Synchronous Fireflies in the Smokies

Like an old-time movie marquee.  An orchestrated light show--flash, flash, flash, sparkle, pause--and so on.  An airport runway, the light taking off down the path and into the darkness.  Christmas lights, or better yet, what they are trying to replicate: the glisten of icicles at night.  The Electric Light Parade.  Moonlight on rippling water.  The sparkle of thousands of camera flashes, like we will see during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies later this summer.  Yeah, that's how it looked.  And felt.        

Something Wicked This Way Comes

About six months ago, in all seriousness, I turned to my friend Bryant and said: "I really need to start reading more science fiction."  Over the past several weeks (since being in Roswell), I have been trying to track down a copy of Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric! to no avail.  Well, when I saw the news of Bradbury's passing--on Venus' transit of the sun no doubt--I had to go out and settle for a different collection of his short stories: The Golden Apples of the Sun (pictured above).

From Ray's website:  

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."

Also, with this blog I'd like to think that I'm following his advice: "Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."

Appalachian State

I spent a fair portion of today driving through what was once the Free Republic of Franklin, a portion of present-day East Tennessee ceded to the federal government as a payment for war debt stemming from the American Revolution.  Turns out, the government didn't want it, at least not as a state; the vote to accept Franklin as the 14th state failed by two votes.  Spurned, the people of the Appalachians decided that maybe they didn't want to be part of this new-fangled United States anyway, and so seceded from the one year-old nation and operated independently for about four years (1784-1788).  The most famous Franklonian? None other than Mr. David Crockett, born in 1786 smack dab in the middle of Franklin.      

Way Down Yonder at Cataloochee

It was a perfect day, driving a winding dirt backroad to Cataloochee, North Carolina.  Ol' Catalooch (as I heard it dubbed by the son of a former inhabitant) was once a not-quite-thriving little valley community in what is now part and parcel of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  In the 20s the government bought out the inhabitants and replaced them with elk and pine trees, leaving only a few tattered homes and a handful of invariably white clapboard churches--one each for the Methodists and Presbyterians, and at least two for the Baptists.  Once a year, the Park Service opens up the road to the families of the Cataleeches to have a reunion of sorts, which happened to be this weekend as luck would have it.  

While I was wending my way through hardwoods to How-Green-Was-My-Valley, I flipped the radio on to Prairie Home Companion, which was being broadcast from--wouldn't you guess it--North Carolina.  This is what I heard:

Road Trip, Week 3: Seattle

Sometimes I have a hard time writing about deeply emotional things, or tend to gloss over some of the life's more difficult events in my blog. This, however, is too important to leave out: I spent the third week of my vacation back in Seattle attending the funeral of my friends' infant son, Isaac Bryant Anderson Casteel.  I will defer to Bryant's blog post for details. 

Road Trip, Week 4: The South

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• Driving Tunes: All country, all the time (with lots of Willie Nelson)
• Books: The Help -Kathryn Stockett;  Treasure Island -Robert Louis Stevenson;  And There Was Light -Jacques Lusseyran
• Wildlife: Turtles, a 15-foot gator, dolphins
• Food: A 22-dish meal at The Wilkes House, which rightly made the cut in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, fried catfish, fried green tomatoes, fried plantains, a deep-fried Moon Pie (are you sensing a theme here); an old-fashioned cream soda float; 35 flavors of Coke; a peanut butter and banana sandwich in honor of the King
• Sights that didn't quite make the blog: Tennessee's rolling hills, the Nashville music scene, Savannah's sleepy squares, Bonaventure Cemetery mossy macabre; Charleston's plantation homes and gardens; Fort Sumter in all it's tiny glory;  the Double-A Asheville Tourists/Moonshiners bringing my home team record up to 4-0 for this trip      
• Friends: Nathan and Hope Wertz; Linda, Mark, and Sam Shaw