Culture – Page 55 – Into the Woods

Pickin' at Priddy's, Oct. 4

Every Saturday in October, Priddy’s General Store near Danbury has “Pickin’ at Priddy’s.” There’s a bluegrass band, and there’s always something homemade in a black pot. Dogs welcome. It runs from 3 p.m. until 5:30 p.m. Priddy’s General Store is three miles from my place.

Today’s band was The Plank Road. Oct. 11, Hubert Lawson & the Country Bluegrass Boys. Oct. 18, Henry Mabe and Friends. Oct. 25, Blues Creek. Nov. 1, The Jug Busters.

Taters a-fryin’

Brunswick stew

Pepper and crackers for the Brunswick stew

The Priddys’ Ferguson tractor

Good eatin’

The stage

Fried pies, $2.50

On the porch at the front of the store

Above the front door of the store. Note the Web site! Also note the reference to Frank Duncan, a local artist. Frank is a neighbor of mine.

On the porch at the front of the store

Inside the store

The address, 27016.

A San Francisco Jeep emigrated to Cheerwine country

The Southern Highlanders: what they ate

This old family photograph was taken around 1921, around the same time the book below was published. It is a family reunion at the home of my great-great grandparents, William Ira Jackson and Martha Marshall Jackson, in Carroll County, Virginia. They are the old couple seated at the center of the table. My father, Sanford Clay Dalton, is the boy whose head is visible just to Grandpa Jackson’s right. The Jacksons were my paternal grandmother’s grandparents.

Here are a few paragraphs from The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (John C. Campbell, New York, The Russell Sage Foundation, 1921). A guest (no doubt the author) stops overnight while traveling through the Highlands. He does not give a specific location. Perhaps he intends this scene as a synthesis:

“One who has enjoyed for a night the hospitality of a more prosperous family in the remote Highlands, carries away with him a pleasing picture of the comfort and simplicity of such mountain life.

“Here, where the bottom land along the creek widens, he sees at the end of a day’s hard ride a cluster of low gray buildings flanked by gnarled and untrimmed apple trees and backed by an imposing row of bee-gums…

“The room they enter is plainly furnished — a bare floor, a few chairs, and two or three beds. On the walls hang large crayon portraits of father and mother, with their first-born in their arms, together with pictures of the older brother or the little sister who died (now twenty years ago) enlarged from some crude photograph or tintype take by a traveling photographer. Often there is an organ, and the guests are eagerly urged to play.

“‘Washing up’ is generally relegated to the porch, and fresh water is drawn from the well or brought from the spring for this purpose.

“By this time the fire has been lighted in the big fireplace, and all gather about ‘to warm.’ Our host, it seems, is getting out some of his timber, and after a time he appears, followed at intervals by the sawmill hands who slip in unostentatiously to join the group about the hearth.

“Desultory conversation as to season, crops, and timber is interrupted by the announcement of supper, and all file out to the long table set in a room near the kitchen. Places are taken without ceremony. The host sits at the head. One of the guests is generally asked to return thanks. The hostess and the women who are helping her wait upon the men and upon the guests. There is an abundance to eat — pork, usually fried, and if it be hog-killing time, the backbone is offered as a great delicacy; fried potatoes, cornbread, hot biscuits, honey, apple-butter and jellies of various sorts, canned peaches, sorghum, coffee, sweet milk and buttermilk, fried chicken, and fried eggs. The meal is not interrupted by much conversation, and there is no lingering afterward. Eating is a matter of business.

“Adjournment to the fireplace is prompt, and the women, after eating their supper, betake themselves to the kitchen to clean up after the meal.”

Some notes out of my own experience of the Highlands, which goes back to the early 1950s about 30 years after the above photo was taken:

Campbell does not specify the season, but clearly it is cold weather. Based on what was served for supper and the availability of eggs, this was probably early spring. In the summer and fall, there certainly would have been fresh vegetables from the garden. So Campbell has described the winter diet of a prosperous family.

