Yeah, I do ride.

I recently had a break of nearly seven weeks between engagements, and among the various tasks and projects and undertakings, I managed to fit in three solo rides of respectable length and variety. Taken together, they encompassed a significant chunk of the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley west to the east front of the Alleghenies and into the Ridge and Valley province of eastern West Virginia. Total distance around eight or nine hundred miles, all on the 1150.

I. The first came early in September, the warm hazy summer Friday before Labor Day. The morning was consumed with chores and trivia, and it was nearly noon with the temperature in the mid-eighties, before I was underway with no particular route in mind beyond the next bend in the road. In a casual and unfocused manner, I made my way across the Blue Ridge at Chester Gap, then meandered through Front Royal and made my way west towards Strasburg and Middletown. But I haven’t ridden Fort Valley in some time, and rarely, if ever, have I ridden it from the north. So at Passage Creek, I decided to head south and follow the stream into the steep and narrow valley.

The early afternoon was warm and the woods were filled with the smells of late summer; cool shade alternated with soft yellow sunshine from second to second. I immediately fell into the rhythm of the road and found myself in a nearly meditative state; it was one of those rare occasions when I was aware of neither myself nor the bike.

My recollections of this path slowly returned, swelling with details at each new turn and vista. I took in the look of the harsh slaty banks and sandstone exposures by the roadside; the dramatic folds that make up Massanutten reveal stratas of rocks not otherwise seen nearby save in the mirrored exposures on the opposite limb of the synclinorum. They have more in common with the rocks much further south and west than the karsts close at hand, and mark this odd mountain as a bit of an outlier.

My next objective is Edinburg Gap Road, a narrow and twisting two lane path across the western spine of Massanutten. Of course, as I approach the turn, I encounter the first traffic since I left Rt. 55, and it is an elderly off-white Vega with cancerous rust spots and two very large passengers who seem to tax the very limits of its suspension and drive train. I am crestfallen to realize I will be following them all the way across the gap and into Edinburg.

But, whatever. I have written about this road before. The sun is warm on my back and the road winds upwards and the woods encroach as it climbs. Pastures spotted with great oaks give way to more humble and homely woods of twisted pines; then we are over the top and beginning that great surprise, the steep, tight and twisty descent of the western slope. Shortly, the grade levels out, the woods recede and houses reappear; the Alleghenies spread from horizon to horizon to the west with the valley before. And, the Vega has disappeared; I ride unimpeded into Edinburg—for the first time as I recall, at least on purpose.

I stopped at the Mill museum, a spectacular and imposing old white mill in the middle of town. It is a good stopping point, and I have been on the road for long enough that getting off the bike to stretch my legs is welcome. I do a perfunctory walk through of the mill museum, correlating its structure with what I know of other such mills in the valley and in particular those mills in the Staunton area which have some bearing on family history.

I roll back out onto Rt. 11 heading south. Edinburg dwindles behind and I am back in valley farmland. Ahead to the south and east, a growing thunderhead sprawls across the valley and up the west flank of the mountain above New Market. At the next opportunity, I turn sharply westward towards the east front of the Alleghenies. I recall that the weather forecast has called for the imminent passage of a strong cold front, and I was about to try and make my way through what I hoped was a weak spot in that front.

I meandered westward on local roads, rising and falling as I rolled towards the mountain. The road seemed to diminish and falter the closer I drew to the mountain, before finally petering out at the odd little village of Orkney Springs just above Bayse, hard against the wooded slopes. Though it is not widely known, Orkney Springs boasts the largest wooden structure in the Commonwealth of Virginia…one whose purpose was not entirely clear to me. And the village is now some sort of religious community, which contributes to the unusual atmosphere of this remote enclave.

But my unintended in-and-out, first to and from Orkney Springs, then from another two-laned road whose promise quickly disappeared, left me feeling conspicuous on the big bright yellow bike, and the glances turned to suspicious stares on my exit. Surely my details had been jotted down in passage for future correlation with the dark deeds I had undoubtedly committed in transit during those four to six minutes.

From this perch high on the flank of the hill, the weather was close at hand; without warning or preface, dazzling flashes of lightning came hand-in-hand with percussive blasts of thunder. I made haste back towards the valley floor with the storm hard at my heels. I managed to take only a glancing blow from the rain by the time I got back to a route whose number I recognized from a long time ago, though I had never traversed this particular section before.

The road meandered through modest woodlots and farm fields, connecting a handful of small settlements and hamlets before ascending above the limestone-scarred fields to hold tight to the spine of a long low ridge that ran parallel to the mountains which framed the valley. The road held kept to this ridge for many miles before gently descending to dump me in the disheartening outskirts of Harrisonburg.

I had a sudden realization around this time. This ride was special in that so far, at each decision point, I had opted to go farther. At this point, I had already gone more miles one way than my typical full-circle route. And I was still outbound.

My objective was to get decisively behind the cold front, which was moving strongly towards the southeast, tracking nearly perpendicular to the mountains. From here, the best (and only) choice was to pick up the thread of U.S.33 from the dreary detritus of strip malls, used car lots and convenience stores. I was not encouraged.

Yet the bleak and humble beginnings of U.S.33 heading west out of Harrisonburg can hardly prepare a rider for the wonders shortly to be encountered. Gradually leaving the warehouses and tract houses behind, 33 winds through broad farm fields then gradually enters the forests leading up to the George Washington National Forest. The road runs straight and true for many miles deep into the deepening forests as it gradually ascends, then abruptly narrows and whips into a frenzy of twists and turns near the West Virginia line.

Now, somewhere back around Orkney Springs, the weather managed to land more than a glancing blow or two on me. I had geared up for the conditions at home when I left—warm, sunny and humid—in mesh gear, cycling shorts and polypro tee shirt. As I ascended Rt. 33, the cool air, so recently dampened by the passage of the storm front, conspired with my damp gear to chill me to the bone. Getting chilled makes you stupid. It blunts your responses, distorts your perceptions, weakens your judgments and makes you reluctant to do simple yet vital tasks like shoulder checking before changing lanes. And I manage to get chilled every single goddamn time I go riding.

The passage of the front left a jumble of confused weather in its wake. A short stretch of road would bring foggy mist, bright sunshine, dry pavement, cold stinging rain and blue sky vistas. My attack on the summit was slow and clumsy, made more laughable by my unfamiliarity with the gnarled, convoluted road. I was relieved to make it to the top, only to begin a steep and dauntingly twisted descent on wet asphalt. And as a sidenote, when West Virginia posts a sign about the road conditions, you’d best take it at face value; they aren’t kidding.

By now, I had been riding for some four hours and I was ready for a break. In a few miles, the road calmed down, leveling out and straightening. And to my amazement, there just off the right shoulder of the road was a Barbecue wagon! Huzzah!

Pulled pork, sweet potato fries and a lemonade. Standing right on the side of Rt. 33. Couldn’t ask for anything better after hours on the road and a chilly, challenging traverse of a foggy mountain. The milder air lower down the mountain helped relax me a bit, though I could really go for a cup of coffee right about now. At this point it’s about 3:30, and I am still heading outbound to an apogee I am still undecided on.

Well, Franklin, West Virginia ended up being the apogee, pretty much. Franklin is where U.S. 33 and U.S. 220 intertwine briefly through the center of town before resuming their respective courses west and north. With a few more hours in my pocket, I would have opted for more of 33 west, through Judy Gap and then on to Seneca Rocks, then maybe on to Canaan Valley. With another day, maybe on to Rt. 50 through Mount Storm for the return trip. Or 220 south to Monterey and beyond. But not this time…

On the back side of the cold front, the air remains unsettled; along the flood plain of the Potomac’s south branch it is steamy and muggy with the strong late afternoon sun. Now I find myself chasing the remnants of the straggling storms, staying just out of reach of the frayed hems of rain but tracking through spray over wet pavement. A rainbow plays hide-and-seek with me, perpetually running ahead to just beyond the next hilltop.

I have been on the road for more than five hours, and have probably gone about 200 miles. I am still jonesing for that cup of coffee, and right about in the middle of Wardensville, pull an abrupt u-turn in order to stop at Star Mercantile. I park in front of the store, noting the gritty, sodden bicycle locked up nearby with a full load of camping gear from front panniers to rear panniers and everywhere in-between.

