11-2-55 A Lot to Write About

There is a lot to write about - there is our weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley and our weekend at the fabulous Greenbriar and I will start to write down all I remember that is worth remembering. We drove first along the turnpike on our way to Shenandoah National Park the weekend after the fall coloring was to have been at its peak but I do not see how it could have been more beautiful. I don't believe that the falls in Missouri were ever as completely breathtaking as these two falls I have lived near the eastern mountains - they might be but I do not remember. The hillsides were such masses of bright color as to seem almost artificial as manmade displays and yet here was something man had no hand in and could not duplicate - something utterly and naturally lovely here but which would have seemed garish and gaudy had man made it.

Early in the morning mist filled the deep valleys and made soft grey lakes of hollows and when we drove along Skyline Drive haze faintly veiled the distant hills, muting their colors, but when the sun shone down through the leaves at hand and overhead, the brilliance of color was fairly blinding. For a while we were able to get good music on the car radio and that combined with what was all about me was to be almost more than I could bear. Music always sharpens my emotions and my absorption of any surrounding beauty. I was filled to overflowing with the rich, golden lustre of this autumn day. "Oh, Autumn, be less beautiful or be less brief!" The sky was vivid October blue - the yellow leaves of the hickory, the pink gold of the maple, and the red of the oak were turned to pure translucent fire by the sun's rays - each, the blue and the flame, accentuated the other 'til the eye turned to the scattered evergreens for cooling comfort. We spent the night in a cabin and ate our dinner & breakfast in the beautiful lodge of Skyland.

Our hike to the fire tower through the wilds was everything that matters to me - there was the vernal silence, the peace that it brought to the mind, the crunch and crackle of dry leaves underfoot, the rain-like patter of falling pine needles and occasional acorns, the rich smells of fungi, lichen, pine, decaying vegetable matter, fallen leaves and earth, the limitless array of things to inspect and admire on all sides, the variety of color, pattern & texture, of leaf, bark, stone and berry. There was so much that I cannot put down here - so much that I can only store, not on paper, but in my memory, my mind and heart.

There were trees sloped like artists' brushes - dipped in painters' pots.

The ride home from White Sulphur Springs took us up a narrow winding mountain road - I gasped aloud when I caught my first glimpse of that night's full moon - it was unbelievably large-looking, caught between two mountain slopes, looking for all the world like a giant peeled onion - sleek, translucent & greenish-white.

On the way down to the Greenbriar I saw my first complete rainbow - I could follow its arch without break from horizon to horizon.

There are two things I would wither without - music, classical music, and nature - all the components of the outdoors - or whatever you might wish to call it - in my experience each sharpens the other - I see natural things more wholly, more deeply to the accompaniment of music and, with the help of music, when away from nature, I can conjure up in my mind's eye no end of beloved panoramas from a brook in the woods to a mountain view to a peaceful countryside of fields and farms to a restless ocean's edge. "Behold the sea - the beautiful, the opaline, the strong."