The pig’s value in the early South, and the importance of lard, cannot be emphasized too much. Though there was butter, the availability of butter would have varied from season to season, and according to the health and condition of the cows, and according to how many cows one had. Lard was the primary fat for Southern cuisine.

Even when I was a child, it was common for the woman of the house, and maybe one of her daughters, to not sit down for the meal if there were guests. Instead they would bustle around the table, and back and forth from the stove. The men, depending on the season, would guiltlessly retire to another room, or to the porch, after the meal, leaving the womenfolk to clean up the kitchen. I’ve witnessed this cleanup, though. It involved huge quantities of boiling water, either from kettles or from a reservoir in the wood-fired stove.

Technically, the musical instrument Campbell refers to is a harmonium, not an organ. The harmonium was a reed instrument driven by pedal-powered bellows. Harmoniums were quite common in the mountains. They were lighter than pianos, less expensive, easier to move and maintain.

Gothic weather

Reuters

East Coast gothic weather and West Coast gothic weather are very different. The best West Coast gothic weather, to my taste anyway, comes with high wind and high waves off the Pacific, with waves crashing against the rocks and seagulls fighting the wind.

It’s very different here. East Coast gothic weather is about a chill wind in the trees, and clouds skudding across the moon, or the stars.

In late September, gothic weather returns. I got up during the night to read the president’s speech on the gothic economy, but the gothic weather is keeping me awake. The windows are all open. The wind is whooshing through the woods and making the curtains billow. Some noisy nocturnal creature blundering in the woods got the cat into a frenzy. She was growling and running from window to window to look out into the dark.

I wish I understood how the rich adjective “gothic” came to represent what it represents. According to a Wikipedia article, it was an insult to gothic architecture during a period of history in which people saw gothic buildings as barbaric. On the other hand, R.A. Lafferty, in The Fall of Rome, which I just finished reading, says that the descendents of the Goths helped to design and build the gothic cathedrals. Lafferty doesn’t give his sources, though I suspect he was relying on Gibbon. There’s some research to do there.

The tree above my trailer, in a gothic mood

Gothic weather approaching from the Atlantic

Gothic music

Two Souths, two versions of pancakes

Lise’s French version

I’ve been having a discussion on-line with a friend in the south of France about the local in-season fruits and what to do with them. Lise sent a photo of a French version of apple pancakes with apples. Isn’t that so French, a tall stack of tiny pancakes with the edges perfectly browned? Whereas my American version takes time only for three middle-size pancakes, not so perfectly browned.

Lise was taunting me about the abundance of figs in the south of France. We don’t grow them here (as far as I know). Since my attempt to send by email a photo of an American persimmon tree failed, I’ll post it here and wonder whether they have persimmons in the south of France…

Humble Stokes County apples from the Danbury farmer’s market

My American version

American persimmon — Wikipedia

And speaking of 19th century French literature…

Internet Archive — Around the World in 80 Days

Here in the sticks I’m clearly not surrounded by a population of readers. The Stokes County library at Danbury is tiny. There are bookstores in Winston-Salem, but they’re pretty terrible bookstores, not like the bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area. But living in a travel trailer I don’t have room for books anyway. So I’ve been making my own books with free on-line texts and my Sony Reader.

I wanted to continue my tour of 19th century French literature, but after the bleakness of Notre-Dame de Paris, I needed a change of pace. I had never read Jules Verne, even in translation, so it seemed like a good time to check out one of the pioneers of science fiction.

Verne has not a lick of interest in philosophical ramblings. He is interested in characters, and places, and situations. So he just tells a tight, well-ordered story. He is, to tell the truth, just a tad shallow. In fact some people assume that his books are for young people.

Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours — Around the World in 80 Days — is a romp. It reads like, well, a David Niven comedy.

I’m not sure what to read next. Probably George Sand, to see what kind of connection, if any, can be made between George Sand and my favorite 19th century English novelist, George Eliot.