I walk in and sit down on one of the old stools bolted down at the counter. At my back, seated sprawled in a booth is the owner of the bicycle, a hirsute, spandex-clad young man in a state of dampness similar to mine. I nod and smile to him, and we share a brief moment of commiseration though I’m pretty sure he’s got the worse of it. I order a cup of coffee—heavy white ceramic mug, with saucer, natch—and a cake cone with salted caramel ice cream, which is wonderful. A follow-on cup of coffee helps to rejuvenate me and after twenty minutes or so, I am ready to go again. I nod to the bicyclist on my way out, and wring my gloves out thoroughly before firing the bike up.

I am determined to stick to “Old” Rt. 55 as much as possible or practical until I cross back into Virginia. “Corridor H” and new “U.S. 48” have made a hash of the old road, slicing and dicing it into little chunks then casting them aside into disrepair. I follow its track from town to town as best I can, at one point riding up one stretch of road I began to think was truly abandoned, given the amount of debris and rain-washed gravel and fallen branches across the roadway. The handful of deer grazing along the road seemed to share my impression. I picked my way judiciously through the litter and persisted until the faltering pavement rejoined its newer counterpart.

Along the old roadway, I find that places I remember from a decade ago have literally fallen by the wayside; I assume the diversion of traffic to the newer, faster, limited-access road slowly starved these old holdouts to death. I am somewhat saddened, recalling that at least one or two were pleasant stopping points on previous outings. Despite these minor distractions, old 55 is beautiful and more importantly, it is immediate. The world is right there at the side of the road, for better or for worse. Dogs and trash, laundry and wildflowers, broken bottles and babbling brooks, gardens and garbage, homesteads and hovels.

From the state line on, it is common knowledge, a road more-or-less well travelled. I close the loop below Signal Knob with the recrossing of Passage Creek; in another hour or so I am home, having ridden just under 300 miles in about under seven hours.

II. I like the idea of randomized riding. Mid-afternoon of one Tuesday early in October, I decided it was too nice to not be riding so I grabbed my gear and headed out. With the bulk of the day already behind me, I decided to stay relatively local and poke around the back roads of the county I’ve never seen. Again, with that little bit of guidance in mind, I thought only as far ahead as the next intersection, and soon found myself meandering down road I hadn’t ridden that went places I was entirely unsure of.

I encountered that neat sleight-of-hand back roads can pull, the trick of starting out broad and well-paved, then gradually and seamlessly devolving into narrower, rougher, less paved, losing any sense of what it means to be a road. The 1150 is better suited than Beast for roads such as these that suffer from identity crises, with its broad bars and pragmatic posture; the stretches of gravel, dirt and mud were easy to handle even at low speeds, and at each moment when I expected to have to turn back for the way petering out, it magically reappeared and began to improve.

I made my way back out to main roads somewhere deep in the F.T. Valley, staring at Old Rag. I didn’t want to head home yet, but really wasn’t sure of which way to turn from here. South towards Madison, Orange or Charlottesville didn’t particularly appeal to me. Nor did east in the general direction of Culpeper, though I was confident I could easily find lots of good roads that way. I would cross the mountain, then figure out a route. But the fuel light was on. There’s no gas in Sperryville, no gas on or over the mountain until Luray. I knew I couldn’t make it that far even if I coasted all the way down off Thornton Gap. So much to my consternation, I had to backtrack halfway to Little Washington just to get gas, an irritating waste of daylight that I couldn’t work around.

Nearly forty minutes later, I get back to the business of going nowhere in particular. I am crossing the Blue Ridge on U.S. 211 for the umpteenth time in my life, no idea how many times I’ve done it on a bike, but maybe the first time on this particular bike. It’s fun, and nimble, and I put great effort into planning my lines and executing them as fluidly as I can. I track from lane to lane as I follow the sinuous road upwards, meticulously avoiding the yellow line to my left or the white line to my right. I have both lanes to myself from the point where they split to the crest of the mountain, and it is a good run, with few missed lines and a soothing rhythm. It is always good to attack the hill, and the quality of the descending ride is never quite as satisfying. But I am happy with my efforts by the time I reach the valley floor, feeling neither fear nor frustration.

I do not want to cross the valley this afternoon. I have no interest in Luray either, so I divert onto the first side road I find, and it immediately carries me northward into flat pastures lined with cedar fencerows. The road snakes amid the low hills and stream cuts, with neat houses close by and rock gardens at the roadside. I admire the gardens and feel an immediate kinship with the occupants of the homesteads so adorned. The railroad also runs through here, which adds a certain indescribable character and timelessness to the neighborhood. I remember the sound of the trains that pass down the valley; I’ve heard them in the night from the solitude of a lonely tent high atop the mountains and I’ve heard them in the night from a house packed with family atop Windy Hill.

I leave the community of Kimball behind when I pause at U.S. Rt. 340. I have sour recollections of the last time I rode U.S. 340 from Luray to Front Royal. Mary rode with me, and the bike was not properly configured for two of us. It was uncomfortable and the road seemed to go on forever. We grew cranky and ill-tempered as we went, and by the time we returned home we were anxious to be off the bike and little disposed to do it again anytime soon. Yet this day, on a different bike and under different conditions, I find the road to be pleasing and engaging. I note that there are many intriguing side roads that break off both east, toward the western foothills of the Blue Ridge, and west, towards the flank of Massanutten. One could well spend a full day—or two—just backroading the northern half of Page County hereabouts. I make a mental note to do so, eventually.

One road in particular catches my eye, and I divert long enough to find out that it goes well up the Blue Ridge, near Matthew’s Arm, before petering out in a dusty single lane. But that vantage point offers a spectacular view of the valley both north and south, and as is so often the case, the return trip on a road offers a subtly different experience than the outbound does. A final thought for this trip: I need to find a different way to come home.

III. So my earlier foray to Harrisonburg and points beyond really piqued my curiosity. For some time I have wanted to get back out and pick up that thread, and I finally cleared my plate and decided that today would be the day. I tried to get out a little earlier than my previous ride, but one thing after another conspired to delay me, and as before, the morning was pretty much done before I geared up and rolled down the gravel road. While I still planned to not overthink this ride, I knew for certain I wanted to get at least a certain distance into unfamiliar territory before tossing any coins.

You thought I was kidding, right?

At least as far as Egypt Bend, this was well-travelled ground, a warm-up exercise. But the crossing over New Market Gap and into New Market proper felt fresh. At New Market I kept to U.S. 11 south, picking up another stretch to add to my collection of disjointed segments of the Valley Road ridden between Pennsylvania and Virginia. I stopped briefly at the Rockingham County line to take a picture of the slightly-larger-than-life bronze statue of a turkey on a large masonry pedestal placed conspicuously on the shoulder.
It commemorates the role of Big Poultry in the fortunes, folklore and history of this part of the Valley. Or something. But you don’t pass up turkey statues without paying some notice. And taking pictures.

I stuck with U.S. 11 as it traced the interstate first to its east side, then for many miles along it to the west, until I arrived once again in Harrisonburg, just a block or two removed from my most recent ride. My goal this time was to connect somewhere with Route 42, a route we used to travel fairly frequently in the decade or two when we escaped to the Dice Cabin in Buffalo Gap.

At some point, I had the great misfortune of getting stuck in traffic close by a manure tanker with a thick encrustation of foul-smelling sludge all about its mess of pipes and valves. Spatters of liquid manure trailed behind it in a nauseating miasma; I held my breath as best I could as I rode in its wake, and was greatly relieved when it finally turned off the highway, leaving a trail of filth behind it. It was several minutes before the stench cleared away, even riding at highway speeds.

Sometime in the spring of this year, I started to recognize “The Lark Ascending” when it was played on the radio. It’s another one of those mysteries to me, how I got to this advanced age without having taken notice of it before.

This stretch of two-lane road may be my ultimate expression of ‘The Valley.’ It traces its way through small towns and clusters of houses, through farms large and small. It rolls through a landscape that is beautiful and storied, maintaining a practical, pragmatic, functional edge and side-stepping the preciousness that so frequently flavors rural beauty. It is Mennonite country as well, and the limestone hills well suit their way of life.

It’s a fairly famous piece in the classical canon, was selected as Britain’s top “Desert Island Disc,” ranked second in WNYC’s listener poll of songs to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, and held the top spot in Radio New Zealand Concert’s New Year’s Day countdown so long that some listeners formed a Facebook group to promote alternatives.

