Please Bear With Me and My New Camera

I'm afraid you'll have to bear with me as I become acquainted with my digital camera. Until this week, my blog photos were shot with my 35mm Olympus OS2 on print film, then developed at the local one-hour photo (but not printed), then scanned and Gimp-ed. As you might imagine, substantial delays between taking the picture and posting it were the rule. I've moved straight into digital SLR land with a Nikon and a nifty new lens, and there is so much new stuff to play with. Monday was a beautiful day, and between the sunshine and the trees, I became a little crazy over the many available shades of green.

Technology, High and Low

I've spent another week absorbed in technology. I've been researching why the sound acts strange on an old laptop, and upgrading my hardware with some more memory. It isn't interesting to report, but I do seem to become obsessed with a problem until it's solved. On a pleasurable note, I finally bought a digital camera, and it arrived Friday evening. Learning how it works is much more fun than tracking down the culprit in an IRQ conflict on that senescent laptop.

Friday morning we looked for mushrooms on Williams River. We found these black morels. I photographed them Saturday morning, after I got the new camera up and running, during a lull in the rain. The white petals are from the pear tree in the yard. Saturday night we enjoyed morels in a white sauce over pasta.

We had company on Saturday afternoon--quite an unusual occurrence. As a result, some nice traditional tunes were picked in our yard. The camper is popped up because we are working on an intractable electrical problem.

Fun (?) With Debian Etch

I've been spending too much time with computers for the last week, none of it involving blog entries. When I quit my genomics job back in 1999, I vowed that I would never again spend 12-hour days at the computer. Well, except once in a while. Last weekend, I determined that I would update my Debian Linux machines. This turned into an obsessive activity much like last winter's quilting project.

My beloved home Linux machine (purchased new in 1998) has been running Debian Sarge (testing), installed early in 2005. Ever since the Debian folks moved Sarge to stable status, I've been unable to update any programs. It always comes down to some sort of problem with the kernel I'm using, or perhaps the xserver program. The new testing version, Etch, uses a 2.6 kernel and Xorg. Last Sunday, I went to the GED classroom and downloaded the latest Etch installation iso's. (The first three, anyway; it took about four hours.) This was probably my last chance to use the school system's broadband connection, so no more large downloads any time soon.

I couldn't get my USB external hard drive mounted on the Linux box in the classroom, because it's formatted as Unix File System, for use with my eMac. Strange as it seems, it's only simple to mount vfat external hard drives on Linux boxes. Rather than spend all night in the classroom, I carried home the computer, connected it to my LAN, and ftp'd the Etch iso's to my Mac, which sports a CD-burner. I burned the CD's and began to install Etch from scratch on the borrowed computer. Unfortunately, the i386 beta2 installer has an insurmountable problem: the new, groovey autopartitioner doesn't work, and there is no way to manually partition the hard drive once you begin the installation process. I spent some time on LinuxQuestions, and was disappointed to find the level of discourse has gone downhill in the last six months. When an online community grows quickly, it seems inevitable that the signal to noise ratio drops, and LinuxQuestions now has a fair number of people posting unhelpful responses.

I found one helpful suggestion: Install Debian stable, then move over to Etch. I spent several days working on this, and eventually decided it wasn't really worth the trouble. It took two nights to download the netinstall iso for Debian stable over my dialup connection, and doing a netinstall over dialup would tie up my phoneline for days. Using the Sarge netinstall iso followed by the Etch iso's seemed promising, and I even got Gnome 2.12 to load and work for a while, but after I restarted the computer, my xserver gave me lots of bogus error messages. Reconfiguring Xorg didn't help; it seems I would need to upgrade the kernel and get a different version of Xorg. I decided I would just postpone any kind of major upgrade on my main machine.

I enabled successful Net updates of individual programs by editing my /etc/apt/sources.list file, substituting "stable" for every occurence of "testing."

Meanwhile, I had messed up the Debian machine I'd borrowed. To get it back in shape before returning it, I thought I'd test Debian Stable using the 2.6 kernel. This turned out to cause problems with the Xfree86 xserver. I wasn't able to configure a left-handed mouse, or get sound to work properly.

