spartanburg

Last Friday evening it began snowing about 5 p.m. It fell at a rate of an inch an hour. By nine, four inches of powder covered the yards and roads as the fast-moving storm softened every angle with a shadow of unexpected white. There wasn't even a mention this time of a "wintery mix." We were getting pure snow.

Our city has some unfinished business. Spartanburg City Council needs to pass a long overdue non-smoking ordinance for our bars and restaurants.

It's not an economic issue. Other communities have banned smoking in bars and restaurants without gutting their downtown economies. Starting Jan. 2 the entire state of North Carolina, the former epicenter of cigarette manufacturing, will ban smoking in its bars and restaurants.

I understand special interest groups are hard at work alerting their membership about the series of meetings on zoning possibilities and changes to our Spartanburg County land use ordinances.

I'd like to offer a few talking points of my own and focus on a small part of the changes under discussion with our county ordinances: stream-side buffers.

There's been so much talk lately about master planning, connectivity of communities, trail building, and traffic that I decided to walk from Glendale to Clifton this week along the route of the old trolley.

The other night we erected our yearly eight-foot Fraser Fir. It fills one corner of our big living room. I watched from the couch as Russell and Betsy trimmed the majestic tree. This year I was feeling nostalgic, thinking about Christmases past as they assembled this one. As my only contribution I offered some coaching if I saw a significant void in the field of decoration.

Out here our house is turned to the linear wildness along the creek like a big ear. We listen for what happens in the timber and thick undergrowth below us with the fascination of someone sampling a new CD. If I hear a bird I don't know, I try to track it down for identification, adding its name to our "play list" of what this place might spin in our direction. I scribble the name in the back of an old field guide, a note as to what is passing by.

We had a little earthquake last week. Its 6 a.m. epicenter was near the town of Columbus, North Carolina. It wasn't much, just a 3.1 magnitude shaking for a few seconds, but the local paper reported it was enough to make some poor child up there wake up thinking that his brimstone preacher was right and the end of time had arrived on schedule.

One percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states is what might be considered "wilderness." Ninety-nine percent is utilized in some way for human profit-urban areas, suburbs, logging, mining, grazing. In 10,000 short years we humans have found ways to extend our shadow over the whole reach of a peopleless continent.

I've been thinking a great deal this week about vision-how it happens, how it affects community, how it morphs (and sometimes transmogrifies) from wild, bold ideas into something people can work inside and celebrate.