View
As if a door has opened. Through it an edgeless, day-scorching light—unbound and vigilant. Its searing luminance dismantles the sky from the horizon.
Clarities come. Trees without leaves. A cloudless blue canopy. February air—its sibilance a slow chill. Across the valley, Grandfather shimmers like a mountain made of boiling skies. A white sun steeples its ridge, whose contour slowly tenses into a horizon, the highest along the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
I will die here. The thought levels my mind. I can see both ends—the journey from Alpha to Omega, birth to death—as straight as a chalk line. As never before, time feels like a possession. From the winter ground on which I stand, I step forward as the threads of my life ravel toward the horizon.
I do what I know by heart to do: I read the mountain. I scan its ancient language and interpret its syntax of peaks, its archetypes of terrain, its allusion to other mountains. Grandfather Mountain is not so much a story of topography, but of a unity summoned in the hierarchy of its peaks. As the logos it is, the mountain signifies all the lower elevations in my view. The horizon-bound ridges of other mountains accrue in its stability.
I know this mountain well. I have hiked it, stood on its peaks, gazed at it from different trails. Today, it articulates the horizon in the imperial sense: its prominence over the ridge on which I stand subordinates all my prior experiences of it.
I whisper, “I will die here”—as though saying the words will commit them to the future.
Dreams
Where do you dream? In what dark room of your house do their energies churn into infinite volumes, unstable surfaces, and wobbly parables of the weird and grandiose? And what of daydreams? While we dream in solitude, a daydream requires no private crevasse of sleep: it is an animal that forages in light, through social proximities, and nudges against any quotidian occasion. Inhabiting new territories without fear of contradicting old ones, daydreams are my favorite narratives. As a realm of soul-making in the speculative mood, they can be blueprints for future experiences—aspirational in the way that maps are.
It is no surprise that the home I will build appears to me in a daydream. Its shape evolves as I maneuver through it—finding a new room one day and a transitional space the next. Within its warmth I watch the snow fall into the woods that surround it. I turn in every direction of its light-held space. I imagine this house and my life within it, day after day, for a year—a speculative structure within the speculative structure of a dream.
After I purchase the ridge line land that framed my sun-swollen view of Grandfather Mountain, the dream imagery of building my house grows more vivid and recurrent. Becoming their own reality, these daydreams prompt an alternate and parallel existence, and I inhabit this version of my life set in the future with the one that fills the present hour.
At the age of 30, I do not need shelter outright, but a space of my own making—an interior space into which I can burrow with intimacy. A youth of displacement from one home to another instills an instinct to hold on to my surroundings—or at least feign their permanence. I can feel it now, this impulse to stay in place, and more, the imperative to settle.
Brushfire
As flames diminish, a perimeter of cold encroaches. It is early March and the mountain ridge is wintered-through. Into the late hours of the night, I lay against a grassy bank and wait as a conflagration of bark, heartwood, and pith ceases into a simmer. To burn away the heaped brush and felled trees is an act of erasure: in late spring I will build my house within the boundary of wood ash the morning will bring.
The most sublime of technologies and the most ancient of destructions, my fire is also an act of centering. It is my first night on my property, and for the first time I sense it as a place of origin. I am here. The world beyond orbits.
I also note the night sky, my first study of the stars—here. Smoke swirls to them. Their burning reprimands time. Not tonight, though—this record: the scarcity of time is a consideration for another evening. Now, a thousand diamonds dazzle, Orion a handful of them, over the dark rim of Grandfather Mountain. More than anything, I want these stars to position my gaze to them. I want these stars to anchor me to this spot on this cold ridge on this Blue Ridge mountain.
Short of breath, the fire opens its mouth and feeds on the remains of its sinking body.
Right Angle
Think what you will, but civilization is founded on the right angle. In building a house, the right angle is carpentry’s modus of elevation—its primary animating agent. As a spatial format of the highest order, its consequence is clear in every foundation that bears upon it a walled and rising structure.
For millennia, societies have housed this thought. As the underlying premise of elevation, the ninety degree angle is the gnosis of all structures. Without it, the built environment sits askew. Architecture is compromised by the correcting shim. The girding of the metropolis is a compendium of this span—a spatial distance translated into the language of steel, stone, wood, glass, and brick.
