Catharine is a new friend of mine. She is my friend Nick's girlfriend. They and I and ten more of us just spent a week in a cabin in North Carolina in the Highlands. The cabin was built in 1911, I think, and belongs to Jon Eaton's family. It was me, Nick, Catharine, Jon, Albert, Jon M, Sam, Joe, Thomas and Owen. I arrived at the Asheville Airport on a Saturday. Flew in, out of stormy NY, down the eastern coast, over green valleys, tiny school buses, houses, lakes, factories, red trucks, a school, a church, blue sky and cumulus clouds. When my I was little, my father was getting into flying, into soaring actually. And he would pull me up on his lap in his office, in his navy blue bathrobe on Saturday morning, or Sunday morning, and he told me about the types of clouds and which were the best for flying. I landed at noon and was greeted by Albert, Jon M. and Nick. We popped in a tape from one of the wood tape bins floating in the car on the floor next to a bag of uneaten pretzels and played in Buena Vista Social Club. The bins were all classics, and later we listened to Harry Nillson's The Point as we climbed to a 4,000 ft elevation. That night we heard Jon's uncle Robin, who was out visiting his friend, a famous actress, now in her late 70's who had starred in To Kill a Mockingbird as a young lady and is now dying of brain cancer, was coming home with chicken and corn. There was still moonshine left, and weed, that the gardener had brought over yesterday evening. The moonshine would soon get me drunk, moonshine drunk, and would become the topic of many a late night porch jam, for we were led to believe, and happily, that it was the infamous Popcorn Sutton's last batch before he ousted himself to avoid going to jail. So maybe it was Sam who began to sing it, but to a Harry Belafonte calypso tune, we danced around the cabin and the barn and the porch, singing 'I'd rather die than face the Moonshine crime." I indulged, we all did, Robin too, a former wild man who still wore his wildness with ease, now a Nashville producer, and we built a bonfire and lay by it and Jon Moses played songs we knew and we all sang along, and the group thinned out, went back to the cabin or the hammock or the barn, and soon it was just a few of us, and I tuned out and tuned in to the clouds as they passed across a near full moon. I had been going through such a time, a time where it was hard for me to distinguish much, make any judgement or place value on things, let alone happiness or beauty. I banged my head against my marble bathroom wall just weeks earlier, to try at anything to get it out, exorcise the lost me. Here under the cover of this vast North Carolina sky, as we saw endlessly, the blue Ridge mountains as they stretched into Georgia, I listened, and sang freely, and finally felt awe again for the forces, natural forces, which are so much greater than I. And the trip rolled on with a similar joy and ease, we made dinner together, sang on the porch, picked concord grapes from the lawn, trying to avoid poison ivy, sang songs in the barn studio, sang songs in the kitchen, in the living room, by the fires Joe built, played dice to Jon Moses strumming. We dressed up as wild beasts for Albert and Jon M's movie. Climbed to Secret Falls and I stepped on a bees nest in a root in the ground, three stung me, I jumped through a waterfall. We made a video for Lost River, and Catharine snapped her camera every step of the way. At the end of the week we drove down the hill. I felt I could have been gone for a quarter century, and it took almost as long to get home. We woke up at 5:30, left an hour later and by 7 arrived at Albert's mom's house in Bulter, MD. She served us great dinner, we all said goodbye and Nick and Catharine took me to the train in Willmington and from there back to New York. If I can perhaps later I will try to describe the spirit and life and humor of the friends I got to be with. It was a blessing, breathing in the air, singing, walking on the wood floors that generations had walked on before me, and eating meals together on beautiful old ceramic plates. I looked up Catharine's photos and they're just stunning, she took the one in this post. Check them out, really. Catharine Maloney. And also Jon and Albert's movie, www.thebeastpageant.com - its a real true testament to heart and creativity. Until next on Peace Mountain. Blessings!
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