Riding the ridges for the Floyd library

Chuck Flynt and his wife Diane have done a lot of good in the places where they have lived and worked in North Carolina and Virginia over the years, and they've figured out interesting ways to make it fun, too.  Chuck turned 74 this year, and as he has in recent years, he invited his friends to ride along with him on a birthday run up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Chuck Flynt leads the 2014 Tour de Chuck out of the parking lot and on toward the Parkway

Chuck's offer was simple: For every mile you ride, we'll donate a dollar to the Jesse Peterman Memorial Library in Floyd. This year there were 22 riders.  They seemed to enjoy it. Got a lot of exercise on a beautiful day. And wound up doing a good deed for readers and fans of the library in these hills.

Getting ready to go

 

And here's the amazing thing: Chuck rides a mile for every one of his birthdays. A number of his friends join him in that, but others are more suited to shorter rides.  Diane aims for 40, she says -- a good age and a good number.  

Diane pedals out front with the Lap Dogs

The Flynts have ridden in a lot of places, and often invite new friends to the Blue Ridge to visit -- and to ride.  "We were especially happy that Larry Stark joined us from Denver and Jenny Turek from Marin County," Diane said in an e-mail Monday. "We met these two on our Spain Backroads trip and they made the trek to VA just for the birthday ride. We met two other bike riding couples from PA who will come next year, when we will avoid the Jewish holiday and leaf season both, somehow."

Not a Le Mans start, exactly, but getting going just the same

Jim Newlin, pulling out smiling

I popped by a parking lot near Mabry Mill on the Parkway Sunday morning to shoot some photos and see the long riders -- the Big Dogs -- off in their northern run up beyond Rakes Mill and back, a total of 28 miles. Later I dropped in on the mid-morning start of the southern leg down to Groundhog Mountain and on to Fancy Gap with the Lap Dogs and (Diane said she couldn't help it) the Puppy Dogs, who could ride the 26 miles to Ground Hog and back or the 46 miles to Fancy Gap and back.  

Diane, Susan Icove (center) and Mary Ann Koch, about set to go

In all the riders chalked up 1,195 miles, the most posted in the three years that Chuck has used his birthday ride to raise money for the library.  In 2012, the Flynts donated $1,005 for the mileage ridden. Last year, the total was $707. It's beginning to build up nicely. "That adds up to $2970 wonderful,  much-needed and appreciated dollars for the library," Cathy Whitten, library branch manager for the Jessie Peterman Library, emailed me this morning. "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!

Most of the riders in this year's Tour de Chuck, at Groundhog Mountain Sunday. Don't know who took this picture, but it's a good one. That's Chuck and Diane in the lower right, front row.

 

How 'bout these apples?

It's been a pretty good garden year up here in the hills, particularly for the aging apple trees put in the ground many decades ago by the Woods and the Conners and other farming folk who lived on this property. Most years the crop, if that's the right word, is puny.   This year, by comparison, has been bountiful. 

We picked some yesterday from our best two trees, high above (well, ok, up the hill from) the pond. The first batch tasted to me like golden delicious and our friend Sandy Dupont thought they were closer to a Granny Smith, so for now we're calling them a golden granny. They had a lot of spots and zits and dings and blemished on them, but they were good. Martha B. made apple crunch and served them under a big scoop of gelato.  Mighty fine.  Here's a look into the five-gallon bucket:

The second batch wasn't as good, but also was more golden than red.  All these apples seem to be blushing somehow.  Dunno what this one is. A grouchy granny, maybe.

 

Then there was the third tree, way down the hill that had just a few more greens in it, in the egg basket on the left.

And finally there was the tree across the creek that had some red apples, on the right, above. Some of them were misshapen, but so am I, so what the heck. 

Oh, three other apples arrived -- with a new tree that I picked up from Slaughter's Nursery in the spring. Had three blooms on it.  In late August it delivered three apples, smallish but good.  That's the apply farm report for 2014.

Gentleman George Hamilton IV, gone too soon

It would have been the summer of  '63, when my pal Fred Birdsong came by the house.  His father was an executive with Blue Bell, at the time one of the world's largest denim manufacturers, and the president of the company had asked a fellow from Winston-Salem to drop by the next evening and sing a few songs for a few friends and family.

