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Announcers:

This is me at the highest point of Mount Desert Island at Acadia National Park in Maine, watching for hawks.

Seth Williamson - Music Director/Host of "Back Roads & Blue Highways" and "Travelin' On" Co-Host of "Back to the Blue Ridge"

E-mail: SethWill@vt.edu

Seth Williamson is WVTF's longest-serving full-time employee. His classical music program went on the air on October 8, 1983. He had been a part-time community producer for nearly two years before that.

He was born and raised in Texas, but moved to Virginia as a teenager. He has always played music as an amateur: trumpet and euphonium in a brass chamber music group, area symphonic bands and the Sauerkraut Band, and bluegrass banjo in several bands. He lives in Franklin County.

He has published hundreds of articles as a freelance writer in magazines and newspapers. He currently does a monthly birding column in The Roanoke Times, where he has also done classical music reviews, op-ed pieces and feature news stories for two decades. In his off hours he pursues his interest in natural
history, including birding, odonata and lepidoptera (dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies) and tiger beetles, and can frequently be found with binoculars and spotting scope in various spots in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Seth says, "I probably spend way too much time reading," adding, "When I was a kid, a book titled 'David and the Phoenix' by Edward Ormondroyd baptized my imagination and changed my life." His interests include libertarian and paleo-conservative politics, the ecology of the southern Appalachian forest and poetry.

He has a new blog on southern Appalachian natural history here.

He offers the following personal nuggets:

A FEW RECENT NOTABLE BOOKS READ: "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Peter Duesberg; "Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival" by Bernd Heinrich; "The Great War and Modern Memory" by Paul Fussell; "The Man Who Loved Wasps: A Howard Ensign Evans Reader"; "Among the Belivers: An Islamic Journey" by V.S. Naipaul; "Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West" by Hampton Sides; "God's Revelation to the Human Heart" by Seraphim Rose; "Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of An American Terrorist" by Alston Chase; "Commentary on the Psalms" by St. John Chrysostom; and "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light" by Mother Teresa.

SOME WORDS THAT STICK WITH ME: "Tall nettles cover up, as they have done / These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough / Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: / Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. / This corner of the farmyard I like most: / As well as any bloom upon a flower / I like the dust on the nettles, never lost / Except to prove the sweetness of a shower."--Edward Thomas

"I have no enemies, but my friends don't like me." -- Philip Larkin

"Rain, wind and fire! The secret bestial peace!" --Philip Larkin

"Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless." -- Philip Larkin

WHAT I'VE BEEN LISTENING TO LATELY: "A Young Man's Exhortation," "Til Earth Outwears," "Oh Fair to See," "I Said to Love," "Let Us Garlands Bring," and "Before and After Summer" by Gerald Finzi; "Uncle Charley and His Dog Teddy" and "Symphonium Drum" by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band; "On Wenlock Edge" and "Five Mystical Songs" by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

MY FAVORITE TIME AND PLACE: A blue late-summer or early autumn day at Rocky Knob as the broadwinged hawks wheel overhead on their way south.

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