Memoir – Page 17 – Via Negativa

June 12, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Elanor

Her most common expression so far in the photos I’ve seen is surprise, pale blue eyes full of what looks like wonder, mouth round as the dot at the bottom of an exclamation point – as if she just can’t get over the novelty of it all. But the face of any infant is such a clear, such a perfect mirror: looking into one, we find our own faces softening, losing their worry lines, becoming – if we’re not careful – infinitely pliable.

Her proud father – my brother Steve – described the occasion of her first laugh. He’s carrying her around the apartment when all of a sudden she lets loose with a loud fart. They grin at each other, & then he answers with a blast of his own. She laughs. He laughs. Her mother, sitting on the sofa, laughs too. They all laugh so hard that tears come to their eyes. The vibration first felt in the bowels travels to the belly & makes her whole body shake – who’d have expected it!

Such an appetite for surprise isn’t given to everyone, I think. Or perhaps it is, & some simply lose it along the way. But isn’t this also what the snapshot photographer covets, the proverbial element of surprise? At first, it’s a novel twist on peek-a-boo, daddy’s face half-hidden by a strange box. He disappears in a sudden flash, returns just in time for another, & another. He croons the familiar syllables that must mean something like happiness, or what happens between us: Elanor, he says, Elanor! & trips the flash once more. Is this all he’s going to do? The last picture shows her eyes shut tight & a mouth open twice as wide as I ever would’ve thought it could go. Just looking at it, I too have to stifle a sudden yawn.
__________

For some reason, I was under the impression that today was Father’s Day, and acted accordingly, gifting my old man with a couple of books this morning. Imagine my surprise when they told me it wasn’t until next Sunday. But I won’t be around next Sunday, so it’s just as well. Happy Father’s Day, then, to all you lucky dads out there.

May 20, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Creature

I used to work with this guy named Creature. I guess it’s been about twelve or thirteen years ago now. Creature was a large biker (ex-Pagans) and Vietnam vet who walked with a limp and sported a big black moustache and an unruly mop of hair. He ran the kitchen of a fairly high-class restaurant where I was hired to do prep work. Like most bikers I’ve met, he was a good storyteller with a very dark sense of humor. He rarely raised his voice, even when things got crazy – as they did almost every night in that cramped kitchen with a permanently broken dishwasher and an almost comically snooty female maitre-d’.

I remember Creature’s three-minute lecture on self-defense, prompted I think by disgust at my professed pacifism and my ignorance of all things violent and manly.

“First, do not go for the balls. You never know if a guy still has anything down there – a lot of real assholes don’t, they got ’em shot off or blown up in Vietnam and they’ve been trying hard to make up for it ever since. You kick ’em down there and you only piss ’em off.

“No. Here’s what you go for: bridge of nose, throat, knees. The first is the easiest, ’cause you can break a guy’s nose just with a head-butt. Nothing is more painful or debilitating. Just grab him by the shoulders, pull him toward you, and slam down on his nose with your forehead, like this.” He demonstrates with me, except for the actual butting. We were taking a smoke break on the back steps.

“Just remember Quiet Riot – ‘Bang Your Head.’ Might be tricky if you got glasses on, though, ’cause they’ll go flyin’.

“Number two: throat. If you have to strike a blow, make it count. This is what you do if you really want to take someone out. You can kill someone that way, though, so be careful.

“Third, knees – a kick from the side or from behind, straight to the body’s weakest link. Then when they’re down, kick ’em again – anywhere you think it’s gonna hurt.

“If you feel like you shouldn’t kick someone when they’re down, you shouldn’t be fighting at all. There is nothing pleasant or gentlemanly about fighting; it’s a nasty business. There are no fucking rules of war. You know that. You say you don’t believe in violence; I respect that. But if somebody’s raping your mother, you’re not going to just stand there, are you?

“I always tell people: never start a fight. Never put yourself in the position of having to start a fight. And if someone forces it on you, make sure you tell ’em how much this bothers you. After you break the guy’s nose, or whatever, be sure to say as loud as you can, ‘I really, really, really hate to fight.’ If he has any buddies who might be thinking of helping him out, that always makes a real good impression.”

Creature wasn’t shy about discussing his American Indian ancestry or his criminal record. “When I was your age, man, I was in and out of jail for burglary, and when they finally got me for armed robbery, the judge gave me a choice: get a degree in advanced anal engineering at State Penn, or go to Vietnam. There was no Door #3 – I checked.

“So that’s how I ended up going to Vietnam, a grunt with a gun on a mission to kill Indians whose major crime was resisting being rounded up and herded onto reservations. And kill I did. Kill kill kill. Did it make a man out of me? No. It simply made me much more determined never to have anything more to do with assholes in uniforms. I don’t care if you’re a Pennsylvania state trooper or an army sergeant, if you’re wearin’ black pajamas or black robes. Something about a uniform immediately turns whoever wears it into an asshole.”

One of the punks I used to hang with saw me wave to Creature across the street one time and was aghast. “You know that guy?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“That’s the guy who came to our house when we fell ‘way behind in rent. We had let the phone bill slide, too, so the landlord couldn’t get a hold of us. But rather than stop by to talk things over, he sends a goon. That guy. He just walks in the front door one day, no knock, doesn’t say a word. Just limps in and sits down in the middle of the room, folds his arms across his chest, and sits there.”

