Happy July Second!

A visit to the Penland School of Crafts is always a good time, but July Fourth is an extra special occasion. So I was delighted when our friend Sandy invited us to her house near the school. With its front row seats on the front porch it’s the perfect place to enjoy a barbeque and the annual parade, ice cream social, and fireworks. Never mind that it was July 2nd—classes ended on the Fourth so the time to celebrate was now! Penland has ten studios offering classes in wood, iron, clay, textiles, glass, metal, painting, photography, printmaking, and book arts (as well as some hard-to-categorize crossbreeds—shrine-a-rama, and giant puppets, for example). Most of the time these studios do their own thing, each holding on to a secret belief that their medium—and its attendant cultural rites and music—is the best. But on July Fourth, they compete fiercely for such prizes as “most enthusiastic” and “eggs-cellent.”

The glassblowers are always a team to watch and this year again they did not disappoint, with a mock “blowing” of a sacrificial watermelon. The school’s director came dressed as a giant cicada, in honor of the group of 17-year periodical cicadas that partied here in the Appalachians all spring. The Fourth is also a community event, and featured local entries celebrating a kid’s 9th birthday, and a VW microbus decked out in red, white and blue.

In years past the parade has been followed by a soap-box derby. The derby was great fun and inspired such vehicles as the “cheese cart,” a yellow wooden wedge of air-slicing speed, stoppable only by its anchor—a block of Velveeta cheese. (Well, it wasn’t really Velveeta cheese but a wood simulacrum of Velveeta cheese. But then again, who knows what Velveeta is really made of, anyway.) But the derby is no more. This reckless outpouring of creativity was eventually tempered with the realization that contestants were rocketing down a steep road in vehicles that were sometimes stronger on concept than joinery, and that even if they themselves were willing to take one for the team, there was the matter of the bystanders, some of whom were probably innocent.

After the parade everyone gathered on the lawn for ice cream while the trophies were handed out. The cognoscenti brought their own Ben & Jerry’s (and beer) but most folks made due with chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. By now it was nearing dusk and the bonfire was in full flame, the better to light the fireworks. As far as I’m concerned fireworks are always magical, but there’s extra magic in local amateur works. So the works went off, competing with the bats and fireflies for sky-space, dancing to some secret choreography of the small band of pyromaniacs. The fine display of color and sound was capped by a grand finale which looked to the untrained eye like half a dozen people throwing everything they could into the bonfire at once and then running away. It was magnificent!

There’s a lot more to say about Penland (www.penland.org), but I’ll say it another time. For now I’ll just say, I hope your July Fourth was as fun as the Second of July at Penland, and that we continue to enjoy the freedoms that our fore bearers fought to win, including but not limited to the right to wear any kind of wings you like!

Small Towns, Big Art

Art, literature, award-winning chili…all in one weekend! Two of the small towns near High Cove were hopping with culture one recent weekend as Burnsville hosted the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, while Bakersville strutted its stuff at the Creek Walk Arts Festival.

Burnsville is built around a town square. All the important civic buildings are found on the square: the courthouse, the library, the historic hotel, a bank, a couple galleries, the feed store (just kidding about the feed store). Perhaps because the square has four sides, Burnsville has four Main Streets: East, West, North and South Main. All four were jumpin’ for the Literary Fest.

I started out at the library for a presentation on the Quilt Trails Project. Good thing I was sitting down, because this project blew me away! The idea is to adorn buildings with large-scale quilt squares that are not only beautiful, but tell a story about the place. It has been a uniting force in the area, as kids from the high school industrial arts class build the “quilt squares” of wood, then community members paint them using a historic—or new—pattern. They are then installed on community buildings ranging from old barns to houses and shops. There’s a map and folks can go on a driving tour to see them all.

I made a quick detour down South Main Street to the farmers market for fresh-baked banana bread, then it was up North Main Street to the History Museum for a talk about the Scots-Irish pioneers who settled in the western North Carolina mountains. Burnsville-native historian and professor Lloyd Bailey described the migration pattern and early history of settlement and showed how the self-reliant, egalitarian culture of these early settlers can be seen today in the hospitality, wisdom, generosity, and dignity of mountain folk. I understand much better now, although I still need the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English to know what folks mean when they say “I’ll carry you on down to the store.”