I didn't know it at the time, but the company president's daughter was confined to a wheel chair, and this fellow from Winston-Salem had a big hit going.  It was a country song, and while I wasn't into country music yet, I had heard it a time or two on the radio and liked it. It would be a huge crossover hit.


I had never been in the home of Rodger LeMatty before, though I went by it several times a day going to and from Page High School. It was a big white house with columns at the corner of Cornwallis and Elmwood, a couple blocks from a girl I was sweet on.  I was working at a day camp that summer, and just had time to clean up a little before getting to the LeMatty's house at the right time.  Fred and I found seats on the floor, the thickest white rug I had ever seen.

I've had the same feeling a time or two, when the lights went down at the Majestic Theater in New York and the organ began rattling  the walls and tinkling the chandelier in the open moments of "Phantom of the Opera,"  and another time in Arizona when I heard the Kingston Trio's George Grove belting out the first chorus of a song I had written with Wood Allen a few months earlier.   Absolute chills, combined with what felt like partial levitation. Hard to describe it right, but what I heard that evening in the LeMatty home made me want to be in show business.

I don't remember the other songs that George Hamilton IV sang that night.  Probably his 1956 hit, "A Rose and a Baby Ruth" was one of them.  Maybe "To You And Yours (From Me and Mine)."  Could have been "If You Don't Know I Ain't Gonna Tell You."  But I will never forget hearing this short, simple song, a man singing about a place he missed:  Abilene.

It's an eternal theme in a lot of genres.  Performer hits it big, goes off to the crowded city, enjoys the high life, but things aren't always right, people aren't always nice, nothing like back home.  If there's anything wrong with that song, it's that it's just two short.   Just two verses, and before you know it, the song is over, and there you are wanting more.  But maybe the genius of the song is that it was short and to the point, and didn't need anything else.

They say the song was written about a town in Abilene, Kansas.  But every time I've heard it since then -- and every time I've sung it -- it has simply been about a place back home.   I don't know if Hamilton thought of the leafy street he grew up on in the Ardmore section of Winston-Salem when he sang it, but I'll bet it crossed his mind more than once, even as he took country music around the world and delighted audiences everywhere.

I only saw Hamilton that one time, and was sad to read about his death Wednesday in Nashville. From everything I've ever read about him, he was the genuine article -- a low-key, easy-going, charming gentleman, generous with his time, warm in his words and his smiles and his handshakes. I have read about a lot of stars in the music and entertainment world, and some of them are not the kind of person you want in your living room for long.  Some are.  George Hamilton IV always was one of them.

The words:

Abilene, Abilene
Prettiest town I've ever seen
Women there don't treat you mean
In Abilene, my Abilene

I sit alone most every night
Watch those trains pull out of sight
Don't I wish they were
Carrying me back to Abilene, My Abilene.

Crowded city ain't nothing free
Nothing in this town for me
Wish to the Lord that I could be

 in Abilene, Sweet Abilene.

Women there don't treat you mean
In Abilene, my Abilene

-- Bob Gibson, Lester Brown and John D. Loudermilk

Still awaiting that call up to The Show

Oh, Doctor!, as Red Barber often marveled in his radio career.  Who'd have thunk that the Washington Nationals of the National League and the Baltimore Orioles of the American League would each clinch their division titles on the same night?  It happened last night, as the O's whipped the Blue Jays and the Nats bombed the Braves once again in a runaway second half of the season that has prompted speculation about a Birds-Nats World Series.  Both teams are red hot and a joy to follow.

It's almost too much for a dedicated fan of each team.  If Lewis Carroll had been a baseball fan, he might have used this phrase instead of merely putting it in a poem: "O, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

This is about the time of year that I used to wait for the phone to ring.  A college pal and I used to joke about it -- it would be Earl Weaver on the line, asking us to report to Baltimore as quickly as we could get up there to help the big team into the playoffs and on to the World Series.   "How's your arm?" we'd ask one another every few days.  "Threw my warmups this morning," the other might respond. "Fastball felt like a rocket...."