“Didn’t you go, like, ‘Yo, who the fuck are you?'”

“No, I guess we were too surprised and scared by the whole thing. And the phone didn’t work, so it’s not like we could’ve called the police. He just sat there for like half an hour —- well, I don’t know how long it was, but it seemed like a real long time — looking at me, looking at my housemates as we walked in and out of the room trying to act all casual and shit. It was like having a bomb in the middle of the room, and you don’t know if or when it’s gonna go off. He finally got up and left. Never said a word.”

“Did you pay the rent?”

“No, but we all moved out a few days later. We didn’t want anything more to do with that landlord.”

I lost touch with Creature after I got fired. (My crime: attempting to make a meatless soup.) One of his nephews by a previous marriage was a good friend of mine, and he kept me informed of Creature’s exploits — which remained fairly tame, at least on the surface. He was just a genial, law-abiding guy who ran a good kitchen and whipped up a mean roux. And no, I don’t know how he got that nickname. I was always afraid to ask.

May 4, 2005June 1, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Of dragons and princesses

My five-year-old cousin Morgan has wanted to be a princess ever since she was old enough to talk. At the wedding reception, she’s agog: the bride was right there in the bathroom! Morgan circulates among the tables telling everyone she knows in what is presumably intended to be a hushed whisper.

The princess may seem capricious, but her whims are predictable: If it moves, make it stop. If it doesn’t move, poke at it with a stick. Try stepping on it. Not enough to really kill it – just so it stops moving. Then give it a new identity, complete with a sanitized version of events. “You shouldn’t be trying to sting people, Mr. Wasp!”

At Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland we get to watch the mangrove viper eat. The keeper removes the back wall of its small green world and dangles a white corpse – a pre-killed mouse – in front of its nose. The trick rope comes alive as quick as lightning. It tries in vain to swallow the mouse tail-first, works it around in its mouth for five minutes until it ends up pointing in the right direction. Then with a sudden gulp, the mouse turns into a lump that makes the blue-black and yellow scales ripple as it moves rapidly toward the stomach. Now the viper can’t stay still: even without legs it paces, impatient for Food #2. When the keeper opens the wall this time, the snake seems ready for larger prey. The mouse does a frantic dance of death at the end of the three-foot tongs.

After the viper feeding, Morgan tugs on her mother’s sweatshirt. “Can I have a mouse, too?” Who’d have thought that mealtimes could ever be anything but a dull game played with fork and spoon? They go into the gift shop, and she picks out a plush purple frog with legs as long and bendable as snakes.

No tawdry roadside menagerie, the zoo turns out to be a real class act, dedicated to endangered species conservation and environmental education. I can’t decide whether to be pleased or disappointed. No one will ever wrestle with these alligators. We’ll never get to place bets on a match-up between the eyelash viper and the poison arrow frog. I crouch in front of the chameleon exhibit, watching crickets trying to burrow into the bark chips. The chameleon rolls its gun-turret eyes – one at me, the other at a doomed cricket.

Adults don’t come to Reptiland, it seems, unless accompanied by children. School groups thunder through like wildebeests. So important to set a good example for the children, we tell ourselves as the handler holds the boa constrictor for everyone to pet. Morgan is delighted. Only one child refuses to touch, mute with terror or intransigence. While everyone around her admires the silky-smooth scales, she stares at the hand clamped over its mouth and keeps her fingers coiled tight against her chest.

An outdoor pen contains the only token birds at Reptiland: five emus, to illustrate the link with the dinosaurs. Victorian feather dusters never looked quite so vengeful, but still… “We are not emus!” I say severely as they eye us up.

That evening we watch two cartoon movies, the world twice saved from certain cataclysm. Morgan seems bored, starts to wander off. “Sit down, watch the movie, and be good!” her father commands. During the intermission, she finds a dead ladybug in the corner of the living room, sets it on top of a block of wood and pushes it back and forth with her index finger. “Be good, ladybug!” I hear her whispering.

April 30, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The finding

Stop this chattering
about what it means, or
might mean. When you first
heard the news, what
was your reaction? Deafness.
Two mornings ago
I played the strange phone
message from
my brother in
Mississippi – Don’t know
if y’all heard yet, but they’ve
discovered the [….]
right across the river
from Rosedale – heard
the tremor in his voice,
but my mind, fearful
daylight creature, failed
to fill in the blank.
I listened again: still
couldn’t make sense
of it. Oh
well, I thought, probably
some archaeo-
logical thing.
And didn’t give it another
thought until mid-
afternoon, when
my other brother sent
around the link. Ivory-billed
Woodpecker Rediscovered.

I would like to
be able to say that I
got up then & wandered
outside to listen
to the birdsong, aware
suddenly of all the notes
inaudible to the human ear.
Perhaps I did sit
a little straighter
in my chair. I kept reading
e-mail, & at some point
I found myself shaking
with silent sobs. I wrote
in my blog. I grabbed
a beer from the fridge.

The next day when
I played that phone
message for
the third time, it was
perfectly comprehensible.
The Ivory-billed. What else
have I failed to hear because
I was trying too hard
to fill some blank that
was never really blank?
Today
I’m off to
a cousin’s wedding
& for once I’m not
thinking gloomily about
what world their likely kids
will find themselves in.
All might
not yet
be lost. It’s raining,
it’s April, &
the goddamn birds
are singing like
there’s no tomorrow.

January 18, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Poetry is my bag

Language Hat’s posting of a poem from the blog of the nine-year-old Julia Mayhew got me thinking about the role that strong parental support, and attention from adults generally, played in my own poetic career. It all started with the Christian Science Monitor’s annual contest for children’s poetry when I was seven years old: I got five dollars for a poem, five more for the accompanying picture, and best of all, my big brother DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I think it was the discovery of one thing my older brother didn’t excel at that really got me going, though the money was nice, too. The opening lines of my first poem, “The Elephant,” balanced understatement and redundancy:

The elephant, not all that hairy,
Stomps around on all four feet.

What’s great about poems by kids, of course, is how fresh, direct and kinetic the imagery can be. I was into my early teens, I think, before I started working more self-consciously on form and style. I remember one break-through poem that I wrote around the age of 14:

Tears on the plaster cheeks:
The ancient meditation mourned?
Uncross your legs, Buddha,
Come see the willow blossoms where they bloom.

– which is interesting too because it shows that even before I knew diddly about Buddhism or Daoism, I was already inclined in the latter direction.

I was working with an adult mentor, Jack McManis, by this point, so in retrospect I guess it’s not surprising that a bit of Jack’s strong emphasis on word music was already showing through. Later that same year, I closed a poem on transplanting cattail tubers with a stanza that pleased me not merely for its sound and imagery, but for the vatic tone – something I continue to strive for 25 years later:

I have seen a sea of cattail reeds
Rippling in the sun, rooted
In the wonderfully wet,
Whistling like the pipes of Pan
Over a broad water.

Of course, that was a good decade before the debut of the Internet, to say nothing of blogs. But my brothers and I did publish a zine of sorts, a natural history quarterly for which we had 35 subscribers, including some folks we didn’t even know. We were part of the Xerox revolution! That’s when I really learned how to write (and draw, and do calligraphy): my dad taught me the principles of good, clear prose composition in two hours. Given the kind of indifferent student I was in school, if I’d waited for my English teachers to teach me how to write, I doubt I ever would’ve learned.

So I’m all for kids writing blogs. One of the things that really impresses me about Julia Mayhew’s writing is the ease with which she assumes other personas. I don’t recall my own interest in dramatic monologue going nearly so far back. Of the poems currently on Mayhew’s index page, my favorite is this one:

I AM A BAG

I am a bag,filled with dirty
garments and when people
pick me up I feel like I am
going to split in half,little
people as big as me
stick their head in,yuck!
Their breath smells bad.
When big people come
they pull away little people
I think you call them bubies
or bibies or babies or
something like that,oh no!
I see bibies or babies in front
of me,Is there a nose plug?
YUCK!

January 11, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Brush Mountain

Sleep, I realized long afterwards, is the one thing that keeps us human, keeps us animal. Go without sleep – all sleep – for too many days in a row, and you lose the ability to inhabit your own body. Pain and pleasure become increasingly abstract. Your consciousness floats in an ether of pure mentation, immune to all worldly beauty. There are two doors, one marked Suicide and the other marked Madness. “What is behind door number three?” you want to know. There must be another way out! But Door # 3, if it even exists, is firmly locked and barred. To sleep, perchance to dream…

I was 16. I had been reading D.T. Suzuki on Zen and filling notebooks with increasingly incoherent thoughts, night after night. Odd things happened. On the day following my fourth sleepless night I completely dominated a volleyball game in gym class, I who had never had quick reactions and was completely unathletic (but in good shape from walking five miles a day, to and from school). That was an intensely egoistic high, a true power trip that I still recall with a bit of nostalgia, how I leapt and dove and shouted, eventually the only one left on my side of the net, playing against a half dozen jocks and winning. “So that’s what it feels like not to think, not to be self-conscious, never to second-guess oneself!” I said to myself afterwards. Who’d have thought that being a machine would feel so liberating?

On the morning after my fifth night without sleep, I was sitting in Miss McCaughey’s Spanish 2 class when the last thread connecting me to earth suddenly snapped. In a flash I realized that everything was empty, empty! I put my unreal books in my unreal pack, got to my unreal feet, and walked out of the unreal classroom and its soulless holographs of human beings, one of whom – the teacher – asked me where I was going. “Out,” I said. I remember her standing at the door of the classroom, watching me walk slowly and deliberately down the hall.

Poor Miss McCaughey! It was only her second year of teaching, and she told me later she’d thought she must’ve done something horribly wrong. When she recovered from her shock, she sent my friend Jim out to find me, but by that time, I was gone.

Gone. Out of the hated school that I now knew to be nothing but a test and a trick. Every sentient being had already achieved enlightenment but me; I was convinced of it. That very realization constituted my own ticket, I thought. I was flooded with something that might have been joy, if I had had any normal emotional reactions left with which to experience it. Now all I needed to do was walk out of the stage set. I was sure the exit would appear, and I’d know it when I saw it. All I had to do was abandon all lingering attachments to the world, expect nothing, and wait for the moment, which was already present, to fully present itself to me.

