Mountains to the Sea

The past month-and-a-half has been a been a somewhat “trying” time for my weakening fortitude and faded resilience; but as the Chinese proverb says the tall, sturdy tree snaps more easily in the high winds than the flexible, shifting, high grasses (or something like this) ‘“ although I have found myself to be more in the mold of partially pliant river cane that can sometimes snap sharply (and loudly) in the face of medium winds, not being quite as pliant as the tall grasses ‘“ nevertheless aspiring for tall grass status.

Allright, I’m sure there is thinly veiled meaning here in a mode that doesn’t require abject butchery of a Chinese aphorism…. so for my own good I’ll stop.

Naturally there are always better tales to tell, except I don’t have any of those at the moment either; the empty whiteness of this blog text block is too much at times ‘“ therefore I’ll get back in the fold with a few photos. I can handle this fer sic now. So by my count,and the tenets of traditional wisdom, I’ve got about six thousand words worth of photography. wonderful.

Many days of summer I am often ambling the steep ridges and watersheds of the Cherokee National Forest to fish the most secretive trout in the most remote pools. A small backpack is all I need and I can bed for the night wherever I end up for the day. The gentle watercourse flows calm:

The deep hollows are thick with rhododhendron and hemlock; so thick is the canopy that the forest near the creeks is almost always soggy damp with a pungency of humus heavy throughout. A favorite forest zone for Narceus Americanus, a rather large millipede (around four inches in length average) common in many southern forests:

The rhododhendron can grow so thick that you’ve no choice but to start a slow crawl between trunks and around branches and against the ground so close that decayed leaves stick to your face. Through the years it has become very clear why the old timer mountainfolk called these areas of extra thick twisted brambles of rhododhendron “hells” cause you’re can almost be sure that’s where you are, and amidst all the slow-going and scraped skin you’ve gotta keep one eye ahead and one eye below, ’cause this is snake country, and I’ve never found it pleasant to bound over a nest of Copperheads with absolutely nowhere to haul buttock except straight up vertical skywalking. This unidentified serpent is no Copperhead, it scuttled to the creek to escape me, and I managed a quick, shaky, zoomed-in snap before he deep-sixed himself:

While fishing one of the larger and deeper pools I had encountered the entire way I noticed something unusual. On a small slate rock protrusion from the ridgeside it saw it watching me. With shell half open in a sign of retreat I could tell that it was an Eastern Box Turtle. What I couldn’t tell as I waded closer, icy water knifing higher up my legs, was how this turtle had managed to get on this ledge a third tier ledge just above the water; it could of fallen, but it would have needed a cache of luck to not have bounced into the creek. As the space between us shriveled it became obvious from the state of the turtle what my gut kept murmuring the poor guy was dead. A bizarre situation, for one it’s rare to find a turtle corpse in the wild, lest it was a blanched shell perhaps, but also the peculiar placing was such a mystery I stood for a good while contemplating the ineffable until my legs were so numb in the creek a small motion almost toppled me. I took one photo of his saddened form before I left him to silently preside over his calm pool:

Awright already, I will end this session with two final photos I took a few weeks back (on honeymoon no less) when we experienced the first hurricane of the season (Alex) that smashed the North Carolina coast as we attempted to relax along the Cape Hatteras Seashore (Outer Banks). Fortunately it was only a Class 2 bad boy, and being the hillbilly that I am I decided to sit by the hotel window, sip a few beers and enjoy the ride (with a few sidetrips outside to run half nude in the searing wind like a frothing, rabid fiend, until a flying garbage can scared my dumb a$$ sober and inside I went and put I stayed…).

When it was all blown to sea, the island was wrecked, not horribly, but I did keep my eye on this trampoline that decided to become close friends with a telephone pole:

By the evening the sky streaked colorful foaming on the western rise, though the east remained dark as pitch for some time: