Journal: July 23
7/23/01
The deliciousness is in the details.
Which is what I remember whenever I am getting to do the sort of thing I most love to do, which is to focus on something, as I was able to do yesterday, at Chimney Rock Park. I love the Chimney Rock job, because the job is to look at the details. And so I notice, notice the particular color of the rock tripe, about the hue of dijon mustard, somewhere on the continuum between muddy yellow and muddy green and mud itself. A warm, but not over warm morning, already so hazy the far ridges are blurring into nothingness, the surface of Lake Lure a haze of brilliance, nothing in the distance delineated, but smudged and huge and not the sort of thing I want to look at for long.
So it’s up the series of stairs to the Cliff Trail. The flowers are almost all yellow and purple (not an infrequent combination — why, I wonder, are so many flowers either yellow or purple?). In the yellow category, everything from coreopsis to a dwarf dandelion (Krigia montana) to St. Johns-Wort to some sort of wild sunflowers; the pinkish purple most outstandingly a Liatris, Bog Blazingstar, growing with Obedient Plant, below the trail on the way to the top of the waterfall. Everything along this trail is worth looking at closely, yet tourist after tourist passes me, water bottle in hand, doggedly pursuing the featured event — the waterfall, which they invariably, when they catch sight of it, declare as “awfully small.”
But what other kind of waterfall could come with a stream as small as the one that spills over the cliff and down the rock for 404 feet? In the pool above the falls, children take off their shoes and wade, chasing the minnows that spend their entire lives in water that is about to drop off the side of a mountain.
Rock tripe!💗