I dropped my pack by the side of the road. No need for that any more! Following my familiar route across town, I tried to climb the steep path up the side of the High School Hill and found I could not. Freezing rain a couple days before had turned the snow into slippery concrete in which it was impossible to find a foothold. I clawed my way about fifty feet up the side, slipped, and slid back down. Nothing to do but circle the hill, then, as I had done in the opposite direction just a few hours earlier, but had already completely forgotten. No wonder I believed so fervently in the perpetual present – it was all I had left.

A half hour later, on my way out of town, I remember stopping in the middle of the bridge over Bald Eagle Creek and staring at the water, fascinated. I took off my gloves one at a time and dropped them in the water, watched them float rapidly away. My hat followed. I think I probably would’ve taken off all my clothes if it hadn’t been so cold out.

The sun beat down from a sea of blue – all light, no heat. The snow-blinding world glittered, impenetrable. I don’t remember much of my walk up the hollow. It’s amazing, really, that I remember any of this at all. Some time around noon, I think, I reached the end of our mile-and-a-half-long driveway and started across the lawn toward the house. That’s when it finally hit me, the sudden realization I’d been waiting for. If I had to put it into words, it would be something along the lines of, Dude, you’re out of your fucking mind!

Everything fell into place. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s also the perfect image for what happened. Everything fell back into its rightful place and I stood there in the glare ice under a cloudless sky staring at the house I’d grown up in, aware and ashamed of my nakedness before the world. I looked all around. The mountain – this mountain – was just a mountain again.

As I walked in the door, the phone started ringing. Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible, I remember thinking, as a great wave of weariness crested and broke.

October 21, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

“Alone in the world”: hill country women

I wrote the following poem back in 1992. My mother included it on the dedication page of her book Appalachian Autumn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), a synoptic nature book that included a description of the clearcut logging of a 100-acre portion of Plummer’s Hollow that had once belonged to the McHugh family.

PLUMMER’S HOLLOW ELEGY
in memoriam Margaret McHugh

When her mind went they took her away
from the house in the hollow where she’d lived
forty years in combat readiness
with her dog & her shotgun, a color TV
& her dead brother’s artificial legs standing
guard at the top of the stairs.

Her ancestors’ land had been sold out from under her
& clear-cut by the absentee owner
who couldn’t be bothered with a mother’s deathbed
commandment half a century old:
Don’t let anyone lumber the mountain again.
She’ll never survive a third cutting
& neither will you.

From the other end of Appalachia, in northern Georgia, here’s an excerpt from an interview with Anna Howard, 93 at the time (1973, or a few years before: this was included in Foxfire 2, edited by Eliot Wigginton and published by Anchor/Doubleday). For all you city people, “locust” refers to a very hard wood, black or yellow locust, often used for fence posts because of its resistance to rot. The oldest portion of my house, built right after the Civil War, rests on a sill of locust instead of a rock foundation. The bark is still intact.

“A STAKE THAT WON’T BUDGE”: Anna Howard

God can put it on your heart or mine anything he wants you t’do, and I know he can. He has mine. Pray about things you don’t know what t’do about. It’ll come to you just as plain.

And I try t’be all th’same alike. I don’t talk about people. I don’t say no harm about nobody and all they do. It says in th’Bible t’do unto others as we wish t’be done by, and I feel that way about that. And I feel like if you’re in earnest and got faith in th’Lord and ask him for anything, he’ll put it right in your mind. . . .

Kindness and love is th’main thing. Now that’s my advice. It’s good to know you got a friend. It’s love. Just like I made [a friend] out of you. I see people that their looks and their ways just a’gives t’you, and you love ’em. And th’next time you see’em, you love’em better.

I’ve not had too much of a happy time since my old man died. And after my children left, I just felt alone in th’world. And when all my people died – everyone that passes on out, I just feel like I’m further and further away. Yes, sir.

So now I knit socks a lot. I just love t’do that. If I ain’t got anybody t’talk to me, now I’m bound t’have somethin’ in my fingers. If I’m able t’hold my head up, I’m bound t’have somethin’ in my fingers t’employ my mind. . . .

I’ve been made fun of for bein’ old-fashioned, but it don’t matter t’me a bit in th’world. If anyone tries to run over me, they’ll find they’ve run up against a stake that won’t budge ’cause it’s made out a’locust! I’ve always done th’work of a man. God’s been good t’me. He’s given me strength.

My grandmother was a far less god-fearing woman. She grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania: still very much in the Appalachians, but culturally closer to New England than Appalachia. This portion of the state was largely settled by pioneers from Connecticut in the 18th century; my grandmother’s people were among those settlers.

Although Grandma was a very reticent person, she was always kind toward us kids, teaching us how to draw and helping with other craft projects. She was fairly intellectual, and much more adventuresome and open-minded than her husband, my grandpa. A four-month sojourn in Peru with my parents a few years before her death may have been the high point of her life. I wrote the following poem in her voice shortly after her death; it may or may not accurately represent her view of life. I felt justified in taking the liberty because, of all my immediate relatives, she is the one I most take after – with a little bit of my other grandmother’s more acerbic personality thrown in.

DREAMER
in memoriam Margaret Ide Bonta

I spent my tomboy girlhood on horses
rambling through orchards & the molehills
we fancied mountains, just south
of the glacier’s plow line. My brothers
taught me all the arcana of knots & hitches
I call to mind now, tied to an oxygen tank,
the transparent umbilicus bridled to my nostrils.

