"Virginia's Mark Twain"

To contact us Click HERE

It's not that far, a couple hours' drive, from Person County N.C. to Patrick County, Va.  But Barnie Day's journey to published author has been going on nearly four decades now.  Along the way he has been a reporter, editor and newspaper publisher; retail merchant and health clinic administrator; political commentator and sage of the Blue Ridge, business executive and farmer; banker and county manager; county supervisor and state legislator.  A couple of people who should know have called him "Virginia's Mark Twain."


And as many who live around Belcher Mountain's Meadows of Dan already know, he has fought through Parkinson's disease while producing some crackerjack writing in his novel "The Last Pahvant," available on amazon.com and elsewhere, and in a new work about life in Oxford, N.C. during the Civil Rights era.
Now there's a 3,000 word story on Barnie Day in the July-August issue of Carolina Alumni Review, published by the General Alumni Association at UNC Chapel Hill.  Here's a link to that story:  If that doesn't work, copy and paste this into your whatchamacallit: http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/20120708/?pg=22&pm=2&u1=friend
That story began 10 months ago after I read a version of "Pahvant" and told Barnie what everyone who reads the book also tells him: It ought to be in print. I sent a copy to my friend Regina Oliver last October and suggested the Review write about Barnie, who graduated from UNC in 1975. She immediately agreed, enthusiastically so, and asked me to write the piece.  So last November, Barnie and I started meeting early mornings for about an hour -- the length of time it takes for my arthritic hands to go from useful to seized up -- and we talked and talked on chilly mornings, and sometimes in the evenings over some Irish whiskey -- well into the new year.
We talked about life in the 1950s and 60s when he was growing up in Roxboro, about working in factories and at little newspapers, about scrabbling his way through Chapel Hill with the help of a athletic meal ticket his roommate had ("I tell people I went through Carolina on a football scholarship, it just won't mine," he likes to say), starting up a newspaper that folded not because it wasn't good, but because it was undercapitalized, and moving through a variety of jobs over the years, all the while thinking about writing the long form and telling stories people will want to read. 


The editors at the Alumni Review liked the story of Barnie's career so much  that they hired one of the best photographers anywhere: Steve Exum.  He came up to Meadows of Dan shortly after Spring arrived and shot wonderful photos of Barnie and Debbie Day, the restored farmhouse where they live (with secret rooms below ground where, the story goes, a moonshiner and bootlegger hid his illicit wares long ago) and the writing room where Barnie turns on the lamp many mornings hours before the sun starts to brighten the rural countryside.
 Oh, meant to add this one, too, of Barnie and Debbie, with Yip.


 

The 'Skunk Works' bass

To contact us Click HERE
My career as a bass fiddle player has been only slightly more successful than my career as a pitcher in the big leagues.  Which is to say, I would have starved to death during the Johnson Administration if we had depended on either one of them to put food on the table, although I played a whole lot more bass in  my youth than I ever threw in organized baseball. I pretty much gave up on the baseball thing at about age 10 or 12, when I could throw a blazing fastball that nobody every knew, including me, where it was going. I once walked a fellow on a fourth pitch that went over the backstop in a sandlot game.  I think they're still looking for the ball.

But for years, after falling in love with the bass sound while playing an old brass Sousaphone in the band at Aycock Junior High School in Greensboro, I fooled around with a bass fiddle.  In high school days a bunch of us got up a folk music group and decided we'd be the next Kingston Trio.  I borrowed an old, beat-up, dark-brown aluminum bass fiddle from the father of a friend and we played all over Greensboro and sometimes as far away as Danville, VA.  We entered a big contest where the prize was an appearance on the Arthur Smith Television Show down in Charlotte, knowing we'd win. (I recently mentioned this to a friend who, unbeknownst to me, had grown up in Greensboro, and he said, "Wait a minute, did you guys have on wide-striped shirts?" We did. He saw us that day long ago, 1963 I guess, up on a tractor trailer bandstand. And so he also saw us not win the thing, not go on to the bigtime in the Queen City, not go on to great fame and fortune in the entertainment business.)

The Villagers in 2004, Cane Creek Valley, Buncombe County

But we kept playing, despite the fact I couldn't read a lick of music, didn't know how to figure out what key some sheet music was in, didn't even know proper technique. See, I thought the beauty of the bass fiddle was you just listened to what other folks were playing and pick out about three pairs of notes and figure out real quick how you could do a little walk up or down the strings.  And that beat-to-a-pulp old aluminum bass sounded pretty dadgum good.