These lines from nndb.com are intriguing. I’m not sure who wrote it:

As a thinker George Eliot is vastly superior; her knowledge is more profound and her psychological analysis subtler and more scientific. But as an artist, in unity of design, in harmony of treatment, in purity and simplicity of language, so felicitous and yet so unstudied, in those qualities which make the best of George Sand’s novels masterpieces of art, she is as much her inferior.

Speaking of gothic revival…

Wikipedia

Speaking of gothic revival architecture, here’s a trivia question for you…

What literary event in 1831 also was a historical event and an architectural event?

The answer: the publication of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. English translations of this novel, for some reason, are generally named The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I finished reading this novel a couple of weeks ago. I can’t say that I recommend it. It is almost unbearably bleak and pessimistic. It is, however, a superb and classic gothic novel. There is almost no daylight in this book, unless it’s a hanging at noon. Instead it’s the dark streets of medieval Paris, the dark vaults of Notre Dame cathedral, blown-out candles, and bats and bells. There are superstitions about the supernatural, including the moine bourru, which I think is generally translated to werewolf in English, though the French moine is a monk, and so moine bourru hints at the dark side of ecclesia.

When Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral had fallen into near ruin from centuries of neglect. Paris was even considering tearing it down. But Hugo’s book sparked a huge interest in the cathedral, and tourists started coming to Paris just to see the cathedral. This led to renovations that started in 1845. It probably would be fair to say that Victor Hugo saved Notre Dame cathedral.

Certainly there were some grand examples of gothic revival architecture. But in America, there arose an everyman’s version of gothic revival — carpenter gothic.

Wikipedia

When I spoke with Rodney Pfotenhauer, the architect who designed the gothic revival cottage I’m building, I asked him if he’s a historian of architecture, since he had worked so many features of gothic revival into such a small house. He said no, he just looks at a lot of pictures.

One other thing before I leave the subject of Notre Dame. I have made no secret of the fact that, by building a gothic revival cottage, putting an organ in it, and putting bat houses in the woods behind it, I’m indulging in a rather elaborate pun. I hope that, when my house is finally done and landscaped, that people who see the house for the first time will break out laughing. That will be the correct response. When one of the framers working on my house stood inside the foundation and looked at the blueprints for the first time, he started grinning, and I’m pretty sure he laughed. He got it.

I am so glad that, owing to my friend Catherine, who dragged me to a Sunday afternoon organ concert followed by mass, I’ve heard the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Notre Dame. Shortly after this, I wrote in a letter to a friend:

Catherine and I went to an organ recital on a Sunday evening at Notre Dame. Cesar Franck, I can tell you, sounds just as bad at Notre Dame as he does anywhere else.

But we stayed for the evening mass. It was an incredible show to a packed house, with excellent music, awesome acoustics, beautiful theater, and altar boys that Oscar [Wilde] would have loved. The organ postlude was a barn-burner, a great swelling of sound in the back of the cathedral like an approaching thunderstorm that swept in and struck hard, rattling the windows and stopping the crowd in the aisles as they were leaving, to look up at the organ as though they were expecting lightning to strike at any second.

Restoring Edna St. Vincent Millay's garden

Edna St. Vincent Millay, photographed by Carl Van (via Wikipedia)

Steepletop today, Washington Post

The Washington Post has a nice story today on my favorite poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think there are always those who want to restore her standing as a poet, but this story also talks about the restoration of her home in the last years of her life — Steepletop at Austerlitz, New York — and the restoration of her garden. The story also talks about how Millay’s love of, and knowledge of, nature greatly informed her poetry. Wouldn’t I love to have a cutting of something from Millay’s garden!

I have long believed that Millay wrote the best sonnets since Shakespeare.

Sonnet

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill
the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood,
nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man
is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Road trip: Mayberry and beyond

Good farming: here swaths of tobacco are alternated with swaths of rye, a nitrogen-fixing crop. This is near Sauratown Mountain in Stokes County.

