According to one background source on Marx I’ve read, Ol’ Karl was less concerned with workers’ material wealth than he was with their time spent in labor - those sixteen-hour days, six-day weeks endured in ear-splitting factories or in dank, lung-clotting coal mines.
The sabbath a rotating oasis in the vast desert of days.
No doubt we modern laborers owe a debt of gratitude to Karl and his ilk for our forty-hour weeks and paid holidays. Rather than collapsing on a sofa all day Sunday trying to recover from bone-aching exhaustion (or hand-wrenching carpal tunnel), we working folk are free to pursue happiness, even to race madly after it, to jump from bridges with bungee cords strapped to our ankles or careen down rapids in inflatable rafts.
Woo-Hoo, as they say on Facebook.
Vacations vs. Holidays
What the Brits call a holiday, we call a vacation, and if you stop to think about it, vacation is a fairly depressing word.
No one wants to have to Vacate the premises at once!
Or encounter a vacant stare.*
painting by Sussi Ross
Or picnic in a vacant lot.
* We teachers get more than our share.
Nevertheless, JBirdsong and I vacated Folly Beach to holiday (a lovely verb) in Saluda, NC, a place I could see myself “summering” if I had the wherewithal. Saluda reminds me of my hometown, the Summerville of the ’50’s, tiny, verdant, so quiet that a distant truck sounds like locomotive as it labors up an incline outside of town.
Saluda’s affect - if you can use that word to describe a town - is the complete opposite of Folly’s tawdrylite. Saluda is your great aunt Christina, once a formidable beauty, now a graceful matron whereas Folly is [bad mental picture warning] your third cousin Brandi who sports a Minnie Mouse tat on her shoulder and cutoff jeans that cut into her thighs.
The vacation trip (another elocution you hear) ended up being somewhat surreal and featured a conversation with the sanest-looking lunatic I’ve ever encountered, hikes to waterfalls and panoramic summits, and a revelation about the Dionysian side of Planet Earth.
Saluda’s Urban Scene
JBirdsong, my long-suffering spouse, enjoys planning out-of-town trips, scouting out and securing apartments and cottages. Except for one occasion when she booked us in a hotel that was hosting a family reunion for the Idi Amin clan in Atlanta, her record has been spectacular (e.g., see here).
After she had booked a place called “The Cricket Box,” she showed me an on-line review by Priscilla F of the Tampa Bay Fla. area. This odd phrase particularly caught my eye: cool urban vibe What? Plu-ease. Nothing in Saluda possesses an iota of urbanity - no metropolis this.
As it turns out the Cricket Box is a loft, an old warehouse or store, that has been refurbished and does, I’ll admit, emanate a cool urban vibe. The outside view isn’t all that promising:
However, the interior is well-appointed and spacious and wired (so I was able to follow up my fieldwork of a fortnight ago and watch the Gamecocks live streaming onto my macbook, a phenomenon not unlike watching my sons play John Madden 2 circa 1995). The line of windows running above the door do an excellent job of, as JB puts it, “letting the outside in,” and I found staying at the Cricket Box delightful.
Having had to replace a car battery as dead as Dick Clark Don Ameche in Ladson, SC, we got off to a late start and arrived well after dark and so were content to forego what Priscilla F of the Tampa Bay Fla. area calls “cool bristos” until the following evening. We sat around and feasted on smoked salmon, cream cheese, onions, and capers (not to mention several Stratton Octoberfest brews).
Woo-Hoo.
The Great Outdoors
Although I would have been content to stay inside the Cricket Box solving crossword puzzles until kickoff, JB, having grown up in the rolling hills of Atlanta, grows weary of the eternal flatness of the Lowcountry and absolutely loves the crisp air, blue skies, and majestic beauty the mountains offer, so after breakfast in what Priscilla F of the Tampa Bay Fla. area calls a diner unchanged from the 40's-50's, we piled into the Mini and headed for a waterfall trail west of Henderson.