So, after all those hours of work, I changed three words in a file on my home machine, and reinstalled the old version of Debian Sarge off the CD's I bought last year. Worthwhile? I hope so. I learned something, I fixed my main problem, and I found out I know more about Linux than some self-styled "experts."

Sherry Chandler and the Historic Poets of Kentucky

Sherry Chandler's weblog is always worth reading. Lately, I've been enjoying her exploration of some early Kentucky writers. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these poets seem not to have considered themselves Appalachians or backwoodsmen. They are fascinating, and despite my days as an earnest undergrad in the English department, I've not heard of them before. It makes me wonder why the New England Yankees have so dominated American literature.

From The Drunken Poet of Danville, Thomas Johnson Jr., Sherry shares excerpts from "Kentucky Miscellany" (1789), published "while Kentucky was still a county of Virginia." The first poem is Johnson's satire on himself. The second is a satire on Brown and Wilkinson.

William Littell "was born in New Jersey in 1768 and came to Kentucky in 1801." She quotes from his "Festoons of Fancy." Gilbert Imlay"is [another] fascinating character. Idealistic enough to have won Mary Wollstonecraft and fathered her first child, opportunistic (or at least connected) enough to have moved through the height of the French Terror with impunity...."

I hope there is more to come. She does a fine job of providing context for these interesting poems and prose exceprts.

Rereading Joseph Conrad

I recently re-read Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and chased it with Jeffrey Meyers' Joseph Conrad : A Biography. Meyers' biography is excellent--neither too scholarly nor too superficial. It left me needing to reread Conrad's other books.

I read Lord Jim for the first time when I was about 12, and I found it an exciting adventure book. When I reread it in college, and then later, in graduate school, it was a fascinating exploration of how we understand who we are and come to grips with morality. Imagine my surprise to discover that it is actually a middle-aged person's reflection on how to live with ill-informed youthful choices, and how to face mortality. One constant in all my readings is my appreciation of Stein, the entomologist. Conrad is unique in understanding how romantic the pursuit of entomology is.

Electronic texts of Lord Jim are available from The Literature Network, Bibliomania, and Project Gutenberg. I prefer reading ink on paper, but it's much more fun to paste excerpts and personal notes in a text file than to try and crowd observations into margins. My marginal notes from a ten-years-distant reading are now completely obscure to me. I might as well have written "How true!!!"

Collapse by Jared Diamond

I just finished reading Jared Diamond's Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I haven't been reading many current books lately, but I found this in my local library. (Unfortunately, it was in the "Adult Fiction" section, so no one else was likely to find it.) I first encountered Diamond's popular writing in The American Museum of Natural History's slick monthly, "Natural History," in the 1980's. Although I was often familiar with his subject matter (evolution, ecology, biogeography), he frequently delighted me with his unusual perspective. He made me think about things differently. I've consistently liked his books, as well.

Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed has been much reviewed since its 2005 publication. Metacritic's collection includes some positive and some negative reviews. I thought a quick search might turn up some interesting links, but for the most part, the links were rather uninformative. Environmentalists think the book is too moderate, too critical of aboriginal peoples and too optimistic, and political conservatives feel it is too politically correct and environmentally alarmist. I found David Brin's essay interesting: A Glass Half Empty: Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE Shows Santayana was Right About that Little History Thing.

My graduate career started at a time when palynology was showing some new things about paleontology and archaeology. Whereas I grew up thinking aboriginal peoples had lived in harmony with their environments, it was becoming more obvious that extinction and habitat degradation always followed human colonization. Desertification followed the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia and the Near East, and Northern Europe had been steadily losing species for 5000 years. We primates are a messy bunch, and big groups of people make big messes. Jared Diamond puts a braver face on the future of our environment than I do. Perhaps he's whistling in the dark, but I hope he's right.

Droop Mountain's Scenic Attractions

Droop Mountain boasts three state parks, spectacular views, many ghost sightings, a well-documented history, and wonderful flora and fauna, but surprisingly little interesting documentation on the Internet. Here is my own edited list of park links.

Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park

• Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park. This is West Virginia's Department of Natural Resources site, including a description, directions, and a historical sketch.
• Museums of West Virginia's Droop Mountain Battlefield page. Behind the park offices is a small museum, containing Civil War artifacts found in the park, a facsimile copy of the New York Times' account of the battle, and other items of historical note.
• National Park Service's Heritage Preservation Services page for the Droop Mountain Battlefield. This gives a more detailed account of the 1863 battle than the previous sites.
• WV Division of Culture and History's Dedication of Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park originally published in the Pocahontas Times, July 12, 1928.
• The Tenth West Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment pages include an account of that regiment's participation in the battle.

Beartown State Park is smaller, only about 100 acres, but when I need to take a visitor someplace outdoors, this park is always a good choice. It's main attraction is a boardwalk around interesting rock formations. WV Department of Natural Resources' Web page is apparently the source for the other Beartown Web pages I've seen.

The Greenbrier River Trail is a long, skinny park, following the course of the defunct Greenbrier Division of the C&O Railroad. The railroad drilled a tunnel through Droop Mountain at Roher (in Greenbrier County), and bikers get to ride their bikes in total darkness for a short ways. There are a number of businesses with Greenbrier River Trail Web pages, but Cherry Creek's Guide to the Greenbrier River Trail is one that has interesting information in addition to tour prices and contact information.

Jaye Slade Fletcher

Jaye Slade Fletcher is the author of two true crime books: Deadly Thrills: True Story of Chicago's Most Shocking Killers (1995), and A Perfect Gentleman (1996). A retired Chicago police officer, Ms. Fletcher moved to Pocahontas County in the mid-1990's. She was among the first people I met when I moved here, as she sold me the house where I live now. I can't say I know her well, but she is a very interesting conversationalist.

Deadly Thrills has been well-reviewed, and an interesting summary is available at Court TV's Partners in Crime site. Lynard Barnes provides one of many positive reviews in 1996 at TG Book Reviews: Deadly Thrills by Jaye Slade Fletcher.

Jaye Slade Fletcher has managed to do a bit more than recount events leading up to the arrests of Robin Grecht and his three "helpers" for the murders of at least five young women....After Fletcher gives a brief history of the seemingly mundane life of Robin Grecht, she asks the rather straightforward question, "Does all this inevitably add up to a sadistic serial killer?" She....points out that we know very little about how a conscience is created in a person. Robin Grecht obviously did not have one. He was incapable of feeling empathy or compassion....

Tracking the police work surrounding the Grecht murders is where Deadly Thrills is at its best. Fletcher, a career police officer as well as an author, provides a peek at the proverbial thin line a cop must walk in the pursuit of an investigation. On one side of that line is the world of the criminal, on the other, the world of ordinary law abiding citizens, the news media and of course the law enforcement community itself. Fletcher artfully weaves across the line, revealing strengths and weaknesses of police work. The strengths of course are the men and women who, year in and year out, stick to the job despite the hazards and the everyday good deeds that go unnoticed....

A Perfect Gentleman was not as widely reviewed, although one Amazon customer said: "In my opinion...Jaye's books have been every bit as well-written and engrossing as Ann Rule's. Jaye writes with an insight to be envied and her thorough research shows in every line." I have to admit that I don't have the stomach to read deeply about the mental processes of serial killers. When I moved in to Jaye's former house, I found she had left me more motion-sensor lights than Fort Knox. Every possum and deer was brightly illuminated, every night. Perhaps this type of research was disquieting, even for a former police officer.

The Joys of Self-Publishing

I've been updating and adding to my "regular" Web pages recently, thinking about how I want them to develop, and what direction I intend for this weblog. The View From Droop Mountain, Literary Pocahontas County, and Rebecca's Linux Page have additions and corrections, and I'm currently revamping Musical Pocahontas County, although the changes are not yet in evidence. A new page, (Mis)Understanding Appalachia, is in the works.

It seems as though I'm not the only "place-blogger" thinking about publication these days. Dave, of Via Negativa, and the alliterative Fred First, of Fragments from Floyd, are both posting about publication. Dave's thoughts are more theoretical, while Fred wrestles with the minutia of a self-published book.

I've been a co-author on several scientific papers, and whether my research contribution was significant or marginal, I always had the misfortune to be heavily involved in manuscript preparation. (Never let the boys know you can type, or spell, or punctuate.) I know all too well the horror of seeing really stupid errors make it into print, despite dozens of rewrites and edits.