The man I married grew up in town
& loved the country for its range of practical puzzles.
But for my part, I preferred the ocean’s
implausible clues: polished stones & glass & wood
on a beach asymptotic to the hyperbole of waves,
tidepool anemones like stars collapsing, turning inward,
conch & clamshell pressing their ears to the sand.

All the men of my family were hardheaded Methodists
for whom speech was more vital than prayer.
But I always found piety jarring–the minister’s
baited candy. Like the scent of a bear in the barn
one day as I rode my favorite Clydesdale in,
standing barefoot on his back like a circus performer,
reins in one hand. When that massive
draft horse shied he sent me flying, really flying,
ponytailed hair & calico skirts ballooning.

My sister & I were like that: we smoked,
we drank a little, we rode along behind
on our brothers’ motorcycles. But when
it came time to marry, we did. Hank & I settled
in calm suburban waters, had three sons–
if I’d had a daughter, I wouldn’t have known
what to do! And when he retired, we bought
a small house on the ocean, ‘way down south–
a house built on sand, true,
but protected by seawalls from the storm surge

until these last couple years when everything
got me at once, & the songs my mother
sang to me in the crib
suddenly after all this time pop into my head.
It’s as if you were to find a bottle, say,
on the high tide’s windrow–& the message inside
were written in your own hand,
in childish shaky letters.
I just lie here humming & wondering where I’ve been.

I’m in pain, of course, but it’s not so bad
that they have to take me out back & shoot me
just yet! The main thing is, my mind’s still clear,
neither too fast nor too slow. Makes me think
of my favorite Robert Burns song, do you know it?
“Flow Gently Sweet Afton.”

Well, we don’t need to sing the whole thing now.
There’ll be plenty of time later, when I’m gone.

The folklorist James York Glimm has written two books on central and north-central Pennsylvania; the following selection is from his second, Snakebite: Lives and Legends of Central Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Glimm writes, “Storytelling has sometimes been assumed to be a man’s province, but I have found that women informants have at least as much to say and can tell stories just as well. . . . As a younger man I was more interested in the frontier hunting and fishing stories that men like to tell. Women don’t tell many hunting yarns, but they tell other kinds of stories that give a detailed and personal picture of the world they lived in years ago.” One of the exceptions to this rule was 82-year-old Catherine Voce, who reminisced happily about living in a cabin ‘way up on a mountainside in the 30s, growing most of their own food and hunting deer with her husband. This is the conclusion of her interview with Glimm.

SHOOTING THE NEIGHBORS: Catherine Voce

If I were young again and had wings to fly, I’d fly back up on the mountain above Rock Run and live in our cabin. When you’re young and in love, it makes all the difference. All I heard were the birds, a distant cowbell, and sometimes the S. and N.Y. whistle when the wind was right. I was in love and I was happy.

That’s enough talk. Let’s go outside and stretch a bit. I’ll show you my garden. Maybe I can get that other woodchuck that’s been eating me out of house and home. Hand me that four-ten over there, and watch out, ’cause it’s loaded.

Now, here’s where Mr. Coon comes for his cat food every night. I ought to shoot him, but I can’t. He’s so big. Sits here outside the screen door and licks his paws and goes, “Mmm yum, yum, yum.” Lately he gets here early, or Mr. Possum will beat him out. Quarter to nine. Now this is my sweet apple tree. The porcupines love sweet apples. Two years ago I killed so many I stopped counting. Maybe seventeen. They come off the mountain and wake me up at night with their weird sounds. Did you ever hear them? It’s a “Wee-wee-yum-yum-yee-yee-mum-mum” noise, like that, and I don’t like it. So I get up in the night with my .410 and my flashlight and shoot them. One night I got six. I buried them behind the barn in the soft soil. No, I don’t like porcupines. Come on. Keep low and quiet and maybe we can get a shot at Mr. Woodchuck.

It’s so overgrown around my garden, I can’t keep up. There are currants, asparagus, potatoes, garlic, and tomatoes. Now, look inside that pen. Just look at that lettuce. Oh! He’s eating me out of house and home. I put boards up and he goes right under – look at that. Watch out – I’ve got a muskrat trap over there. One way or another, I’ll get him. That? Oh, that’s just a black snake. Leave him. He’s OK. Here, take some garlic home with you.

Finally, a selection of Appalachian women’s voices wouldn’t be complete without the West Virginia poet Louise McNeill (1911-1993). In the last years of her life she and editor Maggie Anderson collaborated on a volume of new and selected poems, Hill Daughter, published by (who else?) the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1991.

Anderson notes in her introduction that “The work of many writers from the southern Appalachian Mountains is a record of painful journeyings, away from what Kentucky poet James Still has called ‘the earth loved more than any other earth,’ off to the bright promise and the brighter economies of the cities. Louise McNeill’s life and work reflect those journeyings. The ‘paradox,’ as she has named it, is, in part, that the very opportunities that call mountain writers away from home also cut them off from the deepest sources of the writing itself, from its original impulses in a beloved place and people.”

McNeill’s poems are, in a word, devastating.