Years later, when I got a big raise one year, I bought a 1946 Kay double bass, nicked and gouged and cracked in places, and played it for decades with my high school buddies, a band called the Villagers. Thought about that old aluminum bass from time to time, but not much. I figured some sheet-metal genius somewhere had made a one-off version of the traditional spruce bass.  Sometimes I'd tell somebody about it, and they'd say something like, "You're kidding! Aluminum? No way."

A couple years ago my '46 Kay, made the same year I was, burned in a house fire. I've been looking for a good replacement ever since. Played an inexpensive late model substitute for about 18 months, but the other day drove up the Shenandoah Valley on a mission to Jerry Fretwell's bass shop in downtown Staunton, VA. He and his wife Mary Jane have a great website (www.fretwellbass.com) where you can see all these old basses he has -- a bunch of Kays, dating to the 1930s, and a rare Gibson bass, one of 85 that company made, and some other brands of old basses as well.  Jerry also buys new Engelhardts, which bought up the old Kay brand, and customizes them for folks who want a fancier new one.  I had my eye on a 1940 Kay and a 1952 Kay that I had spotted on his website. They were in pretty good shape and sounded great, but I fell for a 1959 Kay with a blonde finish, a new bridge and a set of Super Silver strings that Jerry installed as I watched.  Soooooo much easier to play that the metal-wound strings I had on my interim base.  I'm taking lessons now from Mike Mitchell over in Floyd VA (http://www.mitchellmusicco.com/) -- and learning things I should have known, oh, about 50 years ago. It's a revelation.

But the thing that really knocked me out was what I saw in Fretwell's front window: an aluminum bass, painted to look just like wood grain.  In fact, it was one of three aluminum basses in the windows -- one of them flat white, and another off to the side in a bright shiny silver.  They were made in the late 1920s and 1930s, all aluminum, and they were part of a collection the Fretwells have.
Here's a photo from the Fretwell website:

Aluminum basses, every one.

 

Turns out there was quite a production of aluminum basses in this country, starting in the late 19th century and championed, for at least a little while, by the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). I found a website that said the first ALCOA bases were turned out in the company's "skunk works" in Buffalo, where the company would fashion experimental products from aluminum.  Eventually the company made 500 of those aluminum basses, each selling in the $200 to $240 range when new.  There were other brands as well in the aluminum bass business.

The website http://kaybassrepair.com/aluminium-instruments/ notes, "The faux natural wood was well done; the top had graining and color close to that of a dark varnished tight grain spruce and the back / ribs have a faux curly figured grain patterning. AlCoA  had a fifty step patented process for creating this finish. From the distance of a bandstand or stage, you’ll have trouble identifying it from a wooden instrument."

I have no clue whether that old brown-painted tin bass I borrowed in Greensboro all these years ago was an ALCOA bass or an Aluminum Musical Instrument or even one of the G.A. Pfretzschner basses, but I do know that that it looked every bit like what you'd think of when you hear the term "skunk factory."  But beat up as it was, it would make a joyful noise. 

Bill Friday, Virginia's gift to North Carolina

To contact us Click HERE
William Clyde "Bill" Friday was born 92 years ago in the Rockbridge County, Va. community of Raphine, but he moved with his family to North Carolina as a child -- a historic event that in time would change North Carolina for the better.  Friday's contributions to the state can be measured in the progress North Carolina made in the second half of the 20th Century, when Friday's sure-handed guidance of the University of North Carolina system  contributed to the state's economic progress, the increase in its college-going rate and especially in his raising the expectations of students from low- and middle-income families that at the 17-campus UNC system, it would always be possible to go to college.

Bill Friday was my friend, though I never could quite bring myself to call him "Bill."  He did not have a doctorate and didn't particularly like to be called Dr. Friday, though many did.  Most of the time it was simply "Mr. Friday," and many was the time when Friday would have some issue on his mind, or a suggestion for an editorial, or a story one of our reporters might tackle, and when I answered the phone, the conversation would start this way: "Hello, old friend. This is Bill Friday...."

I'll miss his friendship and guidance, and his even-handed approach, as will North Carolina, but perhaps our policymakers will keep his approach and his convictions in mind in future as they make tough decisions.

Here's a piece I wrote for today's Charlotte Observer about Mr. Friday:

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/10/12/3594015/how-to-pay-debt-of-gratitude-to.html

Riverside Walk to The Narrows

To contact us Click HERE
The Riverside Walk at the far end of Zion Canyon is an extremely popular hike. The trail follows the North Fork of the Virgin River into The Narrows.