Although I edit everything I post at least three times before I let it go "live," I often see mistakes and clumsy phrasing when I look at this blog and at my Web pages. This is my favorite part of Web "publishing:" I can fix my mistakes anytime I find them. This fluidity also means I can start writing when I'm not entirely sure where I'm going, and still make the work in progress available to other people, who may give me interesting input and change my direction. Why would I want to write a book when I can have all this?

My House Is a Bird Blind

I don't think I'll ever get used to looking out the window and seeing wild birds this big.

More Snow

In addition to rodent extermination and possum monitoring, Princess is always happy to consult on automotive issues.

Homer Riggleman's Quilting Memories

Here's an excerpt on quilt-making from Mr. Riggleman's account of life on Point Mountain in the 1890's.A West Virginia Mountaineer Remembers by Homer F. Riggleman. 1980. McClain Printing Company, Parsons, WV. 140 pp. Strictly speaking, this is a tied coverlet, not a quilt. I'd like to know whether the top or the backing were pieced, or made of whole cloth. Mrs. Riggleman sewed the children's clothing by hand at home, so she would have had fabric scraps to use up.

We didn't have sheets or blankets then; we used old-fashioned knotted quilts made of cotton or wool batting sewn between two layers of cloth. Mother made these quilts on a frame of poles or slats set to the width and length of the quilt to be made. The frame rested in a level position on two supports about three or four feet high. First, mother tacked the edges o f the bottom layer of cloth over the quilting frame; then she spread the top layer over the frame and sewed it along one side to the bottom layer. After folding the loose end back out of the way, she spread about a one inch layer of batting evenly over the bottom layer of cloth. Sometimes she used carded wool batting. When the batting was evenly spread, she turned the top layer of cloth back over the batting and fastened it temporarily around the edges.

Next the knotting began, and we older kids helped mother do this. We each threaded a heavy needle, called a darning needle, with twine string, and working along in rows, we tied the two layers of material together at points two to three inches apart. At each tie point, I pushed the needle down through both layers with one hand, and with the other hand under the frame, pulled the needle through, and then pushed it back up near the same point, through both layers of material. Then with both hands above the frame, I held the tail end of the string with one hand, and with the other pulled the needle on through and out until the string was taut. Then I tied both ends of the string together in a tight knot, cut the string (with the needle) near the knot, and proceeded to the next tie point. By working steadily, we could complete the knotting in a day or so, after which, Mother stitched the edges of the quilt together. The finished quilt was about an inch thick and very warm.

Quilts could be made by "quilting" instead of "knotting," but because the layers of such quilts were sewn together in continuous seams, using ordinary needle and thread, they required thousands of stitches. Such fancy quilts were not only much thinner and less warm, but took many days to make. As neither we nor our neighbors had any time to waste in those days, we made do with knotted quilts.

That's Because It IS Appalachia

Kentucky's Lexington Herald Leader ran an interesting AP article March 17, 2006: Candidate compares upstate N.Y. to Appalachia

ALBANY, N.Y. - Democratic candidate for governor Eliot Spitzer told a Manhattan gathering that the upstate economy is so bad that the region looks like Appalachia, a comment that an aide to one rival said insulted a vast part of the state....

"If you drive from Schenectady to Niagara Falls, you'll see an economy that is devastated," Spitzer says on the tape. "It looks like Appalachia. This is not the New York we dream of."

...."First he attacks our business community, then he trashes upstate," said Rob Ryan, spokesman for GOP candidate Randy Daniels, the former secretary of state appointed by Pataki. "It's becoming clear that Eliot Spitzer is simply not suited to be governor."

Now, a couple of years ago, I said to a rude West Virginian, "Where are you from, New York?" I couldn't have insulted her more. Regional insults are not solely the province of New Yorkers. (Plus, after living in New England for seven years, I know that there are lots of people ruder than New Yorkers, who, I have found, are helpful, resourceful, and funny on their home turf.)

I am only making a fuss over a matter of fact. I quote from the World Book Encyclopedia article on New York: "The Appalachian Plateau, also known as the Allegheny Plateau, covers half of the state, and is New York's largest land region." It includes the Finger Lakes, and the Catskills. Wouldn't you expect gubernatorial candidates and their senior staff to know where their states are located?