By Mayberry, I mean, of course, Mount Airy, North Carolina. Mount Airy is Andy Griffith’s hometown, and they are mighty proud of that. On the other hand, they’re constantly ticked with Andy Griffith because he lives in Los Angeles and apparently doesn’t much like visiting Mount Airy. But that doesn’t seem to diminish Mount Airy’s pride. [Correction: Someone who knows more about this than I do tells me that Andy Griffith now lives in Manteo, North Carolina, on the coast.]

Mount Airy does a booming business in “Andy of Mayberry” tourism. Ground Zero for that tourism is Snappy Lunch on Main Street, because it was mentioned from time to time on the television show. Don’t even think of going to Mount Airy without stopping at Snappy Lunch for a pork chop sandwich. Bring some anti-acid. Californians, can you believe my San Francisco Jeep now has a North Carolina license plate and is parked in front of Snappy Lunch?

Behind the grill at Snappy Lunch — burgers and pork chops.

Barney also gets his due. I think Aunt Bee actually moved to Mount Airy after she retired and no doubt zipped straight to the top of the Mount Airy social ladder. This is nextdoor to Snappy Lunch. [Correction: I understand that Aunt Bee actually moved to Siler City, North Carolina, not Mount Airy.]

Aunt Bee

The cast

Checkers and souvenirs nextdoor to Snappy Lunch.

Mount Airy is truly blessed, because it is famous for not one but two things — Andy Griffith, and granite. Here’s a view of Mount Airy’s enormous granite quarry. Yes I go out of my way to take these pictures for you. I’ve seen all this stuff before!

You can even go for a tour, if you like. So that it gets indexed for Google search, the sign says “North Carolina Granite Corporation, World’s Largest Open-Face Granite Quarry.”

This cottage has seen better days, but once upon a time the granite was so inexpensive that Mount Airy cottages could be built from it.

A mighty cool bug-eyed tractor near Cana, Virginia. Cana is just north of Mount Airy, North Carolina.

Cherry-picking time near Cana, Virginia

Up a cherry tree. I asked if I could take her picture, and she said yes. Then she asked, do you know who I am? And I said no. She said good. So this must be the principal of the school, or a preacher’s wife — someone important in Cana, Virginia, who ought not to be photographed up a tree.

The Levering Orchard has been in business for three generations. It’s operated by the couple who do the Simple Living series for PBS. I stopped to buy cherries.

Inside the Levering Orchard shed

Fresh-picked cherries at Levering Orchard are brought to the shed to be sold.

Nature reclaims an old house in orchard country near Cana, Virginia. Gavin, do you recognize this place?

Another building goes back to nature near Cana, Virginia. I love things like this because it is the essence of art nouveau. It may take me a few years to get enough overgrowth, but I hope to get this overgrown look at my little place at the edge of the woods.

Now we have climbed the Blue Ridge around Bell Spur, Virginia, altitude around 2500 feet. We are looking down, and south, toward Stokes and Surry counties, North Carolina.

Tractor and sickle near Laurel Fork, Virginia

The Marshall home place at Laurel Fork, Virginia. This was one of the closest neighbors to my great uncle Barney Dalton.

The road to Uncle Barney’s. My great uncle Barney Dalton’s place has always seemed magical to my siblings and me. Children often don’t like visiting relatives, but we loved to visit Uncle Barney. He had a farm of about a hundred acres, as self-sufficient as it was possible to be. Barney was an old man when I was a child. He was born in 1876 and died in 1972. When I think about relocalization and living close to the land, it’s Uncle Barney’s place I always think of. They had everything — cows, a huge barn, pigs, a trout pond, pasture, grain fields, gardens, and places to store what they produced. There was even a water-wheel-driven mill owned, I think, by the Marshalls on land adjoining Barney’s. Barney’s place has stayed in the family. His grandson continues to maintain the place, though he doesn’t live there and the place is unoccupied. The place is almost a family shrine, a testament to the enduring high esteem in which we all held Uncle Barney. The land is worth a fortune now and is surrounded by a resort, but the Dalton heirs, bless them, refuse to sell because of promises they made to the older generations. Above is the road to Uncle Barney’s. It’s almost a mile long. When I was a child, it crossed several pastures, and one had to stop and open several pasture gates on the way in. Uncle Barney’s place is near Laurel Fork, Virginia.

