Spring's slick snow job

There's a reason folks up here atop the mountain advise against planting flowers or vegetables much before sometime in May.  You only have to look out the window to see why: it's snowing sideways, with fat flakes screaming along out of the northwest here on the, what, 32nd or 33rd day of Spring? The temps are in the low 40s, the wind has been howling a couple days and it looks like late January or early February, except that the trees have little leaves on them. Or did when this blow started.

About a month ago, there were a lot of daffodils and various other bulbs pushing up and blooming. Then a Saturday afternoon hailstorm shredded the blossoms, made salad out of the leaves and stripped even our tough old mountain laurels of leaves that had been there since, I don't know, the first Mills Godwin administration.  Perhaps I exaggerate.  But that storm was nasty.

Today's is nasty and cold. We hardly had a fire in March because the weather was so warm; I've fetched firewood five times from the woodlot down by the barn in the last couple days, and it looks like I've got four more trips ahead of me before we return to Spring in another day or so.

Should have known, of course, but we got spoiled by the mild weather. Driving down Belcher Mountain Road the other day I spotted the first firepinks, some impossibly red little starburst blooms near a burned-out shell of a house.  And I succumbed to the allure of some bright blooming rhododendron over at Felecia Shelor's Poor Farmers Market. I filled up the back of my pickup truck with five-gallon tubs of those beauties; now they're huddled against the wind at the back of the garage, shivering in the gale and looking doubtful about life up here on the ridgetop.

We'll look back with fondness at days like this in July, when the sun's out and flogging the daylights out of our hides while we scrabble at the weeds in the tomato patch or something,  but right now it seems like light-years away.  A man's got to believe in something, and I believe I will go fetch another cup of coffee and maybe a dollop of that snakebite potion we keep around for emergencies.  You just never know up here.

Remembering Earl Scruggs, and the Villagers

Time was, not so very long ago, when a few of us raised in Greensboro the 1950s and 60s thought we might make it in show biz.  We thought, incorrectly, that we could break in to the folk music business. We thought, naively, that some hard work and good luck would put us on the same stages with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, with Bob and Nick and Dave in the Kingston Trio, with the Limelighters and the New Christy Minstrels and Arthur Smith and the Crackerjacks over in Charlotte.

Of course, we also thought we might be astronauts, neurosurgeons or at least a starting pitcher, maybe a long reliever for the Dodgers or the Orioles. 

Funny how your dreams amount to one thing, and life gives you something else.

But we were children of the New Frontier, and anything was possible in those days. We had three or four sets of striped button-down collar shirts, and more instruments than we could play. There was a 6-string and 12-string guitar, a mandolin and a borrowed banjo-mandolin, a four-string and a five-string banjo, a tin doghouse bass painted to look like metal, even a cut-down Roy Rogers guitar that we hoped would look like that little Gibson (or was it a Martin?) tenor guitar Nick Reynolds played, but it didn't. There was also a zither and a dulcimer we didn't quite know what to do with, and a steel guitar that rang like the bell up at Irving Park Elementary the last day of school.

It started in 1961 or '62 in the cafeteria at Page High School in Greensboro, when Fred Birdsong was recruiting guys who could play or sing or, in my case, neither but at least had a banjo.  Over the next 40 years or so the Villagers played the Carolina League of small stages -- Greensboro and Winston-Salem and Burlington and Danville Va, and on to Meadows of Dan, Va and Helen, Ga. and fine nights in Charlotte, Turnersville NC, Cane Creek Valley south of Asheville and about any place they would let us in the door and even close to a mike.

Here's how it looked on a good night in 2005 up in Buncombe County:

 That's Woody Allen in the middle, and Jimmy Garrison on the right.  We played fund-raisers and fund-losers and birthday parties and high school reunions and a big July 4 celebration in the Gate City of the South. I think we played for Chuck Crews' 60th birthday party, and center stage at a nigh-deserted lunchtime concert in downtown Greensboro one fall day, and a barbecue for the cast of Prairie Home Companion outside the new Performing Arts Center in Durham.  Yep, Garrison Keillor heard us; nope, he didn't ask us on the big show.  We played a Christmas bash at Fisher's Grille in Greensboro, raising money for children's toys, that would have been better only if we didn't have to settle our own bar bill at the end of the evening. Remember that scene from the Blues Brothers?

