Sunday, November 06, 2005
Blue Ridge Trip
By the way, here is a piece about the Blue Ridge inspired by a sentence from a friend's Blog. The prompt for this piece was a piece of imagery on Tantric Sex which goes as follows: “Describe the sound of a moist waffle falling onto a hot griddle."
First one cannot escape the hot and mild humidity in this place called Blowing Rock a town just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Famished, we walked into the Speckled Trout Restaurant and the smell of hot grease added to our body temperature. There they give you a choice of which side of the restaurant to sit in. On one side there is no air conditioning. I want to believe it is an effort to separate the smokers from the non smokers. In the middle of these two spaces-the Kitchen. Throughout the restaurant, all you hear is the sizzle of fryers bubbling and spattering. It was also the bathroom side too. It held rough hewn southerners smoking, drinking beer and eating fried trout. Since my body was heating up, I decided then and there, I wanted the non-smoking air condition area and so they placed us in front of the walk-in freezer. Cold air rolled out upon us each time they gathered or put away the frozen trout. A young Canadian transplant named Tal greeted us and asked what we wanted to drink. He gave us our tea-one sweet, syrupy sweet and the other is not. And then he asked me what I wanted to eat and I said “Trout”! He then asked, "Do you want that trout deep fried or pan fried?" I ordered pan fried. It was regional and it was good eating, yet I couldn’t tell if it was deep or pan fried.
My discomfort leads me to believe whether trout is deep fried or pan fried, it doesn’t mingle well with sweet tea. From Route 321 we turned onto the Blue Ridge Parkway and toward Linville to visit a place where they made the movie “The Last of the Mohicans”. It is also an area where a Professor of Religious study at Appalachia State University in Boone, NC, told us about a church. This is a church of recovering Baptist and Conservative ideologues. There you go, another Church and as one Carolinian shared, “you’re in the buckle of the bible belt”. On the Parkway, the miles dissipated into the past and I forgot about my discomfort. I became cognizant of the trees on each side of the road. We drove through the longest most beautiful tree tunnels I have ever seen. It felt like music to me as the leaves were the notes and the trees were like horn players on each side of the road blowing notes of beautiful colors. Colors that reached across the road until they met forming a canopy of infused color-crescendos of color! Everywhere, you are surrounded with colors of bright yellows, soothing greens, fall oranges and brilliant reds. One could see the shades of light-a million shades of light and occasionally, shafts of light bursting through the color. They are spot lights on the two lane road left behind in the rear view mirror. I could feel the air in my lungs rise and fall as I breathed. There is a calming you get upon exhalation just as your finger depresses the button of a camera and inside of you, what is left inside of you is the fragrance and essences of color from these beautiful mountains.
First one cannot escape the hot and mild humidity in this place called Blowing Rock a town just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Famished, we walked into the Speckled Trout Restaurant and the smell of hot grease added to our body temperature. There they give you a choice of which side of the restaurant to sit in. On one side there is no air conditioning. I want to believe it is an effort to separate the smokers from the non smokers. In the middle of these two spaces-the Kitchen. Throughout the restaurant, all you hear is the sizzle of fryers bubbling and spattering. It was also the bathroom side too. It held rough hewn southerners smoking, drinking beer and eating fried trout. Since my body was heating up, I decided then and there, I wanted the non-smoking air condition area and so they placed us in front of the walk-in freezer. Cold air rolled out upon us each time they gathered or put away the frozen trout. A young Canadian transplant named Tal greeted us and asked what we wanted to drink. He gave us our tea-one sweet, syrupy sweet and the other is not. And then he asked me what I wanted to eat and I said “Trout”! He then asked, "Do you want that trout deep fried or pan fried?" I ordered pan fried. It was regional and it was good eating, yet I couldn’t tell if it was deep or pan fried.
My discomfort leads me to believe whether trout is deep fried or pan fried, it doesn’t mingle well with sweet tea. From Route 321 we turned onto the Blue Ridge Parkway and toward Linville to visit a place where they made the movie “The Last of the Mohicans”. It is also an area where a Professor of Religious study at Appalachia State University in Boone, NC, told us about a church. This is a church of recovering Baptist and Conservative ideologues. There you go, another Church and as one Carolinian shared, “you’re in the buckle of the bible belt”. On the Parkway, the miles dissipated into the past and I forgot about my discomfort. I became cognizant of the trees on each side of the road. We drove through the longest most beautiful tree tunnels I have ever seen. It felt like music to me as the leaves were the notes and the trees were like horn players on each side of the road blowing notes of beautiful colors. Colors that reached across the road until they met forming a canopy of infused color-crescendos of color! Everywhere, you are surrounded with colors of bright yellows, soothing greens, fall oranges and brilliant reds. One could see the shades of light-a million shades of light and occasionally, shafts of light bursting through the color. They are spot lights on the two lane road left behind in the rear view mirror. I could feel the air in my lungs rise and fall as I breathed. There is a calming you get upon exhalation just as your finger depresses the button of a camera and inside of you, what is left inside of you is the fragrance and essences of color from these beautiful mountains.
