The woodstove in the center of a one-room schoolhouse is a spinning pin. When you are small it is behind you. Years pass, you erase your slate a thousand times, you are sitting next to the stove, more trudging and reciting, and finally you are the biggest sitting in the back row looking at the whole school: woodstove, rows of bent heads, maps on the walls between windows, and the teacher at the front. She is another pin. The schoolhouse is a book. The wind pushes on the walls.

“These riflemen..drive a nail into a tree with a ball without bending it...”
~Thomas Nichols, 1864

Thereafter the nail is quite a horizontal pin, piercing a vertical one. As with a fence the tree may swallow the marker eventually, so if the rifleman wanted to come back as to a monument, remembering, he would have to make careful note of the tree. But then maybe he would have shot nails into trees once a week or more and forgotten all of them. Pins all over the district, rusting.

“In loading, a greased patch of cloth or buckskin was laid on the end of the muzzle, the bullet was centered on it, and both were rammed down the bore together. This cleaned the barrel, and the bullet, when shot, engaged the rifling, and spun.”

The painter is working on some trees in the upper left of the mural. Their shadows mass in layers. He isn’t sure yet where to place the buildings but he knows these trees have some relation to each other, and can make a weight together that will indicate something about the arrangement of the barn, the smokehouse, the springhouse, the sheds, the coops, the summer kitchen, the house.

Of course the river will be in one corner of the foreground, making a single convex curve as though rearing up from another lower place. In literal terms that place would be the underfloor of the dining room where the painter is painting. Otherwise it is an atmosphere of water which will give part of its weight and spray and run to a small province of flat blue-green paint on the bottom right of the wall.

The trees hold their newest fingers out lightly, pointing in many directions.

A thicket of metaphor from G. Bachelard, each stem nosing through the others:

“And the next day when I come back, walking more softly than the day before, I see eight pink-white eggs in the bottom of the nest. But how small they are! How small these thicket eggs are!”

“Here the entire tree, for the bird, is the vestibule of the nest...Thoreau tells of a green woodpecker that took an entire tree for its home.”

He quotes Jules Michelet: “On the inside, the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird.” And then comments: “The female, like a living tower, hollows out the house.”

Impeccable example of a spinning pin. It is

A) historical. Thomas Jefferson soaked here in 98 degree mineral springs, and thus do we;

B) historical again. The building is built in the nineteenth century, well after Thomas, well before now. It sags and rots and changes direction. It is so charmingly ramshackle as to be induce worry—not that it will fall down but that it will be tragically misunderstood and violently torn down, which would seriously compromise its pinship;

C) circular;

D) encouraging of contemplation, as bubbles trail up;

E) a physical enactment of spinning, as one floats on a “noodle” (not historically accurate) and thus glides serenely around the center pole, watching sky and rafters spin languidly, at a pace one might describe as “annual.”

The logo, Civilian Conservation Corps, is a stake planted in a park. It marks a spot where people labored for our recreation.



It is a pin connecting anyone now standing in this cabin, with its linoleum updates, to the Depression and an intention of showing work in the woods. Time collapses a little when one honors one’s grandfather. Mine labored in the CCC in Idaho, but the logo is a cross-country pin connecting his work to that of the Virginia-assigned men who built this little cave.



Uphill, a pin becomes a different pin: Sign on tree, nearly messageless.



At the top of the mountain, or alternatively, at the end of Mountain Top Trail, a very large pin (the mountain) is made more clearly pinlike by the addition of a smaller, more human-scaled pin. Now we know where we are. If erosion is changing the shape of the mountain and thus the location of the actual summit, we are unaware of it.

The weaver helps the painter remove the rear shocks from his car.

This involves crouching inside the hatchback, hoping her long skirts won't brush the oil on the seats and the carpet, holding vice grips on the top of a bolt while he strains to turn a wrench on the nut.

She breathes and remembers, earlier in the day, listening to the call of a pileated woodpecker--itself the aural equivalent of the pecking action, a repeated stab inside a small swath of trees near the creek. The bird's ike-ike-ike-ike went on steadily for a minute or more, with variations climbing and falling slightly through pitch and tempo, here a bit more frantic and there more lax. But, also, it seemed the bird was turning or flying around within an area roughly car-sized. The direction of its voice kept changing, and the reverberations shifted and made different colors and rooms among the woods. After a while the bird left its spot and struck off downslope, still calling, and the house its sound had been making turned into a road, swift and directional, falling away behind itself.

The painter gets the nut free, panting.

Two landmarks on the Appalachian Trail:

First, after you climb down a cleft you step through the water and, probably, every single through-hiker puts her feet on the roots of this one maple tree on the way to Maine or Georgia. The trail is a tight fit here and cooler air rolls down the V of which the streambed is the bottom. Maybe the white blaze is matched by an invisible spot where every left or right hand is laid on the bark as the person passes.



Second, a pin spins down toward the soil and makes itself, at one time anonymous, into a landmark, bleeding clay from the feet. Hiking out of the South, especially, you remark on it.

The painter is looking at photographs.

One shows a farm family under an enormous tree, arranged like chess pieces on thick-legged chairs, one boy sitting on a barrel, tall sons in suspenders behind their parents, a baby’s white dress flowing over her feet and continuing extravagantly down her mother’s lap.

One shows Woody Guthrie.

One shows a collection of buffalo nickels and coins from South America.

One shows a man in a lab coat looking into a telescope.

One shows a ranch house in a small yard with a bare patch of dirt in front of the concrete stoop.

The painter looks out the window to the tops of sycamore trees, which are releasing light steam, two days’ rain meeting near-level sun.