I do not know when the right angle came into being. Technically, it existed at the moment of its proof. Whether this was etched into clay tablets or written on vellum is itself a technicality: it has always existed. Its domain is where absolutes abide—no place more so than within the ethereal realm of the Ideal. Here, it is immutable and incorruptible—a perfection inimitable in the hands of the earthly carpenter.
My first act of carpentry is a right angle. I drive a wood stake into the ground to establish the first corner of my house. In doing so, I commit my house to this parcel of land, to this mountain, and to this view. My life, too, settles with this stake.
I drive another stake into the ground twenty-eight feet away and connect them by string. This string line corresponds to the east-facing wall of my house. Determining the location of a third stake establishes a right angle, whose length of string references a north wall that will contain the entrance to my house. A fourth stake completes a square that measures 28’ x 28’.
By applying the Pythagorean theorem, the “3-4-5 triangle” method allows the setting of square corners for a house’s foundation. In carpentry, the theorem is the catalyst of the built structure along horizontal planes. It is also, according to Pythagorean lore, an ordering principle of divine origin that marshals materials into an expression of dimensional form. The math is ordinate, but the mind is there—a geometric subconscious of perpendicular lines whose enclosed form is the intersection of right angles. In the foundation of my house dwells the mind of Pythagoras.
Uncle Butch
Fifteen years earlier, I walk across the yard to a dark blue pick-up that idles in front of my home. The sun will not rise for another hour. The summer after my first year of high school has just begun, and with it, my first day on a new job. I slide into the cab of the truck and exchange a silent gaze with Uncle Butch. Born Luther Bunyan Love, but only ever called Butch by family and friends, my uncle has hired me to assist on a house-building crew. I bring no skills or carpentry experience to the job, only a youthful willingness to make summer money and familial ties.
An uncle nine years my senior, Butch figures as the prodigal kin of my early years. His presence is wayward and unpredictable, but the brio that accompanies his visits suggests breadth and intensity over length and spaciousness. As many of his pastimes register as high-risk, high-consequence, Butch is often in motion—his life a makeshift assemblage of low boiling points, tested thresholds, and few reconciliations. Little in his life goes as planned, although setups for failure are often opportunities for inordinate luck or capricious fate. As a backup, his insouciance has a simmering and leveraging charm.
Butch’s skill in carpentry was acquired during his time in a state penitentiary. He enrolled in a carpentry course offered to inmates, and finding he enjoyed it, got as much out of the instruction as possible. Up to this point, he had had no true calling in life, although he never considered his hours tinkering on a car engine lost time, and he was never short of cash if he could find a pool hall. He held no extravagances for which he needed resources and their attending responsibilities, and his sweetest time is with his back against a wall playing his guitar and singing, both of which he does well.
Following his incarceration, Butch worked with two older acquaintances as a hire-out crew at single-family housing developments. The landscape of carpentry appealed to Butch’s inborn inclination for out-of-door experiences, and he had ample fortitude for physical labor. He could read a blueprint and had a natural feel for the tectonics of house construction.
At the house site, I bear the brunt of the days’ menial tasks—unstacking and stacking lumber across the site, ferrying saw-cut pieces of wood to the waiting hands of the crew, or fetching some equipment from the bed of a truck. Thoreau said he sank his nails deep into boards with one strike of his hammer. In the beginning, my nailing emphasizes attack over aim, and hinders my ability to keep pace with the others.
In a windless, humid southern summer, time at the site occasionally collapses into the boredom of repetition: twelve sheets of 4’ x 8’ plywood moved here, twenty sheets of 4’ x 8’ plywood there. I do not approach my work as an apprenticeship or as having vocational potential. The guidance I receive is specific to tasks at hand. I emulate the broad style of the crew and focus more on the avoidance of errors in my assignments.
While my carpentry skills remain rudimentary, I do gain insights into the progression of a house’s construction. I see how joists undergird a floor. I learn how to space wall studs sixteen inches on center. I see the angle cuts necessary for a vaulted ceiling. As the frame of the house emerges into recognizable domestic spaces, I catalog their structural dimensions and their requisite labor. I experience the stride and movement of a work crew in harmony. The most important lesson I learn from Uncle Butch is how one error of alignment appends another—and while corrections can be made later, amending any oblique malfeasance early on is the prudent path for moving forward.