Most of Zion Canyon is very broad, but the upper reaches of the canyon narrow to only 20 or 30 feet in some places. This section of Zion Canyon, known as The Narrows, is 16 miles long, and has vertical walls that soar up to 2000 feet above the river. Within this deep gorge intrepid hikers will experience sandstone grottos, natural springs and hanging gardens.


The Riverside Walk takes visitors/hikers/adventurers to the edge of this spectacular gorge. If you’re considering proceeding further into the canyon you should note that at least 60% of your hike above the Riverside Walk will be spent wading, walking, and sometimes swimming in the frigid Virgin River. The park recommends wearing sturdy water shoes, neoprene socks, and using trekking poles. Also, be sure to check weather and flash flood conditions before venturing any significant distance into the canyon.


Unless you’re on that first shuttle in the morning, don’t expect a wilderness experience on the Riverside Walk. Although a very nice hike, you'll have lots of companions - as in a couple hundred - literally.


The high canyon walls offer lots of shade, and provide a nice respite from the hot desert sun.


Along the paved path are several trailside exhibits. One of the unexpected features of this hike is that you’ll pass through a desert swamp, a result of the presence of the river, spring run-off and occasional cloudbursts.

As a side note, the trail was listed on the National Register of historic places in 1987.


Trail: Riverside Walk
Roundtrip Distance: 2.0 Miles
Total Elevation Gain: 40 feet
Max Elevation: 4500 Feet



Hiking Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks covers 56 hikes in the two parks, as well as the surrounding areas, such as Cedar Breaks National Monument.









Jeff
Hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Fall Color Round-up

To contact us Click HERE
The Great Smoky Mountains Association published their latest fall color report for the Smokies yesterday. Here's a short synopsis from the report:

Fall colors are now at their peak at the highest elevations of the Great Smoky Mountains. Birches, beeches, mountain maple, and other deciduous trees and shrubs are showing very good color above elevations of 4,000 feet......At the lower elevations the colors are coming on strong....

To read the full report, please click here.

Virtual Blue Ridge is reporting that: It's the second week of October and right on cue, the mountain foliage is making the striking transition to the color that brings so much attention here in the fall.

To read the full report for the BRP, please click here.

The latest fall color update from the Cherokee National Forest states:

More colors continue to appear on the hillsides and mountain tops. Approximately 60-70% of the leaves have changed color at elevations above 3,500’. Colors at lower elevations are at about 30-35% overall.


Jeff
Hiking in the Smokies

A hoarder's story

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Spring's slick snow job

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

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

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

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

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

"Virginia's Mark Twain"

To contact us Click HERE

It's not that far, a couple hours' drive, from Person County N.C. to Patrick County, Va.  But Barnie Day's journey to published author has been going on nearly four decades now.  Along the way he has been a reporter, editor and newspaper publisher; retail merchant and health clinic administrator; political commentator and sage of the Blue Ridge, business executive and farmer; banker and county manager; county supervisor and state legislator.  A couple of people who should know have called him "Virginia's Mark Twain."


And as many who live around Belcher Mountain's Meadows of Dan already know, he has fought through Parkinson's disease while producing some crackerjack writing in his novel "The Last Pahvant," available on amazon.com and elsewhere, and in a new work about life in Oxford, N.C. during the Civil Rights era.
Now there's a 3,000 word story on Barnie Day in the July-August issue of Carolina Alumni Review, published by the General Alumni Association at UNC Chapel Hill.  Here's a link to that story:  If that doesn't work, copy and paste this into your whatchamacallit: http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/20120708/?pg=22&pm=2&u1=friend
That story began 10 months ago after I read a version of "Pahvant" and told Barnie what everyone who reads the book also tells him: It ought to be in print. I sent a copy to my friend Regina Oliver last October and suggested the Review write about Barnie, who graduated from UNC in 1975. She immediately agreed, enthusiastically so, and asked me to write the piece.  So last November, Barnie and I started meeting early mornings for about an hour -- the length of time it takes for my arthritic hands to go from useful to seized up -- and we talked and talked on chilly mornings, and sometimes in the evenings over some Irish whiskey -- well into the new year.
We talked about life in the 1950s and 60s when he was growing up in Roxboro, about working in factories and at little newspapers, about scrabbling his way through Chapel Hill with the help of a athletic meal ticket his roommate had ("I tell people I went through Carolina on a football scholarship, it just won't mine," he likes to say), starting up a newspaper that folded not because it wasn't good, but because it was undercapitalized, and moving through a variety of jobs over the years, all the while thinking about writing the long form and telling stories people will want to read. 