We lost some good boys along the way.  Dave Safford moved out west.  Fred died returning from a prison ministry meeting, when some drunk driver ran into him in Alabama.  "Squirrel" Garrison, maybe the most avid Alabama fan in our part of the world, beat four or five kinds of cancer for just over five years before he went to meet his Maker and demonstrate some heavenly Piedmont Travis picking with metal fingerpicks and new strings forever.

 Woodard Ross Allen, the original Woody Allen before that other fellow hit the headlines, still sings like an angel and picks like the devil on fire. Fred could play any instrument. Squirrel could pick and harmonize at the same time and chew gum and holler Roll Tide at the same moment.  Me, I thumped away at a bass fiddle, most of the time on an old 1946 Kay school bass that burned up two years ago in a house fire.  I've gotten a newer and much prettier bass fiddle now, but it doesn't sound half as good as that old Kay. Maybe that was because we both were born the same year and one of us had mellowed enough to have a good deep, round sound.

Back in the days when I was trying to learn to play the banjo, Earl Scruggs was the man I tried to figure out. I tried never to miss the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs TV show, back when they were still speaking to one another and playing as the Foggy Mountain Boys.  I was a two-finger picker, and not that good with two.  Earl picked with two fingers plus the thumb plus, it often seemed to me, some other fingers as well, if only you could see 'em. It looked like a blur to me on our snowy old TV screen as he raced through things like Foggy Mountain Breakdown. I don't know how many banjo strings I broke trying to do that funky thing where he loosened and tightened a string in the middle of a riff, giving the sound a dip and a rise back to where it ought to be. Amazing.  To this day I'm not sure if he invented that style of picking, but he surely perfected it.  As Greensboro editor Irwin Smallwood might have said, he may not have created it, but he owned the Southern distributorship for picking Scruggs-style.

When he died the other day (March 28) in Nashville at age 88, I thought about how many good players have come out of the places like Shelby, N.C., including song writer Don Gibson.  Something in the water there, or maybe the soil, that produces people who can make musical magic.  I long ago realized how rare that is, and collected their albums and then their cassettes and then their CDs and now hold 'em on my iPod, and sometimes jack up the sound until the light bulbs tremble.

I don't know if Earl Scruggs was an Alabama fan atall, but I fancy that he and Squirrel Garrison and Fred Birdsong, an Auburn fan, might have had the chance to work that out by now, and maybe sit in a corner somewhere to pick a few tunes while they get up a new band over on the other side.

A hoarder's story

Woodworkers are among the worst hoarders. It's a character flaw, but there it is.  Among my conceits is the idea that one day I'll know enough about joinery and dovetails and turning and planing to make museum quality stuff from the wood I've been hoarding for decades.

 And so I hang on to the walnut coffee table top I made in 8th grade shop class, the heart pine door panels that came out of a Greensboro house William Sidney Porter (O. Henry) played in as a child, the burl, if I can still find it, said to have been cut from a tree where they hanged one of Mosby's Rangers in 1864, the rough-cut walnut from a Wake County tree bought by four college friends in 1977, the cherry that my father-in-law and I rounded up somewhere the other side of Willis back in the 1980s, the mahogany that came as part of a pallet made somewhere in South or Central America and discarded by a dealer after arrival of some gizmo or other. Even the mahogany cutoffs from a Raleigh billiards table maker.  And I always regretted not having bought some of the old maple floor from UNC's Woolen Gym, the same floor where Lennie Rosenbluth and Tommy Kearns won a lot of the 32 games they took in that 1957 run to the national championship.

But the thing that made me feel rich was the 2,500 board feet of clear Southern Yellow Pine that I got from a Chatham County, N.C. mill after a foulup over a botched order of flooring back in 2007. We were building a log home then, and had ordered pre-finished pine flooring, six inches wide with tongue and groove edges. The builder was putting it in the first week of December that year, and I was sitting in a State Board of Community Colleges meeting when the cell phone beeped with the bad news: the tongue sat a couple of hundredths of an inch higher than the groove, which meant that the flooring would not fit together in a smooth way. In fact, it would tend to rock as it dried out. It was a mess.

