Saluda & Environs Photo Diary

My boyfriend's family have a long and storied connection to the small mountain town of Saluda, North Carolina. Every now and then - as we did this past October - we make a trip up there to see the mountain house, grab a bite at the Purple Onion, hike some trails, and take in the views. And oh, what dramatic and moody views those can be:

The mountains in the early morning. Photo by Nathaniel Haley.

Saluda sits nestled between low mountains, their peaks and planes softened by lush foliage that lights up with incredible color in the fall. I believe my boyfriend thinks of Saluda as his wilderness retreat: a place where he and his dad ride motorcycles,  hang out with foresters, and get unplugged for a little while. I think of it as my own artist-retreat-that-never-was -- as if, in another life on another timeline, I am a novelist who churns out her best work while sitting on a hardwood deck overlooking a Saluda gorge.

I lounged around in my trusty LL Bean boots...

And hung out with a pony - and even rode one. (Photo by Nathaniel Haley.)

Though I got a moderate case of cabin fever to show for it, in theory Saluda & its environs are probably best experienced at a slow, flexible pace -- one that lets you befriend the woods and creeks around you. 

To that end we took on the (easiest) 1400-step Chimney Rock trail, explored the paths up and down the family mountain, and made some time for late-night star photography.

The steep steps of Chimney Rock. Photo: Nathaniel Haley.

On at least 3 separate nights, there were s'mores involved.

Night walks with Nathan.

One of my favorite places to linger and shoot photos is the area around the Saluda Grade & Main Street. The Grade is, as the historical plaque nearby likes to remind us, the "steepest standard-gauge mainline railway grade in the United States." It no longer operates, and now serves a second life (in my mind) as an excellent place to sit and enjoy the diffuse and warm late afternoon sunlight the town gets. 

On the Grade. Jacket by All Saints Spitalfields, flannel by Abercrombie & Fitch. Photo: Nathaniel Haley.

The recurring food theme of the trip was beets. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're easily locally sourced? I must've eaten my weight in (very photogenic) beets and kale over the course of the week.

The Purple Onion.

And oh, the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

Photo by Nathaniel Haley.

A trip to the Carolinas is really not complete without taking advantage of the scenic overlooks that dot the length of this iconic highway.

On the last full day of our trip, we hopped down to Asheville to tour Biltmore House, the Vanderbilts' sprawling 19th century estate. 

Apparently it is permanently Christmas there. Either that or the property managers thought early October would be a totally fine & sensical time to whip out the holiday decor. I'm not complaining - greenery and lights pair well with high ceilings and luxurious digs.

What I do take issue with, though, is how unfairly gorgeous the scenery behind the palatial house is. What am I supposed to do with the fact that obscene amounts of money allow people to hoard views like this? It's a good job the estate wound up open to the public, or you and I would live our lives never having the opportunity to see all this:

Photo: Nathaniel Haley.

Get a Leg Up

This is so very not a fashion blog. But it is a gratuitous photos-off-my-SD-card blog, and these glorious Stuart Weitzmans were in that bunch. On the horizon (I say with desperate, blind hope): cooler, suede-appropriate weather.

Still.

Cat bedding by Plow & Hearth, matte finish water bottle by S'Well, lights by Urban Outfitters.

Sometimes when I lie awake into the early hours of the morning, I like to think about all the rooms I have ever temporarily thought of as home.

As a young adult -  especially in college, the memory of which is still fresh in my mind - one can feel uncomfortably itinerant. The four walls of your childhood room suddenly seem too close together, and the shelves upon shelves of YA books and stuffed animals so cloyingly juvenile. You're Grown Up now, after all - and this is not home any longer.

A handful of dorm rooms serve as temporary home bases: different residential halls, each with their own pitfalls (Edwards so cramped and musty, Campbell with those charming centipedes), and having to move in and out at the end and beginning of each oppressively hot summer. Each May I tore myself away from a small single bedroom I'd only just become accustomed to, and with choked back, purposeful melancholy, packed and stored my things, hoping desperately that next year's lottery-won room would measure up. Then, in September, I painstakingly arranged all my unpacked, familiar objects (rainbow alarm clock, stand-up fan, posters and odds & ends) in exactly the same places relative to each other. When finished, nothing would seem quite right. And I would begin the school year with a sense of disjointedness and dissonance.

Traveling was the hardest and the loneliest. If I think back to New York City in 2012, the bottom of my stomach drops away and I remember dinners eaten alone and sleepless nights on a fourteenth floor watching traffic come in from the Williamsburg Bridge. I think of a bare-bones room with a microwave and linoleum floor and a loud shared bathroom, and of my rickety top bunk that stood too near the ceiling. And even lonelier was London, my narrow oblong place with a drippy sink and a drafty window facing a row of brown Edwardian apartments and their skeletal rooftop antennae. It was never warm in that room, and I spent most nights bundled in a down duvet with a mug of hot water from the hallway bathroom.

Each room I have lived in, I have grown to love, and stayed in each for too short a time. I feel as though I have left little pieces of myself here and there - in all my tiny Princeton singles overlooking green yards, in my Lower East Side building, in the heart of Bloomsbury, and up four flights of ancient stairs in Oxford. I feel stretched thin - too much of me spent loving too many lost, transient spaces.

When I moved into my current apartment I did not expect it to be for more than ten months. But it has been 23 months and counting, the longest time in recent memory that I have ever lived anywhere - that I have ever stayed still - and parts of me are creeping into the place, lending it a domestic warmth I'd been afraid to cultivate until now. A pitcher here, a placemat there, and piles of books on every horizontal surface. 

I am beginning to stay still, and for now I prefer it - a kind of peace.