It's October again at Carter Mountain Orchard.
Above the frost line in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson's unspoiled Little Mountain, the apple trees abound with crisp fruit. A formation of Canada geese flies overhead and a dusty gravel incline flanked by sprigs of golden rod and reddening Virginia creeper tunnels upward through the trees - the only way to the top. Children - and the occasional University student - scour over the rows of apples.
But here, names like Golden Delicious and Granny Smith are nothing new. In fact, orchards have thrived in the fields atop Carter Mountain since the days of Jefferson himself.
Ruth Chiles, the co-owner of Carter Mountain Orchard, never actually intended to raise apples. Instead, she planned to work as a secretary.
"I married into this farm life," she recalled, sipping from a cup of homemade apple cider.
Four generations ago, in 1912, the Chiles family purchased the land on Carter Mountain and persevered in the orchard business. Today, Ruth and her husband Henry own 10 orchards, two of which they open to the public for apple picking. But in each of their apple orchards, the same goal persists: to raise perfect apples.
"That's the whole purpose in life, to grow the perfect fruit," Chiles said. Chiles, who planned to retire at age 55 and now is several years older, remains at the front line of the business, weighing apples and managing one of several cash registers bottle-necked with customers in the orchard's open-air barn.
Apple picking at Carter requires no great expertise, only some ingenuity with an "apple pole," a clever device that retrieves otherwise impossible fruit from treetops. In October, Carter Mountain Orchard boasts a wide variety of the fruit, including Golden Delicious - Chiles' favorite - ... Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Winesap, Gala, Crispin, York, Staymen, Macintosh, Fuji, Jonagold, Empire and others.
The historic barn houses a market, gift shop and bakery where visitors can purchase gourds, Indian corn, apple butter, handcrafts, an "I Get My Apples at Carter Mountain Orchard" T-shirt and Chiles' famous apple cider doughnuts.
People from all generations seem to find a unique connection to apple picking. "We really get all ages," Chiles said, "from the little ones to grandma and granddaddy."
At the orchard, people of many backgrounds who might otherwise never interact with each other suddenly share an unexpected affiliation with the family at the next tree. One family helps another carry apples to the scale. A group of children assist a man in his seventies down a grassy slope where his favorite apple grows. "I'll lower the branch, you pick," one tells him.
And devout apple pickers journey from miles away to the orchard. Betsy and Don Guthri traveled from Mechanicsville with their two young daughters Laura and Kelly to pick apples.
"I like to pick my own apples just to make sure there are no worms in the worm holes," Laura remarked, biting through the tawny skin of a Golden Delicious.
Other families, including Kathy and Charles Johnston and their daughter Shelby as well as Sue Nichols and her three children, Maggie, Kattie and Jake, all made a pilgrimage to the orchard from Richmond.
"We've been coming up here for the past four or five years," Kathy Johnston said, watching the children clamber up a gnarled tree trunk nearby.
But apple picking is not just a family pastime. During the fall semester, many University students drive the 10-minute trek to the mountain for some weekend solitude.
Perched nearly 1,200 feet above Charlottesville, Carter Orchard offers impressive views of the University. From above the neatly kept rows of apple trees, the Rotunda rises from the valley as a discernable but modest pinpoint.
"I'm pretty sure that Jefferson would have wished that he built here instead of where he did," Chiles said wittily.
Third-year College student Elizabeth Melton found her apple picking experience reinvigorating.
"Taking your own food from the tree, instead of relying on harvesters and grocery stores, reminds you that you're human," Melton recounted. "It makes you feel a certain control over the environment you live in, and at the same time, makes you feel weak in comparison to nature."
Apple picking at Carter also lures health-conscious individuals and nature enthusiasts alike.
"People know that the fruit here is the freshest," Chiles said. "And they love to get on this mountaintop."
Melton, too, agreed that the freshness of the apples is part of the orchard's allure.
"It's just a lot of fun to have the adventure of picking fruit," Melton said. "The apples also taste much better than they do from the grocery store."
In addition to orchards, Carter also offers a two-mile trail for apple pickers in search of a hike.
For the Chiles family, the cultivation and harvest of apples remains inexhaustibly timeless. For them, it seems a ritual as inseparably connected with fall as raking leaves and carving pumpkins. Carter Mountain appears cloistered, and, for the most part, as it did a hundred years ago.
"Still, every morning, I make sure that the mountain is here," Chiles insisted. "The weight of the world is lifted off your shoulders."
Unfortunately, she realizes that fewer and fewer apple orchards dot the countryside of Albermarle County today.
"Most people don't want to stay on the farm," said Chiles, who remembers when small, family-owned orchards were more common in the mountainous region of central Virginia. "Now farmers are selling the land to build condos and town homes."
But thankfully for her, Chiles knows that her family will continue the tradition at Carter and the nine other orchards the family owns. "I have a son and he has a son," she said.
The changing leaves, overwhelming vistas and the proximity to Charlottesville make the mountain an ideal haven for University students in search of a hiatus from studying for midterms.
"It was really a nice stress relief to get away from work and from Grounds for a while," Melton said. "When I'm around college students all the time, I forget that there are so many other people in the world."
Chiles also believes that the orchard offers perspective on the humdrum of daily life. "This is as close to heaven as a lot of us are going to get," she said.
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