Riding this road solo, after being away for—what, more than 25 years?—was fascinating. Some stretches were exactly as I remembered them from so long ago; others were as if I had never seen them before. And there was no rhyme or reason to my recollections. All I could note was the apparently languid pace of change here, in stark contrast to the eruptive, disruptive patterns of Northern Virginia.

Some see 'Lark' as the high water mark of romanticism in English classical composition, the last great work composed on the eve of the first world war. 

Dayton, Bridgewater, Moscow. They slide past under the clear blue sky. A short two hours after my departure, I roll downhill into Churchville. I recall it as the last vestige of civilization on the road to Buffalo Gap and to the cabin, with a Dairy Queen, a gas station and a small strip mall of weary stores. I stop for a quick lunch at the DQ, unchanged over the decades. Middling, generic barbecue and fries made for a functional if uninspired meal, and as I wolfed my food I pored over my dog-eared map book for inspirations what to do next.

‘Lark’ runs about sixteen minutes. It was composed by Ralph Vaughn Williams* in 1914, and premiered in 1920, scored for piano and violin. Vaugh Williams then rescored it for solo violin and orchestra; that version, the version most commonly heard, premiered in 1921 under conductor Adrian Boult. Vaughn Williams is credited with setting a new course for English music, embracing Tudor, Stuart and folk music themes and motifs and rejecting the Teutonic influences which had up until then had shaped English music. Vaughn Williams was tutored by Maurice Ravel and became good friends with Gustav Holst; the two were mutual critics, shaping each other’s works.

After gassing up, it was near half-past two. I was at a logical apogee, and there was no shame in heading back to Harrisonburg at this point, perhaps trying a different, more southerly route. But as I have recently discovered, choosing to go farther rather than turning back is liberating. And realistically, from Churchville in the middle of the afternoon in early fall, the only option is west to Monterey.

‘Lark’ was inspired by the poem of the same name, written by English poem George Meredith in 1881. It is written in rhyming tetrameter couplets in two sections. It is described as a paean to the song of the Skylark.

For the next hour or so I will be riding what I am fairly certain is terra incognito. Had I ever travelled this road before, it would have been when I was a very young child, so I will simply declare this is new to me. I am taking U.S. 250 west through the George Washington National Forest to Monterey.

Curiosity piqued, I was disappointed to find out that with one exception, larks are Old World birds. They are passerine—perching—birds, typically living in open country and nesting on or near the ground. They are renowned for their elaborate songs, and are relatively comfortable living in or near human environments. Larks typically lay clutches of two to six eggs, which hatch in eleven to sixteen days. Larks are the only known Passerines that lose all their feathers in their first molt.

Almost immediately after leaving Churchville, I encounter road construction, which brings our traffic to a halt for the single lane road. This present an unexpected and mildly annoying delay; it makes the otherwise sparse vehicles to bunch up, and casts a pall on the afternoon. As I sit, waiting, I observe that the foliage hereabouts seems to be about at peak color, putting it a week or two ahead of the trees at home; this thought makes me aware of the road being buried deep in the cold shadows of a mountain stream valley. A quick mental calculation makes me realize that if Monterey is my apogee, I will make the last leg or two of the ride home in twilight or darkness (with its concomitant chill, for which, as always, I am ill-prepared). And the days have already lost the better part of an hour since my Labor Day ride.

The only New World lark is the Horned Lark, whose habitat stretches from the Arctic Circle to southern Mexico. Unlike the less conspicuous Old World larks, the Horned Lark has a striking black-and yellow facemask. In 2013 they were listed as  Threatened” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The construction logjam finally breaks after ten or fifteen minutes. Once the bolus of vehicles dissolves and we reach speed, I pull off at a gas station at a minor crossroads to take stock of my resources. I’d rather get warm at this point and stay warm the rest of the trip than have to try and make up a deficit and fail. I add a jacket liner, a bandanna around my neck, and warmer gloves. All that, plus heated grips for backup, should manage the chill.

The poem, and the piece of music inspired by it, reflects not only the song of the lark, but the flight during which the lark sings. Absent, to my knowledge, the example of the Horned Lark, I fill the void with what I have seen of two well-known and locally common birds: the Barn Swallow and the Hummingbird. The Barn Swallow, like the Lark, is a bird of open country which has made its peace with human habitation, hence the name. Barn Swallows build elaborate nests of mud and grass tucked into the crevices and spaces of human structures, and are best known for their dazzling acrobatics, typically seen morning and evening as they feed on flying insects. Swallows have a well-earned reputation as voracious predators of nuisance insects, and are typically welcome for that benefit alone.

U.S. 250 is two-lanes, beautiful, challenging and amazing. At roughly its midpoint in traversing the eastern section of the George Washington National Forest, the road seemingly crumples up in succession of hairpin turns and switchbacks. Without any prior knowledge of the road, I was reduced to taking the turns at single-digit speeds in first or second gear. The road continued to writhe and undulate as it crosses the Bullpasture River, rolls through the village of McDowell, then ascends one last set of ridges before the spectacular, vertiginous reveal of Monterey.

I started listening almost non-stop to ‘Lark’ around the beginning of October, somehow making up for lost time. It formed an indelible association with warm Indian Summer sunlight shining on yellow leaves beneath a crystal blue sky. I can feel the warmth on my face, smell the crispy leaves underfoot, hear the breeze rustling through the branches sweeping out the fluttering remains.

As Monterey spread before me, I was struck by how lucky my timing was. The oaks, maples, hickories and gum trees were all at the peak of their colors, with few trees showing full green crowns and even fewer showing bare grey crowns. What was not bright, saturated color—tree or sky—was deep graven shadow.

The hummingbirds we see are best known for their nasty dispositions and territorial display around nectar-bearing flowers and the sugar-water feeders we provide for them. But on occasion though, you may be fortunate to see a male perform a courtship dance which consists of a straight vertical ascent to about one hundred feet, then a dramatic plummet downward to buzz the female hummingbird of his fancy. This descent is the fastest descent of any animal, exceeding even the falcon, and subjects the male to something like 10 Gs. (Fun hummingbird fact: male hummingbirds are smaller than females exactly because of this courtship behavior; smaller bodies can accelerate and maneuver faster and more easily, obviously making them sexier).

I rolled into Monterey up Main Street towards its intersection with U.S. 220, and smiled as I looked over towards Trimble Knob, that odd little lump of a hill stuck on the south side of town. Supposedly Trimble Knob is the remnant of one of the few volcanoes found in Virginia, the weathered remains of a 35-million year old Eocene epoch eruption. That in itself is a pretty cool story…but an alternative origin story ties Trimble Knob to the Chesapeake Bay Bolide impact also of roughly 35 million years ago.

So when I read “The Lark Ascending,” and when I listen to it, I am picturing some hybrid of the acrobatics of the Barn Swallow and the courtship dance of the Hummingbird. I think that fits the bill pretty well as a visual.

The theory is that what is now the Chesapeake Bay (and the courses of all the rivers in Virginia east of the Blue Ridge) was shaped when a bolide somewhere between two and three miles in diameter, travelling at “many kilometers a second” smashed into the shallow waters of the ancient continental shelf, fracturing the basement rock five miles deep and leaving a crater twenty-five to fifty miles in diameter. That impact ejected vast quantities of shock-fractured rock, including, so the theory goes, at least one massive chunk which landed two-hundred miles west...the future Trimble Knob. Or so they say. Both stories are pretty cool for such a sleepy little village.

Vaughn Williams introduces the Lark motif at about 0:15, with a solo violin. The orchestra joins around 2:30, including flute, oboe, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, horns and strings. Around the seven minute mark, another pastoral theme is introduced, woven around the ongoing ‘Lark’ motif. Then the ‘Lark’ theme is passed back and forth between the orchestra and the solo violin, with the solo violin closing out the last minute and a half.

Well, it took me far longer than I had bargained to cover the thirty-five miles from Churchville to Monterey, and my shadow already stretched long in front of me when I turned north on U.S 220. In a few miles I crossed into Pendleton County, West Virginia at the village of Harper, making the first of many crossings of the south branch of the Potomac River.

The violin cadenzas in ‘Lark’ are written ‘senza misura,’ or without written measures or beat. Instead, they are meant to fill a certain period of time, making the piece additionally challenging for both the violin soloist and the conductor.

