Fire-Watching

Courtesy Dianne Davant and Associates

By Gail Greco / Photos by Tom Bagley

In the 2021 film French Exit, actress Michelle Pfeiffer casts a wry grin at a surly cafe waiter as she flicks her cigarette lighter, torching the table’s flowerpot centerpiece. Mother and son (actor Lucas Hedges) smugly perceive a victory. But by the next scene, things have changed. The flames have won—won them over. The teeny fire has drawn them in big-time. They are transfixed and transformed, smiling with a reckoning.

Only a restaurateur safely plays with fire at a diner’s table, flambéing fruit, blazing stir-fries, or kindling cake candles. Although the movie succeeds in highlighting the power of a softly glowing fire, we in the High Country are the better keepers of the flame, the ultimate fire-watchers, and for good reasons.

For one thing, fire-watching is a form of meditation known to reduce stress and blood pressure, and boost brain function. “Gazing into the flames goes right to our very soul. Our time with others’ becomes more enjoyable and meaningful,” advises Boone, NC, holistic healer and chiropractor Dr. Stuart Y. Kaplan.

Suzette Faith Foster, vision holder and spiritual coach for Guiding Star Light Center in Boone, adds that fire-watching brings clarity and hope. “The peace and camaraderie of sitting around a fire affects everyone differently. Fire in this setting is non-judgmental, calling us to deprogram any limited beliefs that no longer serve us, transmuting them into the fire for cleansing,” she guides. “Fire’s raw power can destroy, but I honor its gentle strength and opportunity for grace.” Author of the 2015 book Calling Back Your Power, she also encourages, “Look behind the light...always available is the sense of the divine.”

Today, a firepit is not only a ring of stone around a wood-burning bonfire. The word firepit has come to mean a fixed circle of safety (often fueled by gas) with unlimited styles of free-standing pits, fire tables, and other vessels as small as that Hollywood jardiniere, and just as sensual.

“They’re called firepots,” demonstrates Roger Robertson, owner of the home lifestyles shop The Last Straw in Blowing Rock, NC. He illuminates a smokeless, bio-gel fuel canister atop a foot-tall, iridescent glass, chiminea-shaped jug called Mosaic Magnum. It’s one in a line of other earthenware firepots—some only five inches tall—used anywhere, including indoors on the dinner table, and when not in use they’re a decorative accent or flower vase. As Magnum’s flame rises and whimpers a crackle, I see it’s a little firepit that could! I’m mesmerized and beckon the shopkeeper, “Please don’t use the firepot’s snuffer to put out the light just yet.”

Various styles of firepits have their own safety tips, but one universal tenet is to mount them on a level, hard (not grassy) surface. For example, Shae Jones, owner of Ground Effects and All Seasons Landscaping Supply and Garden Center, built the firepits at Blue Ridge Mountain Club on patio surfaces. Charming outdoor rockers flank the main pit there, where members of this large community, located between Boone and Blowing Rock, can bond in a unique way.

Also to prevent any itinerant flames, Sheila Gentry, owner of The Cabin Store Outdoor in West Jefferson, suggests adding mesh domes atop portable firepits. The shop carries them in various sizes and some come with the screening top, including the cool-looking burnished copper pit that Gentry describes as maintenance-free and “so heavy that it won’t budge in our mountain winds. People want to be outdoors more than ever, and firepits extend that outdoor living time.”

Traditional grounded pits are the largest type of firepit, “and a highly desirable amenity in our mountain area, since we can gather outdoors three out of four seasons,” notes Pam McKay, ASID interior designer for Dianne Davant & Associates in Banner Elk. “When building a new home, it’s often at the top of the wish-list for comfort and to encourage and enrich family time.”

Skewering s’mores is serious firepit culture. But if you’re into serving more than the meltingly iconic chocolate marshmallow sandwiches, then another popular option is a firepit table. These have a built-in

Continued on next page

FIREPITS: Continued from previous pageFIREPITS: : continued from previous page

Courtesy of the Cabin Store Outdoor

Autumn-

Hour One of many changes?indoor firepot styles

countertop (such as tile or granite) around the fire bowl for food and drinks.

If there’s no firepit at your house or community, you can enjoy the experience at public firepits, including the one at the festive Village of Banner Elk emporium on Azalea Circle. Here, you’re invited to just sit a spell and enjoy the warmth between shopping; checking on a game at the sports bar; relaxing after a friendly duel in the arcade; or dining at Sorrento’s Italian Bistro or the Chef’s Table.

Over on Beech Mountain, the resort village is the perfect place to relax by one of their many firepits—recent renovations have transformed the alpine village at the base of the slopes into a park-like plaza, with a pavilion and social area that includes multiple firepits and outdoor seating. And over in Blowing Rock, Chetola Resort welcomes locals, visitors, and guests to enjoy their amenities, including a spacious firepit by the lake, where families can gather ‘round a bonfire and share s’mores on many weekends.

