Winter is Coming

I have so much to say. Its been building up for almost a week, and it all comes out on the road. Driving that car always gets my mind turning. The fall colors decorates either side of the road as I'm listening to Ricky Skagg's Walls Of Time (though it is that Bill Monroe that composed it, it being one of a seemingly endless number of his compositions. That's one of the very few things I don't like about bluegrass musicians: they do too many covers on their recordings) with that solemnly heralding violin solo. I have programmed this song to a lot of different imagery. At first, I played it on a small cassette recorder (which perfected its feeling of oldness and vaguity) while biking my route down Red Bank Rd to Bushy Park Rd, with the marshes and swamp trees and tall grasses with their ghostly, white husks. There is an ancientness and slow but ineffable timeflow to it. I feel it, and the song depicts it perfectly, with the harmony always at the interval of a fifth (sorry for those that don't know music theory, I do it for the edification of those that do know). As I was walking up the Blue Ridge Parkway in the afternoon, the sun causing all the red-browns to resonate and burst at my eyes, the lyric "the wind is blowing 'cross the mountain, and on the valley way below" described the blustery land that I was slowly ascending. I see the mountain range, hill after hill after hill, with one earthmound right in my face and holiding a vice on my attention. The ancientness, communicated in low rumbling frequencies that must be emitting fro the mountainside . The natural temples embedded in the land. During the most "earthy" season -- when the trees turn the color of the soil -- all of this was, to me, captured in Walls of Time, both the swamp and the mountain. I would REALLY like to go canoeing in any creek flowing through an estuary environment in the period of two to three hours before sunset, but it would have to be soon or never, because autumn, with its evocative ancientness, is giving way to winter. Winter is on its way. My trip to Sully's Island really drove this floating thought home and pinned it in my mind. The constant wind of a beach exaggerated the drizzle and cold air. This wind, eerily enough, was utterly absent during this one visit to Folly Beach last February, though not the kind of quiet that there was at the base of Mt. Mitchell that lone dusk. This absence of noise was a time-halting silence, a silence that restrains utterance or movement -- even to stop the Walls of Time in my head, just having left the Parkway and entered the shadow of elder mountain, father mountain -- a silence that haunts you for the rest of your life. It's like the atmosphere did not exist above 5400 feet. No more medium for sound waves. It was like I had left earth, and was in the heavens, for the stars were certainly closer, and in the morning sky the gentlest shades of crimson. There was no crimson in the sky that morning on Sullivan's Island. It was a grey, not the purgatorial grey of being in a drizzly cloud, but a pleasant mixture of grey melted in with light blues and benevolent whites. It had rained just enough in the night to busy me with keeping dry. Though I only got two hours of sleep when, after four hours, the drizzle finally subsided (and then was left to deal with the colder wind that always follows even the slightest rain), I was at relative peace. No cursing my discomfort or lack of sleep, no regretting I didn't take a ride home after listening to Ward and Joel at Art's. I left towards my destination as they had sung finishing the song Sullivan's Island. It was neat, because I desired to hear it right before they decided to play it. The idea of living here, in this old sleepy town by the sea, then travelling all over, only to return back, right where you started, broke and beaten -- "back on Sullivan's Island" -- is one of pure legend and stoicism. Getting there, a sudden thought struck me with horror: What if they had closed the swing bridge?! I read in the newspaper about the closing of the bridge while a new one was built and about traffic being rerouted over the IOP connector, which would mean an insurmountable ten-mile detour for me and my lowly bicycle. Luckily, this was not so, but walking over the bridge was the eeriest experience. The fiendish bridge played on my fears of falling and drowning, and the lights above the suspension structure gave the feeling of being in a sinister cage. I arrived, and dealt with the rain for the said four hours. When the clouds thinned a little bit (only for a moment), just as the time the clouds temporarily cleared to flaunt the glorious yellow sun when I last visited this bless-ed sandbar, I saw instead the white moon. Even in its waning, near-dark phase, it lit up the clouds perfectly, just as I had romantically hoped for (it was the imagining of this: relaxedly looking up to the comforting moon from cool, windy shore; that swayed me to risk being rained on). This scene evoked the greatest feelings of comfort and mildness in my heart. I was too chilled to be warmed by it though, but it was wonderful as it cast the gentlest white on the edges of the clouds around it. In the only break in the clouds a few stars could be seen, and this feeling of fun-ness -- of things getting back into motion -- that was sprinkled on me, such as I felt upon seeing the reddest evening sky of my life, now reminds me of LEAF, when the clouds thinned and gave way to the stars, promising the victorious sun come morning. There was no fun-ness in the morning, just tiredness, but the ineffable feeling to move on was there. I actually walked a lot of the road through Mt. Pleasant and halfway up the Ravenel. Viewing the trains of cloud with the fresh backdrop of light blue to the north on top of the Ravenel was oh so refreshing. I was passive in my tiredness, but enjoyed it nonetheless. Rocketing down the Ravenel, I just made the bus home, popping out onto Meeting St just where the bus was about pass. Under the covers, as I collapsed into an unrefusable sleep when I got home, the thought that winter was coming (though the warm Charleston sun persisted through the glass) pervaded my thoughts. I do hope I can enjoy more colors before winter comes and steals them all away. Edisto is next.