Blue Ridge Mountains

Ann is the mountain person in our family. I'm more the beach person. But that's not to say we don't both love the mountains, for we do, with a passion.

That's why in the course of our travels together we've spent a good chunk of time in just about all the mountains of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We've crossed the East and West Sierra Madre in Mexico, we've wandered up and down the Canadian Rockies, and camped in all the mountains of this country, including Alaska's Mt. McKinley/Denali and the Chugach range. From the magnificent Adirondacks and New England's White Mountains out to the awesome Rockies, we've stories to tell about them all. We love the mountains.

Of course we haven't seen the Swiss Alps or Everest and the Himalayan peaks, or other mountains that we can't reach by car, but here in the Western Hemisphere we've enjoyed them all. There's something about the solidity and power of mountains that captures the imagination, which is why, I suppose, so many of the ancients saw them as the home of the gods.

Then there's our own Olympus, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the east face of the Appalachian chain, mountains like no others. They start down in the Great Smokies of north Georgia and continue northeasterly into northern Virginia, where they merge with the Alleghenies and quietly disappear.

They are, simply, the most beautiful mountains I've ever seen. The most elegant, the most peaceful, the most gentle of all mountains. It's as though the forces behind all the authority figures in my life were put into geographical terms, where they would be the Blue Ridge.

Sometimes, like last weekend when we crossed them, the laurel and rhododendron are just beginning to give color to the intense light green of the trees' new foliage. Then, with layers of green turning to blue turning to gray, they fade off into the distance. Although the word is terribly overused, these mountains are truly awesome.

The beauty of the Blue Ridge is undeniable, but there's another ingredient in this mix: the Blue Ridge Parkway. It wanders for 469 miles along the crest of the Ridge, a two lane, 45 mph speed limit, no commercial vehicles gem of a road. Along the way are turn-offs, many with picnic sites, where vistas (like the one in the accompanying picture) can be enjoyed from the eagle's perspective. It is, bar none, my favorite drive in the whole country, and a national treasure.

You won't be surprised, I sure, to know that the current administration in Washington can spend (or waste) a billion dollars a week in Iraq and Afghanistan, but is reducing the budget for our National Parks. In the hierarchy of sins and misdeeds our country (and, in fact, the whole world) is experiencing as a consequence of the Bush-Cheney tragedy, I suppose this (financing the Blue Ridge Parkway) is only a glitch on the budget screen. The good news, however, is that there is a volunteer organization (http://www.blueridgeparkway.org/) formed to take up the slack, and they deserve the support of us all.

The mountains, of course, will be there in all their beauty long after we're gone. With any kind of luck, our grandchildren will be nourished by them just as we have.