This magazine has lost a dear and treasured friend. The world has lost much more than that.
Those who have been with the magazine for many years will remember the name Elizabeth Hunter, anointed many years ago by Richard Wells, our founder and publisher, as “the heart and soul of Blue Ridge Country magazine.”
Those who were lucky enough to know her—through face-to-face contact or via her 25 years of passionate, intimate and occasionally piercing “From the Farm” columns—will remember her as a person of unflinching character and conviction, of deep, pervasive love of the natural world and as a giver of gentleness, friendship and love the likes of which you will never forget.
At the time of her first column for us—in the March/April, 1992 edition, she had already lived in the mountains of Mitchell County, North Carolina, for 15 years, having left behind her enlightened New England upbringing and a Harvard education to live by the North Toe River.
She said of herself, in that first column . . . Like the stubborn roots of wisteria and honeysuckle, vinca and sweet potato vine, thistle and poison ivy, I have taken hold. Like them, I am not easily eradicated.
There are ample hints in those two sentences of who Elizabeth Hunter was. Read them out loud and you get a sense of the poet she was, the Vs and the Ws flowing through with ease and grace, traits always true of her writing, which she anguished over and polished again and again until at last it satisfied her.
In those two sentences as well are pieces of her intense love for the natural world. Not just the pretties and the fruitfuls, but things too many of us view as pests.
And I cannot imagine anyone taking a fuller, more embracing and powerful hold of her land and her life than Elizabeth did. She died too young, but the “not easily eradicated” was as intensely real at her death as it was for every day of her life: She discerned an illness about two years before her death, and until near the end told no one. During that time and over the last months of her life—when she was helped by the friends in her tiny community of Bandana—she sought no medical help.
What was not easily eradicated—what was completely untouchable—were her convictions and principles, and her unflinching and courageous determination to choose her own path. To the point that she maintained her good humor into her final months, at one point saying to a long-cherished neighbor now too her caretaker—“Why can’t I go ahead and die? I just wanna be moss.”
Here far away from where she lived, I can reflect on the insights and lessons and just plain brilliance I was so lucky to receive from her in letters and emails. In my Elizabeth folder on this computer are 1,989 emails, and there is not one that does not contain wisdom, care, humor, humility and full attention to the person I am so honored that she called friend.
Beyond that, many of us are able to think back on the 160 columns and the many feature stories she did for us—including a beautiful series on the Blue Ridge Parkway she loved—and thus hold in our hearts a piece of something learned from Elizabeth Hunter. The beauty and intensity of her writing was such that for the dozen or so years that this magazine belonged to the International Regional Magazine Association, her column won eight Golds and two Silvers in annual competitions, leaving behind the likes of Yankee Magazine, Arizona Highways and 20 others.
But it is the Bandana community where she lived for the last 45 years of her life that is fortunate beyond measure to have had her there, by virtue of experiencing this force of nature as she lived in it, and thus getting the most concentrated dose of her. Elizabeth coalesced the community in a physical and psychic sense, putting her arms around it to meet and talk and document its history. The community’s Bandana Club came to be at her impetus, and created stronger neighbors, dearer friends and people better at living their lives by virtue of having her intently and lovingly in their midst.
And what did Elizabeth get from Bandana? A deeply rooted sense of home and place and an equally powerful feeling of communion and love amid dear members of a species that in many other instances drove her nearly mad.
Her intense love of community and her little acreage within it were the essences of her day-to-day life. From a column about, of all things, combing through old mine dumps, written the year she turned 50:
Out here in this rockpile, I’m confronted by 370-million-year-old rock and a black widow 350 million years in the making. Fifty years, I think. What is 50 years? Or 75? or 100? Barely enough time to get a good look around. I have to laugh that it takes a mine dump to make me see how lucky I am to be able to share this earth with a chunk of feldspar and a poisonous spider.
