Time has worn the old mountains to modest heights and gentle profiles. Some days you barely notice them. Still, the blue horizon draws the eye.
The mountains often make me wish I were a painter. The effect of winter daylight on their softly contoured watersheds produces impressions I try hard to hold in my mind. But the colors of the Blue Ridge in winter, a continuum of undramatic changes, won't stay within the discrete compartments of my words--the uninspired grays, greens, and browns I have at my fingertips. Language is one thing, but morning light slanting into the abrupt eastern slope of the Blue Ridge quite another. And evening light leaving the gentle western ridges, that too moves just ahead of the reach of a sentence, like a deer you are trying to photograph in the woods.
From a distance the Blue Ridge is uniformly gray in winter, but the gray darkens to brown as you approach the mountains. At streamside the brown is laced with the greens of eastern hemlock and white pine, as well as the waxy sheen of rhododendron and mountain laurel. The gray that was only a haze from the interstate solidifies as outcropped bedrock--neutral tones of quartzite and granite, the stuff of ridgelines and riverbeds. This gray and brown world that underwrites the green world--the world of bedrock, bare trees, and leaf litter--has a skeletal clarity about it that is easy on the eye and seems to offer some depth of perspective.
The blue for which the mountains were named is rare in winter, but there are evenings in late December when, viewed from the east against a salmon sky, the enfolded ridges take on a indigo hue that makes them appear larger than they are, higher and cut more deeply into the horizon.
Rivers run quietly, steadily through the gray and brown world, and the rivers, more than any other feature in the landscape, tempt you to make sense of the scene. But it is hard for words to follow water flowing over a staircase of moss-covered greenstone, or trace the pleasing abstract of sycamore bark at streamside, or depict the attitude of a junco keeping its distance in the winter understory. The near sound of rivers, like the far sound of geese in flight, plays on one's consciousness without resolution.
In winter trout are nowhere to be seen, but you know they are there. They inhabit a cold within the rivers that is older than the mountains themselves.
I move tentatively through the year's shortest day, as if I'm on the edge of something. I do not like the brief, dark days when the silent turn of the year in the dead of winter seems to stall. In early January I drive north along the eastern flank of the mountains twenty miles to get my fishing license at Wolftown in Madison County, Virginia. I buy it at the old post office and general store there, because I believe that somehow brings me luck. The locals wonder where I come from.
This year it was so cold I didn't bother to drive on three miles to the Rapidan, past Graves Mill, to start the year's fishing. The leaden sky seemed to get lower by the minute, as if it were packing the frigid air deep into fields of corn stubble and snow-dusted pastures, and I was glad not to be wading what I knew would be a gray, uninviting river.
But back home, I was as restless as the wintering Canada geese that flew about the county in undisciplined vees from frozen cornfields to freezing farm ponds all afternoon. My house wasn't as warm as I thought it would be, and I kept moving from room to room, looking out the windows.