From the publisher, August 2020
I know most people long for the bright, clear, sun-drenched summer days with just a few of those puffy, cumulous clouds dotting a spectacularly clear blue sky. Trust me, I’ve spent many of those afternoons on long hikes or a splashing in a mountain-cold watering hole, then ending up splayed across some kind of ground cover—coat, blanket, whatever—enjoying some trail food and the sun’s warmth. Days like that make it easy to remember why those of us who call these mountains home know for a fact that we live in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
But the cloud-filled, misty days take me back. I’m not a local, so etched clearly in my memory are my earliest years in these mountains, and I remember a lot of summers in the late 1970s and 1980s when it seemed to always be rainy and cloudy in the summer. I was 17 when a friend’s sister—who was a student at Appalachian State University—invited me and her brother to Boone to check out the college. It was July, and as we drove up the mountain past North Wilkesboro, the temperature dropped and we were enveloped in a cool, misty rain.
Later on that visit I remember seeing clouds swirling around the coves below us when we drove the Blue Ridge Parkway, and in Blowing Rock we were totally lost in early evening fog. It was magical, and even today it makes me feel like a kid to get out and get a little wet.
Years later, when Lori—my wife—and I started dating and were living in the mountains, we often took summer bike rides to picnic spots in and around Blowing Rock, and inevitably we sometimes got soaked. We would laugh it off, get to some shelter and eventually home for dry clothes.
The constant forecast for rain makes planning for outdoor work challenging. Just last week my grass was making that transition from long to shaggy when Lori told me she had invited several friends over for an early dinner on a Saturday evening. Of course, rain was in the offing. Just about as soon as I got the mower out and went to work, the bottom fell out and we had one of those monsoons. I pulled my hat down tighter over my head, took off the headphones and stashed them on the porch, and just kept mowing. Before long I was soaked, grass was clogging up the mower on about every pass, and I have to admit I was having a blast.
It also works the other way. We’ll plan to do something outdoors, check the forecast and see it calls for rain. With that in mind, we’ll stuff windbreakers into our backpack and even take a change of clothes thinking we’re bound to get wet. The day will pass with clouds above keeping us cool and not a drop of rain. Wonderful.
While raising our kids, each of them always had waterproof windbreakers, with the kids more often than not outfitted in hand-me-downs. It’s just an essential wardrobe item growing up in the mountains if you like to get outdoors. When Megan, our oldest, lived with some New York City girls while working in Dubai, they didn’t understand what she was talking about when she told them stories about always having a raincoat. For them, normal clothes when rain was coming were an umbrella and a fashionable coat. She said they often teased her about her windbreaker.
Today, as a write this, from 1 p.m. until 7 p.m. the chance of rain varies between 30 and 70 percent. It’s only noon, and out my window I see blue sky while off on the horizon there are dark clouds building. I glance at my phone, and there’s a chance or rain for eight of the next ten days. The rainy, cloudy, cool summer is going to be with us for a while. I can’t wait.
—Scott McLeod