The mammoth scale to which her house, yard, grounds and community formed the core of her everyday life is in completely commensurate measure with an intellectual life that was equally modestly and thoroughly undertaken. She wrote, she painted, she made books and wrote books—including the history of her adopted county on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. She learned whole new realms—astronomy, mycology, ornithology, the hemlock tragedy and scores more—with a thoroughness and passion most of the rest of us can apply to, well, maybe a half-completed crossword puzzle.
She learned very close to all that can be learned about most everything natural that she came in contact with: swallowtails and chimney swifts, mantises and toads, lilies and lunas, and scores more. And above all, the monarchs butterflies she cared so deeply about and raised; and the hawks that gave her some of her most exalted days as she watched them soar above the Blue Ridge Parkway each fall.
The people she read and admired provide us with a reading list for the rest of our lives: The poets Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser and W.S. Merwin; the nature writers Barry Lopez and Elizabeth Kolbert, to name but a very few. She gave huge pieces of her heart, her money and her time to causes for social justice, environmental protection and peace.
Another set of the people she admired formed a precious part of our friendship. As children of the ‘60s, we came to learn of the other’s passion for Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Chris Smither and David Loggins—he of much more than the one hit. Behind my home desk, amid my own albums, is her collection of Jesse Winchester, a gift she made when in 2012 she went “vinyl-free.” And most poignantly, we shared a love and admiration for the great Fred Eaglesmith (the characterization of “the Canadian Springsteen” sells him only slightly short) of Ontario, Canada. She rode the FREDTRAIN several times across that nation to listen to his amazing songs and stories. Gail and I have driven over much of the southern Appalachians to do the same over the past 30 years.
Elizabeth shouted in an email only twice over the years, both tied to things that had held each of us since early childhood. HOW ‘BOUT THEM SOX! she exalted when at last the team she’d been a fervent and knowledgeable fan of all her life won the World Series, which she’d stayed up far past her bedtime to watch at a Bandana neighbor’s house since she chose not to own a TV. And she made a point to be kind to he who has been an equally nutcase fan of the Orioles since the day they moved to Baltimore. We shared the practice of never referring to the common enemy—The Hated Ones from New York—by name.
The other was, 21 INCHES?! Her response on that rare winter day when 900-foot elevation Roanoke got far more snow than 2,600-foot Bandana—a signature win for me in winter weather competitions carried on over the decades.
There are many ways to remember Elizabeth Hunter and this note has done no more than touch upon the breadth and depth of a life that saw her go into prisons to teach writing, take care of a girl who had no one else to take care of her for a period of years, teach those who needed teaching, care for sick neighbors, volunteer wherever help was needed and travel to Vermont each spring and fall for many years to help her aging Mum in the garden.
And whatever Elizabeth did, she did it with a modesty born out of the conviction that she was doing the right thing and that the doing itself was ample and complete reward. No need to talk about it. I stepped outside her noble example only once (I hope), beginning when she made a visit to us Roanoke. Elizabeth walked into uncharacteristic excitement about a short story I was working on, prompting me to make a rare exception in my writing practices and ask both Gail and Elizabeth to read it, hoping they could help me get perspective the way I wanted it.
They were both relatively lukewarm with the story, and I should have left well enough alone. But a few months later, when it won a national fiction prize judged by the late Ursula Le Guin and was to be published as the lead piece in that contest’s anthology of the top 10 stories, and also in Portland Monthly, my hubris bubbled out.
The response was perfect, pointed, polite Elizabeth: “I’m glad Ursula Le Guin liked your story, Kurt.”
In mid-2009, Elizabeth chronicled in detail the life of a long-time Bandana neighbor who faced and met death from a terminal illness with courage, planning and strength. Her admiring notes on him were framed with these words, from Fred Eaglesmith’s “Ship”:
I’m beat up and I’m broken
And my light is getting dim
Lord, if you could find me
A place to land
My ship needs to come in.
Have a memory or thought about Elizabeth you would like to share? Click here to email a letter to Kurt. Thank you.
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2022 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!