Where I live now, the Blue Ridge isn't very high. Snickers Gap and Ashby Gap are just 1,000 feet, and the ridge between them rises only half again that high. But it has impressive separating powers. The other day, when I left my house on the western slope at dawn, the sky was clear and starry and the air was cold and dry. It hurt your ears. A mile and a half east of my house, where Route Seven crosses Snickers Gap, the entire Loudoun Valley opens under your gaze, and that day it was full of cream, north and south as far as you could see, a white lake. I held my breath as we descended into it.

Modest as the mountain is, it still seems to separate the east from the west culturally as well as atmospherically. When I lived on the eastern slope, I bought bread and milk in Purcellville and looked to Leesburg for sophisticated needs. Now that I live on the western slope, I keep a PO box in Berryville, and I'm addicted to the masaman curry at Winchester Thai. You'd think that it was hard to get a thought to go across the mountain. You'd think the mountain had a special kind of gravity that made thoughts flow in the same direction as water.

When I moved from one side of the mountain to the other, I realized that culture is a function of place, both specific to it and determined by it--as specific as a couple of miles, whose minor differences have great determining power. That became clear to me when I learned the story of a cultural event that takes place down the road every year.

It started like this: In the old days the postal service wouldn't deliver on the rugged western slope, so people had to row across the Shenandoah every Sunday to get their mail at John Miller's farm. They came after Sunday services, where they had sung gospel music with friends, and they brought the pleasure of song and communion down the side of the mountain with them. They also brought the fiddles and guitars they'd played in church, and after collecting their mail they took up those instruments again to play a faster kind of song. A banjo appeared, and a dobro--Friday and Saturday instruments. And then strangers started coming, for the music, not their mail.

"One day my dad drove down to Richmond and talked to Carlton Haney, who was a promoter and manager," John Miller, Jr. told me, "and the next day the Carter Family came and sang right over there." That was 1945. Now the Watermelon Park Music Festival has evolved into an annual event that lasts for three days and attracts many of the world's best bluegrass players. Last September there were 18 bands, including Ralph Stanley and Bruce Molsky.

Why is it, I wonder today, that I didn't know any of that until I moved over the top of the mountain?

I'd like to think of this column as an effort to pick the mountain up and hold it in the air, so the separated thoughts and waters of a common culture can flow back together. The two sides of the mountain aren't exactly the same place, but they're more alike than different, and together they produce a culture of extraordinary richness. We are lucky, wealthy people.