The editors at the Alumni Review liked the story of Barnie's career so much  that they hired one of the best photographers anywhere: Steve Exum.  He came up to Meadows of Dan shortly after Spring arrived and shot wonderful photos of Barnie and Debbie Day, the restored farmhouse where they live (with secret rooms below ground where, the story goes, a moonshiner and bootlegger hid his illicit wares long ago) and the writing room where Barnie turns on the lamp many mornings hours before the sun starts to brighten the rural countryside.
 Oh, meant to add this one, too, of Barnie and Debbie, with Yip.


 

The 'Skunk Works' bass

To contact us Click HERE
My career as a bass fiddle player has been only slightly more successful than my career as a pitcher in the big leagues.  Which is to say, I would have starved to death during the Johnson Administration if we had depended on either one of them to put food on the table, although I played a whole lot more bass in  my youth than I ever threw in organized baseball. I pretty much gave up on the baseball thing at about age 10 or 12, when I could throw a blazing fastball that nobody every knew, including me, where it was going. I once walked a fellow on a fourth pitch that went over the backstop in a sandlot game.  I think they're still looking for the ball.

But for years, after falling in love with the bass sound while playing an old brass Sousaphone in the band at Aycock Junior High School in Greensboro, I fooled around with a bass fiddle.  In high school days a bunch of us got up a folk music group and decided we'd be the next Kingston Trio.  I borrowed an old, beat-up, dark-brown aluminum bass fiddle from the father of a friend and we played all over Greensboro and sometimes as far away as Danville, VA.  We entered a big contest where the prize was an appearance on the Arthur Smith Television Show down in Charlotte, knowing we'd win. (I recently mentioned this to a friend who, unbeknownst to me, had grown up in Greensboro, and he said, "Wait a minute, did you guys have on wide-striped shirts?" We did. He saw us that day long ago, 1963 I guess, up on a tractor trailer bandstand. And so he also saw us not win the thing, not go on to the bigtime in the Queen City, not go on to great fame and fortune in the entertainment business.)

The Villagers in 2004, Cane Creek Valley, Buncombe County

But we kept playing, despite the fact I couldn't read a lick of music, didn't know how to figure out what key some sheet music was in, didn't even know proper technique. See, I thought the beauty of the bass fiddle was you just listened to what other folks were playing and pick out about three pairs of notes and figure out real quick how you could do a little walk up or down the strings.  And that beat-to-a-pulp old aluminum bass sounded pretty dadgum good.

Years later, when I got a big raise one year, I bought a 1946 Kay double bass, nicked and gouged and cracked in places, and played it for decades with my high school buddies, a band called the Villagers. Thought about that old aluminum bass from time to time, but not much. I figured some sheet-metal genius somewhere had made a one-off version of the traditional spruce bass.  Sometimes I'd tell somebody about it, and they'd say something like, "You're kidding! Aluminum? No way."

A couple years ago my '46 Kay, made the same year I was, burned in a house fire. I've been looking for a good replacement ever since. Played an inexpensive late model substitute for about 18 months, but the other day drove up the Shenandoah Valley on a mission to Jerry Fretwell's bass shop in downtown Staunton, VA. He and his wife Mary Jane have a great website (www.fretwellbass.com) where you can see all these old basses he has -- a bunch of Kays, dating to the 1930s, and a rare Gibson bass, one of 85 that company made, and some other brands of old basses as well.  Jerry also buys new Engelhardts, which bought up the old Kay brand, and customizes them for folks who want a fancier new one.  I had my eye on a 1940 Kay and a 1952 Kay that I had spotted on his website. They were in pretty good shape and sounded great, but I fell for a 1959 Kay with a blonde finish, a new bridge and a set of Super Silver strings that Jerry installed as I watched.  Soooooo much easier to play that the metal-wound strings I had on my interim base.  I'm taking lessons now from Mike Mitchell over in Floyd VA (http://www.mitchellmusicco.com/) -- and learning things I should have known, oh, about 50 years ago. It's a revelation.

But the thing that really knocked me out was what I saw in Fretwell's front window: an aluminum bass, painted to look just like wood grain.  In fact, it was one of three aluminum basses in the windows -- one of them flat white, and another off to the side in a bright shiny silver.  They were made in the late 1920s and 1930s, all aluminum, and they were part of a collection the Fretwells have.
Here's a photo from the Fretwell website:

Aluminum basses, every one.

