Yancey County

One Sunday morning, back in the dark ages, we left Asheville to play golf - in Black Mountain if memory serves - Tony, his dad, his granddad, and me. We went by way of Mars Hill, where we stopped to deliver something to someone on the way to the golf course. Looking at it from this end of my life (with the aid of Google Maps), Mars Hill doesn't seem to be "on the way" to Black Mountain, but my sense of geography in the Asheville area has always been suspect.

In any case, while Tony's dad took the package up to the house, the rest of us stayed in the car discussing my observation that the cows in the area must know some special trick to be able to graze on the steep mountainsides. Tony's grandfather, in a statement typical of him, chuckled and said, "Yeah, up here in these mountains they hang the fields from the clouds and plow both sides."

*****

My good friend Joe has a little house on a mountainside in Yancey County like that. He doesn't have to plow either side, or worry about cows falling off the pasture, but he can sit in a rocking chair on his front porch and stare straight ahead across the river at the steepest wall of hardwood forest you can imagine. The mist clings to the mountains until midmorning when it vanishes, leaving the Carolina blue sky.


Next to the cottage in the clearing on the mountainside in Yancey County there is a nondescript. . . spring house, I guess you'd call it. Being up at Joe's to simply relax for the weekend, visit, and look around for things take pictures of, I guess I was primed to appreciate any nuance of beauty in the surroundings. I shot the mountains and the mist in the early morning light and wandered around the property taking pictures of the flowers still wet with dew. And I shot the spring house, above, clinging to the side of Joe's mountain.


I love my Canon camera with it's stabilized telephoto lens. The telephoto let me take the picture of the river, down the hill and across the road, from a rocking chair on Joe's front porch. The stabilized lens allowed me to slow the shutter speed enough to record the movement of the water like I wanted without having to resort to a tripod. I like the twin contrasts of the shade versus sunlight and the stability of the rocks versus the motion of the river.


We took Joe's dog, Ramsey, for a walk early one afternoon so Joe could show me the landmark above. It's a natural Appalachian "bald" called "The Beauty Spot"; with an elevation of 4419 feet, it provides clear views in nearly every direction. As far as I can tell, the meadow straddles both the North Carolina/Tennessee border and the Appalachian Trail.


I took this picture on the short walk from where we left the car to The Beauty Spot. What interested me at the time was the cow stile in the split rail fence. The near section of the fence simply stops at a vertical end post. The far section of the fence splits 3 or 4 feet away from the end post, with a V-shaped extension reaching past the vertical post on both sides. This allows bipeds, like Joe and I, to pass through the fence with a single change of direction. Ramsey, too, though a quadruped, could pass easily through but the stile design would foil the wanderlust of any cow (or similarly shaped domestic animal).

When I reviewed my photographs that evening, the composition and lighting, the isolation and dryness of the landscape suggested to me an Andrew Wyeth painting. I love it.