No matter what the fire, or where it’s burning, it’s Kaplan’s inkling that “we have fire-watched since Paleo times and we will always seek this comfort.” So grab some fire-watching essentials—a blanket and a beer. I’m opening a can now, Cloud Rise from Blowing Rock Brewing Company. A fitting choice, considering the flame rising now from my own firepit. I think that if nothing else, during this, our endearing season of the harvest moon, a warm blaze on a cool night will keep fanning the flames of my desires! And yours?

828-733-3603 • www.BlueRidgePropaneAvery.com Avery County’s Only Locally Owned Full-Service Propane Company

Sales & Service / Gas Appliances / Firelogs / Space & Wall Heaters Tankless Water Heaters / Outdoor Fire Pits

“Proudly Serving the High Country since 1992”

NC LICENSE # 21823

1104 Hwy 105 • Boone, NC 828-264-9476 www.PeabodysWineAndBeer.com

By Jim Casada

As this material is being written there’s an elusive but nonetheless tangible hint of autumn at dawn and again at dusk; or, as my beloved Grandpa Joe used to put it, “You can feel fall in the air.” Those harbingers of my favorite time of year are largely sensory in nature. Slightly lower temperatures and reduced humidity provide at least a glimmering of what is to come, and that’s particularly true at dawn and dusk. Take a walk in the gloaming anywhere you get away from asphalt and the ear-assaulting noise of nearby traffic and you enjoy a majestic insect orchestra at full volume. Katydids and crickets give voice with a degree of exuberance that sounds like date night in the Tower of Babel. At mid-day delicate aromas from fall flowers such as wild asters, golden rod, and Joe Pye weed drift through the air while grasshoppers saw away on their built-in fiddles. Dust devils dance across sere fields where crops have been made and laid by. Early coloration on sumac, black gum, and those sentinels of fall, hickory trees, serve as harbingers of October’s palette and leaf peeper delight.

All of these signs and sensations, among a myriad of others, take me joyfully back to simple pleasures of a mountain boyhood and fall pursuits during adolescent seasons in the sun. Perhaps a longing look back to that world we have largely lost will resurrect similar sensations in others or, better still, serve as an incentive to participate in them. All the activities described below share certain things in common, and that’s a reflection of the decidedly modest economic circumstances I knew as an adolescent. They cost little, needed minimal if any equipment, and mostly required a large measure of gumption. All got you out of doors, necessitated considerable expenditure of energy, and were flat out fun.

One of those simple pleasures was broom sedge “sledding.” As summer morphed into autumn, hillside pastures, worn out cropland, and indeed most any open area that wasn’t being carefully cultivated would be overgrown with sedge. Once that wild grass matured and dried in late September and October, on any sunny day such terrain would be, by mid-afternoon, a wonderful place to board the cheapest of all sleds in the form of a large section of cardboard. Any old box that had been flattened out was quite suitable. It lacked a steering mechanism but once you jumped aboard and headed down a sedgeladen hillside, you immediately understood the simile, “slick as greased lightning.” Zipping over a golden carpet, the cardboard carried you downhill at breakneck speed. There was no means of braking other than rolling off, hanging on until the ground leveled out, or tumbling into an obstacle such as a briar patch. It was grand fun and carried just enough of an element of uncertainty and danger to satisfy daredevil youngsters.

Although dramatically different, another seasonal pursuit was just equally enjoyable and offered the added benefit of meaningful returns as opposed to the bangs, bruises, and scratches regularly accumulated from broom sedge sledding. This was gathering black walnuts. The process was a multi-part one that involved appreciable effort. It began with picking up baskets or tow sacks full of the nuts soon after they fell. They would then be spread out in a sunny spot for the hulls to dry. Once that was achieved, the nuts could be easily (and stainlessly) removed. Then came the two most tedious aspects of the nutting process—cracking and shelling the walnuts to obtain the delicious meats. It required care, a watchful eye to avoid getting bits of hard shell in the delectable goodness, and lots of time. Yet the complex operation, from beginning to end, was one an entire family could enjoy, and the end results, in forms such as oatmeal/walnut cookies, black walnut cakes, or maybe even a hand-cranked churn of walnut ice cream, were sheer culinary bliss.

Another food-related activity involved apples. Since my family had a tiny orchard, that may have been of greater significance to me than a lot of others, but in the High Country, autumn and apples go together like country ham and redeye gravy. The whole process of picking, sorting, peeling to can “fruit” (we used that term rather than apple sauce or canned apples, and Momma was never satisfied until she had a hundred quarter jars lining basement shelves), slicing thin and drying, and the weekly chore of going through storage bins to remove apples that were going bad, was labor intensive yet welcome. When you lived in a home where apples featured on the menu two or three times every day, where fried apple pies and apple cobblers were standard desserts, and where the ultimate offerings for the sweet tooth were applesauce cakes and stack cakes, understanding and appreciation of everything associated with apples was a given.

Continued on next page

Photo by Tipper Pressley

WISDOM: Continued from previous page

Then there were the joys, ones I fear are all too seldom enjoyed today, of squirrel hunting. Once the season opened in October, my daily routine was a straightforward one of rushing home from school, changing school clothes for my Duxbak attire, grabbing my gun and a couple of cold fried pies or maybe a big chunk of cornbread and a raw onion or turnip, and heading for some bushytail-holding patch of woods lying within walking distance. From then until light faded to night and it was time to head home, I was in veritable hillbilly heaven.