 

Turns out there was quite a production of aluminum basses in this country, starting in the late 19th century and championed, for at least a little while, by the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). I found a website that said the first ALCOA bases were turned out in the company's "skunk works" in Buffalo, where the company would fashion experimental products from aluminum.  Eventually the company made 500 of those aluminum basses, each selling in the $200 to $240 range when new.  There were other brands as well in the aluminum bass business.

The website http://kaybassrepair.com/aluminium-instruments/ notes, "The faux natural wood was well done; the top had graining and color close to that of a dark varnished tight grain spruce and the back / ribs have a faux curly figured grain patterning. AlCoA  had a fifty step patented process for creating this finish. From the distance of a bandstand or stage, you’ll have trouble identifying it from a wooden instrument."

I have no clue whether that old brown-painted tin bass I borrowed in Greensboro all these years ago was an ALCOA bass or an Aluminum Musical Instrument or even one of the G.A. Pfretzschner basses, but I do know that that it looked every bit like what you'd think of when you hear the term "skunk factory."  But beat up as it was, it would make a joyful noise. 

Practice Bear Safety While Visiting Pisgah National Forest

To contact us Click HERE
The U.S. Forest Service is encouraging campers and visitors to the national forests in North Carolina to practice black bear safety while visiting the forest.

The warning comes on the heels of six bear encounters on the Pisgah Ranger District in the Pisgah National Forest over the past two weeks. The incidents occurred in the Graveyard Fields, Black Balsam, and Shining Rock Wilderness areas just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. In these cases the bears took food from camp sites. While no injuries were reported, visitor’s tents and packs were damaged.

While black bear attacks on people are rare, such attacks have sometimes resulted in human fatalities.

Visitors are strongly encouraged to prevent bear interactions by practicing the following safety tips:

* Do not store food in tents.
* Properly store food by hanging it in a tree or in hard-sided secure container.
* Clean up food or garbage around fire rings, grills or other areas of your campsite.
* Do not leave food unattended.

For more tips, visit www.fs.usda.gov/nfsnc, click on “Bear Safety Tips and PSAs.”


Jeff
Hiking in the Smokies

Zion Canyon Overlook

To contact us Click HERE
The third stop on our southwest odyssey took us to Zion National Park, by far the most impressive of the seven national parks and monuments we visited during our trip to Utah and Arizona.

The first hike during our two-day visit took us to the Zion Canyon Overlook on the southeast side of the park. I don’t know this for certain, but it seems like this hike isn’t quite as popular as most of the other trails in the main portion of the park. My guess is that many people skip this trail because it’s outside of the canyon. However, it really shouldn’t be overlooked. The views are absolutely stunning.


The trail begins near the east entrance to the Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel. This high desert trail crosses slickrock slabs while passing through stands of pinyon pine, juniper, prickly pear and yucca. Along the way you’ll have a birds-eye view of the Pine Creek Narrows, a slot canyon that’s popular with canyoneers.


The trail does pass a few long drop-offs, but the most dangerous sections have fencing along the edges. One interesting spot along the way is the bridge you have to cross. It hugs a cliff face, below an overhang, before leading into a fairly large alcove.


This short hike ends with a magnificent view of Pine Creek Canyon and lower Zion Canyon. From this vantage point, more than a thousand feet above the Zion Canyon Floor, you’ll have commanding views of Bridge Mountain, The West Temple, Alter of Sacrifice, The Streaked Wall and The Sentinel. Many of the most iconic photos of the park come from this overlook. Unfortunately mine won’t be counted among those!

If you look closely at the wall on your left while standing at the overlook, you may notice a window in the rock. This was built as part of the Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel, which extends roughly 1.1 miles through the wall and provides motorists with access to the lower canyon. You may recall that a 1964 Cobra sports car, valued at $800,000, was completely consumed by a fire in the tunnel earlier this summer.

We stayed at the overlook for almost 45 minutes and saw only six other people. I was really surprised, given this was a Saturday morning and the weather was absolutely beautiful. Moreover, the morning hours provide for some of the best photo opportunities.

Trail: Canyon Overlook Trail
Roundtrip Distance: 1.0 Miles
Total Elevation Gain: 163 feet
Max Elevation: 5300 Feet



Hiking Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks covers 56 hikes in the two parks, as well as the surrounding areas, such as Cedar Breaks National Monument.