This was pure Walter Mittyism at its most ridiculous extension, of course.  I haven't played anything approaching organized baseball since I was a small boy with dreams of pitching for the Dodgers, and only one thing stood between me and the majors: Talent.  Just had none.

Well, I did have a wild arm, and a lot of professional baseball players have had them, but at least they had other qualities -- the ability to stand in to a 95 mph pitch, or to catch a blazing grounder and get it to first in time, or run like a scalded jackrabbit and steal second any time they wished. 

But I did have couple uniforms -- a heavy flannel Dodgers road gray uniform from Manny's Baseball Land, that my fan club gave me for a birthday present one year just in case the newspaper career thing went bad, and a lightweight Orioles home getup just in case Earl Weaver lost his mind and got me mixed up with someone who really could pitch in the fall campaign. 

Not sure what happened to those uniforms, but I still have the caps -- a Baltimore cap from the 1970s, and a more recent Washington cap after baseball came back to the capital. So if by chance I score a ticket for the playoffs of either team, I'll be ready to move on up.  And if by long-shot fortune the Birds and the Nats wind up in some sort of Beltway World Series,  I may have to shell out the big bucks for one of those satin-jacket warmup rigs to get ready for my first Series start.

Now, if I can just find my old glove, I may go down to the barn in a little bit and paint a strike zone on the side of the tractor shed, get in a little throwing time, brush up on my curve and my slurve and my dipsy doodle.  You just never know when you might need a trick pitch.  Wait, was that the phone ringing....?

Run for your life! Here come the weeds!

Up here on the top of Belcher Mountain, we have a short growing season, and it's a good thing, too. Otherwise we would have disappeared long ago under a mountain of greenbriar vines, crabgrass, squash vines, orchard grass, cucumber vines, timothy, tomato vines, locust shoots, dill weed, alfalfa, hawthorn, and new varieties of ill-tempered weeds that science has yet to discover. Well, ok, seems like it anyway.

But lest it seem like I'm complaining, let me take it all back. It has been marvellous to watch, this past month as the garden down by the creek started coming in like the legendary Wabash Cannonball came into the station -- with a rumble and a roar, if not exactly a jingle, too.  It took a while to get up steam, though. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, cukes and a half dozen other things that were planted in June sat there for a couple of months, pretty much ignoring the careful ministrations of this, that and the other: cool spring water piped in on a gravity-fed line from the old springhouse, a king's ransom in some of the prettiest compost you ever saw, careful additions of an organic fertilizer that looked like thin sand and cost roughly the same as gold dust.

The weather never really got hot, so it took a while for these plants to absorb enough sun to begin measuring up. Then shortly after July 4 we began getting some regular afternoon rains, and by the first week in August, everything was coming in like crazy.  (Well, ok, not the corn.  The corn we planted in late May, and which had begun pushing up before we left for a long trip, turned into a buffet for the crows, or some kind of bird. When we got back, there were maybe 21 pathetic stalks left, and so they have remained ever since, bedraggled sentinels reminding us of the folly of turning our backs on the predators nature sends us to remind us not to get too swelled-headed about our ability to squeeze food out of the ground.  Something got the eggplant we put out too, come to think of it. It has been so long.)

But otherwise it has been a month of bounty -- and of pulling weeds and mowing the tall grass and trying to keep up with the high tide of produce.  The tomatoes have been especially good -- anatomically correct Dolly Partons, nice red German Johnsons and hundreds and hundreds of cocktail tomatoes that have graced our plates for weeks on end.  The cucumbers now mostly repose in jars of bread-and-butter pickles.  The zukes and the yellow squash have made wonderful casseroles, and lot more went into freeze bags for the winter.  The banana peppers are rolling in at an unholy rate, some of the hotter ones destined to be pickled this afternoon, and the green peppers have been hollowed and stuffed and packed off to the freezer for dim evenings in January and February.  The potatoes have finally all been grabbled out, dusted off and put up in baskets under the house. We might even pick a pot of okra if the drizzle lets up.

