What if the mountains aren't there?

We had the first cool days in Charleston this past weekend. It was ahead of schedule, but it got many people thinking about knee-length boots, football, and large bowls of spicy chili.

For me, I started thinking about leaves changing in the mountains, how that must be already happening, and how many people make their annual pilgrimages to high elevations too ooh and ahh. But what if the mountains were not there? I don't mean paved over by outlet malls; I mean not there.

For many in some of the deepest hollers and hideaways in the Appalachian mountains, this is a reality, and it's called mountaintop removal. It is a modern technique for mining coal, and the coal companies in places such as West Virginia say it's safer and good for the economy.

For those of us, and that's most of us, that don't live in that world, it is a controversy that too many of us find too painful or too complicated, so we turn away. Carl Galie is asking us -- through his art -- to turn back, to look again.

I had the chance to talk with him about his commitment to wild places and rural communities, and about his approach to photography. See some of his photos of coal country's vanishing places here and read about what sets apart his calls for change.

Playing with Fire

 It's spring here in Charleston, the azaleas are through blooming, Tomato Watch 2011 in full swing, and event after event is happening, with so much to do that I more often than not find myself doing nothing at the end of the day. I've been banking up some writing that is spilling out now into publication, and it's been an amazing month, talking to a variety of interesting people about the interesting things they do.

Sometimes I seek them out, and sometimes I am assigned. An assignment is what introduced me to Walker Babington, who defines the always-overused term "free spirit." What has he done? Studied photography (check), lived in a tent on the beach of Costa Rica (!), carved faces into coconuts with the heat from a magnifying glass (!!), and habitually dumpster dove for his art materials, only at least once to return an art piece to the suburban curb from whence he "found" it after completing it (!!!).

Oh, and I didn't even mention the rusted mural in India, using a blowtorch as his painbrush, and currently saving up for stuntman school. He is funny, inspiring and really an underappreciated artist, although I did my best to explain all that in the recent Go Triad article.

He doesn't have a gallery, a plan, or even a palette, but he is making it happen nonetheless. I hope to keep my conversation going with him and bring more of his work to this little forum in the future.

The road

In writing, the road is a symbol for journey, and I've been thinking a lot about journeys lately. A road to Canterbury is what structured Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the theme extends all the way to the trip to the beauty pageant in Little Miss Sunshine. It's a framing device, tapping that story-telling subconscious that we all have, that we understand. It's the road in the parable of the Good Samaritan or the path to enlightenment, the symbol of change but also of commitment. I could muse on this all day, but it would be better to read Joseph Campbell.

In short, sometimes you don't know where you're going, you just can see the road to get there, and your job is to just get on the path. Recently, when I interviewed Doug Klesch for Go Triad about his project, 99 Americans, he talked about looking for something, and hoping to find it on the road.

The road frames Klesch's project both literally and creatively, and it extends farther beyond the horizon than he once could even conceive. And if we really commit to the road, all our journeys will take us places that would not even be imaginable at the start. I'll see you on the road ...