Appalachian State University - Rhododendron Yearbook (Boone, NC)

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You think of short trips to the rainbow-colored ;averns in Linville where blind fish plough the anderground river like the lost tribes seeking the aromised land, eveni ngs spent at Wiseman ' s View searching for the legendary Brown Mountain Lights and theorizing about their myth-shrouded source, or raucous weekends at Holly ' s or the Villa Maria. You imagine the rapid slamming of dogger ' s feet on a hard oak floor and the blatant shock of that first sip of white lightning at the back of your throat. Or you imagine the fall of apples, like small fists applauding their own crisp ripeness, of the first snowfall when the white crystals seem to fall out of a saw-edged sun and drift to the ground like vanishing manna, like tiny slivers of a spun-glass dream. You look forward to the explosion of flowers that will follow the snow - heal-all, jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, rhododendron. You await the sweet showers of April washing the roots and stirring you to blood-touched pilgrimages to the rock and water, the unreality of Linville Falls, to the trails, to the rivers and fields and treetops and ridge crests and split-rail fences that unfold the eternal glories of the Appalachian Mountains. You hook your thumbs in your belt and hum a few bars of Foggy Mountain Breakdown or Cripple Creek and light up a corncob pipe and throw back your shoulders to give a rebel yell that rises from deep in the blood in your guts to the rim of the heavens. You know that you are in Appalachia and at ease and glad as a fox in the hen yard to be at home where the sun splashes off the mica sheets in the mountains as if the hills themselves were the source of the light, the source of the energy, the source of life. When December locks the mountains in shadowed chains of blue snow, you hoist your skis and set out for the slopes, or you sled or drink steaming apple cider and watch the sky fall softly through an ice-sheened window. Your curl into your parka and mittens, your hood and boots, and explore the exploding flower of winter, for in the mountains you are free and able to resist the ruin that hovers in fragments over the rest of the world. Scenics 7

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