Ridgelines
Where we are—our location—is both fixed and a fiction, a creative referencing of proximities and distances—in the same way the self is a curated construct of relationships and roles. Not long ago, I believed the self to be fait accompli, historical and determinate. Now, with good fortune, I continue to believe that our horizons, like the self, are fluid experiences.
While the view of Grandfather Mountain determined the location of my house, its peaks belong to a collective of ridgelines that surround my property. From my land’s highest elevation of 3116 feet, I can identify on a clear winter day the surrounding mountains: Flat Top Mountain, Rocky Knob, Baird Mountain, Nettle Knob, Hanging Rock, Beech Mountain, Poga Mountain, Frozenhead Ridge (where the sun sets in the middle of winter), Little Stone Mountain, Love Knob (where the sun sets in the middle of summer), Prophet Knob, Panther Knob, Snake Mountain, Rich Mountain Bald, Snakeden Mountain (where the sun rises), Bingham Hill, and Grandfather Mountain. My house is the nexus of their shared circumference, and into whose reach is gathered the thunder that rumbles down the hills, where all snows are adjacent, and where a gleaming light at sunset cradles the circulating eye.
Each peak possesses its own story, as well, and is a stitch in the historical fabric of settlers and homesteaders, of wayfarers and tradesmen and farmers, of felled timber and reclaimed forest, of agriculture and infrastructure that shaped and reshaped the terrain of the mountains that make up Watauga County, whose peaks cluster in the northwestern corner of North Carolina along the Tennessee border.
Through the seasons, these peaks shape-shift through fog and snow and mist and late-hour sunlight. As with all elevated surfaces, low light gilds their proximities. At night, they become vague speculations of depth in the un-seeable distance. But the mountains are always there. More than just a physical context, their presence is a kind of connective tissue whose visual language speaks both a territory and a perspective that centers it.
Carpenter Savant
Everett is short, has no neck to speak of and wide shoulders that spread level beneath the perch of his bearded face. His arms hinge down with brute symmetry. As they are unaccountably hairy, the worksite’s sawdust never touches his flesh, but rests atop the dense follicular forests of his forearms.
At the construction site, predictability is a consequence of repetition, and the cadence of called measurement, the shrill of the circular saw-blade, and hammer-pounded nails tune each day to a semblance of the next. Everett is the engine of this rhythm, his voice the predicating condition of the days’ sequences and their completions. Even-keeled and focused, he articulates each addition to the frame of the house in the language of carpentry, whose soundness bears within it a constructive resonance.
It is true Everett possesses no panache, no joie de vivre that I witness, although he is not without the appeasements of carpentry’s accommodating alignments and congruities. He finds satisfaction in the proper abutment of right angles and the material intersection of planes, though less as personal accomplishments and more as correspondences of geometrical pureness.
In my eyes, Everett is a philosopher-carpenter of the highest order. He interprets universal principles of space and tectonics, and applies these in the steady expansion of the physical structure that will be my house by the end of summer. Under his guidance, we conjure geometric forms from raw materials—aligning and joining sheets of wood, studs, and boards into volumetric dimensions. Whether in framing up a wall or the cutting in of an end piece, we evoke Euclid’s pure and immutable realm of rectangles, squares, and triangles—even as our efforts refuse to acknowledge that all things of this world are makeshift to the eternal.
If there is an element of Everett’s life that draws from the spirit, I am not privileged to know it. His elevations are secular: his trinity is that of all carpenters—that the built structure must be square, plumb, and true. Otherwise, to venture a glimpse into his soul would be to suggest a spiritual empiricism where integers and fractions are the voice of the divine. Everett measures to within a sixteenth of an inch—a mere sliver of materiality. Marking a surface with such a fraction is an aspiration—an attempt to approach, in good carpenter’s faith, an absolute that rings true within the structural universe of the house.
The summer is an incantation of fractions. I fall under the spell of their authority as we frame up the house, whose growing presence is a summoning of a hundred measurements, each with their cut and consequence. Everett’s voice intones the specific lengths and widths of beams and boards. The house responds. As its essence is numerical, in the Pythagorean sense, the house is a medium of the divine, hoisted to the real by Everett’s and my hand.