The south branch, or south fork, of the Potomac begins just a couple of miles up the Alleghany slope from Monterey at Hightown, Virginia, on a 140-mile course to join the North Fork at Oldtown, Maryland near the Paw Paw Bends. This branch of the river and the road I ride share a common valley much of their routes from here to Franklin, diverging again until Petersburg where they reunite as far as Moorefield. At Moorefield, the road strikes off north-northwest while the river maintains a northerly course.

Iona Brown is widely quoted as saying her canonical performance of ‘Lark’ was informed by the songs of larks she heard on long walks at Marleycombe Down, near the village of Bowerchalke in Wiltshire, Salisbury. The area is a chalk grasslands area, renowned both for its rich and diverse plant and animal life as well as numerous sites of historical interest including a bronze-age bowl barrow. Brown was one of the few women performers who successfully transitioned from performing to conducting. She died in 2004 at the age of 63, having given her last performance as a violinist in 1998. Ironically, Vaughan William’s widow, Ursula, is quoted as saying that Ralph “…was good at growing green beans but rotten about anything else to do with the countryside…I don't think he could have spotted a lark if he saw one." .

At Franklin, I pick up the track from my ride in early September, where U.S. 33 crosses U.S. 220. The thermometer at the bank downtown tells me the temperature is in the upper eighties, the generous warmth of an Indian summer day when the leaves are peaking. I realize the thermometer is probably correct; the chill I had experienced just an hour or two earlier has been supplanted by a growing sticky steaminess. I pull over along Main Street and take the bandanna from my neck, and swap out my gloves for the lighter pair I wore on the first leg of the ride. Equilibrium restored.

Anyway. I added ‘Lark’ to my riding playlist. It’s not ideally suited for riding because of the large dynamic range; long passages are inaudible at anything above a crawl. But the parts you can hear are so…magnificent…that it’s worth the downtimes. This was the first ride that included it, and it didn’t come up until I was somewhere near Dayton.

This road is still fairly fresh in my mind from a few weeks ago, when I passed through here amid sultry, steamy air and road spray, dodging thunderstorm and rainbows. I know what to expect from here on out, and from Franklin to Petersburg to Moorefield to Baker, I am only interested in keeping up the pace. I know twilight will be awaiting me when I reach the Blue Ridge again. I willingly, nay, eagerly embrace the “Corridor H” route eastward, that odd amalgam of new superslab U.S. 48 and old decrepit two-laned S.R. 55. While previously I had eagerly sought out the disconnected snippets of old 55, this time I am deliberately using every mile of superslab and using every bit (plus some) of its generous speed limit to bump up my consistently feeble average speed.

And after hearing it, I didn’t want to listen to the rest of the stuff on my playlist that was so tired and I’d heard countless times before. At my lunch break, I took my earphones out and wore earplugs instead. For the rest of the afternoon, the ‘Lark’ motif played in my head.

Admittedly, U.S. 48 is a pretty nice stretch of road, and it’s a pleasure to ride on new pavement when so many roads, large and small, have been ignored into utter disrepair and collapse. High, wide, and open, the roadway seems in places to glide along the hilltops. The air here, high up from the darkening valleys in the clear sunshine is warm and smells of pine and dry leaves; riding this unfaired bike at highway speed with its upright posture is both a pleasure and a challenge. The wind is invigorating, and I naturally gravitate towards a pair of riders until we share a loosely staggered formation. We smile, nod and wave in mutual acknowledgement.

And in a moment somewhere on the Highland Turnpike high above Monterey, it all came together.

And ever winging up and up, our valley is his golden cup, and he the wine which overflows to lift us with him as he goes:

Here was the valley, his golden cup; the lark—or what we have here that passes for a lark—the wine which overflows, lifting us up with him as he goes.

For the last stretch, where the two-lane prevails, I tuck in behind a small group of baggers. I follow them at a respectful distance until somewhere just across the border into Virginia, where I make one last stop in preparation for the homeward leg of the trip. It’s a small, roadside convenience store, selling supplies for campers and hunters and locals who find themselves disinclined to drive all the way to Middletown for some Doritos or ice. The signage out front is a polyglot of misspelled English and Hangul, and the woman behind the cash register speaks to me with a heavy Korean accent. I purchase a diet Pepsi and an ice cream sandwich that from all appearances is either locally made or hand-made, two waffle wafers with a thick slice of Neapolitan ice cream, folded neatly in wax paper.

I sit outside on a picnic table beside a low cinderblock wall, feet on the bench, watching the traffic on the road and the people coming and going at the gas pumps. The lowering sun dazzles me from its perch squatting over Great North Mountain; it seems it will set locally in a couple more minutes. I stretch my legs and slowly wend my way around the stacked cars at the gas pumps to pitch out my trash. There’s always that funny look you get from car drivers…particularly when they’ve got their kids with them. Like you’re a carrier of some dangerous notion or something. It always makes me smile more.

I gotta get out here more often.

The Lark Ascending, George Meredith (1828–1909) 

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit’s chime
On mountain heights in morning’s prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

For singing till his heaven fills,
’T is love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labor in the town;
He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eye of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.
Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink:
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.

Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap,
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve and pass reward,
o touching purest and so heard
In the brain’s reflex of yon bird;
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

My analysis of “Lark” is based on the 1972 recording of Iona Brown and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields with Sir Neville Marriner, which can be heard here.

*Who knew that was pronounced 'Rafe?'

June 30

I left the office at the usual time and immediately gassed up, the fuel light having been on for quite a bit of my inbound ride. With a full tank, I considered my options and decided it was a good day to take the long way home.

Tuesday is the day Mary works late. Were I to go home straightaway, I would have several hours to myself. If experience is any guide, I would squander that time by stuffing my gullet with fists-full of junk food, drink too much, and surf the Internet in my underwear with the pets staring at me with disgust, contempt and revulsion.

So yeah, rediscovering the back roads seems like a good idea. I found a newish route that evolves from the godforsaken generic office park into twisting, rolling two lane roads shaded by deep woods and chased by serpentine rivers.

The roads gradually lose their exurban harshness and yield to scrub and young forests lately farm but not yet townhouses and strip malls. At some indefinable point, more felt than seen, the character drops its last vestiges of development and transitions to simply rural. I set into the rhythm of rise and fall, lean left, lean right, throttle on, throttle off. But there is trouble in paradise.

I see brake lights ahead, and a long line of stopped vehicles. I see vehicles randomly pulling out from the line, executing awkward turns across the road, and heading back in my direction. The drivers are making undecipherable hand gestures and shouting things I cannot understand as they pass. Clearly we are bollixed up, but I am so close to where I must turn that I decide to tough it out for a few minutes. I am literally within a few tenths of a mile, and in a pinch I could probably go off road to make my turn.

But as solid information begins to make its way back down the line of stopped vehicles, it become clear I will not make my turn. An ancient tree has fallen across the lanes, and it is massive beyond the abilities of anyone on-scene to deal with. In an area where folks routinely travel with their chainsaws, we are all stumped.

So I pull from the line and make my way back upstream. I am not familiar with this area except in broadest terms, so I will probe and test to find my way forward. I assume that all roads go somewhere, a supposition which seems true about 90% of the time. Unfortunately, the roads that comprise the remaining 10% seem to undergo a steady diminution in size and quality before finally revealing their shameful failings, meaning the ride in is bad, turning around is worse, and the ride back is long and humbling.

Naturally, I find some of those. And I follow a few roads that end up depositing me in places pleasant enough but diametrically opposed from my destination, so since leaving work, I have actually made negative progress towards getting home. Shadows are lengthening, I am getting hungry and cranky. This is not working out to be one of my better after-work rides, all thanks to the vagaries of a dying oak.

Retracing my path, I duck down another sketchy yet somehow promising lane. The surface begins as pavement, and in a few tenths of a mile collapses into fragments of pavement then some pavement-gravel hybrid, then gravel then just washboards of dust and potholes. The banks are high on both sides and the rutted track is narrow; if I encounter another vehicle on the way, I have very few options except to pin myself against the bank and hope for the best.

The deep woods and sudden curves make the situation even sketchier. If someone is coming the other direction, neither of us will have warning. Dollars to donuts, they’ll know the road better than I, and so will be going full speed. But I’ve squandered many miles this evening to come to this pass, and have no alternative but to forge ahead as best I can. And Beast does not care for this kind of terrain, not one little bit.