Long story short, that batch of flooring went back to the factory, which could not deliver a new batch for weeks.  In a sweat, we found locally-produced oak flooring in Hillsville and the contractor went on to install that.  I didn't find out until much later that the oak flooring had a similar problem, and had to be ripped out after half a room was done, to be replaced with proper flooring. When that (third) floor was finally down, it was lovely, exquisite, perfect.  And it stayed perfect for several weeks, until the appliance store tried to roll a refrigerator with a frozen caster across the floor and etched an interesting pattern in the wood. Duck fits ensued. But that's another story.

What I wound up with was some lovely 12-foot and 16-foot lengths of 1x8 Southern Yellow Pine that the mill in Chatham County sent me in exchange for the bad flooring. Mostly straight and mostly smooth, it looked mighty good. I built pantry shelves with some of it, and bookshelves in the great room with more of it. Looked fine right up until lightning struck and made a big pile of ashes and rubble in June 2010.

We've rebuilt, and my winter project this year was replacing the bookshelves. I started on the side away from the stereo system and TV and about two dozen kinds of wires that looked too complicated to even think about for awhile. Once the easy side was done, I started labeling the wires and running speaker cable beneath the floor and figuring out which speaker was going to go where. And instead of shelves that went to the floor, that side had to have a base cabinet large enough to house a receiver, CD player, Blu-Ray player and set-top box, plus a lot of CDs and the subwoofer, and hold the flat-screen TV at the proper height.

For a couple weeks I did nothing more than turn 1x8 boards into 1x18 inch boards, for cabinet sides, shelves and top.  I used every clamp in the shop and quite a bit of Gorilla Glue, and then a good-sized batch of 3x21 belts and six-hole oscillating sandpaper discs trying to get everything flat, or at least reasonably smooth.

It all came together about 10 days ago, and since then has soaked up a couple cans of hand-rubbed satin finish.  For a batch of botched flooring, these shelves and cabinet look pretty good. But you still can't walk on 'em, nosireebob.

Now, if I could just find a couple boxes of missing books....

The ice monster cometh

OK, so I know I oughta quit tempting fate by writing about how mild this winter has been. We even went s far as to bring out the plastic rain gauge, stored inside during the winter so it wouldn't freeze and crack. What could go wrong? Two hours later, a ferocious hail storm with ice pellets the size of Buicks -- well, ok, not that big, but certainly faster -- knocked the thing to bits,
 So here, without further commentary, are a few pictures of early spring in the Blue Ridge:

From the springhouse to the asparagus patch

Last fall the springhouse seemed about to run dry; there was but a small puddle in the little catch basin at the rear of the springhouse that Hal Strickland had poured to trap sweet springwater that collected from seeps and springs near the foot of a steep hill.  One reason I thought the thing was drying up is that the 200-foot hose supplying the tap on a wooden sink down by the garden had quit flowing. But it was just running a little slow and low.

Some weeks ago I realized there was plenty of water in the springhouse; and began a ritual of early spring: trying to find out where the water hose was stopped up. Last year it took four days before I finally hauled a pressure tank down there and blew the line out with a blast of 100 psi air and got the H2O rolling again. 

This year I couldn't figure it out. When I poured water into a funnel stuck in the water intake line up at the springhouse, the water spiraled out quickly. But the far end of the line down by the garden gave out nothing.  The mid-run break in the line, deliberately cut so we could easily connect and disconnect it around a copper bushing, was intact. Where was the water going?

It finally dawned on me yesterday that a crumbling concrete catch basin just outside the springhouse -- built at least half a century ago by a former owner in hopes of collecting water from other little springs in the immediate vicinity -- might be part of the problem. I pulled off layers of old grass and rubble and hardware cloth and crumbling concrete mixed with field stone -- and found another place where the half-inch black plastic line had been cut and equipped with a bushing to reconnect it. In this case the feed line was separated from the rest of the hose, and water was bubbling merrily away into the mud. 

