trimmed down to size. Burned up one drill before we borrowed a heavier duty driver from a friend to get those long screws down into the wood. 

You see the result here -- along with my kindling cart, converted from an old baby carriage that once belonged to our neighbor Leslie Bevacqua's daughter  in Raleigh and tossed out on the trash heap one morning.  Helps keep us warm up here at nearly 3,200 feet of elevation in the Blue Ridge.

Spies in our yard! Northern Spies, yet!

 For the more-than-four decades we've been coming up to Patrick County's Belcher Mountain, we've known there were some apple trees on the property -- some old ones, in fact.  Until we retired in 2011, though, we weren't up here often enough to take note of where the trees are, or to guess what they might be.  I would have told you there might be six apple trees on the yonder hill, tucked away here and there not far from the old Conner-Woods house down by the springhouse.

This year was a revelation.  For the first time, I realized there are at least a dozen apple trees on the property still capable of putting out red and yellow apples.  Thanks to an amazing spring that came on slowly and without a killing frost, we found applies on 12 trees, and a few more apple-looking trees on the borders of old fields that we've slowly uncovered as we hacked away decades of overgrowth and briars and clinging vines. But I had ever known what any of them might have been. Sure, we had a hunch that two trees near the asparagus patch might be some kind of Golden Delicious, and maybe that red apple tree  might be some kind of Red Delicious, only better tasting.  In one of the notebooks my father-in-law, Hal Strickland, carried around, I came across one notation: the apple tree nearest the old house might be a Fireside. 

 I showed a few of our apples to our friend Diane Flynt, of  Foggy Ridge Cidery over near Dugspur, and she showed me the best way to tell if they're ripe (cut 'em open and see if the seeds have darkened; if they have, you can plant 'em, she advised).  She also gave me the name of an apple expert in Virginia who might be willing to take a hard look and tell me what they are. So I sent a box full of two apples from each of the trees (except from Tree No. 5; the apples were gone by the time I got around to collecting samples), marked 'em with a Sharpie and sent them off to Professor Apple, whose real name is Tom Burford.

Not long ago a message arrived from the Professor.  He had not had time to study them in great detail, but had identified about eight.  That little apple tree by the blueberry patch is a Red Siberian Crab apple.  The two we though might be a Golden of some sort are Yellow Bellflowers.   That red we thought might be a Red Delicious is something far better: a Limbertwig, so called because they grow on long, drooping, springy twigs, and they taste great.

True, that tree my father-in-law mentioned is indeed a Fireside, and another tree closer to our house is also a Fireside.  The website applejournal.com describes it this way: "Fireside is a great fresh-eating apple with a great name. Originating from Minnesota, it is mainly seen in northern orchards. It doesn't get as red as McIntosh, Cortland, Empire, Jonathon and other northern varieties when ripe, but rather is splashed with quite a bit of green. This color doesn't affect the flavor, which by the way is excellent. You may notice some peening on the skin, which look tiny little dents. This is not a defect, just part of this apple's interesting character. Minnesota apples certainly have the best names."

There's also a Green Cheese apple tree, sometimes called a Cheese Apple, not far from our house.  But the one I like the most -- actually, two of them, one down by the creek and the other about 200 yards from where I write, are Northern Spy apples.

Oh, my. Down here in the Southland -- even in the Appalachians, where folks often had widely differing views about the War Between the States -- the idea of a Northern Spy lurking about is enough to get your attention. I'm not clear where the "spy" part of the name came from, but they are said to be cultivars of an apple native to the Northern East Coast of the U.S., plus parts of Michigan and Ontario. One website I looked at provided some light on the topic -- the Northern Spy is also known sometimes as the Northern Spie, or the Northern Pie Apple. 

OK, could be,  but I rather like the sound of "Northern Spy."  And so did Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology, who wrote this in the poem "Conrad Siever:"

NOT in that wasted garden
Where bodies are drawn into grass
That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens
That bear no fruit—
There where along the shaded walks	5
Vain sighs are heard,
And vainer dreams are dreamed
Of close communion with departed souls—
But here under the apple tree
I loved and watched and pruned	10
With gnarled hands
In the long, long years;
Here under the roots of this northern-spy
To move in the chemic change and circle of life,
Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,	15
And into the living epitaphs
Of redder apples!

