AFTERNOON WITH THE GOTT FAMILY
Sunday I went with Todd and Susie to visit the legendary Gott family who live about 20 minutes away from Todd and Susie’s cabin in the mountains. Polly Gott, whose passion is painting beautiful water color pastel mountain scenes was having an exhibit and sale at her cabin studio looking out over the mountains. In an odd coincidence Polly Gott grew up in Ithaca, New York not far from my parents home, and my mother knew her parents.
Peter Gott, a graduate of Cornell, became a mountain man. He first made and sold banjos and then learned to make log cabins and made a living building log cabins in the traditional way. He built all of the Gott compound of log cabin homes on a 218 acre mountain top with the Pisgah National forest on two sides and a long view over the forested mountains. He also built the log cabin on the farm garden at Warren Wilson College where I taught and where both of his children, Susi and Tim, went to college.
There were a number of people at the sale which was held in Polly’s Studio and under a tent on the lawn. I got to touch the feet in respect to the owner of Ultimate Ice Cream where Kathe used to love to get salted caramel ice cream cones and got to meet his mother, a traveler.
We looked at all the paintings but then, without our knowing what was coming, Peter Gott, whose memory is leaving him but who could still play the banjo and remember the mountain ballads, his daughter Susi, who sang beautiful harmony and played the fiddle, and Larry Norton, who played the guitar and had a marvelous voice, sang mountain ballads. I recorded the whole thing in spatial video.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0e3DHkUJO7RCYyKwta6x3aODw
After almost an hour of singing as we sat on the porch overlooking the valley the sky darkened and the wind caused the trees to begin to thrash. We carried all the paintings into the log studio and drove home in the rain.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 