Then I remembered a warm day early last fall, just before I noticed the line had stopped flowing, I had been cutting weeds around the springhouse and had felt the earth give way in a couple places. That was probably me stepping on the unseen line, hidden by high grass and mud, just hard enough to uncouple the line, stop the flow to the sink, and leave me with a a six-month mystery to solve.  

It was a joyous moment to reconnect it all, turn the tap on the old wooden trough and see that water flowing strong and clear once again.

Thence to the asparagus patch.  Usually we clean off the old patch -- planted decades ago on the site of what once was a small dairy barn -- sometime in April. Fran Strickland usually supervises, whacking away at each base of the old asparagus ferns after the garden was let go to seed the previous June. But this was my first good look at it since a recent trip down to Western North Carolina -- and I was horrified to see asparagus was already coming up among the rattly old dried-out fern stalks.  Well, ok, not a lot of asparagus.  Two stalks, actually, but one of them was 1/2 inch thick and 21 inches high.  The other was thinner than a Palomino pencil, but nearly 12 inches high.

So we did it the non-cowboy way. Instead of whacking off each stalk of dessicated fernery, I got out the mulching mower and laid waste to it all in about a dozen passes.  The air was full of dried stuff, brown dirt, muffled oaths, and bits and pieces of the mob of invasive raspberry bushes that have been moving into the neighborhood, intent on controlling the asparagus business.

 This is not the proper way to clear an asparagus field, but the weather forecasters were predicting a soaking Saturday rain and more on Sunday, and we decided emergency measure were in order.  I fired up the old Toro and mowed the fencelines outside the patch and inside the patch and knocked down everything that looked like it could take a rotary blade.  Even mowed a rock or two, which made an awful noise, but in an hour or so a job that usually takes a couple days was done. Or more or less done.

As I look out my window through the fog and rain toward the asparagus patch, I can almost see hundreds of asparagus spears, fattened by the heavy rain and encouraged by the unseasonably warm temps of the past few weeks, pushing  their knobby green periscopes toward the surface and emerging to scan the landscape.  I can just about taste 'em, too.

What I saw on the wall

On the walls of the den in the house in Raleigh where we lived for nearly 34 years were hundreds of little holes where I banged in nails and tacks and screwed in hooks and stobs to hold an ever-growing army of old tools.  Some had come from my grandfather's home in South Carolina, some from my granddad in Greensboro.  Most had come, one by one, from antique shops and junk shops and yard sales over the years.  One lovely box of tools -- the box itself a work of the cabinetmaker's art -- came from a neighbor up the street who was looking for a place to put his father-in-law's tools. 

Most of these old tools collected dust for years.  There were decorations of sorts, especially the pieces with ornate lines on them or shiny brass parts -- the old boxwood rulers, hanging scales, fancy thumb screws on planes and the like. I rarely used anything more than some of the old hammers that hung over the hearth, or a curious oval-handled set of screwdrivers that must have come off the designer's table accompanied by smiles and nods of heads.  Mostly I looked at them, and thought about the work they might have done in their primes.

Up in one corner out of reach was an old backsaw, a short saw that would have been used to cut tenons for drawer corners and carcase joinery.  I was attracted by the handle, something close to a work of art, but it was rusty, a little bent and didn't look like it would stand much hard work.  I can't remember ever giving it a job to do, until now.

I'm building shelves in the great room, fitting them into the spaces between the heavy beams the timberwrights put up to hold the house upright.  The beams are white pine, held together with big wooden pegs where the pieces are morticed and tenoned together.  The pegs -- some call them "trunnels", short for "tree nails" --are vital parts of the structure, holding the beams tight.  There's not a nail or screw in any part of the timberframe that I'm aware of.

Well, there are now, because I'm building these bookshelves and cabinets board by board as they go up, fitting and fixing with finish nails each piece one at a time because the dimensions are, um, subject to change.  One beam might be a degree or two off square; the wallboard behind it might be a bit off the bubble, the floor beneath it might have an interesting pattern all its own. I'm used to these variations in old houses we have fixed up, but finding them in a new house was a revelation. My father-in-law once told me the secret to good carpentry was knowing how to hide your mistakes.  I'm relearning that lesson every day.