The road diminishes with each turn and cresting of a hill. I anticipate it will end at some locked gate, dead fall or vast muddy pool. Yet mirabile dictu, suddenly I see pavement ahead once again, and not far beyond that, a small crossroads of two paved roads.

I pause for a moment at the crossroads to get my bearings. To my left, a small, humpbacked bridge and a road leading into deep dark forest; to my right, a road leaping steeply upward to crest a small hill through pastures and woods. In an instant, I know where I am; I need only choose from an embarrassment of riches the route to select.

I pick the road to the right, and it quickly connects me with a stretch of road I do not recall ever riding before. Perfect! Sinuous, it winds generally southward from where I am, which is good, because south is the direction towards home. The sun is now low in the sky, casting long and deep shadows across the roadway. The hilltops are warm, bright and sunny, but cooler air has already begun to pool in the valleys and low spots; in the shade the sweat I have accumulated over the last hour is chilling.

The low sun strobing through the trees is…distracting. It is oddly soothing and relaxing in a way, but the experience would be more enjoyable if I were perceiving it through both eyes. Because of my route and position of the sun, only my right eye is seeing this; my left eye remains in shade. I recall reading somewhere this effect is not uncommon, and has something to do with either emulating or stimulating alpha waves in the brain.

Shortly I pass out of the woods and the effect stops; when I am back in woods again, the sun has dropped behind the Blue Ridge, rendering a beautiful blue wash across the landscape entire. My route from here to home is known to me, and will follow paved two-lane roads at a minimum; I will be home in short order with ample light left to take care of chores, yet not so much dead time that I will embarrass myself in front of the pets before Mary gets home.

All I need concern myself with now is the deer.

Addison through the Looking Glass

My day began under a tormented gray sky, blowing a thick layer of pine needles from the roof and skylights and flashing and gutters, then policing the odds and ends subject to being wind-tossed from the open spaces, then felling the massive, spectral skeleton of a pine tree which menaced the turkey yard and which nearly menaced me...all while the temperature slowly fell and the winds slowly rose.

But shortly I found myself six miles above some vaguely discernible part of the south in an airplane packed every cubic inch with restive travelers and their Brobdingnagian rolling suitcases and ubiquitous iFarkles. On arrival, despite the boogeyman of checked luggage, my bag reaches the concourse seconds before I. I have arrived in a broad, flat tan landscape strewn with scores of mirror-faced office buildings gleaming like chunks of galena shattering the light of the setting sun. In the east the gibbous moon takes ownership of the sky. I feel like I have been teleported into a terrarium.

I ditch my bags, shuck my travelling clothes and spend my first hour just walking around taking stock of my new neighborhood and getting my bearings. The air cools down quickly with so little humidity to hold the day's warmth, and it is warmer here than at home during the day but colder at night. In Texas. Go figure. On a Sunday night, late to me, the traffic is manic, hostile and unrelenting.

And the birds...there is some kind of dark flocking bird, similar to grackles or starlings, who are all but invisible in the trees and amidst the buildings, but whose cries and calls absolutely fill the air. As I walk, I notice the sidewalks beneath the overhead lines—beneath anything that offers a perch or roost-- are thickly whitewashed with their droppings. Their screeching and calling is otherworldly in this garish landscape.

Back in my room, I roll through the cable channels as quickly as the remote allows. I am concurrently watching a dozen programs, serial snippets in rapid rotation, comprehension uninhibited by the mosaic but assisted by the glacial pace of television storytelling. I am trying to feel like a part of the growing catastrophe that is consuming the eastern seaboard while I am exiled here for the week, a storm for which a new vocabulary must be created.

I look for news of the wind, of the rain, of the coming snows and the loss of power and of the dozen other vectors of misery and suffering and dislocation and loss. I look for news of home, and feel so powerless to be so far away. There is no need for me to be there, nothing I could add or bring to bear, but it is in my blood and soul to wish to experience the darkness of such an event, to be able to say I was there, and came through it unscathed.

I watch long into the night, image after image relentlessly strobing the bland room and its bland furnishings. I am so dislocated; I feel warn and exhausted but not sleepy, so continue to provoke my senses until long past the time I should have given up, given in.

The dawn comes oddly late in my temporary home. A full ten minutes later, by my recollection, than it had come on the last cloudless morning. Timezones are funny things. East and west, north and south; if you notice these things, then you know when they are not right. And though we acknowledge the east and west of things, we rarely comment on the north and south of things, and how changing longitude will affect your sense of time in a different way than simply where you fall in time. Relative differences and absolute differences.

It is cold and clear at dawn, but the air quickly warms with the sun and its fun-house rising. Again I am transfixed by the flashing images, of the process proceeding without me. Back there the cold rains have come, the sideways rains, and in some places things are beginning to fall apart, though not in my places. Things remain mostly routine in my place until some hours after nightfall, when the power finally fails. It will stay failed for just over a day, and then it will return with little fanfare, and as best I can tell, little disruption of the normal routine.

The cold rains fell for many many hours, until over four inches had fallen. In those places where our rains usually came in, this time they did not. The snow did not come, the leveling winds did not come. All appears to be normal, for the most part.

But from my vantage point in this terrarium, I still cannot resist making the ice-blue images march unrelentingly across my eyes. I cannot turn away, and it fills my brain with shrapnel and shards that will not let me sleep. Images of flood and wind, of streets turned inside out, of homes evulsed, of arc flashes bringing day to night, of towers rent asunder, of masks of anguish, of crushing snows and tides of broken pieces and of ravening fires consuming all, unquenchable in the dark heart of a hurricane. In the middle of the night, I admit defeat, acknowledge that sleep is not coming anytime soon, and open the floodgate once again for another bout.

I walk briskly to lunch in my shirtsleeves; were there any humidity, I would probably break a sweat. My glasses darken in an instant from the sunshine, and there is still not a solitary cloud in the sky. I spend the end of the afternoon on the patio, chatting amiably with the other until the sun finally goes down and the chill arises. The bird calls begin to rise as the darkness encroaches. I am here right now and there is no other place I can be for the time being.

I will try to sleep tonight. Happy Samhain.

Benchmarks

October 6, 2012: Fired up the wood stove for the first time of the season. I love the smell of hot dust.
October 13, 2012: First frost.
October 14, 2012: Cabernet bottled, 25 bottles.
October 15, 2012: Last hen transferred to the winter yard. Summer yard gets a chance to rest.
October 15, 2012: Sauvignon blanc started.

A Long Day in the Dairy

Sunday began bright and early with a quick post-coffee cleanup of the kitchen. Without pause or interruption, we proceeded directly into the first of a long series of interwoven projects: I delabeled the last few wine bottles we needed for the oft-postponed bottling of the Cabernet, and Mary brought in three gallons of milk from the outside refrigerator so it could slowly come to room temperature. She then skimmed the many quarts of milk on hand, gathering six pints of cream. As the milk and cream tempered, Mary packaged up an earlier batch of butter.

Then began the making of the new batch of butter. No homely churn for this task; the blender is a fine and expeditious helpmeet. In relatively short order, the butter was churned and the extravagant buttermilk set aside as a treat for the poultry. The scrubbed wine bottles were ready for a thorough washing. On to the next project—about five pounds of pure white fresh cheese, made the previous Sunday, waiting to be salted, divided and improvised upon.

The greatest measure of this cheese was simply salted and frozen as an ingredient for later. For the balance, we decided to take two tacks—Mary would make savory cheeses, I would make sweet. So together we crafted several flavors of soft, spreadable cheeses (including a savory Boursin clone and a brandied five-spice sweet cheese) which joined the butter in the freezer for enjoyment over the long dark winter.

By now the large pot of milk was ready to begin its magical transformation. We spent the bulk of the afternoon and well into the evening transforming three gallons of fresh milk into a small wheel of cheddar cheese through a process of strictly regulated heating, enzymatic action and physical manipulation that made mashing and brewing an all-grain beer look like fixing a glass of lemonade.

I would have to say there are a handful of magical transformations in the realm of the cooking arts. Mashing is one, where suddenly thick, starchy porridge becomes a sea of grains suspended in a clear, golden wort; another is the nixtamal reaction, where thick cooked corn is transformed in a different way, releasing the smell of fresh sweet corn where a moment earlier there was nothing; and cheese making, where in an instant, milk polarizes into clear liquid and a snowstorm of curds.

