Month: December 2017

Mysteries of the upper Dan River


⬆︎ The Dan River along Kibler Valley Road, Claudville, Virginia

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to go on more photo-taking and hiking expeditions. Yesterday I explored the upper Dan River, on a quest to figure out where the river comes down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains into the foothills.

The Dan River is part of the Roanoke River basin, one of the river basins of the water-rich Blue Ridge Mountains. The river meanders down out of the Virginia mountains into Stokes County, North Carolina, and flows about two miles south of Acorn Abbey. The river meanders back into Virginia again (near Danville), then back into North Carolina again. It reaches the Atlantic Ocean through Albemarle Sound. Though Acorn Abbey, altitude about 1,000 feet, lies just south of the mountains, the fact that this area is in the same river basin really makes Acorn Abbey a part of the Blue Ridge. If you’ve heard Joan Baez sing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” then you’ve heard of the area, when she sings, “Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train.”

Though I know this area very well, recently I realized that I had no idea where the Dan River comes down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains (altitude about 3,000 feet at that point) into the foothills (altitude about 1,500 feet at that point). With a rapid 1,500-foot fall, shouldn’t there be some drama there worth seeing? What I learned is that the falls are no longer in their natural state. There are two dams on the mountain that hold back the water, sending part of the river’s water down a large conduit to a small hydroelectric plant built in 1938. The plant still supplies electricity to Danville, Virginia, which owns it.

⬆︎ The red dot shows the location of Acorn Abbey

⬆︎ Low-water bridge — no guard rails!

⬆︎ The headwaters of the Dan River lie in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. I know where roads cross the river, but I lost the river among the hills and valleys. So I stopped to ask at the Mayberry Trading Post where the river lies and where it falls toward the foothills. Speaking of Mayberry, if you’ve seen the Andy Griffith show, you might assume that the name “Mayberry” started with the television show. That is not the case. Andy Griffith grew up in Mount Airy, North Carolina. I believe he was descended from the Mayberry (shortened to Mabry) family of Carroll and Patrick counties, Virginia. Griffith chose the name “Mayberry” for the television show because of its local history and local color. My great-grandmother was a Mayberry/Mabry. This is where my roots are in old Virginia.

⬆︎ Peggy Barkley runs the Trading Post. She told me where to find the dams, and she told me how to get to the hydroelectric plant (which is far from obvious). Peggy is a great fan of science fiction. She was sitting at the counter reading when I went into the store. I asked her to hold up the book and show us what she’s reading.

⬆︎ I couldn’t get to the dam, when lies about a mile below this gate. So I headed down the mountain via Squirrel Spur Road.

⬆︎ Looking south from Squirrel Spur Road


⬆︎ Mayberry Presbyterian Church

⬆︎ Along the road to the lower dam

⬆︎ Mayberry Presbyterian Church is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The church was built by an intinerant preacher.

⬆︎ Looking down into Kibler Valley from Squirrel Spur Road

⬆︎ Squirrel Spur Road

⬆︎ Squirrel Spur Road near Meadows of Dan, Virginia, looking down into Stokes County, North Carolina. The low mountains are the Saura mountain range. That’s Pilot Mountain on the right, which Andy Griffith called “Mount Pilot.”

⬆︎ A river-bottom pumpkin patch near Kibler Valley, Claudville, Virginia

⬆︎ Tiny house on Kibler Valley Road

⬆︎ Kibler Valley

⬆︎ Kibler Valley

⬆︎ A section of the conduit that brings water down from the dams to the power plant

⬆︎ I understand that this telephone still works, though it’s not much used anymore. It rings up the mountain to the dams.

⬆︎ Tommy MacAdams, the operator who was on duty when I was there

⬆︎ On the way up the mountain, I had breakfast at the Cafe of Claudville in Claudville, Virginia.

⬆︎ On the way down the mountain, I stopped at the Cafe of Claudville again, for supper. This is salmon cakes and fixin’s.

All the photos are digital, shot with a Nikon D2X with a 28-85mm lens, except for the food shots, which were shot with an iPhone.