Uncle Barney’s. It has changed, but not drastically.

Aunt Rosie’s food cellar

Uncle Barney’s backyard. When I was a child, I walked with Uncle Barney and my father to the upper pasture to get the cow, which Barney brought to the backyard here for his daughter to milk.

Uncle Barney’s kitchen window. What I would give to sit down to a meal in that kitchen again!

This is just a little field now, but 50 years ago it was the kitchen garden.

An upstairs window at Uncle Barney’s

The side yard at Uncle Barney’s, looking toward one of the pastures. When I say that, when contemplating relocalization, my reference is how my older relatives lived, Uncle Barney’s place is of course one of the places I think of. Yet most of my older relatives lived like this, on largish, self-sufficient farms. I was very lucky to have witnessed this when I was boy. I had no idea how practical such references would be for a retiring, relocalizing, boomer like me.

Uncle Barney’s barn is gone now, but it used to stand at the far end of this meadow.

Very old electrical apparatus still feeds Uncle Barney’s place.

A while back I promised that I would look in on the cabbage crop in Carroll County, Virginia. It’s coming along! I’ll be eating it in a month or two. The road at the top right is the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Cabbage!

Nature reclaims an old trailer near Meadows of Dan, Virginia.

Turnips at a roadside produce stand near Meadows of Dan, Virginia. Once upon a time I was served turnips at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. I said to the waiter, “Man, it takes confidence to serve turnips.”

Today's photos, in no particular order

The local power company, Energy United, has been clearing trees around the power lines up on Duggins Road. I stopped and had a nice chat with the two supervisors about going as easy on the greenery as possible. They were very nice and didn’t disagree at all. Part of what they’re doing, though, is an infrastructure upgrade. They’re getting ready to replace the old copper and steel overhead wiring with aluminum and steel wiring. They say that the new wiring is stronger, less likely to melt when something falls on it, and has lower electrical resistance.

The local strawberries are in. These were in a produce market at Walnut Cove, and they told me the berries were grown in Madison.

In the agricultural history department, this old sickle caught my eye. It’s beside the main drag in Walnut Cove.

It’s meant to be pulled by a mule. It takes power from a rear wheel, and, through a shaft and cam, converts the wheel’s motion to reciprocal motion to drive the sickle. This machine was made by B.F. Avery & Sons Co., in case anyone is doing a web search on old machinery.

The sickle

Abandoned homeplaces are always fascinating. There are lots of them around here, and we take them for granted. But they can’t be common everywhere. I would imagine it takes certain trends and circumstances to create abandoned homesteads, things like cheap land, changing technology, more suburbanized ways of making a living, migration patterns, and so on. In short, not many people want to live that way anymore, and the places aren’t worth keeping up. It’s a shame.

Old houses are a repository of vanishing culture. They’re also a repository of heirloom varieties of flowers, shrubs, and fruit trees. This particular old house, on Stewart Road on the way to Walnut Cove, has two huge growths of roses, one pink, one deep red. The front porch is large and is still there, but it’s been taken by overgrowth.

An overgrown outbuilding. It’s all so art nouveau.

Honeysuckle everywhere. Right now you can drive for miles and miles on the backroads and never leave the scent of honeysuckle.

Irises by the kitchen window

Old roses…

Can you find the chimney?

Speaking of miracles…

Cartoon by Sidney Harris

I came across this quote a couple of days ago at survivalblog.com:

There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. — Albert Einstein

I don’t think Einstein was deluded about the all-knowingness of science. I think he understood perfectly well, though he longed to understand, that he didn’t have a clue why grass grows or why roses bloom.

I’ve tried to verify this Einstein quote and see what its context might be, but I’ve not succeeded so far. Einstein was too complex to go around making up aphorisms. If the quote is authentic, there must have been some interesting context.