Pearl S. Buck, New Icon of Fashion

The Keyboard Biologist has been working on a project with an intriguing name: The Pearl Buck Swing Jacket. By including a Pocahontas County author and beautiful and informative knitting photos, she's got my full attention. (I was also, once, a keyboard biologist, but they didn't keep the outside door shut, and I ran away.) I was curious about the sweater name. It comes from the Interweave Knits Winter 2005 issue, Pearl Buck Swing Jacket by Kate Gilbert: "Fine literature meets fine merino in a jacket inspired by The Good Earth." To me, swing jackets are more a 1950's retro look than a nineteenth century Chinese peasant look. Maybe the Mandarin collar is the connection. I confess the name made me think of those fox stoles Mrs. Buck and Mrs. Roosevelt used to sport in the 1930's. However, The Keyboard Biologist looks much more fetching as she models her knitting.

Windmills In Our Backyards

This is the windmill that was in my backyard when I was growing up. Everybody had one. I always thought they were pretty, and I liked the many sounds they made as the wind changed direction and speed.

Lately, there has been some interest in locating windfarms in Greenbrier County, WV and Highland County, VA (both of them just over the border from Pocahontas). They would generate electricity and green points for a power company. A lot of people are opposed, claiming the windmills would degrade local land values, ruin the scenic vistas, and generally be bad. I've been trying to find out more about windfarms, so that I can come up with a better opinion than "I like windmills because they are pretty." Unfortunately, almost everything I've found on the Internet has been advocacy for the pro or the con position. Here are the best balanced informative sites I've found so far.

• U.S. Department of Energy Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. There are many large pdf's of environmental impact studies on extant windfarms in the U.S.
• Wikipedia's article on "Wind Power." This is not a large article, but it makes a good attempt to give both pro's and con's for the technology.

From what I've read so far, if care is taken in placing the windmills, they don't grind up migrating birds, cast flickering shadows over people's homes, or create loud noise. They do seem to kill a lot of bats, and no one knows why. You have to cut down trees on the windmill site, but they look a lot better than a strip mine, and you have the option of removing the windmills. There are several mountain tops around here that were strip mined in the seventies. Snowshoe Mountain, where the ski resort was built, is an example; so is Briery Knob. Trees will not grow on these sites again for hundreds of years. They might look nicer with windmills. I'm afraid I haven't developed that informed opinion yet.

The Bluegrass of Kentucky and John Fox Jr.

Here's another strange and disturbing passage from The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come by John Fox, Jr. (1898). While our hero, Chad Buford, embodies "the spirit of the old race that had laid dormant in the hills" of Appalachia, the Kentuckians of the Bluegrass are Nature's Chosen People, led into the Bluegrass Garden of Eden, and fenced in by "grey hill and shining river," so that they would remain untainted. Eugenic as it all sounds today, I think this sort of nineteenth century writing is the bedrock of modern characterizations of the nature of Appalachian people. Note the inevitable juxtaposistion of "sturdiness" and "Scotch-Irish."

God's Country!

No humor in that phrase to the Bluegrass Kentuckian! There never was--there is none now. To him, the land seems in all the New World, to have been the pet shrine of the Great Mother herself. She fashioned it with loving hands. She shut it in with a mighty barrier of mighty mountains to keep the mob out. She gave it the loving clasp of a mighty river, and spread broad, level prairies beyond that the mob might glide by, or be tempted to the other side, where the earth was level and there was no need to climb; that she might send priests from her shrine to reclaim Western wastes or let the weak or the unloving--if such could be--have easy access to another land.