Jeff
Hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

A hoarder's story

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Spring's slick snow job

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

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

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

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

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

"Virginia's Mark Twain"

To contact us Click HERE

It's not that far, a couple hours' drive, from Person County N.C. to Patrick County, Va.  But Barnie Day's journey to published author has been going on nearly four decades now.  Along the way he has been a reporter, editor and newspaper publisher; retail merchant and health clinic administrator; political commentator and sage of the Blue Ridge, business executive and farmer; banker and county manager; county supervisor and state legislator.  A couple of people who should know have called him "Virginia's Mark Twain."


And as many who live around Belcher Mountain's Meadows of Dan already know, he has fought through Parkinson's disease while producing some crackerjack writing in his novel "The Last Pahvant," available on amazon.com and elsewhere, and in a new work about life in Oxford, N.C. during the Civil Rights era.
Now there's a 3,000 word story on Barnie Day in the July-August issue of Carolina Alumni Review, published by the General Alumni Association at UNC Chapel Hill.  Here's a link to that story:  If that doesn't work, copy and paste this into your whatchamacallit: http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/20120708/?pg=22&pm=2&u1=friend
That story began 10 months ago after I read a version of "Pahvant" and told Barnie what everyone who reads the book also tells him: It ought to be in print. I sent a copy to my friend Regina Oliver last October and suggested the Review write about Barnie, who graduated from UNC in 1975. She immediately agreed, enthusiastically so, and asked me to write the piece.  So last November, Barnie and I started meeting early mornings for about an hour -- the length of time it takes for my arthritic hands to go from useful to seized up -- and we talked and talked on chilly mornings, and sometimes in the evenings over some Irish whiskey -- well into the new year.
We talked about life in the 1950s and 60s when he was growing up in Roxboro, about working in factories and at little newspapers, about scrabbling his way through Chapel Hill with the help of a athletic meal ticket his roommate had ("I tell people I went through Carolina on a football scholarship, it just won't mine," he likes to say), starting up a newspaper that folded not because it wasn't good, but because it was undercapitalized, and moving through a variety of jobs over the years, all the while thinking about writing the long form and telling stories people will want to read. 


The editors at the Alumni Review liked the story of Barnie's career so much  that they hired one of the best photographers anywhere: Steve Exum.  He came up to Meadows of Dan shortly after Spring arrived and shot wonderful photos of Barnie and Debbie Day, the restored farmhouse where they live (with secret rooms below ground where, the story goes, a moonshiner and bootlegger hid his illicit wares long ago) and the writing room where Barnie turns on the lamp many mornings hours before the sun starts to brighten the rural countryside.
 Oh, meant to add this one, too, of Barnie and Debbie, with Yip.


 

The 'Skunk Works' bass

To contact us Click HERE
My career as a bass fiddle player has been only slightly more successful than my career as a pitcher in the big leagues.  Which is to say, I would have starved to death during the Johnson Administration if we had depended on either one of them to put food on the table, although I played a whole lot more bass in  my youth than I ever threw in organized baseball. I pretty much gave up on the baseball thing at about age 10 or 12, when I could throw a blazing fastball that nobody every knew, including me, where it was going. I once walked a fellow on a fourth pitch that went over the backstop in a sandlot game.  I think they're still looking for the ball.

But for years, after falling in love with the bass sound while playing an old brass Sousaphone in the band at Aycock Junior High School in Greensboro, I fooled around with a bass fiddle.  In high school days a bunch of us got up a folk music group and decided we'd be the next Kingston Trio.  I borrowed an old, beat-up, dark-brown aluminum bass fiddle from the father of a friend and we played all over Greensboro and sometimes as far away as Danville, VA.  We entered a big contest where the prize was an appearance on the Arthur Smith Television Show down in Charlotte, knowing we'd win. (I recently mentioned this to a friend who, unbeknownst to me, had grown up in Greensboro, and he said, "Wait a minute, did you guys have on wide-striped shirts?" We did. He saw us that day long ago, 1963 I guess, up on a tractor trailer bandstand. And so he also saw us not win the thing, not go on to the bigtime in the Queen City, not go on to great fame and fortune in the entertainment business.)

The Villagers in 2004, Cane Creek Valley, Buncombe County

But we kept playing, despite the fact I couldn't read a lick of music, didn't know how to figure out what key some sheet music was in, didn't even know proper technique. See, I thought the beauty of the bass fiddle was you just listened to what other folks were playing and pick out about three pairs of notes and figure out real quick how you could do a little walk up or down the strings.  And that beat-to-a-pulp old aluminum bass sounded pretty dadgum good.

