Ups and downs

Well, that was quick.

Yesterday the temperature dropped something like twenty degrees between dawn and dusk. It fell below forty sometime during the night. With clouds and drizzle.

Somebody muttered about freezing rain. That, at least, we were spared. But some of the mountains were white with frost this morning, as if they'd been dusted with fine sugar.

The rest of the hills were starting to color. I begin to see where olive drab came from—it's a crude approximation to the color the mountainsides are right now. Summer green just starting to turn to autumn reds and golds and browns, caught partway.

The real thing is much prettier, though.

Only half a day to drive today. My load cannot deliver before lunchtime tomorrow. (You ever hear of “just in time” inventory? I am caught in it...) So here I am in Kentucky, sitting and thinking and moving my pen.

I-40 between Asheville, NC and Knoxville, TN is a strange drive. A twisting winding roller coaster. Deceptive, too.

My father once told me of a mountain highway where he stopped to check his engine. It was laboring, for no reason he could tell. He opened the door and got out of the car—and almost fell.

The road ran steeply uphill, you see. But without a horizon to go by (at night, in all those hills) he couldn't tell.

That's how those houses work, you know—the ones built crooked on a mountainside, where balls roll uphill across the floor, and water leaves the tap at the weirdest angles. It's also why airplanes that fly into clouds fall out of them, if you don't have the right instruments and know how to use them.

You only think you know up from down. Without a clear view to a far place, you soon lose track.*

I wasn't anywhere near that kind of trouble. But I kept coasting faster on level ground, or losing speed downhill. Even in daylight.

A little spookiness does help the day go by...
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*Someone could probably write a sermon about this if they were so minded. I'm sure someone has...