A letter of remembrance and farewell
By Kurt Rheinheimer
You could select, as the widest of the concentric circles that make up the spirit and wonder of the Southern Appalachians, the Iapetus Ocean, which filled the space before the tectonic plate collisions that thrust the land upward through the sea to create the mountains themselves—the broad, green, deep geography that is the place where we live.
Inside that circle are the creatures and people who came before us, with their feeding and shaping of the land to become a place more habitable than it was when they arrived.
Draw further in across infinitely more ever-smaller circles and you find the tiny outer circle of my own set: My mother’s family having lived in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia for a time reaching back at least to the birth of Zachariah Hurt in 1763 in Virginia.
Tinier circles still: Summers and Christmases as a boy in the 1950s in the small mountain town of Radford, Virginia, and at nearby Claytor Lake, learning from my grandfather the wonders of things like baseball, digging for worms and fishing, wandering and just playing outside.
Perhaps the richest circle of my Appalachian experience began in 1988, when I became founding editor of this magazine, and was thus charged with learning all I could of the region’s history, culture, nature, recreation, and travel opportunities, and then delivering those to readers who share the love of our region.
Early in those years came the richest blessing of the magazine’s editorial history—the arrival as a writer, columnist, and contributing editor of Elizabeth Hunter. Elizabeth had long since left behind her semi-aristocratic New England upbringing to live—mostly alone—in a modest house slung into the side of the North Carolina mountains. Her writings of dedication to nature, to the land where she lived, to the creatures around her, and more won international awards and established a banner of excellence for Blue Ridge Country that carries on today to help define the best spirit of our mountains. Elizabeth became a friend, as we shared passions for hiking, the weather, baseball, and music, perhaps especially in the person of the amazing Canadian troubadour, Fred Eaglesmith, who began touring into the mountains in the early 1990s.
It’s several circles inward to reach the one around my cherished girlfriend/wife of nearly four decades as she and I completed the Virginia Appalachian Trail, having taken four years and never once sleeping on the ground to cover all 550 miles in day hikes made of loops and out-and-backs, with the most glorious Appalachian experiences taking place in Shenandoah National Park and upon the roof of Virginia, in the Grayson Highlands.
Move inward toward the tiniest and most-recent circle: A visit from our home in Roanoke, Virginia, to Asheville, North Carolina, as we have done many times over the decades. This trip, as have been most, was built around walking, dining, and live music. The combination of my retirement from Blue Ridge Country in November, of the death of Elizabeth Hunter at age 77 in 2022, and of the trip’s music performance brought sharpened focus to the visit to a core destination for the region.
We have visited the venerable Grey Eagle Music Hall & Pub many times over the years, and on this night, the kind, gentle, and ghostly presence of Elizabeth Hunter hung in the air in a room of 250 people seated and waiting excitedly for the performer.
I hope, Elizabeth, that you’ll accept this inner ring of experience from Gail and me as a kind of last and lasting farewell: Over the years of trading notes on this performance or that of Fred Eaglesmith—you from east Tennessee, us from the valley of Virginia, for example—we were many times pleased and other times not so much in watching his mercurial, determined, uncompromised performances with a varying array of bandmates. Today, I simply want to let you know that Fred, those few months back, brought with him a new band, and seemed to say-without-saying to his enthusiastic audience that he knew pretty well which songs we loved most from over his 40-year recording career, and that what he had come to Asheville, North Carolina, to do that evening was to work as hard as he and his bandmates could to deliver them better than we’d ever heard them.
I thought of you again and again, Elizabeth, as the set unfolded with your favorites and mine, with the self-deprecation (“Oh, I see some young people in here—must be community service?”) and humor (a new joke about a woman who kicks the man out of bed after she notices his feet under the covers; he explains he lost two toes to frostbite and she is forced to admit to him that she’s lactose intolerant) that always accompany the magic of the music.
The evening was, if you will have it, Elizabeth and dear Blue Ridge Country readers, the last tiny circle, upon which a perfect pearl of Southern Appalachian experience formed with pure luster and color and, from atop that equally perfect circle, slipped silently and forever toward the bottom of the great sea of the lives we’ve lived here.
The story above first appeared in our July/August 2026 issue.