It only took about 15 months of fence-building to cut down on the daily visits by bunnies and other critters of the fields and woods.  A neighbor reminds me that we've probably only insured that the rabbits cannot get out once they figure out how to get in, and that the deer will hop about anything we put up or else they'll just bull their way through. Maybe. But we put in about 270 feet of field fence stretched around new 6" posts. We topped that with another couple of feet of barbed wire -- my friends down home know it as bobwar -- and still something was getting in. So we ran through another 270 feet of 1-inch chicken wire, using about 1,500 zip strips to fasten it against the sturdier field fence, to further discourage the bunny invasion. We buried the bottom 6 inches or so of the chicken wire in the ground and piled on a goodly percentage of the million-or-so stones that my in-laws hauled out of the garden when they tilled each spring for going on 40 years.

I won't say it'll keep everything out of the garden.  I do expect it will slow unauthorized animals down at least a little until the pickins get slim and the frost takes the rest.  On the other hand, I also expect the deer will be up here by the house, gnawing down liriope and the last of the day lillies and whatever else they choose for a snack. Well, shoot, everybody's got to eat.

Wisdom and wit of the late U.S. Rep. Caldwell Butler

I long admired Rep. Caldwell Butler in my reporting days in Washington, and was sorry when I read of his death last week.  I offered a remembrance of Butler's role to a newspaper I had not written for in decades, and Roanoke Times Editorial Page Editor Dwayne Yancey put this on his pages this morning:

The death of former U.S. Rep. Caldwell Butler of Roanoke July 28 was more than a sad moment in Virginia politics; it was a reminder that the model of the elected politician who chooses to do the right thing rather than bow to pressure of party or electorate has virtually disappeared from American politics. Don’t get me wrong: Caldwell Butler could be a fiery proponent of his Republican Party’s conservative mainstream, fighting against an entrenched state Democratic machine that controlled Virginia politics early in his career and bringing about the vibrant two-party political system that gives Old Dominion voters real choices in today’s highly-charged atmosphere.

Where Butler stood out was in the depth of his integrity – everything from his careful parsing of legislation to make sure it did what it purported to do, to his determination to ignore potential for personal political damage on questions of governmental ethics. Many regarded the owlish, bookish Butler as a modern-day Founding Father, as concerned about principle and fairness as about policy. He became a central figure in the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry. He at first regarded the committee as overloaded with “crazies” and maintained a stout defense of the president who helped him win election – right up until he concluded President Nixon had committed at least two impeachable offenses.

Butler’s remarkable speech about his vote, delivered 40 years ago on July 25 and reprinted on these pages in recent days, was the most riveting and memorable drawing of the line in the sands of politics I can recall while working in the Roanoke Times and World News’ Washington Bureau in the early 1970s and covering Virginia and N.C. politics for going on 40 years. He was one of several Republicans on the committee – an “unholy alliance,” as they put it – whose influential votes not only helped move the committee to adopt articles of impeachment, but sent a clear message to the American public that this was a bipartisan indictment of impermissible presidential conduct.

Butler might well have played an even more visible role in the continuing impeachment process had President Nixon not resigned on August 9, 1974, after the release of tape recordings showing the president was deeply involved in a cover-up. His resignation came before the full House was to vote to formally adopt articles of impeachment and send them to the Senate for a trial whether to remove President Nixon. For weeks, Butler had quietly been discussing, on an entirely off the record basis, his views on the impeachment process with my colleague in the Washington Bureau, Wayne Woodlief, for a book that might appear after the process ended. Butler was thought to be the perfect lawmaker to serve as one of the House “managers” of the impeachment trial in the Senate, where House members would act as prosecutors and make the case for the president’s removal. The Roanoke Republican would have been a formidable opponent for the president’s dwindling number of supporters in the Senate, and it would have given him a world-wide platform to demonstrate his legal and oratorical skills. I have no doubt Butler would have ignored the opportunity for dazzling publicity and concentrated instead on doing what he regarded as an unpleasant but necessary job. President Nixon’s resignation short-circuited that book.