In the beginning, such was her clear purpose to the Kentuckian's eye, she filled it with flowers and grass and trees, and fish and bird and wild beasts. Just as she made Eden for Adam and Eve. The red men fought for the Paradise--fought till it was drenched with blood, but no tribe, without mortal challenge from another straightway, could ever call a rood its own. Boone loved the land from the moment the eagle eye in his head swept its shaking wilderness from a mountain-top, and every man who followed him loved the land no less. And when the chosen came, they found the earth ready to receive them--lifted above the baneful breath of river-bottom and marshland, drained by rivers full of fish, filled with woods full of game, and underlaid--all--with thick, blue, limestone strata that, like some divine agent working in the dark, kept crumbling--ever crumbling--to enrich the soil and give bone-building virtue to every drop of water and every blade of grass. For those chosen people such, too, seemed her purpose--the Mother went to the race upon whom she had smiled a benediction for a thousand years--the race that obstacle but strengthens, that thrives best under an alien effort to kill, that has ever conquered its conquerors, and that seems bent on the task of carrying the best ideals any age has ever known back to the Old World from which it sprang. The Great Mother knows! Knows that her children must suffer, if they stray too far from her great teeming breasts. And how she has followed close when this Saxon race--her youngest born--seemed likely to stray too far--gathering its sons to her arms in virgin lands that they might suckle again and keep the old blood fresh and strong. Who could know what danger threatened it when she sent her blue-eyed men and women to people the wilderness of the New World? To climb the Alleghenies, spread through the wastes beyond, and plant their kind across a continent from sea to sea. Who knows what dangers threaten now, when, his task done, she seems to be opening the eastern gates of the earth with a gesture that seems to say--"Enter, reclaim, and dwell therein!"

One little race of that race in the New World, and one only, has she kept flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone--to that race only did she give no outside aid. She shut it in with gray hill and shining river. She shut it off from the mother state and the mother nation and left it to fight its own fight with savage nature, savage beast, and savage man. And thus she gave the little race strength of heart and body and brain, and taught it to stand together as she taught each man of the race to stand alone, protect his women, mind his own business, and meddle not at all; to think his own thoughts and die for them if need be, though he divided his own house against itself; taught the man to cleave to one woman, with the penalty of death if he strayed elsewhere; to keep her--and even himself--in dark ignorance of the sins against Herself for which she has slain other nations, and in that happy ignorance keeps them to-day, even while she is slaying elsewhere still.

And Nature holds the Kentuckians close even to-day--suckling at her breasts and living after her simple laws. What further use she may have for them is hid by the darkness of to-morrow, but before the Great War came she could look upon her work and say with a smile that it was good. The land was a great series of wooded parks such as one might have found in Merry England, except that worm fence and stone wall took the place of hedge along the highways. It was a land of peace and of a plenty that was close to easy luxury--for all. Poor whites were few, the beggar was unknown, and throughout the region there was no man, woman, or child, perhaps, who did not have enough to eat and to wear and a roof to cover his head, whether it was his own roof or not. If slavery had to be--then the fetters were forged light and hung loosely. And, broadcast, through the people, was the upright sturdiness of the Scotch-Irishman, without his narrowness and bigotry; the grace and chivalry of the Cavalier without his Quixotic sentiment and his weakness; the jovial good-nature of the English squire and the leavening spirit of a simple yeomanry that bore itself with unconscious tenacity to traditions that seeped from the very earth. And the wings of the eagle hovered over all.

For that land it was the flowering time of the age and the people; and the bud that was about to open into the perfect flower had its living symbol in the little creature racing over the bluegrass fields on a black pony, with a black velvet cap and a white nodding plume above her shaking curls, just as the little stranger who had floated down into those Elysian fields--with better blood in his veins than he knew--was a reincarnation perhaps of the spirit of the old race that had lain dormant in the hills. The long way from log-cabin to Greek portico had marked the progress of the generations before her, and, on this same way, the boy had set his sturdy feet.

page 101 Chapter X

Randolph County Cooking, ~1895

Here's another excerpt from Homer Riggleman's memoir of his 1890's childhood home on Point Mountain in Randolph County, West Virginia. Here in Pocahontas County, stone fireplaces are uncommon. This may be because most of the log cabins have been torn down for salvage. Chestnut logs bring a good price, and people remove log cabins and reassemble them elsewhere. My house, of sawmill lumber, is dated 1911. In any case, I found the description of cooking with a fireplace quite interesting.

Our little log cabin stood in a four-acre clearing in the virgin forest. The little one-room log house was twenty by twenty-two feet with nine foot walls, and an A-shaped shingled roof. The main room was a combination kitchen, living room, and bedroom for father and mother. A tiny bedroom was boarded off in one corner for my sisters; we boys slept in the attic. There was a huge stone fireplace at one end, the opening of which was four feet wide by four feet high, and three or four feet to the back wall. A very old woodburning cookstove sat in one corner. The name of it was "Indiansla." But much of the cooking was done in the fireplace, especially in the winter.