First analog photos

The first roll of film from the Mamiya RB67 has been processed. The camera certainly works, but I have some stuff to learn. For a first roll, it wasn’t bad. Here are two of the ten shots. It’s available light, shot on a table beside a north-facing window, camera on a tripod. They’re experiments for portraiture, of which I’d like to do much more.

This was Kodak Tri-X film, processed and scanned by thedarkroom.com, 127mm lens.

Two silly photos


Click here for high-resolution version

Nothing meaningful here … just that I’m continuing to experiment with black and white photography, both analog and digital, using household objects as models. These photos are digital. I’m still waiting for processing on my first roll of analog film with the new Mamiya RB67 portrait camera.


Click here for high-resolution version

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, by Steven Stoll. Hill and Wang, 2017. 412 pages. ★★★★★

During the past couple of years, an extraordinary series of books have brought to our attention just what a sorry state the world is in. Ramp Hollow is the latest. Some of the others (many of which I have reviewed here) are:

Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Anthony Atkinson: Inequality: What Can Be Done?

Kyle Harper: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

James C. Scott: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

Jason Stanley: How Propaganda Works.

Sebastian Junger: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Jason Brennan: Against Democracy

Volker Ullrich: Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939

Jack Rakove: Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America

This is by no means a complete list. There are others that I still urgently need to read, including books by George Monbiot and Jonathan Haidt.

Stoll is a professor of history at Fordham University.

As for Ramp Hollow, I used the word “angrifying” in an email to a friend. I subsequently came across a review that used the word “enraging.” This book is a history of how the self-sufficient subsistence farmers of Appalachia were dispossessed of their land by the timber and coal industries and forced to work in coal camps and mill towns for starvation wages. Their forests and swidden fields, which they depended upon for their living, which were a kind of commons, were enclosed and decimated to feed the industrial revolution.

Stoll has much to say about dispossession and enclosure in general, starting in England in the 17th Century when Parliament dispossessed the rural English of their common lands, gave the land to the lords, enclosed the land, and forced the people to become peasants who worked the land for others. Earlier in American history, the native Americans had been dispossessed by the colonists. After the Civil War, every possible effort was made to keep emancipated blacks dispossessed, landless, and forced to work like slaves for others. All this was seen as economic and social progress. The poverty and misery this so-called progress caused was hardly noticed.

All around us today, we see the consequences. The poor people who now spend much of their sorry wages buying health-destroying foods at Dollar Generals are descendants of people who once lived off the land with no need of wages. The old subsistence farmers liked money when they could get it, but they could live without money. They traded with each other for what they could not make or grow themselves. Their descendants are dependent on money and sorry wages. They buy their sorry food from corporations.

We have forgotten how forests provided a living. The abundance produced by forests goes far beyond hunting or gathering nuts. One burned a little piece of forest and planted one’s crops amid the stumps. Pigs could live in the woods without being fed. Chickens did fine with a little bit of woods, a little bit of clearing, and a little stream from which to drink. With some pasture, you could keep a cow. Capitalism, on the other hand, saw the forests only as a source of timber to be clear-cut and shipped out by train. Beneath the West Virginia forests lay coal. Capitalism could not tolerate people living without money. Dispossession was a win-win for capitalism. The timber could be sold, and the people who were forced off the land were now a source of cheap labor and taxes, dependent on money for a living rather than on their environment.

Stoll’s book is an unapologetic indictment of capitalism. He ends the book with a stunning proposal — he calls it a thought experiment, but it would be doable if we had the political will — for reversing the centuries-old process of dispossession and the poverty and inequality it has caused. He calls it “The Commons Communities Act.” I’m all for it.

This book is enraging because it tells the story of cruelties and injustices that history did not record:

Those who hung on in the hills had their misfortunes thrown back at them. The basis of their autonomy gutted or sold, they pecked and scrimped. The words of the engineer who condemned them in 1904 echo here: “forlorn and miserable … never having known anything better than the wretched surroundings of their everyday life.” Though they often insisted that they could make a living on remnants of the old commons, they had become poor. They had become the horrifying hillbillies that lowlanders had always thought them to be.

The story is an old one: The intentional creation of poverty by the rich, in order to exploit the labor of the poor. Today’s rich have become so sophisticated at this exploitation that their propaganda has turned its dispossessed victims into active agitators for their own greater exploitation. The very idea of taxing the rich for the relief of the poor is rejected with a religious fervor. How long can this go on?