POET
by Louise McNeill

I am the trajectory and flight –
The archer, arrow, and the bow –
The swift parabola of light –
And I the rising and the flow,
The falling feather of the cock,
The point, propulsion, and the flood
Of blackbirds twanging from the nock,
And I the target and the blood.

WARNING
by Louise McNeill

Walk through the fern but do not tear the root.
Rest on the stump but count no ring of age.
In rotting wood see neither hint nor sign,
Nor translate from the oak leaf’s fallen page
One mystic line.

Look at the wheat field, see it blade and straw,
But neither bread nor sealed-in germ nor shadowy reaper –
Leave the close ground its anonymity,
Such knowledge to the blind mole and the worm –
The gray night-creeper.

Leave the enigma to the close-lipped dark;
Beyond your fenced-in land do not inquire –
For things there be best hidden:
Light that only the blind should see –
And over the hills in that far country
Truth bare, forbidden.

August 20, 2004March 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Child’s play

Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, it is order. Into an imperfect world it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it “spoils the game,” robs it of its character and makes it worthless.
– Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Beacon Press, 1950)

The hasidim tell the story of Rabbi Baruch, whose grandson Yechiel was playing hide-and-seek with a friend. Yechiel hid himself cleverly and waited for his friend, who never came to find him. Realizing that he had been abandoned, he ran crying to his grandfather and complained about his faithless friend. Rabbi Baruch’s eyes, too, filled with tears, as he told the young boy: God says the same thing: I hide, but no one wants to seek Me!
– Rabbi Amy R. Scheinerman, ELUL WEEK 1 — RESPONSIBILITY (via Velveteen Rabbi)

I hid too well. I lay under the tarp in plain view and willed myself into a clump of weeds, a mound of dirt. Springtails and inchworms began to claim me as an extension of their territories. A daddy longlegs scaled my torso and ran across my face, palpae ghosting over the Braille of my cheek and forehead.

My niece ran around the house, peering into all the obvious places, hollering my name. I lay still, certain the slight crepitating of the tarp in time with my breathing would give me away. But in less than ten minutes, everything was quiet. A vole began rustling against one of the corners farthest from my head, and I began to think my presence there was unwelcome. But I waited, trusting that the seeker would not abandon the chase without signaling surrender.

I’m not normally inclined to claustrophobia, but after twenty minutes it got too hot under the tarp and I had to get out. I eased it off me as quietly as I could and stumbled to my feet, dislodging several ants and caterpillars in the process. The thing to do now, I thought, was creep around the house and take a seat on the verandah, where she’d find me right before she gave up.

But when I rounded the corner of my parent’s house, there she and my dad sat, reading a book together. “Where were you?” she asked with feigned unconcern. I stood there blinking in confusion. “Where did you hide?” she persisted. I brushed at an imaginary spider. “You think I’m telling you? Don’t you even know how to play hide-and-go-seek?” I demanded angrily.

But of course she didn’t know. Without siblings, and with precious few playmates her own age down in Mississippi, where would she ever have learned the rules of engagement?

***

Thhhnk! Thhhnk! Thhhnk! Eva’s fist slams into my diaphragm with all the strength she can muster. She stands with one foot forward, in prizefighter form. Then for variation she crouches and aims a karate kick at my head. “Hey! Where did you learn to do that?” I barely dodge in time, grabbing her foot. “From watching my mommy!” Then she’s back to punching my flabby gut.

“Does your dad let you do this to him?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know. I guess not.”

“So why pick on me?” I whine. “Can’t you pick on someone your own size?”

She giggles. “No! I only punch my Uncle Dave! Because I know you’re FIERCE!”

If only that were true, I think to myself – but already the game has morphed into something else. “I LOVE you, Uncle Dave!” she says in her most melodramatic voice, throwing her arms around me. Good grief! What next?

There’s no question the kid’s got brains: it didn’t take her long to figure out the one kind of attack I’m not very good at fending off. “Put your arms around me!” she commands. I reluctantly comply, thinking: another eight years and this girl’s gonna be hell on ice.

***

The crudely drawn map had shown only a few, tentative landmarks – lines that might or might not have been trails, an “x” showing where the treasure chest had been hidden “at ye base of ye white pine tree between two okes.” Additional inscriptions hinted at the forbidding nature of the terrain: “BEWARE: Many Spyders,” and “here there bee squirrels.”

The doughty female pirate, accompanied by her two chief scientists, was unperturbed. She hacked mercilessly at the webs of the spiny micrathena with her vorple, cardboard blade. Any squirrels that hadn’t fled at the sound of her bloodthirsty cries must’ve been struck dumb by the terrible device with which her shield was emblazoned: a skull swimming in a pool of blood, encircled by a ring of fire. It looked a bit like the cover of a Slayer album.

Even with the help of scientists, the map’s instructions were difficult to follow. Where was that scurvy pine tree? Disoriented, they found themselves stumbling in circles, the thick vegetation tearing at their clothes, vultures circling. But just as they were about to abandon the search, the chief scientist spotted a scrubby sapling with dark needles. “Hey, there’s another pine tree! And look, there’s the chest!”