Mother baked cornbread and roasted potatoes and other root vegetables in the hot coals of the fireplace. She cooked dried soup beans and bacon in a heavy iron pot that hung in the fireplace. She baked the bread in a heavy iron pan we called a "baker" or "Dutch oven" which had three short legs and a rimmed lid. First, mother raked hot coals out on the hearth and sat the baker in the coals. Then she poured sweetened cornpone dough in the greased oven, put the lid on, and raked more coals around and over the baker, replacing the coals as necessary until the bread was done. The smell of that food cooking nearly dove us kids crazy.

When everything was ready, Mother put the cornbread, the pot of beans, and the roasted potatoes on the table, and called everyone in. Father said grace, and we dug in. Now that was really living high on the hog.

A West Virginia Mountaineer Remembers by Homer F. Riggleman. 1980. McClain Printing Company, Parsons, WV. 140 pp.

Mary Moore, The Captive of Abb's Valley

Last week, my friendly neighborhood librarian showed me this interesting story: Mary Moore: The Captive of Abb's Valley." Abb's Valley is not too far from here, in Tazwell County, Virginia. It was a jolt to me to read that Native American tribes were still a powerful force in the Blue Ridge Valley after the end of the American Revolution. Much of what I've been reading about Appalachia glosses over this, and attributes the mountaineers' affinity for violence to an Old World tradition of blood feud. I'm not convinced that Appalachian people have (or had) a greater affinity for violence than other groups, but if they do (or if they did), there's nothing like on-going guerilla warfare to keep such a trait alive. Mary Moore's children, who grew up on tales of her harrowing experiences, found the Civil War fought in their back yards, by their own children. This seems much more likely to explain a readiness to violence than the persistence of sixteenth century Border Reiver folkways.

There is a Pocahontas County connection in all this. One of Mary Moore's sons, Rev. Samuel Brown (1806-1889), came to Little Levels, and founded the "Academy," a school for which the community was named. "Academy" was changed to "Hillsboro" in the late nineteenth century. Pearl Buck's mother, Carie Stulting Sydenstricker, was disturbed by this change when she came home for a visit from China.

W. E. Blackhurst, On Logging Pocahontas County

W.E. Blackhurst, a Pocahontas County native, devoted much of his life to documenting local history and observing local natural history. He was an English and Latin teacher at Greenbank High School for over 30 years, and he was active in the movement to create the Cass Scenic Railroad. He belongs on my Literary Pocahontas Page, and this is my first attempt at writing about him. This excerpt from the Preface for the posthumously published Afterglow: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems gives a quick rundown of his work:

Warren Blackhurst....wrote of the first great cuttings of the virgin forests, and in Riders of the Flood he told of the formations of the great rafts of logs, from the time they left the stump until they and their riders completed their journey of nearly a hundred miles down the Greenbrier River to the lumber mill at Ronceverte. In Mixed Harvest he told of the first timber surveys, the beginning of the sawmill town and the coming of the railroad which would supplant the river as a means of taking the lumber to market. He also told of the people who were there, and those who were drawn to the industry. Sawdust in Your Eyes depicts the social life of a lumber town when the twentieth century was young, and no one could tell it better; while Of Men and a Mighty Mountain weaves the biographies of the men who made the wheels of the lumber industry turn--from the head of the Company to the mill hand, and how the work of each contributed to the finished product. And through each book there runs a thread of romance, skillfully woven into stories of a great industry. Then there was the railroad, built just for logging, which was the forerunner of the Cass Scenic Railroad.

While there is much to learn about Pocahontas County here, I really wish Mr. Blackhurst had skipped that "thread of romance, skillfully woven into stories of a great industry." In fictionalizing his stories, he fell into some of the unfortunate habits of mid-twentieth centry popular novelists. The attempt at dialect, whether of Irish, Italians, blacks, or hillbillies, is poorly done and offensive. The characterization of the workers as simple and childlike makes my skin crawl. If you can wade through this stuff, which he doubtless included to make the stories more palatable to the "reading public," you can learn a lot about Pocahontas County, and about how logging changed the Appalachians.