West Main Street brought me to DK Puttyroots teahouse to hear Peter Turchi, writer and director of theMFA Program for Writers at nearby Warren Wilson College. Ok, I’m a map freak, but if you’re even a little interested in how we imagine and display the world through maps, you might want to check out Turchi’s book Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.

If you take East Main Street waaaay out, you’ll come to Bakersville, our county seat. Now Bakerville only has one traffic light, which is fine with me. Especially since it has a great pedestrian path along Cane Creek. During the Creek Walk Arts Festival, that walk is jammed with painters, potters, wood turners, and so on. There’s plenty of festival food, a street dance, and a moon walk for the kids, so everyone is happy. Including the dogs, which were promenading a-plenty, although it did not appear that any special events had been arranged to entice them. I had been to the first Creek Walk six years ago, and was amazed to see how much it’s grown. The local arts council says there are more artists per capita in Mitchell and Yancey Counties than anywhere in the US. I don’t know if that’s true, but there sure was a lot of fine work by local crafts persons on display.

As for the chili, my friend Amy Waller won the first prize trophy—for her vegetarian chili made as a fund-raiser for the Democratic Women’s club. Even our non-vegetarian, non-Democrat county commissioner, Phil Byrd, was enjoying a cupful. When subjected to questioning, he admitted to knowing it was Democrat chili, but claimed he didn’t know it was vegetarian.

From the Porch at High Cove,
Olga Ronay

Energy and Environment Futures

I saw my first straw-bale house about 15 years ago in the western North Carolina mountains. The owner/builder was an organic farmer who grew vegetables for her neighbors through a community-supported agriculture system—another first for me. She and her friends were finishing the inside of the house, whose thick walls made a perfect resonating box for the Gregorian chants that fueled their work. Western North Carolina continues to be a leader in progressive, green and sustainable practices. That’s one of the reasons we chose to build High Cove here.

So we were excited to attend the Southern Energy & Environment Expo held recently near Asheville. It’s held in an agricultural arena, a real down-home event with a garage-business feel but some very sophisticated stuff. Like goats. Yeah, goats. Folks are using them for land management. They like to eat kudzu and poison ivy, and are a lot quieter than a herd of chainsaws, and a lot cuter that Roundup. We’ve invited the herd to visit High Cove next Spring.

Then there were Mike and Paula Moore of Ampmobile Conversions, who gave up their business of do-it-yourself solar water heaters after getting hooked on electric cars. They’ve put electric motors into several stock cars. Why? They say an electric motor costs just four cents a mile to run, with a lot less pollution and noise than a gas engine. Range is limited with today’s batteries—which are substantially unchanged from the batteries used in the first cars 100 years ago. But advances in battery technology are allowing a range of 100+ miles per charge.

Some old ideas were there, wearing their new, high-tech party clothes. Precisely-machined windmills connected to inverters and into the power grid generate supplemental power without a lot of complication for the homeowner. The windmill folks say this is the second-fastest payback on investment. The fastest is heating your water with the sun. You could get a sophisticated system installed by Sundance Power Systems for a few thousand dollars. Or you could find plans in BackHome Magazine and build one yourself for a few hundred bucks. Not as pretty and more sweat on your part, but also the satisfaction of washing it off in a shower made with your own hands.

A real driving force for the local sustainability culture is the Department of Technology at Appalachian State University in Boone. Among their activities, App State tests windmills on the brutal conditions of a local mountaintop, and has built a closed-loop biodiesel facility that uses solar heat and recycles all the byproducts. But you don’t have to go to App State to buy biodiesel; Blue Ridge Bio Fuels has seven retail stations in the Asheville area. They produce biodiesel for vehicles and home heating from used vegetable oil recycled from local restaurants.

Our heads full but our bellies empty, we stopped for dinner at Salsa’s (a gastronomic and local business success story and perhaps my favorite restaurant in Asheville) for some local food and a brew of a different sort—a microbrew from Asheville's Highland Brewing Co.

From the porch at High Cove,

Olga Ronay

From the Porch is a periodic missive from High Cove. High Cove is a new community in the mountains of western North Carolina, focused on the environment, the arts, and life-long learning. High Cove Visitors Center www.highcove.com