Backwoods Bop

I got back on my bicycle and really hit the trail. It had been such a very long time since I dedicated a large part of my day to bicycling. I spent four hours in the woods and swamp and field, mixtures of moist and arid, mingling between the wet and the dry. The part of the forest nearest to Red Bank Road still held a black chemical burn to it. I rejoiced upon seeing the open landbridge, where I first took my rest, and gotten bitten by fire-ants. This spot of open sky, bordered on the right by much dry marshgrass and small trees rested a poignantly beautiful dead tree at the beginning of the landbridge with its gnarling, twisting growth. It was a grimace of an image only a lustful black-and-white photographer can marvel upon. The open marsh was to the left. Again were fields of waving tan grasses to the left, and the footbridge over the trickle of water where I busted out and fell down my first bike ride through. I was quite tired after it all. On the way back across the reservoir swamp, Walls of Time played. I need a CD Player to carry with me.

Today was truly the first day of summer; the beginning of the championing of the sun as victor over the cloud. There is much bicycle riding to do. There is much hitch-hiking to do. I sharply remember everything the summer brought me and the adventure it sprung my wildfire heart to in late October. The day after bicycling the trails in the chilly sunlight, the gilded gate to the golden mountains of Buncome County opened to me. A car leaves Thursday towards Riceville, and I'm going on that heaven bound vessel!! I wish nothing more than to be bathed in the memories of last summer. The pasture blanketed on hillside, the sweat, the cool streams, the paradisaical emotion, the intensity and gentle infinity of open sky and seclusion and serenity of the shadow of the mountain ravine, all at once. Actually. that reward of green and blue may be in waiting for later. What I have to look forward to now is light snows covering everything. It will be absolutely astounding. I don't exactly have much music to go with a snow-scape (I think of the icy three-part harmonies of Alison Krauss and Union Station, and Into the Woods by Nickel Creek) to listen to on a CD Player. In a way, when this portal to the hills opened to me Friday night, I felt not prepared to return; not ready; even unworthy. I am much less physically fit than I was while up in the mountains last time on bicycle. I was an entirely different person -- a human adapted with devouring eyes and powerful legs and a furnace of internal heat.

My plan is to contra dance Thursday night, then lay a sleeping bag straight in a field by night. I must quickly catch a bus in the morning to Brevard and perhaps spend no more than an hour there. I will catch Greenville-bound traffic and bicycle the rest of the way. Caesar's Head frightens me delightfully. The last time I biked down a road descending off a mountain, I broke my bicycle and nearly rammed into the rock face on the inner shoulder or ran off the hill to the outer (and I had brakes that time -- mostly ineffective breaks, but breaks nonetheless). Worst-case scenario is that I'd have to bicycle from Brevard, a nearly fifty-mile endeavor, not mentioning the ascent over Caesar's Head. All in all, it could easily take seven hours, rest and lunch included.

Though this certainly isn't bluegrass, as the title of this post may have teased at, but watch the vid and wait for the very end. I may be in for seeing something very much like it.
Russ Barenberg - The Pleasant Beggar