Roanoke College.
College Lutheran Church.
I keep telling people on my native Long Island how hilly it is in Southwest Virginia. Depending on where you live, you might need to walk up or down just to visit your nextdoor neighbor. It seems like nothing to people who raised here. But it can feel utterly strange at first to anyone who grew up in a region that is almost uniformly flat.
The first is a terrible picture, of course; it was taken from a moving car. I’m sharing it here anyway, because I still like the effect of the backlit entrance to the Confederate Cemetery at dusk.
The second photo is of houses on Amelia Street.
These were taken from a moving car — my friends and I were headed for dinner in Salem. As I’ve explained before, I have a weird thing about blurry pictures taken from a moving vehicle. And the foreboding and colorless quality of these shots makes them extra trippy.
The disembodied black blurs that you see are actually trees close to the roadway; I thought the effect was pretty damned cool — especially in that last shot. The second-to-last shot would be great to accompany a haunted house story.
I have no doubt that many of you will find it strange, but sometimes I really like blurry photos of a rainstorm. They have a dreamlike quality and, every once in a while, you’ll get a shot that resembles an impressionist painting.
That’s Edmund Burke speaking, or at least we think it is — the statement was attributed to him by John Stevens Cabot Abbott in 1876. It seems relevant with an eye towards Donald Trump’s apparent equivocation about the neo-nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There are two other Burke quotes that might spring to mind, too, after this past weekend’s alt-right rally and the murder of a 32-year-old counter-protestor, Heather Heyer.
The first is one I grew up hearing from my father, although today I discovered that it, too, may be apocryphal: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (I’ve read that there is no primary source citing Burke as the speaker here; he may have been paraphrasing John Stuart Mill.)
But Burke definitely penned a similar sentiment: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
This is a terrible picture, but … you see those tall, dark shapes ascending from the high, bare branches like grotesque, upright fruit? Those would be buzzards.
Or … turkey vultures. To be honest, I don’t know if there is any difference between turkey vultures and buzzards. I’m from New York.
“Roanoke Summer Midnight”
Its silhouetted mountains
are great blue gods at slumber
the faded-haze azure horizon’s
giants in the dim.
Those slopes have known a billion bones of hares
that raced upon them other midnights, then,
pausing, one by one,
and drawing up their downy legs at last to final sleep.
Where the Shenandoahs’ driving
beryl falls to black,
ultramarine to onyx,
lay legions of hares — generations resting.
There are the hills where ivory
rabbits sleep among gods.
Ahead and under moonlight
the curving rural road obscures its end.
At right, an intersecting well-lit modern block
confuses the curling topography.
The fresh and symmetrical asphalt’s angle
mars the winding thoroughfare with order —
a ninety-degree anachronism.
That new and perfect subdivision
affronts the corner’s antebellum chimney,
broken down to stones and overrun in lavender
— its lilac colors driven plum by sunset.
That last century’s smokestack
was itself effrontery once
to the formless places where natives stayed,
their only edifice the stars,
their only currency the blinding coin of moon.
Eyeing, then, the summits’ crowning cobalt
driving down in royal blue to coal,
I hope to one day take my rest
there, in the darkening indigo,
alongside giants,
among white rabbits in myriad easy stillness,
to pause myself at last and sleep beneath
what meadows stretch in cerulean dark,
where hares will race like moon-kissed silver,
or comets of darting pearl.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2017
Photo credit: By Jessie Eastland (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
If you look closely at the third photo, you can see a helicopter beginning an ascent from the top of Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Evidently, the facility’s landing pad is at the top of its cylindrical section. It kept landing and returning the day I took this photo; I’m guessing that a pilot was either training or practicing.
Or maybe not. They’re a good deal blurrier than I’d hoped.
I encountered this lost little lady about an hour ago. She was between a rock and a hard place — the fence and the adjacent road.
I did the best that I could to help her. (Hey, if there is a human who knows what it’s like to be lost and confused in Roanoke, it’s me.)
But my assistance didn’t amount to much. The best I could do was wave at oncoming cars and point out the deer to them. (She kept wandering into the road in desperation. At one point an SUV almost hit her … she collapsed and clattered to the street in fear, and, trust me, that is one heartbreaking sound). I’m not sure what more I could have done; I’m no Deer Whisperer.
Anyway, a pair of pretty girls showed up in a jeep and cheerfully assured me that they would take it from here. They sounded pretty confident, and they seemed like Roanoke natives who were well-versed in country ways. (They had a jeep.)
Either the fawn is now fine, or someone’s serving venison extra tender tonight.
At left is a Bradford Pear tree, at right is a Cleveland Pear.
Bradford Pear.
This Bradford Pear tree was felled by a derecho windstorm.
Termites? A mutant steel-billed woodpecker?
I have no idea what this … organism is, but it looks like the inside of a dog’s ear.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 