By Greg Evans
I have to say the weather has been pretty freaky lately and I do know, because of science, that the planet is undergoing a geomagnetic polar shift which is why Appalachia is now experiencing tornados and heavy daily showers like a Guatemalan rainforest. Some say that eventually the Appalachian mountains will be sub-tropical. Fine with me. I wouldn't care if I never saw snow again for the rest of my days. Summertime in Appalachia is beautiful. The clear, fresh, warm mountain air and lush green forests. Birds and butterflies are everywhere, the sweet smell of fresh moss and trickling streams. I drift off with the wind to times past, when the world was smaller and the forests bigger, when the oceans were blue and green instead of brown. I walk through endless golden fields of wheat and meadows of crocuses.
I lived in cities for years, New York, Los Angeles, just outside Nashville and who knows where else? I'll tell you what, the skies were never as blue as they are here at the top of the world, high up in the clouds of the Appalachian Mountains. The bluest blue you could ever imagine, bluer than a Van Gogh painting, a blue that is so pure and vibrant you get a strange warm tingling feeling like you are flying, or that sensation of laying in a field far from any humanity without any shoes on, your eyes closed and the soft mountain breeze tickling the soles of your feet in the shade of a green apple tree on a warm summer's day. You can't put stuff like that into words, you have to experience it. A world full of little yellow inch worms.
Saw a show the other night, drove down, out of the mountains and along winding, narrow roads with hairpins turns and speeding trucks like being in Peru, and watched guitarist and banjoist Al Petteway and singer, harpist, guitarist, mandolinist and doboist Amy White, perform. It was an extraordinary show and the purity of the music was Appalachia. This couple comes from the east near the Flattop mountain in the Carolinas and showcased their mountain music with the precision, fluency and passion of Apelles painting a line. So in a small concert hall, a couple thousand people, dimmed lights, the clanging of flasks of peach moonshine and the scent of nearby peppermint chew wafting through the quiet crowd the music took us away, floating through the ancient hills and howling of raiding injuns, whispering waterfalls and swaying of Revolutionary War oaks tree branches we soared and swam through our own thoughts and memories, accompanied were we by incredible photographs of nature and mountain top views, photographs taken by Al and Amy. I was moved by the performance and I'm not moved by much. Another day high in the mountains of Appalachia.
