From ilovemountains.org.

I decided to include this brief documentary here as a kind of quick course for those who might be unfamiliar with the phenomenon of mountaintop removal, since I’ve made reference to it here in the past (most recently in my Campfire tale post). I don’t particularly care for the use of celebrity spokespeople and other outsiders to the region, which to my mind reinforces the notion that mountain people are incapable of speaking up for themselves, but otherwise I think the video gives a good overview of the crisis.

Some additional points to consider:

• “Mountaintop removal” is a bit of a euphemism. This form of extreme strip-mining effectively obliterates the entire mountain by taking off its top and then using the “overburden” to fill in the adjacent valleys and ravines (a.k.a. hollows).
• The forests will likely take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to recover, if ever. When the narrator refers to a moonscape, that’s not hyperbole. However, more aggressive species of grass will grow, and some local boosters of the coal industry talk about how this will open up the view and allow cattle grazing and the introduction of Rocky Mountain elk for big game hunters to pursue.
• The practice of mountaintop removal is tantamount to ecocide. As mentioned in the documentary, the location of these mines in southwestern West Virginia and Kentucky threatens one of the most biodiverse temperate ecosystems in the world: what forest ecologists call the mixed mesophytic forest. This forest is simultaneously under assault by pulpwood companies who are stripping out everything, plowing, and planting red pine monocultures designed for short-rotation tree farming. Many species of salamanders, land snails, and beetles, and even some wildflowers and songbirds, will be threatened with extinction if the combined assault continues too much longer.
• Mountaintop removal amounts to an undeclared war against the people and communities of this region. The mining companies display the same kind of callous disregard for life as the European companies that conspired to ship deadly chemical waste to Ivory Coast last month: it’s not that they hate poor people, exactly, they just fail to recognize them as fully human. The documentary shows this pretty well. Like any war, it also divides communities, with many people clamoring for the few, temporary jobs that this form of mining provides, even knowing that laying waste to the land will render it largely uninhabitable for generations to come.
• What can you do? Besides helping to spread the word, consider supporting organizations such the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, West Virginia’s premier conservation organization, which has been tireless in its fight against mountaintop removal through every possible legal means. (The Highlands Conservancy is also, incidentally, one of the main reasons why the Monogahela National Forest is in such good shape.) Other worthy groups include Appalachian Voices, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

What is it that keeps pulling me back to northern West Virginia and the magnificent Monongahela National Forest? Maybe the fact that it looks so much like home — only more so. Though the basic geology is virtually identical to where I live, the mountains are higher, the relief is greater, the roads are scarier and the people are much fewer. I’ve probably said this in one of my previous posts about West Virginia, but the mountains and hollows there look the way this mountain and hollow appear in some of my dreams — the ones where I’m five years old again.

My hiking buddy L. and I just made our fourth visit in two years. Time constraints and the length of the drive down there (four and a half to five hours just to get into the northern part of the forest) meant we’d only have one full day, so we decided to play it safe and re-visit areas we’d seen before at different times of the year. The first of these was Bear Heaven, a primitive campground and picnic area on a high ridge eleven miles east of Elkins. We discovered it on our last trip, in late July 2005, and were enchanted by the huge, weathered mazes of rock under a maturing second-growth forest, reminding us of lost cities being reclaimed by the jungle. Our last morning on that trip started out rainy, so we took our umbrellas and wandered out among the misty rocks. Many of the boulders were thick with lichen, including rock tripe lichen (genus Umbilicaria) bigger than any we’d seen before.

L. is an enthusiastic spinner, weaver, and dyer, so our main excuse for returning to Bear Heaven was to collect fallen rock tripe to use in dyeing — it apparently yields a legendary purple known as orchil. Also, the campground is cheap: only five dollars a night. The temperature dipped well below freezing both nights, and that combined with a brisk wind, I think, kept the one noisy bunch at the other end of the small campground from partying much later than 10:00 o’clock.