That summer of 1974 was fraught with strain and turmoil for members of both parties struggling to resolve a great constitutional quandary. Butler’s wife, June (who died June 28), read to him from Woodward and Bernstein’s book, “All the President’s Men” at bedtime, but the calls and letters from Nixon’s supporters kept rolling in. Late in the proceedings I spoke with Butler and wrote about how he was handling the pressure. The phone rang at my Arlington home the night before the story was to run. An editor had a question that went something like this; “Jack, in your story you say that Caldwell Butler keeps an $80,000 concubine down at Southern Pines. Didn’t you mean ‘condominium’ instead of ‘concubine’?” Knowing that Butler liked a good story, I confessed the almost-error to him the following week when he got back to Washington. Butler quipped something like, “I’m sorry they caught that. It would have done wonders for my reputation.”

Even in duress, Butler knew when to laugh at himself. Then he went back to work.

'Owed' to an Old Chain Saw: We're both wore out

When I bought the thing, I was 41 years old, still young enough to saw down entire forests, cut it into fireplace lengths, split it and stack it. Or so I thought, anyway. I'd had a couple of used chainsaws -- an old Poulan I bought from a hardware store in Zebulon after its first owner had brought it back, and then a fouled up McGregor that someone had thrown out on the street in frustration, as I was soon to learn why: It ran poorly, cut badly and served mostly to foul the air and tick off the operator.

So one day I walked into Wilson's Outdoor Equipment in Raleigh and listened to someone who knew what he was doing when it came to chain saws.  Walked out an hour later with the Stihl 028 Wood Boss with a 20 inch bar and a bag full of chains.   It sounded like an old British Small Arms motorcycle I had had when we lived in Washington, but ran faster and cut quicker than anything I ever saw -- when I had a sharp chain on it, anyway.

I cut trees all over Wake County with that saw, took down some monsters in our yard and pitched in on those occasions when Raleigh got a freak ice storm or wet snowfall that brought down trees in our neighborhood. Hardwoods, softwoods, junk wood, good stuff -- it ran through wood like a hot knife through warm butter.

It was particularly good at laying down about 10 tons of old locust and two-foot oaks and 10-inch maples that occupy much of the old 66-acre farm that we have been trying to keep tidy for the past 25 years or so.  We burn a lot of firewood, and once we built a house up in the Blue Ridge, the Wood Boss was what kept us warm twice a year -- all summer when I was cutting and splitting and stacking that wood, and all winter when the winds howled outside as we burned wood in the soapstone stove.

There was a rising price. As I got older, I noticed that when I was cutting with the thing, my arms and upper chest would ache for days.  Didn't feel that back in the late 1980s, but after the turn of the 21st century I realized a couple of hours with the Wood Boss would flat wear me out.  I'd still be feeling it on Tuesday after a long Saturday afternoon getting up firewood.

Reckon I went through 50 or more chains on that thing.  Found a man who sharpened them up cheap, and mourned when he died too early of cancer.  Took the saw to the shop twice a year to have it tuned and tweaked and cleaned, and once had the thing rebuilt for more than the cost of my  first car, an old '56 Chevy Bel Air with the small block V8.  Both ran like tops when they were running on new plugs. Both coughed and sputtered and bucked and shuddered when the plugs were fouled.

The last three years or so, the Wood Boss has spent more time in the shop than in the kerf of a big tree.  It was slow to start, started throwing chains, gobbled up bar oil and sometimes just quit when it got too hot to work.  I took it in last week and showed it to the fellow who has kept it going for the last few of its 28-year life, and he shook his head.  "Can't hardly get parts for these things anymore," he said with a regretful look on his face. "I'll call you when I get a look inside."

That call came yesterday. He might be able to fix it up for a short time, but chances are its best cutting days were long ago.  Might be best, he thought, to just consider it worn out and put it out to pasture.  Made sense to me.  That old saw with its long bar and full tank could weigh something like 14 pounds.  But the new line of high- efficiency saws would go considerably lighter -- not to mention how light I'd be in the wallet once I bought one of those things.  They're real proud of 'em, the Stihl folks are.

I haven't shelled out for one yet, but that day is coming. I've gotten up seven or eight cords for the coming winter and marked standing dead trees that will come down this winter when the weather allows -- and when my knees and hands and elbows recover from splitting a huge oak across the road this past month.  Like that old saw, I've had my fill for a little while.   Rode hard and put up wet, as my Dad used to say.   When my arms and knees quit hurting, I'll go shopping for a new one.  Doesn't look like that will be any time soon.