And there it was, a classic, green sea chest with tarnished brass fittings, gleaming in a patch of sunlight. Eva let out a triumphal shriek, and she and her grandpa pushed their way through the laurel to claim their prize. But just then they heard a crashing noise off to their right, the sound of pirate boots scuffling on dry leaves. Sun flashed on metal. The air filled with the smell of brimstone. They stood transfixed with horror as the apparition hove into view: a bearded, black-bandanna’d pirate ghost clenching a scimitar-shaped machete between yellow teeth. “WHO DARES DISTURB THE LOST TREASURE OF PLUMMER’S HOLLOW?”

“Avast!”

“Have at ye!”

“ARRRR!”

The fight was long and – needless to say – terrible. Blood was curdled. Timbers were shivered. When it was over, the undead defender of the lost treasure lay in a pool of gore, torn limb from limb. The female pirate and her assistants ignored the threats of revenge that still issued in a hoarse whisper from his bloody lips. They broke the lock on the chest and lifted the lid: another strongbox! They tore savagely at the duct tape. Oh my god! Styrofoam packing peanuts!

A small jewelry case lay hidden at the bottom of the box. Cautious now despite her great excitement, Eva pried it open. At last, the treasure was hers! It sparkled between thumb and forefinger as she gazed for a moment or two in uncharacteristic silence.

“AHA! Feast your eyes on this, me maties! The world’s most precious and only clear ruby!”

***

“Yes, Eva, there are female pirates – or were.” One of the encyclopedias we consulted even included portraits of two of the most famous women pirates from the late 18th century. We were careful not to mention the reality of modern piracy in places like the Molucca Straits, nor to bring up the only slightly more figurative piracy that is contemporary monopoly capitalism.

The idea of a treasure hunt on the last afternoon of Eva’s latest sojourn in Plummer’s Hollow had come from my dad – her grandpa. Which is ironic, given his strongly pacifist views. They’d hung out together all morning, telling stories. “Geez, you were never this much fun when we were kids!” I said jokingly during lunch.

But the truth is that when my brothers and I were kids, living on an isolated, mountaintop farm, we had each other as playmates and fellow adventurers; Eva is an only child. Now, thinking it over, I’m forced to reevaluate my childhood memories a bit. However much each of us three brothers might choose to dwell on the times when we fought, when we dominated and made each other miserable for no good reason, the fact is that we were extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up the way we did, our imaginations virtually unimpacted by television, pop music, and all the other anodynes of post-industrial civilization whose side-effects seem to include a general stifling of the imagination and a fracturing of the attention span.

The most salient fact of my pre-pubescent history remains my unusual capacity for self-induced misery. I was a displeasure addict, throwing tantrums at the drop of a hat. Even so, I can easily recall dozens of memorable adventures that I had in the company of one or both of my siblings. There was the time we went looking for Middle Earth in the hollows beyond the Far Field, mysterious with fog. I got completely disoriented and frightened, and was forced like Rabbit in the House at Pooh Corner to humble myself before my little brother, who led us unerringly home. Then there was that time when my big brother led the way into a giant blackberry thicket – at a rabbit’s-eye level. The three of us spent a lovely couple of hours on our hands and knees, gingerly excavating a long tunnel, then hollowing out a sanctuary in the thicket’s impregnable heart. Talk about a pirate fort!

On rainy days, we set up makeshift tables in front of the doors to our rooms, set out all the toys, knick-knacks and gee-gaws we could afford to part with, and then took turns “shopping” at each other’s tables. No money was necessary; even questions of trade, fair or otherwise, didn’t intrude. These were, as we called them, “give-away sales.” And just as in the kula system of ceremonial exchange described by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the same items circulated from owner to owner.

Raised by liberals who believed in treating their children as intellectual equals, the problems of the world were never far from our minds. Our parents didn’t try to shield us from the knowledge of such nightmare-inducing horrors as mass starvation, genocide and nuclear Armageddon. But we remained kids; such knowledge only challenged our imaginations to work harder. Now, from the perspective of a quarter century later, I am struck by the fact that the adult reality we lived under, the Cold War, has utterly vanished, while the worlds we conjured up in its stead have lost none of their power to enchant. The buried treasures and dragon hoards we sought then seem, in a strange way, realer than the stock-optional wealth of the dot-com boom or the ebb tide of investments that devastated the economies of Southeast Asia a few years back. My brothers and I each remain idealists, and on the rare occasions when the three of us get together, the B.S. sessions are a wonder to behold. We may disagree about the nature of the quarry now, but the rules of the game are still intact and the search is still on.

August 9, 2004March 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Missing notes

I was a Phebe – nothing more –
A Phebe – nothing less –
The little note that others dropt
I fitted into place –

Six-thirty. The treetops glow with the first rays of sun. A hummingbird circles a bull thistle’s purple tuft – all looks, no substance – then zooms over to the bergamot with its washed-out, scraggly heads.

Aside from the background trill of crickets and the sound of cars and trucks on the interstate highway a half-mile to the west, I’m struck by how silently the day has dawned. Early August is always a sad time of the year for me: the dusk and dawn chorus has dwindled to almost nothing. No more phoebe, wood thrush, Baltimore oriole, indigo bunting, scarlet tanager, catbird, great-crested flycatcher. Their young have fledged and learned their parent’s songs, and some have already begun the journey to their true homes in the tropics. Without such stalwarts as the cardinal, song sparrow and especially Carolina wren, the morning would arrive completely unheralded eight months out of twelve.