Those days in the quest for bushytails served me well in many ways over the course of my evolution as a hunter and in life. I learned patience, persistence, how to read signs, stealth, marksmanship, a degree of selfsufficiency, and the ways of the natural world. Mind you, the end results of successful hunting in the form of squirrel and dumplings on the family table—or maybe fried squirrel with biscuits, gravy, and sweet potatoes—was culinary delight of the kind no four-star restaurant can ever hope to match.

There were other pursuits aplenty. Games of rolly bat as the World Series approached and engendered one last fling with ball and bat before they were put away for another season. Gathering persimmons for that most delectable of desserts, a properly made persimmon pudding. Picking up ripe pawpaws for a field snack or enjoying the sweet/sour succulence of the inside of mature maypop fruit beginning to wither and yellow from ripeness. The dawn to dusk and beyond labor of hog-killing time, with every bit of the work being forgotten the moment you sat down to a meal featuring fresh tenderloin fired to a perfect turn and flanked by a big plate of cathead biscuits. Gathering the various winter squash; eating pumpkins, candy roasters, acorn squash, and cushaws; and storing them beneath shocks of corn or carefully nestled against the cold in protective layers of straw. Making “’lasses” (sorghum syrup) and knowing you’d have long sweetening, as it was once known, to enjoy all through the winter.

Those offer a slender sampling of a time when mountain life involved simpler days and simpler ways. Folks lived close to the good earth, found much of their fun and sustenance in pursuits where there was no clear dividing line between work and play, and knew in intimate fashion the verities of the timeless adage suggesting that the key to a joyous life was to “make do with what you’ve got.” For me, at least, “making do” was a never-ending time of wonder. I can only hope that at least some readers are blessed by having known similar jubilation.

Photo by Gary Peeples, USFWS

Jim Casada is a full-time freelance writer who grew up in the N.C. High Country. His latest of many books, several of which have won national awards, is Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir. Signed copies are available from him through his website, www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com or standard Internet sources.

By Michael C. Hardy

North Carolina is well known for blazing trails and setting records: the first colony to declare independence; the first to instruct its delegates to vote for independence from the British; the first in flight; the highest incorporated town in the eastern United States; and the highest peak east of the Mississippi River. This last peak is named for a remarkable man in the early history of the state of North Carolina.

Elisha Mitchell was born in Washington, Connecticut, in August 1793. In 1813, he graduated from Yale University, and in 1817, he was licensed to preach by the Congregational Western Association. Mitchell taught at a number of New England schools before accepting a position as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of North Carolina. In 1825, Mitchell became professor of chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. Besides teaching, Mitchell officiated at chapel services on campus.

Mitchell was ahead of his time in some aspects. He disliked Jacksonian democracy, supported progress, wanted a taxsupported system of common schools, believed in the education of women, supported temperance and temperance societies, and advocated for better roads in the western part of North Carolina to improve economic access to the area. Mitchell was also a slave owner, acquiring slaves at some point after he moved to North Carolina.

Beginning in the late 1820s, Doctor Mitchell began working on a state-wide geological and mineralogical survey commissioned by the General Assembly. He spent summers surveying the coastal plain and piedmont regions before heading west. In July 1828, he visited Grandfather Mountain. Beyond collecting plants and rocks, Mitchell was interested in the question of which mountain east of the Mississippi was the tallest. Mount Washington in New Hampshire was believed to be the tallest mountain. Mitchell (and several others) believed that a peak in western North Carolina was taller, and over the next two decades he surveyed numerous peaks in the area, including Grandfather, the Roan, and the Black Mountains.

As early as 1828, Mitchell believed that a peak in the Black Mountains, bordering Yancey, McDowell and Buncombe counties, boasted the highest point. He was in the area measuring in 1835, 1838, and 1844. During the latter trip, he measured a peak at 6,708 feet, 250 feet higher than Mount Washington. His observations were challenged in 1855 by Thomas L. Clingman, a former student and member of Congress. Clingman claimed that he had measured a different peak at 6,941’, over two hundred feet higher than Mitchell’s. Much of the debate was waged publicly in various newspapers. Professor Mitchell returned to the Black Mountains in June 1857 to verify which peak he had previously climbed and to confirm his measurements. On June 27, Mitchell, traveling alone, was caught in a thunderstorm. He evidently tripped and fell into the pool of a waterfall, where it appears he drowned. Mitchell was first buried in Asheville, but a year later, his remains were moved to the highest peak on the mountain. The U.S. Geological Survey upheld Mitchell’s measure of the highest peak in 18811882, and officially named the peak Mount Mitchell. The current official measurement of Mount Mitchell is 6,684 feet, strikingly close to Mitchell’s original 1835 measurement of 6,672 feet. In 1915, a bill was introduced in the General Assembly establishing the Mount Mitchell State Park, the first state park in North Carolina. Today, there is a visitor center, museum, hiking trails, and an observation tower. The North Carolina Highway Historical marker was erected in 1988.