Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 22, 1994 TAG: 9401220077
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG - LENGTH: Medium
The interview notes smelled of patchouli.
Well, maybe not patchouli exactly, but definitely an incense type of smell. That's what even a short visit to Apt. No. 1 in the old Christiansburg schoolhouse will do.
Chris Saunders lives at that address, and he's a candlemaker/incense maker/musician/picture framer. He's the sole employee of Blue Ridge Incense, which supplies incense to stores in Blacksburg, Floyd, Roanoke, Richmond, Asheville, and, in the past, Tennessee and Florida.
He doesn't make incense there - he does that in the converted school bus in Floyd County, his former home.
"Everything I have sort of smells like that. My Volkswagen bus does. It's sort of a vague haze of incensey smell."
The sticks of incense he makes, darker in color than most mass-manufactured brands, burn with a thick plume of smoke. The smell lingers almost indefinitely. "They're very, very fresh compared to the incense you would buy from India," he said.
Saunders learned the trade from a man in Hillsville who has since tired of candle and incense making and now makes jewelry.
Twenty-three scents make up Saunders' repertoire. Some sell steadily, such as sandalwood and vanilla; others are more popular in the winter, such as bayberry and cinnamon.
He tried carnation, but that smelled just like a funeral home. Chocolate was disquieting; coffee, disappointing. He imagined waking up the house with coffee incense: "Won't they be surprised when they found out I've just been burning incense!"
With a peasant shirt, hair too short to be long and too long to be short, and a beard, Saunders doesn't break any conventional notions of an incense fan. But he liked incense long before the '60s.
"My grandmother was the first person I knew to burn them," he said. "She burned them in the '20s. It was sort of a luxury during the Depression."
Saunders' grandparents at one point lived in a tent in Riner during the Depression. "They would burn anything." One of the things they burned for warmth was tires. "Great heat, great fire, but a right wretched smell," he said, his gentle twang becoming a little more pronounced. "The incense killed the odor of burning tire."
Saunders' folks have lived in Floyd since they immigrated to America, but he's also part of the artisans' community there that many locals consider interlopers. He's used to disabusing stereotypes.
"I stand with one foot in both worlds. It's great! They're not that far apart at all," he said. "All the people are interested in being self-sufficient and minding their own business. You can say that about the `hippies' or the New Agers or the old hippies, the counterculture in Floyd." And you can also say that about the farmers, who gave Saunders his independent work ethic.
Saunders' school bus stands on his great-grandmother's land, which she left for the city life in the town of Floyd. "She swore she wasn't going to live in the country all her life," he said.
With each succeeding generation, each family matriarch moved to a slightly more cosmopolitan locale - first to Riner, then to Christiansburg. When he set up the bus in Floyd County, the family wisecracked, "You're setting us back generations."
"I had an uncle that moved to Roanoke, and the family just about disowned him because he moved so far away," he said.
Incense will never be replaced by plug-in room deodorizers or steaming potpourri pots, Saunders said, adding there will always be a demand for creating an atmosphere through smell. "Your sense of smell is probably one of the strongest senses that you have. It can connect you with all kinds of memories and people and places and things."
by CNB