The white deer

It has been months since I’ve had a chance to get a photo of the white deer. I saw her this morning from an upstairs window. I grabbed the camera and shot the photo from the front porch. Then I dashed upstairs to get a telephoto lens. But by the time I had attached the lens, she had vanished like a ghost.

Though the local hunters are well aware of her and have pledged not to shoot her, deer season is still open. I believe it’s a standing joke in the area that she knows she’s safe here. She actually was lying down in this photo. I’m starting to suspect that she shelters under a large rock formation downhill from the abbey, sort of a tiny cave. A small stream runs past the rocks. Under that rock would make a very cozy, and rather magical, deer den.

Maybe I need a sign that says “Deer Refuge.”

Truck porn


For high resolution version, click here.

For those who don’t share my truck fetish, I apologize. To me, carefully engineered machines are art. The beauty of military trucks is that there is little or no concern for showroom style. Rather, it’s all about function and the military specifications.

I believe I have identified this truck as an M109A3 shop van. It’s parked beside the road near Meadows, North Carolina, in Stokes County.

Shop vans were used as mobile repair shops. The interior of the truck’s body is probably more or less empty. If you want to turn a surplus military truck into a camper, this would be a nice way to go. A sticker that remains on the front of this truck indicates that it sold as a military surplus item for about $9,500.

The photograph was taken with my Nikon D2X camera in high-dynamic-range mode. Four images at varying exposures were combined into one.

I return to the Mystery House

Somehow I knew that only special people could live in that old house. There were many clues: The complete absence of no-trespassing signs; the horse tracks; the lace curtains in the upstairs windows; the smoke from the kitchen chimney; the unpretentious elegance of the clutter; the not giving a hoot what people think; not living like other people live; an obvious reverence for the best of the past; an un-consumerist self-sufficient style with nothing bought from Lowe’s. Late this afternoon I met Gary (one of the two human residents), Abby (the horse), George (a cat), and Sam (George the cat’s brother and a fellow drop cat1. The lady of the house was not in.

Here is a link to my previous post about this house, when I saw it only from the road.

I had been on a photo-shooting expedition and had a lot of camera stuff in the car. I drove by on my way home, hoping to see someone outside. I was in luck. Gary was out back sawing firewood. I politely left my car on the side of the unpaved road, walked up the driveway, hailed the man who was cutting wood, and introduced myself to Gary.

“I’ve heard of you,” said Gary. I didn’t ask how or where, but it’s good to know that I’m notorious — at least with those with similar values. I stayed for more than an hour, and we had a very fine neighborly talk. Gary showed me the interior of the house. He introduced me to some of the animals. He showed me some of his projects. We talked about the neighborhood. The abbey is about two miles from Mystery House by road, but only about a mile and a half if you walk through the woods up Lynne Creek, which touches the abbey’s land as well as Gary’s.

I was wrong about the age of the house. It’s much newer than I thought, built in 1910. Though it was not an inn on the Great Wagon Road2, as I had imagined, it does sit right on the old wagon road. Gary knew much more about the exact path of the old wagon road than I did, including the place where the road crossed the Dan River, just downhill from Mystery House. Though the house wasn’t an inn, it also was not a farmhouse, as I had guessed. It was built by the family of Gary’s first wife. They had outside income, Gary said, and did not rely on farming for a living.

Inside, the kitchen, parlor, and downstairs hallway were cozy, with a wood fire going strong in a large steel stove. The parlor was decorated for Christmas. I saw a television, and a washer and dryer, but otherwise everything was completely old-fashioned and greatly reminded me of how my great uncle Barney’s house looked in the 1950s. Gary said that he and his wife consciously do their best to live the old way.

I remarked on the absence of no-trespassing signs and ventured a guess: “You don’t believe in that, do you?” I asked. Gary shook his head. He has the same attitude toward neighborliness and the openness of the land as the residents of the abbey. Gary knew far more about the local history than I do. He and his wife are members of the county historical society. I learned a lot from talking with him. We are true neighbors in the old-fashioned sense: We live on the same creek. We’d give anything to see the Dollar Generals going bankrupt because local people are creating their own economy.