A diner unchanged from the ’40’s-50’s
Given that we’re living in an era dubbed the Great Recession, you might expect to find on the roads hordes of refugees headed west with their meager belongings; however, we encountered instead well-heeled folk with enough disposable income to purchase ear-splitting Harleys (some with sidecars), horses and trailers, and mountain bikes that looked as if they might cost more than my very first car, a $1700 MGB GT that was about as reliable as the father in Angela’s Ashes.
Given JB’s foot surgery, we opted for an easy trail, one we shared with equestrians, mountain bikers, and hunters.
Watch your step, hikers!
Of course, the waterfall was lovely, and the weather throughout the weekend was edensque - cool, dry sunshine kindling the autumnal colors.
The following day, Sunday, we wandered further afield and took the Parkway north for a hike to a place called Craggy Gardens, a mountaintop area already practically denuded of foliage but offering panoramic views of Appalachia. The “garden” nomenclature no doubt refers to rhododendrons that grow abundantly on the rounded mountaintop and trees full of red berries that create a nice contrast with the bluest of skies.
Craggy Garden Vista
Night Life May Not Be the Good Life, But It’s My Life
The Purple Onion is the premier restaurant in Saluda, which is sort of like saying the Diana Ross is the premiere Supreme, because there just aren’t that many to choose from. Although Priscilla F of the Tampa Bay Fla. area lauds the Purple Onion as “one of my fave restaurants anywhere in the world!,”* I would rank its service down there with the Summerville Town jail where I spent an uncomfortable night in the early ’70’s where breakfast consisted of two hotdogs from the poolroom served in a brown paper bag.
After standing at the hostess stand for ten minutes, I finally found someone and asked her if they were still accepting customers. After she scrawled my surname on the list, I wedged my way to the bar to order two beers. After a five minute wait, one of the patrons sitting on a stool in front of me informed me that the bartender’s name was Shand, and if I wanted to be served, I should shout his name. Coming from a bar scene where eye-contact suffices, I went ahead and hollered “Shand” and eventually scored two JoMo lagers for my troubles. Judy, who had been waiting with others on the list, suggested we take our beers outside, which we did.
*It should be noted that PB accounts herself “a pretty sophisticated traveller.”
After a reasonable passage of time, I decided to go in and check on the wait and see if I could somehow manage to order another beer from my man Shand. No, several people still stood between us and the mushroom pizza we would order, so I procured my beer and went back outside where I found Judy, a usually taciturn interlocutor, engaged in a conversation with a man in perhaps in mid-to-late sixties. “Sometimes, people show their true colors,” she was saying as I approached the table. Although he appeared absolutely normal (close-cropped hair, down vest, reasonable glasses), in the five minutes I endured his monologue he informed me that he was an Episcopal priest, then a security officer in the army, and finally a physician. After a literal kick under the table, I made cuckoo eyes at Judy, and we took leave of Proteus to find that our table was ready.
I won’t bore you with descriptions of the mediocre, muddy sounding bluegrass band in their silly hats or our “server” who must have been recruited from the Greta Garbo College of Reclusive Waitresses. Suffice to say that although the pizza was terrific, we ended up not only stiffing Greta but also coming up 38 cents short on the tab. In the time that passed from her handing the bill and our leaving I could have recited all 12 books of Paradise Lost.
The Pursuit of Happiness
After our epic hike and picturesque drive on Sunday, I sat on the bench in front of the Cricket House to enjoy the view while Judy took an extended walk through town. As I was sitting there in front of blooming azaleas, a bumble bee showed up and had his way with several of the blooms. Frankly, I’d never given cross pollination much thought until I read a book that claimed that one way that some blooms attract insects is that the insects mistake either the odor or cavern of the flower for a mate. I suspect that this confusion was not the case with the bee I observed, but this fellow was having either a feast or orgy and positively looked drunk at one point when he plummeted from a flower like a WWI biplane shot down until he broke from the stall and regained altitude only to dive again and again into flower after flower. The beauty of it, the wonder, the bee feasting on nectar, colliding with stamens and pistils, spreading seeds like an aerial Johnny Appleseed!
Hail Dionysius, Hail Karl Marx!
Oh, the little things we rarely see that are so important and so beautiful. Time, indeed, is of the essence.