Subfloor
The day’s work ended hours ago after we secured the last 4’ x 8’ sheet of plywood to the subfloor of the house’s main floor. Two sawhorses are all that remain on the 28’ x 28’ platform, otherwise as bare as a stage between plays. Locust trees edge in on the left, and on the right, maple trees are close enough to touch—and below, the forest steeps swiftly to Brushy Fork Creek in the valley.
Alone in early evening light I pace the platform’s length. I feel its levelness and explore its stability. I gaze through windows that do not yet exist. I overturn and locate an empty five-gallon bucket where I will place my couch, and sit on it like the Buddha and embrace the silence. I aim my eyes south across the valley where the contours of Grandfather Mountain suggest a fate in the making.
Below the subfloor—a basement interior of 784 square feet now surrounded by footers, a ground-level concrete floor, three exterior stud walls, a floor truss system, and a subterranean cinderblock wall. The wind now contours to the horizontal and vertical planes embedded into the mountainside.
My daydreams stopped when the building began. My dreams, too. After black voids of sleep, I wake to fingers clenched, which I slowly pry open as I sit on the edge of my bed. Carpentry is insistent, bracing, always in the grip. My body is too exhausted to dream.
Into the liminal space of dusk, the dream life returns as I drift from one edge of the platform to the other. Around, the sky is all periphery. The house is now the center and the building of it the locus of all the substance of my life.
The sun casts my shadow the length of the floor like the gnomon of a sundial. Its hour-line points to a first love who still occupies space in my heart. In this fable, a door opens and she stands within it. She is only a shadow, I know. But the door will be built. Standing where it will open, I know I must remain single-minded. Tomorrow we will frame up the west wall. The agenda of construction continues. The days narrow into focus. But here, mid-journeyed, I am fixed to this hour.
Blueprint
“Where do you want the window?” Everett asks, standing on the unframed first floor of my house.
“Right about here,” I say as I widen my arms to suggest the span of the window. I stand several feet from the edge of the subfloor, facing a maple tree. Through spring’s early leaves, I can see the ridgeline in the west where the sun will set in the evening. “This is the view.”
The location of the west-facing window is predicated on the location of my dining table. The day before, in the evening when I was alone at the house site, I arranged books on the table, and a notepad and pen. I slid my hand over its oak grain. I sat at the table and stared through the window into leaf-laden branches, and beyond, my eyes trailed down the slope of the ridge following a flank of rhododendron. I imagine margins of movement around the table, the location of corner cabinets, and where a light might hang from a ceiling. There was, of course, no dining room or table, no walls present in which windows were framed. Yet all the work to date preambles this moment as I occupy a house half-constructed and half-imagined.
Everett marks the edge of the subfloor with two X’s to signify the location where we will frame in the window opening within the stud wall.
There is no blueprint. Prior to and throughout construction, the design of the house is rendered only in plan, a technical term that reveals walls as lines from a birds-eye view. The house diagrams are accounted for on two sheets of graph paper on which I have drawn the 28’ x 28’ outline of the house that includes interior walls and a kitchen plan of counter space and appliances, along with references for plumbing fixtures. No elevations are drawn, except for one set of stairs. Measurements in the plans are given for the location of doors and windows, although there are margins—wide margins—for improvisation, and the placement of most windows is decided during wall framing, saw and hammer in hand.
Other in situ decisions are made: where to put the fireplace—in the southeast corner or between the corner and the stairs? Do we frame the bathroom wall up to the vaulted ceiling or frame in a platform to create a triangular loft space above the bathroom big enough for two people to sleep in? At the last minute we decide not to frame up a triangular wall above the French door on the second floor, and leave instead an opening for a window, which will allow moonlight to access the main bedroom.
Cheese
Of a day, Everett and I will ride down the mile-long dirt road from the house site, turn left and travel down the two-lane road a half mile and park in front of the Vilas Feed & Grocery. The single gas pump, which has not functioned in decades, recalls the building’s past as the Vilas Service Station. The wood floors creak under each step, and the air smells of oil and desiccated livestock feed, whose earthy pungency flares the nostrils as you near the back wall array of farm tools and fertilizer.