Did I mention that somewhere in there, we also started roasting one of our turkeys, to have for dinner?

So, by sometime after dinner, the cheddar was ready to be set aside to drain for a bit. But we're not quite done yet—still one more dairy project to take care of.

The three gallons of whey from the cheddar is heated, and to it we add a pint of whole milk. Somehow, from this meager beginning, we manage to produce over a pound of fresh ricotta! That is the most amazing step, because it really gives the appearance of getting something from nothing. (In reality, the cheddar extracts most of the casein protein from the milk with the help of the enzyme action of rennet; ricotta uses a near-boil heat and mild acidity, provided through the addition of a small quantity of cider vinegar, to capture the remaining albumin proteins from the whey). After this final magical transform, the last iteration of whey—stripped of protein but still vitamin and mineral rich—will be fed to the poultry as a supplement.

It is bedtime when we are finally done. The cheddar is undergoing its first pressing; the ricotta and butter are in the refrigerator chilling. The turkey carcass has been picked apart and the leftovers are put away. For all intents and purposes, we have spent the entire day on our feet, in the kitchen, by the stove or around the island, working together on these interwoven projects. It is all we can do to tie up the loose ends of the day, to make sure what needs to be closed up is closed up and what needs to be secured is secured. We are as sore and exhausted as had we been working in the garden or in the woods for as long a day.

And still the cabernet sits, unbottled.

Halloween 1979

The cold comes on suddenly on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, where it never really goes far away. It lurks just out of mind all the time, and drops in impulsively from time to time just to assert itself, lest anyone doubt its primacy.

In late October cold is a given, and the frost was truly on the pumpkins. It destroyed the faltering vines and left ember orange fruit naked and exposed across the roadside fields. Worse luck for the farmer, it was a hard freeze; hard enough to seize up the flesh of the large succulent pumpkins and slowly rend it with a million tiny daggers of ice. The larger the pumpkin, the worse it fared. They sat ruined in the midday sun, slowly deflating into mottled puddles of pulp and seeds, beyond resurrection at the point of their greatest glory.

But here and there, scattered throughout the field, a careful observer could spy smaller pumpkins that survived the cold. Fleshier, drier varieties, with less moisture to freeze and better insulated by their own mass, they managed to pass the cold unscathed. None larger than a man’s head, some as small as a softball, all perfectly shaped and brilliant orange.

The field was a total loss, not worth the farmer’s effort to glean even as feed for his cows and pigs. We had free rein to gather what we wanted. Yet I could find no one among my jaded and aloof compatriots to share my enthusiasm for the task. So I set out alone, walking the dusty shoulder of the road to the farmer’s field with my empty sack over my shoulder and the late afternoon sun warm on my face.

I filled the sack with a half-dozen or so pumpkins of varying size and description, and stuffed two more smallish gourd-like fruit in the pockets of my army jacket.  My shadow stretched long and far before me as I returned to my room. There was still time left before nightfall, if I worked without delay.

As short walk and a brief stop in the general store later, I settled in the communal kitchen with my pocket knife and began the work of transforming the lowly pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns. I did the best I could with the time available and tools on hand; no simple triangle eyes and square gap teeth for me. A Jack-o-lantern must have a personality of its own, and its native shape of course determines its personality. So a certain amount of deliberation must take place in the span between the initial craniotomy and innard scooping, and the final flourish of rind striping intended to release the pumpkin’s inner demon.

The sun was just set, the cool evening air settling rapidly. I now had six Jack-o-lanterns, where just a few hours earlier there were only orphaned pumpkins abandoned in a field. It was time.

I walked briskly and purposefully down the winding gravel lane to the old farm graveyard, sack slung over my shoulder now filled with Jack-o-lanterns. It was a short walk, less than a mile through the rolling hills and fields, but the light faded quickly and stars appeared faintly overhead.

Within the bounds of this tidy plot lay a score of graves, most sharing the name of this ancient farm, and a few others represented as well. I found the boundary stones marking each corner of the sanctified ground, and gently placed a Jack-o-lantern on each, face to the cardinal points of the compass. The others I placed atop the tallest gravestones, facing east. I lit the small candles inside them, and then climbed up the hill behind the graveyard and sat among the balsam fir as the eerie glow countered the deepening twilight.

How One Thing Leads To Another...

Saturday was a day chock full of overlapping errands, interconnected tasks and nested interruptions—a typical Saturday, made more hectic and frazzled by the expectation of company’s arrival in the coming week.

But certain things cannot be ignored, and the irrepressible enthusiasm of a house-bound dog who believes a walk on a sunny afternoon is imminent ranks high on that list. At one point mid-afternoon, we set our cleaning and other projects aside to take Carrie and Schroeder out for a brief walk, if for no other reason than to calm Carrie down a bit.

We set out down the gravel driveway for the usual round of peeing and sniffing (Schroeder marks, Carrie examines). As we dawdled into the pine woods—where much sniffing was required—we could not help but notice the pine litter everywhere erupting with mushrooms. The piney ground was an undulating carpet, where the pine needles were pushed up and aside by countless clusters of tan mushrooms.

They looked like ‘short stacks’ scattered through the woods—mysterious little clumps of glossy golden brown discs, some perfectly round, others missing a chunk here and there, where some woodland creature had nibbled on them. They were beautiful, and looked utterly benign in the afternoon light.

But the mystery of the mushrooms did not concern the dogs, so we pushed on through the pines, and down the lane, and wound our way back to the house and the chores and cleaning and errands, stopping to chat with the neighbors along the way. But later that afternoon, as the shadows lengthened and the evening light cooled, we revisited the pine grove, guidebook in hand.

Kneeling in the cool fragrant litter with sample mushroom in one hand and taxonomic key in the other, we carefully worked our way through the key, learning proper mushroom nomenclature, mushroom physiology and making a few false starts before tracing our way to a definitive identification: Dentinum Repandum, (also known as Hyndum Repandum, sometimes called 'Hedgehog mushroom' for its teeth on the underside of the cap)—an edible mushroom!

The 'Hedgehog' is our fourth foray into the world of wild fungi: a massive sheepshead mushroom in Pennsylvania decades ago, a solitary morel in Arlington, and another solitary morel a few years ago here.

We picked a handful, marveling at their oddly sticky surface and beautiful coloration. They became the centerpiece of our dinner, sautéed lightly in butter and folded into the center of an omelette made with a handful of the day’s newly gathered eggs. The mushrooms were delicious, delicate and tender, with a mild, subtle yet distinctive flavor.

We survived the night without ill effect, and returned Sunday evening to pick a small basketful. Some of those became part of Tuesday’s dinner, along with fresh pesto and braised carrots; with luck, we will dry enough of the bountiful crop to supply us through the winter. We even recommended some to our neighbors, who were trusting (or bold) enough to take us up on the offer—though, now that I think of it, I haven't heard from them since...

There’s something pleasingly…empowering…about trusting your land and your judgment enough to identify wild mushrooms. I'm very happy we did this; I hope we continue making discoveries like this.

Winging it

I gotta say that freestyling bread has got to be maybe the most impressive thing I have ever seen done in a kitchen—a kind of yeast-and-gluten based jazz, an improvisational art form that I plainly do not have the stones to try. It is an interpretive dance, dusted with flour.

Mary has been doing this of late, and Madeline does it also. Now, I baked my first loaf of bread in, what—third grade or something like that? And since then, I have baked all sorts of breads over the decades, and lots of other goodies as well. I consider myself a reasonably accomplished amateur baker. But, as I learned from my mother, I bake always using a recipe, followed with great deliberateness and devotion. How do these two do it?

It's almost scary for me to watch the bold and fearless way these women bake: intuitive, insightful, free-form, based on solid experience and whatever ingredients are at hand. Everything goes into the big stainless steel bowl in its turn (nothing seems to get measured) where it's mixed, then kneaded, then risen: a single vessel for the whole process. Four round loaves emerge from this crucible to nestle together on a big baking sheet, making a giant clover-leaved loaf, each leaf with two flat sides and a broad dome.

