When I was growing up, the phrase “Blue Ridge Mountains” somehow sounded magical to me. Now that I’ve wandered up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Blue Ridge Mountains, it still makes me smile to see that phrase on a sign. Maybe it’s my personal version of the Magic Kingdom.
Today’s post, then, features images I’ve taken this summer that didn’t make it into any earlier post.
This type of fence is all over the mountains and I haven’t met one yet that I didn’t want to take a picture of. The more weathered the wood, the better. And the lushness of the hillside, even in late August, is definitely magical to someone like me, who grew up with dried brown hillsides and desert landscapes.
I sent this photo to my horse-loving friend, Sue, and then felt it deserved a wider audience. Those horses sure have the life, out in the warm sun on a beautiful day.
When I pulled off the Parkway to visit friends in southern Virginia a few weeks ago, it was haying season. I had fun taking way too many photos of hay bales in the late afternoon sun. In the end this tractor sitting in the field was the one I liked best.
Across from the small post office in Roan Mountain, Tennessee, this old store building stands. Long deserted, it has much lonely company in small towns up and down the parkway. The pandemic has hit those towns hard. I worry what will survive.
One of the places closing down is the old hardware store in Floyd, Virginia. We checked out the remaining goods on offer, but it was this rack of rakes and shovels outside that caught my eye.
Small towns and two-lane roads are the heart of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’ve been lucky to have spent the last three years driving and exploring it. Despite the economic challenges this area faces, I still think it’s a magical stretch of America.
It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America – in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I bought my first ever pocket knife on a family trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway. We were on our way to visit family in Virginia — we, the Yankee offspring of my southern father. Cherished that trip. Not just the pocketknife, applied to the hotel bar of soap that evening. But also the fishing, the fireflies and the campfires among family I had never before met. So yes, I remember the Blue Ridge Parkway and understand your fondness for the place!
What a great trip and memory, Anne, I love it.
I always feel sad when a small hardware store closes. A store of such basic needs…
From my friend, Jack, about those fences:
Those fences btw are, for the most part, all monuments and testaments to the American chestnut. Some still sprout up from and around old stumps but seldom survive the blight for more than 10-15 years. That span is, alas, a few years shy of when the trees would begin flowering and fruiting. Those old chestnut rail fences and the occasional framing timber from old farmhouses are all that’s left.
The Appalachian Chestnut Foundation continues to back cross some viable American Chestnuts isolated to the Mackinaw Peninsula, I believe, with the blight resistant Asian chestnuts. They’ve got some hybrids to 7/8 American Chestnut that seem to be surviving. But replacing the vast forests will take generations.