Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

One of the first things that Horace Kephart noticed about the mountain people was their peculiar attitudes toward water.  (Second thing was their familiar attitudes with corn liquor.)  The mountaineers did not like to travel to the flatlands because good, clean water was hard to find.  It was not unusual for them to carry water (and corn liquor) with them if they had to go outside of the mountains.  The highlanders were not known to share their mountain water although they might sell their mountain dew.

Their descendants in Altamont are still funny about sharing water.  In the early part of the 20th century, the communities of Padgettown and Walkertown gave up the ghost to be submerged under the Burnett Reservoir in Black Mountain.  The clear mountain streams that feed this august body have provided drinking water to Altamont and its environs ever since.  It initially fed independent water districts throughout the county as well.

At the end of the 1920’s the stock market crash had a disasterous effect on these highly leveraged water districts as well as the equally highly leveraged City of Altamont.  The county took over the debt of the districts but passed the infrastructure on to the city in exchange for a promise that rates would remain the same for all subscribers, wherever they lived.  This promise was subsequently written into law with the Sullivan Act.  The City said thank you very much and proceeded to use the revenue from the water system to do all sorts of things except keep the water system in good repair.

So now the City of Altamont faces the bill for maintenance long deferred.  In addition, it seeks to extend its authority beyond its borders through manipulating who does and does not get water.  Living among the Suwaree, not in the City of Altamont, I have to register my objection to this plan.  Poor planning of previous generations does not obligate me to retire another’s budget deficit.  Furthermore, I desire a voice in the discussion of decisions that will affect the Land of the Suwaree for many years to come.

In the current process to decide who will speak for Buncombe in the State Legislature, one candidate would overturn the Sullivan act and leave regional land use planning to the City of Altamont while the other has been slow to embrace any land use planning at all.  While I do not like the latter, I loathe the former.  We need our state representatives to move City and County officials closer to cooperative planning, not into further bickering and debate.  The Sullivan Acts are law, supported by multiple court rulings.  Since you don’t mind drinking the water of the Suwaree, maybe you can talk to us too.

It’s not that I want to tell people what to do. I simply want everyone to follow the rules. If they need help with the rules, I will be happy to provide such help. Because I know the rules. Let’s start with the driving.

Everyone is pretty clear on the going. Keep to the right, just like fish stick day in 3rd grade. Stopping is a different issue. The big white line is not a suggestion; it is there for a reason. The two little while lines after the one big white ones are not the place to center your front tires or to practice your track stand for that matter. Turn down the Band of Horses and back your wheeled vehicle out of my pedestrian walkway.

Speaking of pedestrians, the long cold winter seems to have deprived some of our Altamont ambulists of their muscle memory. Sidewalks are expensive. Don’t be ungrateful. Use the ribbon of concrete. Same goes for the two little white lines. I stood up for you with the dipshit on a fixed gear, so do your part and stay in the lines.

Again, I’m not saying these things because I think I know better than most. I say them because it seems as if I know more than most. If everyone knew these things, they would naturally do them right? It’s enough to make me want to go all Wayne Brady on a fool.

The fourth stalk of the butterfly bush was unwilling to be trimmed back in the way that the first three had.  The whole bush had stood through the winter, looking like a rattling skeleton of it’s summertime self.  We have cut it back in the fall before, and it failed to regenerate with the vigor we had hoped.  Last year we did not trim it much at all and it threatened to take out the rhododendron and azalea with it’s aggressive foliage.  We left it up through the winter this time, and as the fourth stalk finally succumbed, I trimmed it back substantially but not as far as it has been trimmed previously.  Hopefully we are finding some balance.

For the last month or so, Tallulah and I have spend a substantial part of Sunday afternoon together.  Sort of father-daughter bonding time.  Several weeks have involved swimming at the W, but with a tattoo healing the pool is not an option.  Today’s warmth and light probably would have kept us out of the pool anyway.  Instead we loaded up the Bucket with 8 bags of mulch and came home to spread out the blanket of decomposition across the flower beds and garden.

There is also a pumpkin from last fall’s Beltain celebration slowly melting into the dirt.  We should have a lot more decaying matter to add to this small plot of land, but I have not gotten it together to plunk down the cash for a composter.  It just comes hard to think about laying out a wad of dough for something that makes dirt, even if that dirt is very special.

What I want is the beautiful garden, but not the terrible process that will produce it.  The food scraps that go into a dark dispose-all or garbage bag don’t remind me of the greens I am not eating.  There’s no turning, and turning,

and turning,

and

turning, and waiting to see what the outcome will look like.  I don’t want to spread the humus and hope that the rain will come in the right amount and the sun will come in the right amount and everything will turn out.  When I see a beautiful garden, for some reason, it does not connect that the gardener as gone through all of these steps too.  Just because all I see is the beautiful does not mean that some ugly has not gone into getting it there.

The trip to Lake Tomahawk began with great consternation.  Why do I get so excited about super-broadband access when there are kids who will be hungry today?  How do I respond when a person of my same religious creed refers to the Dude and the SubDude as reptiles on the newspaper website?  Who can I trust to advance the cause of sensible land use in the Land of the Suwaree without disenfranchising the Suwaree in the process?  These are not bad questions, but they are a bit hard at 7:45 on a Saturday morning.

And there is something in me that becomes suspicious when I value participation on an Internet message board above conversation with My Sweet Lady.  Being active in one’s community is not a bad thing, but since I have chosen to be a husband and father, perhaps my priority should be on getting Fruit and Fiber rather than Google Fiber.  It’s taken a lot of time for me to learn that being a good family man, working man, and man of faith is a full day’s work.

It’s also honest work, honorable work.  There are things I can’t do, at least not at this point in my life, and sustained participation in public discussions is one of them.  Other things I can do, and like Voltaire’s Candide, I want to cultivate my garden.  As I returned from the journey over the mountain and felt the warmth of the sun on my back, it occurred to me that the time to start some sprouts in a cold frame may have come.

Big P and I were standing in the tall grass outside his house.  He was relating his joy in going to college, a joy which he had not felt before.  The difference, this time around, was that he had found something to study that he really loved: ancient Rome.  He loved Rome because Rome was full of misfits.  In the beginning, the Romans recruited all the castoffs and outlaws and undesirables from the surrounding region to come be its first citizens.  Big P could identify with these guys, and he loved learning about them.  What he really wanted to do was to teach kids about Rome.  There was just one problem: drug testing.  By his own evaluation, BP could not be a teacher because he loved smoking dope too much.

The shame of this, in my mind, was that Big P could not let go of who he had been in order to become who he could be.  I’m not saying that it is wrong to be a stoner grocery clerk, but given the choice, I’d rather be a history teacher.  On the other hand, I could also understand how hard it is to give up my idea of who I am, no matter how much sense that idea makes or doesn’t make to anyone else.  Giving up cigarettes involved my giving up a little bit of who I thought I was.  Giving up active participation in local politics meant giving up a lot of who I thought I was supposed to be.

In “the Sound of Music” Maria has a line that goes. “When over God closes a door, he opens a window.”  This is pretty close to the Quaker saying, “Way will open.”  Parker Palmer, a good Quaker, points out that sometimes “Way will close.”  Whenever a door opens, it seems to me like an invitation to go inside, and yet some rooms are not meant for me.  How would I know this if I did not go in and check it out?  So I back slowly into the hallway and watch the door close again.  But then it’s dark.  And the window does not always open automatically.  And I would sometimes rather be back in the room that sucks instead of out in the hall where I don’t know what is going on.  At least when the next door, or window, or transom, or pet egress, or mail slot, or whatever opens up, I will know that — going in or coming out — I am still me.