The motivation to bake is often some ingredient that needs to get used up; dairy-based, typically, so the breads are usually rich with cottage cheese or the equivalent. Some mix of herbs usually enlivens the flavor, often finely minced onion as well, a perfect compliment for a 1/4 rye-1/4 whole wheat loaf, like the ones we just enjoyed.

I watch it happen, and stand back and keep out of the way. It's a music I can't play...though I certainly enjoy listening, and am a willing audience.

********************
On the other hand, I am pretty good at free-style cooking.

Sunday morning I announced we were having quiche for dinner, and Mary concurred. When the time came, at the end of a long day of many hard tasks large and small, we went at it.

Mary made the crust, in this instance using the old-reliable recipe—pie crusts are treacherous and notoriously vindictive creations who won't hesitate to turn on you if you show the slightest weakness or fear or relinquish an iota of control for a moment. She prevailed, predictably.

I began making the filling by cutting up a hunk of smoked pork (like bacon but without the cure) and sauteing it; then adding finely minced onion, some finely chopped kale stems and, shortly after those, the kale leaves; then some sliced white mushrooms and salt and pepper. While that was all slowly cooking together, I beat a handful of eggs, some freshly-skimmed cream, and some cottage cheese until it was frothy. As soon as Mary had the two crusts ready, I divided up the kale mixture between the crusts and poured the egg filling over them.

The quiches were done in about a half an hour, along with a pumpkin-like winter squash I threw together. The squash was just cleaned out and baked with some cider, butter, brown sugar and spices. The two quiches and the squash together would make about three full meals for the two of us, with mostly local ingredients and without recipe (...excepting the crust...) with about thirty minutes prep time all told.

The trick is having a wonderful assortment of outstanding ingredients on hand, and a willingness to use them how you see fit. No recipe for the filling, just the miracle of all those foolproof pieces to put together like a puzzle. I suppose I could try and apply that approach to baking, but...

Nah. I'm not even going to pretend like that's going to happen. I will leave it to the two virtuosos. I know when to leave well enough alone.

Supper for a fall evening:

Home-corned brisket of local-grown beef, simmered in the crockpot with nothing but sweet cider all day, sliced thin and served open-faced on fresh baked onion rye cheesebread with just a smear of mustard.

Mixed green salad, with tomatoes and two kinds of green peppers—still from the garden.

A pint of pumpkin spice ale.

Hardly a scrap left.

The view from Stephenson

Here—what the old timers refer to as 'down-valley'—is where the identity of the valley falters a bit. The ancient mountains splay outwards, appearing as little more than far-distant wrinkles, turning their backs on each other in lassitude, barely bothering to define the gently rolling sprawl between.

This timeworn place, where seventeen generations of mountains have come to die, entombs each succeeding layer on the bones of its predecessor. It is a geological ossuary. Amid the dust and glare, the bountiful fractal history displays itself in both the contours of those distant ridges and in the dirt at your feet.

Squinting against the dazzling sun and the unbounded sky, you can envision the succession of orogenies building mountains from chunks of continental crust, grinding them away and flushing the dust back to the sea with the tools at hand like some dissatisfied and frustrated sculptor. The steady northward succession of Appalachian water gaps betray how the workpiece gradually moved upwards into the steady-held cutting tool over eons, allowing the most patient of processes to make its mark.

At the same time, beneath the same sun and the same brilliant sky, you sense the fractal nature of the human presence here, a tiny imitation of the cycle of orogeny and erosion. To stand here within sight of the interstate, the railroad and the U.S. highway, all three nearly coaxial, is to marvel at the obviousness of this path as a north-south route traversing an immense span.

The interstate is merely the most recent entrant in this field, not breaking any new ground but simply mimicking a portion of venerable U.S. Rt. 11 as it passes from Quebec to New Orleans. I imagine Rt. 11 was superimposed on some earlier Valley Pike or collection of roadways, themselves built upon earlier road, paths and trail, until, with enough regression, we encounter the first north-bound pre-Columbian traveler en route to his or her passage to points unknown, who were probably taking advantage of trails worn by migratory animals.

It pleases me to think of someone pausing briefly beneath the same dazzling sun five-hundred generations ago, admiring the distant beauty of Signal Knob rising through the blue haze and the flame-colored leaves.

Kick the rough ground where the fallow farm fields were churned over for this new place, this most recent squatter on the thin surface soil, and you uncover plentiful stones just beneath the sparse weeds and coarse grasses. Uniform grey limestone, occasionally striated or iron-stained, they are abundant and likely steered many farmers towards pasture animals rather than field crops. Animals thrived on the limestone-nourished grasses, while plows were worn and thwarted by this taut skin of dirt stretched over the valley's ribs.

You kick the dirt circumspectly in places like this, where the transition from past to present may not be complete, out of respect for what lies beneath. You do not want to disturb the cadre of ghosts sleeping below the surface. This place of time unbounded can have an oppressive air; these mountains, and their ancestors, have been here for four and a half thousand million years. People have seen them for one-one hundredth of a million years. I have seen them for one-twenty thousandth of a million years.

I don't quite know what to make of that. So I scuff the dirt once more, and return to the task at hand...

The Wonder of the Night Sky

One of the benefits of living in the woods is seeing the night sky as it should be seen.

Last night, roused by Carrie’s abrupt pursuit of a pooka, we decided to get dressed and catch the late late show—the Orionid meteor shower. Aided by the combination of a brilliantly clear fall sky and a cooperatively absent moon, we enjoyed a rich and full star field from les chaises longue set right out in the driveway.

In years past we went to absurdly extreme lengths to enjoy a show like this. In mid-November, 2001, we woke everyone up after midnight, piled into the Aerostar and drove fifty-plus miles to the east flank of the Blue Ridge to see the Leonids. Aided by thermoses of hot apple cider and hot chocolate, plus a couple boxes of waxy chocolate-covered donuts, we lay under the icy night sky in awe.

Prior to that evening, my lifetime count of shooting stars was in the dozens, most from a single night at the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. But the 2001 Leonids were astonishing—seeing our first shooters even while still driving on the interstate—and my recollection immediately afterwards was that at no time from when we arrived until dawn had lightened the sky was I not seeing a shooting star in one quadrant of the sky or another. My calculation (counting was simply impossible) was 3,000 shooting stars that night.

We followed up in 2002 by reserving a room at Skyland Lodge in Shenandoah National Park in order to be able to improve the driving/sleeping/viewing ratios. We watched from an east-facing overlook along Skyline Drive, lying on our backs on snow-covered stone walls until daybreak, then hurrying home along with all the crazy long-distance commuters to schools and jobs. It was a beautiful display, made more magical by the setting on the snowy mountains.

Last night was its own experience. The stillness was a thing of its own; other than the rustling of Schroeder’s peripatetic wanderings, our immediate surroundings were silent. I saw only one airplane in the time we lay under the icy black sky, and no satellites. (We realized that seeing satellites depends on the sun illuminating them, so after a certain point in the evening you just don’t see them anymore…).

At some point, Mary and I heard what was perhaps, the death scream of some small animal, followed by the call of an owl. More owl calls, the distant yipping of a fox, then the unmistakable howling of a coyote—or coyotes. The howls began an eruption of barking from every insomniac dog within earshot in Fauquier, Culpeper and Rappahannock counties, which slowly petered out due to an apparent lack of interest. Then it was still and silent again, until our resolve faltered and the chill night air chased us inside again.

Final count: A score of shooting stars—maybe two dozen all told. And for no more trouble than bundling up, walking into the yard, moving the lawn furniture and settling in. How great is that?

PS: The 2009 Leonids are expected to be above average this year—though not anything like 2001—peaking around 500 per hour November 17 around 21:30 UT (Okay, that's best if you're watching from Mongolia. But still. The moon is also cooperating then. Stay tuned!

Yeast Music

It is quite the modest spectacle to have three large carboys and one small carboy—seventeen gallons of cider in all—fermenting at once. In the quiet predawn darkness, there is a syncopated gurgling of four airlocks bubbling away in slightly different rhythms, superimposed over a subtle sizzling—the sound of millions of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide rising through the cider and striking the inside of a carboy.

Taken together, it is the work song of ten billion yeast plants, contentedly chewing away at molecules of various sugars, burping out tiny little burps of gas, secreting ethanol, and budding off their daughters.

Yeasts of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! (...of long-molecule sugars!)

Whew!

