“In this mountain country, November is the month for classic beauty. Lines are clear and simple. Colors are subdued earth shades. Only those who know well and deeply these hills and rivers and their valleys can find them beautiful in this starkness, as a doctor may find a skeleton beautiful in its precision of bone and joint without camouflage of flesh. November strips the trees and leaves their branches in etched design against the sky, strips the hills and reveals their contours– every winding path and rocky ridge and scooped-out gully-and finally reveals the river. No longer laced overhead with green limbs or half hidden under banks of bush and fern, the steams and springs and rivulets, as well as the river the feed, emerge in each sharp twist, each lazy pool, and become dark liquid lines threading the mountains and valleys. It is a fir time to trace the river’s course. It is a fit time to meet the country and its people.

Now there is nothing hidden by summer’s rich growth, which Is past, or winter’s soft snow, which will come. Now the pasture gates swing on stout hinges or sag in careless sloth, town streets stir brisk with purpose or swarm with aimless indolence, and now the river rushes cold clear green with the first winter rains or mines a thick red-yellow mud from barren hills and fields. Now it is November." (page 6, The French Broad by Wilma Dykeman)