Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 1, 1993 TAG: 9307300428
SECTION: DISCOVER PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I get a lot of pleasure from looking at the mountains," Carol says. To her husband, they are timeless sources of solitude and serenity.
The Hills can see mountains from their home at Smith Mountain Lake. Each morning, as they commute to Roanoke, they watch the sun light up the side of Windy Gap Mountain - a sight, Carol says, that can bring tears to your eyes. They get irritated when they see the mountains defiled. And they are delighted when friends come to visit and see for themselves what the Hills mean by natural beauty.
"They're amazed how pretty it is when they come here," Carol says, "and they always comment on it."
If there is one thing people across the Roanoke Valley agree on - and there may be only one - it would be that the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains that encircle us are uplifting to look at. Their peaks provide us with reference points both geographic and emotional. Their age gives us a sense of perspective. And their histories remind us that this area was not always a settled place.
With their lush foliage and changing colors, they insinuate themselves into the soul of anyone who lives here. Their beauty strikes even those who are just passing through.
Al Parker, 44 years old and "homeless by choice," said these mountains are as pretty as anything he has seen since taking to the road more than three years ago. Parker has hitched and bused his way north to Canada, west to Arizona and south to Florida, performing odd jobs and seeing the sights as he recovers from a broken relationship. He was sitting on a bench by the lily pads in Roanoke's Elmwood Park, wearing just shorts, socks, running shoes and a baseball cap, and reflecting on the itinerant life.
He had time. His morning job search proved futile. It was an hour before his Rescue Mission lunch. He said he was trying to earn $26 for a bus ticket back home to Richmond.
Once there, he hoped to "wise up pretty soon and get stable." Bumming around was OK,"but there's not much future in it," he said. There's not much leisure in it, either.
When you have a steady job, you can take time to appreciate your surroundings, he said. When you're scrambling for your next meal, you tend to lose sight of those things.
Parker sounded like a man who was tired of scrambling. Maybe the mountains put him in that thoughtful mood.
The mountains can take you away from your worries, says Scott Geller, an environmental psychologist at Virginia Tech. You don't even have to climb them or drive through them. Just having them in view, knowing that they're there, can provide the sense of control so vital in combatting stress.
"I think a lot of it could be unconscious," he says. "We're not even aware of the value of the peace and quiet of the mountains."
He sometimes has to remind himself to enjoy the scenery as, preoccupied, his drives from his home in Newport in Giles County to his office at Virginia Tech. Yet he knows, deep inside, that the mountains have had much to do with his staying here for 25 years, despite job offers from schools like Memphis State and the universities of Florida and Colorado.
He credits his wife, Carol, a professor of special education at Radford University, for that choice. Originally from Chicago, she was awed when they moved to Blacksburg, and resistant whenever he thought that maybe they should leave.
Now, he is thankful for her reluctance. He says he couldn't live in a better place.
Around Roanoke, the mountains may not be as overpowering, visually, as the Alps, but they are quietly majestic. Though no peak rises as high as 4,000 feet, there are some spectacular views, like the one from McAfee Knob on Catawba Mountain, and others from spots along the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is when they are taken as a group that the mountains seem most impressive.
"Mother Nature was in an expansive, not to say gay and slightly hysterical mood, when she fashioned the Roanoke region, for she followed no set pattern but gave the earth a bewilderingly beautiful variety of hills and valleys, crags and ravines, to set a scene as alluring as it is astonishing in its variety and scope," said a writer in "Roanoke: Story of City and County," produced by the Virginia Writers Project and the federal Works Project Administration in 1942.
The writer credited a geological event known as the Appalchian Revolution, millions of years ago, for the liveliness of landscape that economic developers have been cursing ever since. The revolution has given us an ever-changing array of land forms affected by season, by sun and shadow and by weather.
You can even see them breathe. At least, it seems that way to artist Victor Huggins, whose acrylic paintings of the mountains enable viewers to appreciate them all the more.
"You can't paint the dynamic quality the mountains have, even though they are extremely stable and stationary," Huggins says. "The light will flood across the mountains and various contours suddenly will emerge because the angle of the light all of a sudden exposes one area and puts another into shadows. If you stare at them, it looks like they're breathing."
In the mountains, he adds, every view is entirely different.
Working out of Blacksburg, Huggins has spent more than 20 years painting mountain landscapes so serene that people sometimes tell him they look easy to do. They're not.
"Colors can be virtually impossible," he says, "because they just don't mix that way in pigments."
In the mountains, colors go from warm to cool, depending on atmospheric conditions. A yellowish orange, Huggins says, blends into a blue or a bluish purple. When you mix pigments, such colors tend to neutralize each other, yielding gray.
"In the atmosphere, the gray may be there, but it's not visible. It looks as though a warm color is just blending into a cool color, with none of the adulteration."
One of the greatest compliments he can receive is when friends return from drives in the country and tell him the mountains were just like his paintings. Another sort of praise comes from people in flat states, like Florida.
"They're not accustomed to seeing mountains like these," Huggins says. "They think I made them up."
Western Virginians who hunt, fish, hike, ride bikes, horses and hang-gliders or just like to lift their eyes know these mountains are real.
"Pretty," says Scott Updike, 23. He's a mountain biker just out of Emory & Henry College, with a temporary job at a downtown bank.
"I like it when the mist is hanging down on them - the fog," says Chris Berger, who is 15 and a rising junior at Cave Spring High School. He's an inveterate camper who prefers cold weather to warm.
"I love 'em," says Clifton W. Clark, retired on disability at 48. "I find that everything God created is beautiful, and I hate to see it destroyed. It breaks my heart."
"They're lovely," says Marilyn Williams of Roanoke. "I'm always outside in the yard, and I'm always looking at them."
L.N. Reed has lived in this area nearly all his life, growing up near Buchanan and settling in Roanoke in 1948, after his military service. He has hiked to the Peaks of Otter, breathed in the view at McAfee Knob, scoured the woodlands as a child to find chinquapin, running cedar and bittersweet that he could sell.
Like many area residents, he says the mountains exert a pull on him, and always have.
"Years ago," he says, "before integration, when we didn't have a choice of places to go, my wife and I would get in the car and we'd drive 25 to 30 miles from Roanoke in every direction."
The mountains were their entertainment then. They still are.
"When you go up on the Blue Ridge Parkway and see the fall foliage," Reed says, "it's such a panoramic view, it's breathtaking.
"Man didn't make those mountains."
by CNB