Two batches of beer bottled (Septemberfest, a.k.a. 'Old-Fashion Horse-Powered Sorghum Ale' and Autumn Brown Ale), nineteen gallons of cider pressed—seventeen gallons of cider fermenting. Not bad for one three-day weekend!

Weird Times

Columbus Day weekend was beautiful and classic—cool, damp, with tormented grey skies early Saturday, gradually giving way to blue skies and broken clouds by evening. Some chainsaw work in the wilderness helped me break a sweat and earn some soreness in the arms and back. By late in the day, a chill was in the air, and good company helped season the moment.

Sunday was sunny, cool and breezy, and after taking the dogs for a walk through the leaf-bespecked woods, we began preparing the eight bushels of Stayman, Arkansas Black and Ozark Gold apples for pressing into cider. The pressing took up all of Sunday afternoon until the sun was settling into the trees and the cool was gathering anew. We led our guests down the lane, disturbing three deer from the roadway, as we took the spent apple pulp to dump in the woods far from the house and gardens.

We ate a simple supper Sunday, and went to bed. Then, about an hour before dawn Monday morning, Schroeder woke us up with fierce, angry, ferocious barking; Carrie bolted awake and raced to the (closed) door, then found her way to the other end of the house and added her voice to the hue and cry. Lights went on all over the house, and we tried to see what the source of the commotion was.

Mary heard a noise at the west gate, where Schroeder was now barking; by the time she arrived there, all she heard was the sound of the fence below the chickenyard being disarrayed. When daylight arrived, we put the pieces together:

• A Black bear raided our trash cans, hauling a plastic bag of trash from beside the pole barn to the east side of the house, where he tore the bag open and strewed its contents.
• He proceeded south and crossed the fence into the back yard near the triple-trunk oak.
• He crossed the backyard heading west, perhaps towards the trashcans where we store the chickenfeed.
• Schroeder detected him somehow and went after him.
• The bear bolted over the gate—what Mary heard—then headed towards the woods, not seeing the fence and netting over the chickenyard.
• The bear made his way into the chickenyard, bending the fence down, then bounded over the fence at the west edge, inflicting some damage on the old fencing. (I know this because in best Gil Grissom-style, I closely peered at the broken fencing until I found a number of HAIR SAMPLES left behind by the perp—coarse, wiry black hairs distinctly unlike Schroeder's fur. )
• Paw prints and other disturbances corroborate this theory.

Strangely, we didn't notice the trash bag until sometime late Monday morning. But all day, Carrie acted strangely, as though the incident had severely upset her equilibrium. She was very needy, and stayed close to us; she behaved as she does when she senses a storm approaching, whining randomly throughout the day without apparent stimulus. By evening, her behavior seemed very peculiar, pacing around the room and the house, repeatedly demanding attention from both of us, and wandering restlessly.
By the time we went to bed, her behavior began to disturb me. First of all, she refused to settle down, repeatedly demanding attention from Mary by gouging the bed in her inimitable fashion. When she did lie down, she would pop right back up again, insistently gouging the bed and waking us both up time and again.
I began to absorb her unsettledness. I wondered what she sensed. Was it just the bear? Time and again, I got up and looked out the windows to the woods and the yard, seeing nothing in the deep dark. Was Carrie sensing a storm approaching? I had heard about animals sensing impending disasters like earthquakes, and lay awake wondering if that was what was in store.
Then I noticed that Julia, the cat who kept us both awake with her relentless purring and need to be on top of someone, had not appeared. I could not remember seeing Julia since sometime in the afternoon, and she usually joined us at bedtime. Was Carrie anxious because of some fate she sensed had befallen Julia?
Now another line of anxiety began joining the chorus in my mind. I thought back over the day, trying to think if I had seen Julia in the evening. Did bears eat cats? Coyotes? Foxes? Owls? Julia was tiny, and would hardly make a meal for any kind of predator.
Whatever had bothered Carrie so deeply, was now my problem as well. Every sound was startling, every thought dark, every vision disturbing. Strand upon strand of worry began seeping in and weaving a grey cloak over my mind, ever keeping me from sleeping and building an edifice of troubles in my mind.
Around 1:15, with Carrie having finally given up and gone to sleep, I remembered the storage shed, far up the driveway. I had gone in during the day to get some boxes; could Julia have snuck in behind me and be stuck there? I lay awake pondering. Damn.
Nothing to do but check; I wasn't sleeping anyway. Flashlight in hand, I walked up the driveway in the silent darkness, the only sound that of gravel crunching under my slippers. It's a long way from the house to the shed, in the middle of the night, in the stillness, in the dark, alone, in a tee-shirt and pajama bottoms, with bears...
And no Julia. I came back to the house, worried, chilled, anxious, and got back into bed for a fitful few hours of sleep. Tossing and turning through aches and disjointed dreams, I arrived at morning far too soon for my preferences. On the bright side, Julia trotted into the kitchen as I got up, her collar bell jangling merrily, with nary a word of explanation for her absence, only her traditional monotone demand for breakfast. And no bear visitation, no earthquake, nothing to fulfill the discomfiting sense of foreboding that kept me awake through the night. Just another regular old day.
But I really hope the dogs scared the bear away for a long while. I don't think I can stand another couple of nights like that.

Writer's block

Uh, yeah, there's this one thing I've been trying to get written and posted, for like three years in one form or another apparently, and it seems like it's more of a kidney stone than a post, because I CAN'T SEEM TO GET IT OUT OF ME and I keep not getting it written because the ESSENCE of it keeps eluding me, or transmogrifying, or I keep stepping back and looking at it differently, and then I think it's the MOST FASCINATING THING EVAR and then it occurs to me that really it's dumb as dirt, and then I notice certain aspects of my writing that suddenly I'm all self-conscious about, and oh yeah THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK. Hey! Look over there ! A bright shiny thing!

That is all.

Au Claire De Lune

Last night was a school night, which makes for a very long day—a day capped off with a nearly fifty-mile ride commencing around 10:00 PM.

I walked out of class across campus and found Beast waiting right where I left her, poised gracefully on three points, calm and composed. The night air had already chilled from the twilight cool to the earnest cold of night, exactly what you would expect for early October. In a long-familiar ritual, I secured the items I wouldn't need for the ride, and geared up in what I would.

I rolled westward, and for the first time saw the moon before me. It glowed with the warmth of sunlight that has passed through earth's air, not the icy moonlight that so often rains down to make the coldest nights of the year. It appeared to be a perfect half-moon, smiling on the diagonal at the occult sun, teased in its passage by a lone planet dancing just above its crown. Its poignant beauty was enhanced by the faintest wisps of high clouds catching and amplifying the dusky light.

It stood before me as I rode westward towards the mountains, and I recalled a piece I had written many years before about such a westward ride in the night, never expecting I would actually make that cold and persistent ride. And as the miles rolled beneath me (snug within my heated cocoon, chilling air flowing around and through me) I noticed the moon was constant, always before me no matter how the road twisted and turned.

As I turned off the great highway southward on the lesser roadway, it rode directly before me, and I saw something I had never noticed before; the sparkling lights of a aircraft transecting the half-disk perfectly, looking like lunar fireworks and calling to mind Welles' 'War of The Worlds' and its reports of explosions on Mars...

At each hill I ascended on my westward path, the warm half-moon shone bright at the crest, as though to illuminate my road. As I crested each hill, it lit up the valley before, and rolled on westward to await me at the next peak. How it anticipated where I was going, I cannot fathom.

In the final stretch towards home, on the gentle ridge preceeding the gravel path down the hill and into the darkling woods, I paused and turned off Beast. I sat in the cold silence and looked back over my shoulder, for now that I had made my way home, the moon and I parted company. It was free now to go with its fellow traveler the planet, and cross the low broad mountains it faintly illuminated. I could make the last few miles without its help, and as I rolled around the penultimate bend, I caught a glimpse of it settling for the night into the deep cover of the pines, and the oaks, and beyond.

The chill of the night's ride stayed with me for hours, despite the warming jacket and a glass of hearty red wine once I had shucked my layers of gear. The great thick muscles are dull, massive, and slow to respond; I delude myself that I am mostly warm, and will recover quickly. But where there is no heat, no warming comes no matter how many blankets are piled on, and next time I will not count on the light of the moon to keep me warm.

Yet there is something to be said for a night's ride in such beatific company, that cannot be translated into simple warmth or comfort.