On the check-out counter is a daisy of cheddar cheese—a twenty-two pound wheel mold, common for the variety, and a log of bologna. On each lunch trip to the store I watch T. P., who stands behind the counter, place his knife on the cheese. He looks up at Everett, who nods his head to the right. T. P. moves his knife over more cheese in that direction, and looks up at Everett. If Everett lowers his chin, T. P. slices the cheese. The same act plays out over the bologna.
During this time, the three or four elders who normally lounge around the check-out counter draw silent. They watch, as I do, the precise location of the knife over the cheese and bologna. Will T. P.’s initial knife placement accurately guess Everett’s appetite? How much bologna for lunch is enough bologna? Each time, when T. P. scores the cheese and bologna, it feels as if something important has happened.
Seven decades earlier, the Brushy Fork Co-Operative Cheese Factory was awarded First Prize in the cheese category at the North Carolina State Fair. Established in 1917 a mile up the road from the Vilas Feed & Grocery, the Brushy Fork factory had become the third largest in the state by 1919, using approximately 150,000 pounds of milk a year in the production of its cheddar and cream cheese.
This was not an industrial factory, brimming with smoke stacks and wage workers. The Brushy Fork factory in Vilas was a small, white-painted, gable-front, frame building. Babbling nearby was cold spring water, essential to the mountain-styled and pre-electric cooling of cow milk. The building faced unaccommodating mountain infrastructure—a rut-susceptible dirt road which nevertheless contributed to the substantial transport of cheese up the Boone Trail Highway through Vilas on to the county seat of Boone.
The production and transport of cheese through the valley below my house was inaugural. Located two miles from my property in the opposite direction of the Brushy Fork Factory, the Cove Creek Co-Operative Cheese Factory had the distinction in 1915 of being the first factory operated in the South that manufactured cheese.
How good was the cheese produced at the Brushy Fork Factory? At the Southeastern Fair held in Atlanta, Georgia in 1925, the factory’s cheddar took first place. The mountain cheese boon didn’t last, though. In 1937, a Mr. Goodrich opened up a new filling station in what was once the old Brushy Fork Cheese Factory. Only a few years later, the curds and whey of Watauga County had settled into obscurity.
Deck
I work with a single expectation—that the four holes dug below my house yesterday will be filled with fresh concrete by the end of today. I erase from my mind everything except the five-gallon bucket of wet concrete I carry down a steep fifteen-feet decline, and the empty bucket I carry back up the slope to be refilled. Within a few awkward carries, I am mired in the dirt I slide and scramble and knee into. Of the strain of sinews, the soaking perspiration, and edgeless wind—nothing is fleeting.
Each hole is three-feet deep and spaced seven feet apart to form a length of twenty-eight feet. The eight-feet distance from the house accounts for the width of the deck that will be supported by four footers and cinder-block columns with 6” x 6” wood posts built up upon them.
The margins of error narrow in constructing this twenty-four feet elevation from ground to deck level. These margins are measurable in the tone of voice in which directions to secure the deck’s critical support is both bracing and fixed: any verbal inflection can destabilize a word’s meaning or the application of its action. The twenty-feet wood posts are positioned by alignment and levels, and every anchoring ledger screw, nail, and lag bolt into the deck frame and joists ease the work’s precarious exposure to the conclusions of gravity.
As designed, the deck serves as a continuation of the living room where it functions to reconcile the antinomy of indoor and outdoor space. Its functional dimension is infinite. As a projected horizontal plane that scaffolds immensity—I am outside on it while also within the material presence and architectural breadth of the house. The deck keeps the hours of the day and to transition to its space involves a psychological shift unlike changes of occupation between adjacent interior spaces.
Of almost any deck it can be said it evokes a presence of attention, as this is where the world comes into full view. This perspective amplifies my deck’s singular function—to leverage a view of the past, the present, and the dreamt-of future. From this perch, my view is framed by a mile-wide echelon of wavering ridgelines that bottom out to Brushy Fork Creek, whose westward flow ends in the Gulf of Mexico. The view down from the deck is also full of the annotations of local history. The creek edges the old Boone Trail Highway which traces a centuries-old pioneering path of Daniel Boone. Marching east up the narrow valley below my house, General George Stoneman led 6,000 Union cavalry soldiers, who added to their provisions from the farmland within my sight, including the Benjamin Councill homestead, which boasted the first brick house constructed in the county in 1845. The house is now gone, as is the Councill grist mill and Will Holsclaw’s General Store, which collectively established a locus of commerce for the small community of Vilas over a hundred and fifty years ago.