My shelves are 8 inches wide -- the nominal width of the southern yellow pine I got from a mill down in Chatham County, N.C. a few years ago.  This really means the shelves are 7 1/4 inches wide, after milling and shrinkage and whatever other trade reasons there are for supplying lumber that is not exactly what it is said to be.  And at that width, the shelving boards have to occupy space where the original occupants are those big pine pegs, which the builders left with an inch or so still protruding from the beams so all can admire the joinery. 

There are any number of ways to remove those pegs, even on a finished beam.  A chisel could be used to cut them off. Or an axe -- one of the worst methods.  I've been cutting these off with the a backsaw, which lets me saw nearly flush with the upright beams. It's a job I've finally given to that old backsaw and to another old saw that some woodwrights call a gent's saw. Both of them have thin blades, which let me get close to the beams without leaving much of a tool mark on the surrounding surface.

The backsaw with the pretty handle was made in Sheffield, England sometime during the 19th century by J&I Taylor. Stamped below the maker's mark is the phrase "German Steel."  I'm told the Taylor saw works on Lawson Street in Sheffield was not one of the top-notch sawmakers, nor was German Steel some of the best steel.  The Taylor saw handles evidently have a reputation for moving about, attached as they are with just two screws.  Saw collectors and tool enthusiasts appear to have little regard for the Taylor Brother's quality.

But their saw, perhaps a century and a half after its manufacture, has done the job that had to be done. Those pegs are now flush with the surface of the beams they hold together, and evidence of their existence is disappearing behind the shelves and the stiles and rails that will serve as the trim, hiding the gaps and the flaws and the occasional scrapes where the backsaw dug into the wood.

Most of my old woodworking tools now sit in boxes, banished from our walls and awaiting their fate.  When the shelves are done, they'll fill up with books hauled up from the Piedmont, family pictures looking for a place to stand and the occasional knickknack from some place or other. I'm thinking of giving the old backsaw a place on a shelf, maybe up high in a corner again, where it can stay handy just in case.  You never know when something needs to be taken down a peg or two.

Gardening in the snow

Snowing sideways off and on today as the sun and the clouds battle it out. First it will snow so hard it looks as though you're in a cloud; moments later the sun will break through and the thin patina of white on the ground and deck just fades away.  We're looking for a snowbow; from where I sit in the second-floor writery, to the south it's a murky dazzle of blowing wisps of snow glazed by the winter sun as it ebbs and flows; to the north, I see clearly gray clouds hyphenated by patches of blue -- what deepwater sailors used to call Dutchman's Britches.  Beats all I ever saw.

My friend Barnie Day, who lives up the road a couple miles, has warned me about the futility of planting a garden too soon, and I know he's right. There are years when we wait until after mid-May to put tomatoes in, and still wind up replanting in June after the occasional cold spell. It's probably even too early to begin thinking about gardens, and never mind the seed catalogs that arrived in the mailbox the other day.

Still, our long-range plan calls for converting the garden in the bottom down by the creek into raised beds.  We've got a ton or so of leftover 2x12 and 2x10 floor joists from the log home that once stood here, and I toted some 8- and 4-footers down to the garden last week. Sunday afternoon I got out long screws and galvanized nails to knock them together. It was a lovely day: overcast, wind scudding along at about 20 knots, white caps on the leaky pond, and about the time I got down there I saw the first thin flakes of snow.

It never amounted to anything, but I'll tell you what right now: It's hard to screw in a three-inch Torx drive deck screw for a garden box when your teeth are chattering away like a teletype machine and tiny but determined flakes of snow swarm all around you, and you're laughing at the absurdity of it all.  But two 8x4 raised bed boxes are together now and awaiting loads of soil.  And I was mighty glad I had cut only enough materials for two boxes.  I high-tailed it back to the Rocky Knob Tractor and Yacht Club and took up residence near the wood stove, a glass of amber-colored snakebite medicine in hand, and once again gave silent thanks that it doesn't snow inside.