Years later, when I got a big raise one year, I bought a 1946 Kay double bass, nicked and gouged and cracked in places, and played it for decades with my high school buddies, a band called the Villagers. Thought about that old aluminum bass from time to time, but not much. I figured some sheet-metal genius somewhere had made a one-off version of the traditional spruce bass.  Sometimes I'd tell somebody about it, and they'd say something like, "You're kidding! Aluminum? No way."

A couple years ago my '46 Kay, made the same year I was, burned in a house fire. I've been looking for a good replacement ever since. Played an inexpensive late model substitute for about 18 months, but the other day drove up the Shenandoah Valley on a mission to Jerry Fretwell's bass shop in downtown Staunton, VA. He and his wife Mary Jane have a great website (www.fretwellbass.com) where you can see all these old basses he has -- a bunch of Kays, dating to the 1930s, and a rare Gibson bass, one of 85 that company made, and some other brands of old basses as well.  Jerry also buys new Engelhardts, which bought up the old Kay brand, and customizes them for folks who want a fancier new one.  I had my eye on a 1940 Kay and a 1952 Kay that I had spotted on his website. They were in pretty good shape and sounded great, but I fell for a 1959 Kay with a blonde finish, a new bridge and a set of Super Silver strings that Jerry installed as I watched.  Soooooo much easier to play that the metal-wound strings I had on my interim base.  I'm taking lessons now from Mike Mitchell over in Floyd VA (http://www.mitchellmusicco.com/) -- and learning things I should have known, oh, about 50 years ago. It's a revelation.

But the thing that really knocked me out was what I saw in Fretwell's front window: an aluminum bass, painted to look just like wood grain.  In fact, it was one of three aluminum basses in the windows -- one of them flat white, and another off to the side in a bright shiny silver.  They were made in the late 1920s and 1930s, all aluminum, and they were part of a collection the Fretwells have.
Here's a photo from the Fretwell website:

Aluminum basses, every one.

 

Turns out there was quite a production of aluminum basses in this country, starting in the late 19th century and championed, for at least a little while, by the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). I found a website that said the first ALCOA bases were turned out in the company's "skunk works" in Buffalo, where the company would fashion experimental products from aluminum.  Eventually the company made 500 of those aluminum basses, each selling in the $200 to $240 range when new.  There were other brands as well in the aluminum bass business.

The website http://kaybassrepair.com/aluminium-instruments/ notes, "The faux natural wood was well done; the top had graining and color close to that of a dark varnished tight grain spruce and the back / ribs have a faux curly figured grain patterning. AlCoA  had a fifty step patented process for creating this finish. From the distance of a bandstand or stage, you’ll have trouble identifying it from a wooden instrument."

I have no clue whether that old brown-painted tin bass I borrowed in Greensboro all these years ago was an ALCOA bass or an Aluminum Musical Instrument or even one of the G.A. Pfretzschner basses, but I do know that that it looked every bit like what you'd think of when you hear the term "skunk factory."  But beat up as it was, it would make a joyful noise. 

The 'Skunk Works' bass

To contact us Click HERE
My career as a bass fiddle player has been only slightly more successful than my career as a pitcher in the big leagues.  Which is to say, I would have starved to death during the Johnson Administration if we had depended on either one of them to put food on the table, although I played a whole lot more bass in  my youth than I ever threw in organized baseball. I pretty much gave up on the baseball thing at about age 10 or 12, when I could throw a blazing fastball that nobody every knew, including me, where it was going. I once walked a fellow on a fourth pitch that went over the backstop in a sandlot game.  I think they're still looking for the ball.

But for years, after falling in love with the bass sound while playing an old brass Sousaphone in the band at Aycock Junior High School in Greensboro, I fooled around with a bass fiddle.  In high school days a bunch of us got up a folk music group and decided we'd be the next Kingston Trio.  I borrowed an old, beat-up, dark-brown aluminum bass fiddle from the father of a friend and we played all over Greensboro and sometimes as far away as Danville, VA.  We entered a big contest where the prize was an appearance on the Arthur Smith Television Show down in Charlotte, knowing we'd win. (I recently mentioned this to a friend who, unbeknownst to me, had grown up in Greensboro, and he said, "Wait a minute, did you guys have on wide-striped shirts?" We did. He saw us that day long ago, 1963 I guess, up on a tractor trailer bandstand. And so he also saw us not win the thing, not go on to the bigtime in the Queen City, not go on to great fame and fortune in the entertainment business.)