Of all the architectural features of the house, the deck’s minimal form belies the abundances it manifests. Enacting equilibriums that contain the natural and human made, the celestial and terrestrial, and exposure and containment allow the deck to appropriate both the center which the house summons and the periphery in which it is contained.
Fog
A sog of mist lingers from one day into the next. This morning, before doors and windows are added to the framed-in structure, a dense fog drifts up the valley and enters the south door opening and trails—like the ghost of a snake—through the house and out the front door. It passes by me, a taper of concentrated vapors, and merges with the mother cloud on the north side of the house.
A fog in the old cantos forebodes reckless actions caused by short-sightedness. Or else its drift is a symbol of memories lost. As such, fog is elegiac—an encrypting ether that spirits the imagination to the horizon’s absence. Its erasure of trees settles over the valley like a crown of longing.
In the near distance, fog fills the woods: the air is permeable, a murky waft that silhouettes and desaturates the trees. Forms appear more like a dream of forms, emerging and disappearing as the fog settles and unsettles. The wooded horizon dissolves into a play of restless tonalities.
Acting as the cloud it is, fog is ephemeral. It persists without anchor—drifting away or lifting—vaporous droplets incubating rain. In late summer through early autumn when the moon is bright, you can watch the valley give birth to a wisp of fog—as winsome as a lock of your grandmother’s gray hair. Although a common scene during mornings, it is hard to pass by and not take notice: ridges and mountaintops poke above a sea of white—an archipelago of the high Appalachian Mountains.
In this area of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina it is lore that for every morning fog in August there will be a day of snow in winter. In my county where students miss an average of fifteen days of school due to winter weather, this form of forecasting is practiced more than you might expect. The tradition is to put a large bean in a jar for a heavy fog and a small bean in for a light fog. Each large bean represents a heavy snow day in winter, and a light snow day, determined by the ability to track a rabbit in it, for each small bean.
After the sun rises above the eastern ridge the valley fog burns off. Increments of color clarify. Forms—still ambient in the last of the mist—tighten into lines of contrast and depth. Remnant moisture rises back into the sky. The fog is gone in a breath.
Three Horses
Three horses graze in the high grass along the rickety wood posts of a barbed wire fence. They edge against the hard afternoon light: when it brushes across their large bodies they lean back into the shade of maple trees. The horses are on the other side of the fence, where hardwood trees run deep through the woods down to hillside meadows. They are free to roam these meadows or through a long and narrow grove of rhododendron that borders my property, but for a moment, I pause nailing boards into roof rafters and hold them on the ridge with my gaze.
I look around and see how the house enters the sky. When the time comes—is now an afterthought. Honed by the magical thinking of the level’s bleb and plumb line, every measure, mark, and cut forms a syntax of tight orders and rigid symmetries. Euclid stated that the line is infinite, but I am only interested in the linear intersections that contain the finite space of my house. The home of my daydreams has taken its form: its framed geometry articulates the human scale of my domestic aspiration. I understand the house now as the shelter it is intended to be. It will not waver in the wind. The cold will not penetrate it. The sun will animate it.
The trees that tower below me—those almost within reach and those that slope down the mountainside—sway in a wind that rears up like a high-cresting wave. My body corresponds: I feel the sway inside of me, pulling me from my spot. A hot pulse of adrenaline jolts my body. I grab the ridge beam of the roof and flatten my body against the 12” x 12” pitch of the wood planks. Everything is moving—the clouds, the air, the trees, the ground. I hold on to the house and weigh my body into its stability.
I peer over the roof ridge. The horses graze on. Their presence, calm and steady on the mountain, bridles my body. They give my mind quarter. They station me. As the inflection of fear passes, I reorient to my inventory of nails. The next rafter board is handed up to me.
The midday sun amplifies—everything. Grandfather Mountain across the valley. The clutched board. The gripped hammer. The sunk nail echoing down through the valley, whose strike pulses back in waves of determinacy. The seams join, every nail a step along its path. I ease forward as my house casts its shadow across the mountain like a touched horizon.