⬆︎The parlor


⬆︎Gary and George on the front porch


⬆︎Abby


⬆︎Gary puts on Abby’s halter


⬆︎Abby wears Gary’s cap


⬆︎Abby and Sam

Watching Abby interact with Gary, I easily detected that he had raised her from a colt. They understand each other. Abby is confident and sociable. She let me kiss her nose. I told Gary that if he ever needs a horse-sitter to please let me know. Gary promised to ride Abby up the creek for a visit.


⬆︎Gary is building a stone cottage in his free time, behind the big house.


⬆︎Sam


⬆︎Gary also is building an Amish-style cart for Abbey to pull


⬆︎Sam ended up climbing inside my car.

1. Drop cat: An abandoned cat typically left near the home of someone who, it is suspected, will take it in and take care of it.

2. Great Wagon Road: During American colonial days, a major wagon highway from Pennsylvania to Georgia. See the Wikipedia article.

Analog photography, here we come


A portrait of the abbey’s new Mamiya RB67 single lens reflex camera. • Click here for high resolution version

Sentimental as some of us may be about older, high-quality professional cameras, analog photography is not obsolete.

There’s no longer a camera shop in every town. But good film is still made by companies like Kodak and Ilford. To get the film developed, one mails it off to places like thedarkroom.com. Though one can of course make prints from the film, most people have the negatives scanned and then use a digital workflow from that point on. That’s what I plan to do.

Having worked for newspapers all my life, I’ve long been around excellent photographers and good cameras. Taking pictures was never one of my responsibilities, but many times, when on an assignment that was too far away or too unimportant to send a photographer, I took my own pictures and did a pretty good job of it, if I may say so myself. One of the most remarkable cameras I ever used was a Mamiya C330. It is a twin lens camera, somewhat older than the RB67. Unlike the C330, the RB67 is a single-lens reflex camera with a mirror that flaps when the shutter fires. I could easily have bought a C330 on eBay, but the RB67 was the natural next step up. When the RB67 was new (Mamiya made them from the mid-1970s until 1990), they cost a fortune. They were a workhorse camera as studio cameras. There’s a good chance that your old school portraits were taken with a Mamiya RB67. They are totally affordable now on eBay. They’re completely mechanical and don’t even use batteries.

For a long time, I’ve been tempted to buy a classic analog camera. I fell over the edge after a friend posted some beautiful old portraits on Facebook of some European relatives. The portraits appeared to have been shot in the early to mid-1960s. The lighting was elegant, even glamorous. That kind of work can be done only with film, by someone who knows how to set up the lighting.

The Mamiya RB67 is a “medium format” camera. That means it uses 120 or 220 film. Each negative is 60mm x 70mm. A negative of that size contains far more information than a 35mm negative, which is only 24mm x 35mm. Not only that, but the tonal range that film can capture is wider than the tonal range that digital cameras can generally achieve.

The camera is huge. It weighs 5.5 pounds. Because of the size and the un-automatic nature of the camera, it’s not exactly easy to use it as a handheld camera, or for shooting any kind of action. Rather, it’s a camera that belongs on a tripod, either in the studio or in the field. It takes time to measure the light, set the exposure, focus, and shoot. It’s more a landscape and portrait camera. The only medium format camera that might be considered a step up from the Mamiya RB67 would be a Hasselblad. I have never seriously used a Hasselblad and can’t compare.

I’ll shoot the first roll of film this week. It probably will be at least a couple of weeks before I can post photos here, since the film will be mailed to California for processing.

High dynamic range photography


HDR photo, adjusted in Photoshop. Click here for high-res version.

I am just beginning to experiment with high dynamic range photography. I won’t go into detail here about what that is, but the short version is that the camera shoots multiple versions of the exact same photo, at different exposure levels. Then, special tools in Photoshop combine the additional detail contained in multiple photos into a single photo with far more information than was available otherwise.

The method works for black and white as well as color photography.

I’ve also bought a classic film camera that will be delivered on Monday. I’ll have more about that soon. But this is fair warning that you’re going to be subjected to my photography experiments, both from classic film cameras and more modern digital cameras.


A single, non-HDR photo