• Riders of the Flood 1954. McClain Printing Company.
• Sawdust In Your Eyes 1963. McClain Printing Company.
• Of Men and a Mighty Mountain 1965. McClain Printing Company.
• Your Train Ride Through History 1968. McClain Printing Company.
• Mixed Harvest 1972. McClain Printing Company.
• Afterglow: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems 1972. McClain Printing Company.

Where Droop Mountain Fits

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand where Droop Mountain fits in the geology and biogeography of the Appalachians. Maurice Brooks' The Appalachians (1965) seems to place it either in the Allegheny Mountains or immediately west of it. Despite the hours I've spent with topo maps, I can't quite understand if Droop is in the Yew Pine Mountains, or between them and the Alleghenies. Despite finding Droop interesting enough to mention, Brooks never quite spells it out.

Brooks mentions an unnamed muskeg (a bog, like the Cranberry Glades) somewhere on Droop.

Mrs. Graham Netting found an orchid rarity, Small's twayblade (Listeria smallii), not known elsewhere in Cranberry but common in a rich (and unnamed muskeg on Droop Mountain, about twenty miles away. There are other plant specialties in these southern muskegs. The one on Droop Mountain, just mentioned, has thousands of plants of netted chain-fern (Woodwardia areolata), a species associated with coastal plains, seemingly out of place on a 3000-foot mountain....

Brooks' The Appalachians includes a very helpful breakdown of western Virginia and West Virginia in this passage:

The westward escarpment that defines the Shenandoah Valley is called North Mountain, and with it we may again take up the course of Paleozoic geology. Old Appalachia is to the east; the Great Valley and the ridges beyond are a part of New Appalachia, where rocks are sedimentary, and where the fossil record of ancient life has been preserved. In parts of the valley, and just westward, there are outcrops that date from the...Cambrian....

North Mountain (with its counterparts north and south) marks the beginning of a distinctive Appalachian topographic province, the Ridge and Valley Province. Comparatively low but steeply abrupt ridges are arranged parallel to each other on a northeast-southwest axis. Between these ridges are streams, tributaries of the Potomac River, which form a trellised drainage pattern....

Just over a hundred miles west from Washington, the Alleghenies rise abruptly one or two thousand feet above the Ridge and Valley Province. This escarpment marks the beginning of a new topographic province. On its higher expanses it recaptures much of the northern atmosphere that occurs on Blue Ridge summits, and it introduces many new plants and animals of boreal distribution. To add further to its biological significance, it shelters surprising numbers of plant and animal endemics. Greatest elevations normally occur along the axis ridge known as Allegheny Backbone, but there are also extensive areas above 4000 feet on such westward ridges as Cheat, Gauley, and Back Allegheny.

Along higher Allegheny crests there is a southward extension of the red spruce forest, so typical of Maine and New Brunswick. Here hermit and Swainson's thrushes nest, red crossbills occur at all seasons, and varying hares, brown in summer and white in winter, reach their farthest southward limits. Visitors will soon come to recognize the loosely cemented sand and coarse gravel, geologically Pottsville conglomerate, which outcrops on many of the higher Allegheny peaks. Another characteristic Mississippian formation is Greenbrier limestone, holding within its depths many of the caves which we shall be discussing in a later chapter. Some of Appalachia's finest ferns are at home on these limestone ledges.

Between high Allegheny ridges and the prairies of interior America is a region of eroded hills, which are dissected by streams that flow in almost every possible direction and then are finally drawn to the Ohio River. So broken and irregular is the topography that it takes close looking to see this area as a plateau, but actually the hilltops maintain remarkably even elevations. This is the Appalachian Plateau, with outcrops that date from the Pennsylvanian Period to the east and from the Permian to the west, where hills run out and the level lands begin.

Within Pennsylvanian formations are some of the richest coal beds the world holds. The Pittsburgh coal seam has often been called, and with justification, "the world's most valuable mineral deposit." This and other coal seams have profoundly affected the habitance and economy of the region, since the mining of coal is ever an ugly and destructive process. Still, there are forests in the coves, remarkably rich and varied ones, with trees that suggest regions farther north or farther south.

pages 13-17