Dave, as you predicted, all the James Booker Youtube video has been removed. There were seven or eight of them. I got a look a five or six. Thanks for getting me to the show while it lasted. Never woulda made it without you. What an experience to see Mr. Booker. He was only a dim prescence to me. Sometimes our independent radio station would play “Sunnyside of the Street”. That was about all I knew, but it was a big deal to me. Now to have heard “Malaguena”, “Classified”, “True” and best of all the intrumentals “Put Out the Light” and “Pixie”. I replayed them all many times before loosing them to the next screen. Now they are gone. So serious while working out “Pixie”. But the smile to the ovation when he is through.

No doubt. Our disinclination to zone against “development” is one factor, and restlessness is another. But what makes people want to buy a tract home in the exurbs to begin with? Nothing more than a sentimental love for “country.” It’s the age-old story: we destroy what we cannot possess.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Have you blogged these stories? People should be able to relate to them no matter where they’re from. I think it’s important that we keep telling stories of love and loss for real places, not just “nature” in the abstract, or some charismatic elephant or polar bear on the other side of the world.

My most lasting image of that sort of thing is a small mountain that stood near Cullowhee, my home in North Carolina. On top stood one of the few remaining older houses in the area, a simple two-story white house surrounded by a ring of maples, yellow in the fall. Now the trees are gone. The house is gone. The mountain is gone. There is a Walmart and a parking lot and a lot of congestion on the busy road between Cullowhee and Sylva.

The image of the mountain, the house, and the trees that are not there comes into my mind so often! But it is the same all over. Outside Cooperstown was a long lyrical passage of low hills and farmlands that in the past decade has become junk and baseball camps. Cooperstown is mightily zoned, but that just pushes greed and ugliness to its outer edges.

I think the Scotch-Irish heritage has a lot to do with Americans’ attitudes toward central authority, and our propensity to keep wandering, as you say. And I guess the latter does contribute a lot to the transfer of exotic species and diseases. I’d never thought to connect the two before. Obviously, the current economic emphasis on “free” trade from all corners of the globe is a huge part of the problem, too. A lot of nasties are arriving in packing materials and the ballast water of ships.

Yes, there are so many blights and kinds of blights. I’m more aware of insect pests when I’m in the Carolinas, as my mother is still an ardent hiker, wildflower gardener, and amateur naturalist (though she wouldn’t say any of those things about herself, being afflicted with modesty.) She would never, never go to bed with a sweater around her head, though!

Most places it seems to be the rampant refusal to zone. At one time, I thought it was the Scotch-Irish borderer refusal to bow to authority that was the main problem in the North Carolina mountains, but I’ve come to think that we Americans move around too much. Seldom do people truly care for their adoptive regions…

The funny thing about my web presence is that I’m still an almost total loner. I only started social bookmarking so I could put that nifty “web gleanings” section on my sidebar. I read more than 100 blogs, but rarely leave comments on any of them.

There’s so much of you! Now that I know about you, I’m starting to see you popping up all over the web. What a master of infiltration…

That was rather a sad post, in your elsewhere. I hate to see the dead balsams when I go home to the mountains, though they sometimes look weirdly silver and beautiful.