Already, the early goldenrod is blooming, and by the end of the week the whole field will have turned to gold. The season’s final generation of monarchs is on the wing. A dry high has settled in, bringing clear skies and autumn-cool temperatures. My niece is in heaven – she can spend almost every waking hour out-of-doors if she chooses. She spends the nights apart from her parents, sleeping up in her grandparents’ house in what had been my bedroom when I was growing up. And though she sometimes seems to wish that every adult were as facetious as her daddy and uncles are, there’s no question that her serious, naturalist-writer Nanna is still her main role model.

Yesterday morning the two of them went for a walk down Laurel Ridge, and Eva discovered a box turtle that her Nanna had walked right past without noticing. It was half-grown – only a few years old – and completely unafraid, even when Eva picked it up. After a careful examination of the eyes and plectrum, they decided it must be a female. Eva was so excited to have been the first to spot it, she ran all the way back to the house to tell her grandpa – and anyone else who would listen.

After lunch, without prompting from anyone, she sat down with a clipboard and legal pad and began to write what she proudly predicts will be her first published nature essay. We were astonished by the neatness of her hand and her fantastic spelling for a second grader. Mom reported the following conversation from earlier in the day.

Eva: “Are you famous, Nanna?”

Nanna: “Well, no, not really.”

“But do people know who you are?”

“Well, in Pennsylvania, I guess some people know who am.”

“That’s what I want! I want to write about Nature so people will know who I am!”

Yesterday afternoon my cousin Heidi stopped over with her three-year-old daughter Morgan in tow. Eva immediately took her under her wing and managed to coax her into walking much farther than she ever had before, showering her with praise for the feat. It was amusing to see these two only-children relate to each other in a big sister-little sister fashion.

As for me, I’m just happy for the company of two spontaneously affectionate and imaginative children – even when sudden storms of temper blow in from nowhere, as sometimes happens. Most of the time I am content to play Thoreau without regret for my single, childless state. But then I get a hug from a little kid and am reminded suddenly of just how much I’m missing.

The missing All, prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World’s
Departure from a Hinge
Or sun’s Extinction, be observed
‘Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity.

__________

Both quotes are from the R. W. Franklin edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson: nos. 1009 (first stanza) and 995 (complete).

August 7, 2004March 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

House and garden

My brother Mark’s family is visiting. Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with my sister-in-law Luz about clay tile roofs. When they paid a contractor to rebuild her mother’s house in Juticalpa, Honduras, they replaced the roof tiles with tin. How come? Well, short of setting them in concrete, it seems there’s no way to fasten the tiles securely in place.

I was especially intrigued by Luz’s description of the traditional manufacturing technique: women in Honduras used to make the u-shaped tiles by bending slabs of wet clay over their thighs.”Surely they’ve graduated to using logs now?” “Well, I suppose so. But you never know.” Parts of the country remain deeply traditional, though electricity, television and internet cafes are spreading to the remotest villages.

One consequence of the loss of traditional techniques is that in the bigger towns and cities, like Juticalpa, it has become impossible to find anyone who understands the delicate art of roof tile readjustment. As I understand it, the tiles are nested together and keyed to notched roof beams in some way. All is fine and dandy until the neighborhood cats start using the roof for nuptial activities. Their constant running about is enough to vibrate individual tiles out of position.

“Can’t you just get up on a ladder and move them back into place?” “It’s not so easy. I’ve tried it. Mark’s tried it. It’s practically impossible if you don’t know what you’re doing. You should’ve seen us three years ago, during the rainy season. Every night we had to keep moving our beds around so we could sleep without getting dripped on!”

And concrete? “No, because kids, you know, throw stones. The tiles are softer than the concrete. One broken tile and you have to replace the whole thing.”

So after supper I am sitting here going through my e-mail when my eight year-old niece comes in and grabs me by the hand. “Uncle Dave!” “Niece Eva!” “Tell me the names of the plants in your garden!”

I let her drag me outside. “You know this one, right?”

“Tomato.”

“Yep. They’re all volunteer plants that I rescued from the compost pit. And you should know this plant, too. Here, smell a leaf.”

She takes the proffered leaf, crunches it against her nostrils, then chews on it. “Smells like limes!”

“So it’s lemonbalm, remember? We made tea out of it last spring.”

“What’s this yellow one?”

“That’s rudbeckia. I got the seeds from Pop-pop originally, over ten years ago. It just keeps re-seeding itself, year after year. Now that he’s dead, I have something to remember him by.”

And so it goes: bouncing bet, lamb’s ear, thyme, butterfly weed, bindweed, tansy, peonies. She wants to know not only the name but each plant’s reason for being there.

“This tall purple stuff is bergamot or oswego tea. It does make a nice tea, but really, I keep it for the hummingbirds.” I make her feel the square stem characteristic of the mint family, then show her catnip, with the same property.

“Is that for cats?” she asks, knowing that the only cats around here are the fully wild ones that show up from time to time.

“Yes, well, it does make cats crazy-hyper. But it has the exact opposite effect on humans. It’s an essential ingredient for sleepytime tea. I don’t plant it – it just grows wherever it wants to, and I pull out the ones that get too aggressive.”

After a while of this, she inadvertently pays me the ultimate compliment.

“Uncle Dave, this is the strangest garden I’ve ever seen! You can’t tell the good plants from the weeds!”