Blue Ridge Country May/June 2022 - 8

FROM THE EDITOR
Elizabeth Hunter,
1945-2022
This magazine has lost a dear and treasured friend.
The world has lost much more than that.
By KURT RHEINHEIMER
hose who have been with the magazine for
many years will remember the name Elizabeth
Hunter, annointed 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/
T
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
8 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
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
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Blue Ridge Country May/June 2022

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