October afternoon with curious dog

Sadie, French Brittany Spaniel

Jammin' at Bristol

For several years I've been hauling my old 1959 Kay upright bass down to Galax on Fridays to play in the four-hour Midday Music program in the breezeway of the Blue Ridge Music Center.   Toting that bass around, playing it for that long a time and then getting it, and the special stand, and the special stool, is a load  -- sometimes seeming more like a process than a performance.  So when I heard about the Jam Town Jam Camp planned for the four days preceding the annual Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, I signed up, went over to Bristol and spent a wonderful week making mostly bluegrass music with some talented people.

Among them were Gilbert Nelson and his wife Leigh, professional musicians and good teachers who operate these jam camps all over the East under a program developed by Pete Wernick.  The plan isn't to produce professional musicians, but to help dedicated pickers get better at it, learn how to improve their playing skills, absorb the rules of jamming etiquette, expand their repertoire of songs, understand better how to harmonize with other pickers, and become more familiar with stage management, microphone setup and use, and even such things as how and when to make runs up and down the bass.  In other words, not reinventing the wheel, but making sure pickers come away with more knowledge and better skills, and having fun.

Leigh Nelson, left, and Gilbert Nelson at Jam Camp

Among other things, we broke up into four bands of about 7 players each, and performed on a stage that a little later that evening would be occupied by the award-winning Black Lillies.  So our story, of course, is that we opened for the Lillies.  Never mind that our audience was spouses and friends and nice folks who wandered in off the street, while the Lillies' audience was a sold-out, paid audience of enthusiastic fans.  Our band called itself the Bluegrass Misfits -- we had three banjos but just one dobro, one mandolin, one guitar and one old bassman.  Here's a couple pix:

The Misfits, on stage

The best fun of the evening came when Leigh and Gilbert, joined by teachers Bob Minke and Dee Rosser, were performing, and invited up Hannah Jacobs of Danville, whose sweet high-range voice had transported the Misfits with her rendering of "Angel Band", and Corinne Macintosh of Lanexa over near Williamsburg, who played the Stanley crosscut saw with her fiddle bow.  You ain't never heard nothin' like it -- hilarious, charming, eerie, and right smack dab in the middle of the bluegrass tradition that if you can play it, people will listen and let you know when it's good.  They did.  Here's another photo, showing Hannah at the mike and Corinne sawing away on the saw.  You can't make this stuff up.

Sawing away at a Stanley 26" crosscut saw

Of birthdays, bikes and books

For the past five years, Chuck and Diane Flynt of Dugspur, pictured above, have raised a bunch of money for the Jessie Peterman Memorial Library in Floyd with a birthday ride down the Blue Ridge Parkway.  This is the 6th year, and the goal is to ride a mile for each of Chuck's birthdays -- 75 miles this year.  Some of the dozens of riders opt for other goals -- 20 miles, or 40, or 50, or whatever seems right.  The Flints contribute a dollar for each mile biked to the library. It all adds up.

Last year, for example, the birthday ride brought a contribution of nearly $1,200, and the folks at the library were thrilled.  As I reported last year, branch manager Cathy Whitten said, "We are so grateful to all of you who ride and donate.  It’s just the most delightful thing to us that you all would do this!"

This year's event was a huge success, raising $1,589, reports Chuck Flynt. "Thirty-one riders participated in this glorious event. We all had a great time and are a little tired and sore from the experience. 

Paul Lacoste finished with me as he has for all the six previous rides. Craig Rogers from Patrick Springs, a biking newbie of only 4.5 months, completed the 75 mile course ahead of his coach and inspiration, me. I won't let him start early next year!"

It looks like pretty much fun for the riders who gather early on a Sunday morning to head up the Parkway for the Big Dogs ride up to Rakes Millpond. The wind was howling and it was just over 52 degrees this morning when they left for the first 25-mile leg.  They rolled back in at mid-morning to get a quick snack and then join the Puppy Dogs riders for the second segment down to Fancy Gap and back.

Dan Sweeney gnarfs a banana-and-peanut concoction before heading out with the Big Dogs

But at least this morning it wasn't sleeting, as it was for part of the ride four years ago.  Today's gusty, strong winds were enough to battle. Craig Roger of Border Springs Farm in Patrick Springs, fairly new to serious bike riding, said he fought not only strong winds but also some startled turkeys in the road as he biked up and down some of those steep hills. 

Craig Rogers and Chuck Flynt, shortly before Craig was first out of the blocks toward Rakes Mill Pond

 

Craig, heading north, first leg

 

 

Heading back down toward Mabry Mill

Newlywed Dan and Beth Sweeney

Floyd builder Ed Erwin, about to start on the second leg