MOUNTAIN INCLINE
When, perchance, I fall on evil times and find I cannot do certain things as well as I ought to be able to do, I start looking back to possible mistakes in my upbringing. I try to determine when and where my parents
could have caused such a deficiency in my makeup.
In that way was I try to prove something which, as they say “warped me for the rest of my life.” It must happen that way. The textbooks say it can and does. Or, could. We are asked to assume,of course, that
those textbooks were written by unwrapped “experts”.
It has helped me decide several things during my lifetime.
There used to be a genuine, turn-of-the-century style mountain incline on Mill Mountain , in what is now a well-populated part of Roanoke, Virginia... way back when the Roanoke motto was “The Magic City”.
I never got to ride it! That’ s where I think my loving parents possibly went awry. Had they taken me on a ride up the side of Mill Mountain on that clickity-clackity rail-grabber I may, for instance, have grown up
without my phobia about riding roller coasters and other such demonic contrivances which now infest our theme parks.
Just think, if I , as a small child, have been bundled up and stashed away on one of those long seats and been magically wafted into the clouds to the top of Mill Mountain, in Roanoke, Virginia what a tremendous
difference such a childhood adventure might have made in my psyche!
Perhaps several such trips would have been needed to imbue within me a acceptance of being strapped into a movable mechanism and whirled upward, outward ,over and under - who knows in what
directions. I was taken on the Ferris Wheel as a youngster; the Merry- Go-Round and even on those little canvas-seated contraptions which whirled us around a center pole or pylon at carnivals.
As I remember it, there was a two-storied entrance arch at the lower end of the incline and I vaguely recall seeing it on a picture post card, with a horse and buggy waiting at the entrance, which gives you an
idea of how up-to-date I am on the one-time attraction.
There is one factor which leaves my parents off the hook, however, and that was the fact that I never remember seeing the Mill Mountain Incline in actual operation . It may well have been that when my
memories started taking over it became a sort of wish thing. I wished I could have ridden it - even just once.
It was years before I gave the idea up and as a teen ager I remember writing a song s about it: “Mill Mountain Incline, Where You and I Made Love”. It’s still around somewhere in my music files, but when I visit
Roanoke today there is not the slighest sign of the old place. For many years there was an obvious, up-the-side of the mountian, treeless incision which was apparent for many years which marked the location of the incline. Mother
Nature has erased such a scar memory of it. Maybe someone else remembers it, too.
On second or third thought, I doubt, seriously if I was in any way bent or frustrated by failing to ride the thing. Today the mountain itself appears to have been little more than a steep hill than a mountain.
A.L.M. September 6, 2002 [c-577wds]