The Villagers in 2004, Cane Creek Valley, Buncombe County

But we kept playing, despite the fact I couldn't read a lick of music, didn't know how to figure out what key some sheet music was in, didn't even know proper technique. See, I thought the beauty of the bass fiddle was you just listened to what other folks were playing and pick out about three pairs of notes and figure out real quick how you could do a little walk up or down the strings.  And that beat-to-a-pulp old aluminum bass sounded pretty dadgum good.

Years later, when I got a big raise one year, I bought a 1946 Kay double bass, nicked and gouged and cracked in places, and played it for decades with my high school buddies, a band called the Villagers. Thought about that old aluminum bass from time to time, but not much. I figured some sheet-metal genius somewhere had made a one-off version of the traditional spruce bass.  Sometimes I'd tell somebody about it, and they'd say something like, "You're kidding! Aluminum? No way."

A couple years ago my '46 Kay, made the same year I was, burned in a house fire. I've been looking for a good replacement ever since. Played an inexpensive late model substitute for about 18 months, but the other day drove up the Shenandoah Valley on a mission to Jerry Fretwell's bass shop in downtown Staunton, VA. He and his wife Mary Jane have a great website (www.fretwellbass.com) where you can see all these old basses he has -- a bunch of Kays, dating to the 1930s, and a rare Gibson bass, one of 85 that company made, and some other brands of old basses as well.  Jerry also buys new Engelhardts, which bought up the old Kay brand, and customizes them for folks who want a fancier new one.  I had my eye on a 1940 Kay and a 1952 Kay that I had spotted on his website. They were in pretty good shape and sounded great, but I fell for a 1959 Kay with a blonde finish, a new bridge and a set of Super Silver strings that Jerry installed as I watched.  Soooooo much easier to play that the metal-wound strings I had on my interim base.  I'm taking lessons now from Mike Mitchell over in Floyd VA (http://www.mitchellmusicco.com/) -- and learning things I should have known, oh, about 50 years ago. It's a revelation.

But the thing that really knocked me out was what I saw in Fretwell's front window: an aluminum bass, painted to look just like wood grain.  In fact, it was one of three aluminum basses in the windows -- one of them flat white, and another off to the side in a bright shiny silver.  They were made in the late 1920s and 1930s, all aluminum, and they were part of a collection the Fretwells have.
Here's a photo from the Fretwell website:

Aluminum basses, every one.

 

Turns out there was quite a production of aluminum basses in this country, starting in the late 19th century and championed, for at least a little while, by the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). I found a website that said the first ALCOA bases were turned out in the company's "skunk works" in Buffalo, where the company would fashion experimental products from aluminum.  Eventually the company made 500 of those aluminum basses, each selling in the $200 to $240 range when new.  There were other brands as well in the aluminum bass business.

The website http://kaybassrepair.com/aluminium-instruments/ notes, "The faux natural wood was well done; the top had graining and color close to that of a dark varnished tight grain spruce and the back / ribs have a faux curly figured grain patterning. AlCoA  had a fifty step patented process for creating this finish. From the distance of a bandstand or stage, you’ll have trouble identifying it from a wooden instrument."

I have no clue whether that old brown-painted tin bass I borrowed in Greensboro all these years ago was an ALCOA bass or an Aluminum Musical Instrument or even one of the G.A. Pfretzschner basses, but I do know that that it looked every bit like what you'd think of when you hear the term "skunk factory."  But beat up as it was, it would make a joyful noise. 

Fogsoon season

To contact us Click HERE


Well, it was winter the last few days -- never got out ofthe mid-30s on our ridge Monday -- and it was fogsoon season as well.  You know fogsoon, don't you?  Wet, raining from all directions ("Iteven rained upside down," as Forrest Gump once observed), and soakedeverything even when it wasn't raining.  Thenif neither the sun nor the wind comes out, nothing dries out.  "You cain't do nothing", toparaphrase the late James G. "Squirrel" Garrison.
Today, however, the stars and a sliver of moon were outbrightly when I crawled out of the sack at 5 a.m. to grind out my quotidian of1,000 words. Now the sun is out and bearing down and the wind is howling at15-20 knots.  There are whitecaps out onthe hayfield, and there's a small craft warning for garden tractors and wheelbarrows.  Might be best to stay in the slip, and turn to the traditional make and mend work before splicing the mainbrace sometime in late afternoon.