Bear Heaven features the same weathered tors as the much better known Bear Rocks Nature Preserve, adjacent to the Dolly Sods Wilderness. Both bear-friendly destinations are created from the same Pottsville conglomerate, a formation first described from beds in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania. Some 300 million years ago, in between the swampy periods that gave us all that coal, a vast, shallow lake gathered the silica-rich erosional remnants of an earlier, granitic version of the Appalachian chain. Over millions of years, as additional sediments accumulated on top, the sandy lake bottom hardened into rock. Then came the head-on collision of North Africa and North America, mashing against each other and pushing up mountains on either side of the orogenous zone in the same way that the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Eurasia is currently making those bumps knows as the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush.

Hundreds of millions of years later, erosion has sadly diminished what must once have been soaring peaks, but the low ridges that remain memorialize the violence of their origins in the incredibly complex folding and fault-thrusting of the bedrock, especially in the eastern and central portions of the chain. West of the Allegheny Front, sediments lie flat enough to justify use of the term “plateau” (The Allegheny Plateau in Pennsylvania and West Virginia; the Cumberland Plateau farther south), but dramatic down-cutting by creeks and rivers can expose a wide range of geological formations within a short distance just as surely as the accordion folding of strata in the ridge-and-valley province to the east. This geological diversity and constant variation in altitude within a convoluted landscape, combined with the relatively wet and temperate climate, helps make the Appalachians a hotspot for global biodiversity.

The vast, old Appalachian mountain chain has shaped the natural history and biodiversity of the continent. Its elevational, moisture, and latitudinal gradients have helped to protect its species during periods of climate change, resulting in today’s richness of life-forms. The elevational differences help to extend the distribution of certain species throughout the region. Species that thrive in the colder northern latitudes, often occur in the south too, at higher elevations. In terms of species number, the Appalachians are among the richest temperate areas. They include 255 birds, 78 mammals, 58 reptiles, and 76 amphibians.

The mountains we see today are like bones in a long-buried skeleton, exposed when the land rose and the sea’s long fingers began to cut more deeply, seeking out the softer sediments. Many of the rivers are far older than these latest incarnations of the Appalachian chain, which is how they have come to cut directly through the hardest layers to such dramatic effect. But first- and second-order streams tend to follow paths of least resistance.

The Pottsville conglomerate accounts for many of those “bones” in the plateau portions. It caps some of the highest ridges, including West Virginia’s highest point, 4,863-foot Spruce Knob, also within the Monongahela NF. Due to its unique physical and chemical properties, this conglomerate often tends to erode into maze-like rock cities, and close up, one can see that flat surfaces both horizontal and vertical are stippled with little hollows and bowl-shaped depressions. It’s a bear’s heaven, one supposes, because of the abundance of suitable denning spots. In Pennsylvania, local toponyms for outcrops of the Pottsville formation include Wolf Rocks and Panther Rocks. They’re places that really bring out the kid in me — I want to crawl through every cave and canyon and scale every tor.

Scrambling over and around big rocks was just the thing to get our blood moving on a chilly morning after a hearty breakfast at camp. We waited until the sun was fairly high to improve our chances of lichen- and photo-prospecting success, but then were a little disappointed when the rocks didn’t appear quite as marvelous as they had on our previous visit, in the mist and rain. L. got a couple quarts of fallen rock tripe pieces and was satisfied, I think, but I didn’t get nearly as many good pictures as I had hoped, and I think it’s because I was looking with the wrong eyes. I kept searching for the Bear Heaven we’d seen before, and feeling frustrated when it didn’t appear. I circled one of the “cities” twice, looking for a deep canyon that I’d glimpsed from both ends last time, but it seemed to have vanished. I’d be tempted to think I dreamed it if L. hadn’t been there too.

We did make some interesting finds that morning, though. Yellow birch has always been one of my favorite trees, largely because of the way its ropy roots loop over the ground or twine around rocks and stumps. Black birch does this also, but it’s a much shorter-lived tree; yellow birch can live for two hundred years and get up to five feet in diameter at breast height. (The breast height of the hiker, that is. Most birches don’t have breasts.) I’ve seen yellow birches that approached that size in a spectacular old-growth forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Sylvania Wilderness in the Ottawa National Forest. I’m sure there are some ancient yellow birches lurking on inaccessible slopes in the Monongahela National Forest, but I haven’t found them yet. Probably if we can ever get our asses down to the Gaudineer Scenic Area’s 140-acre old-growth fragment we’ll see some good-sized specimens. But no matter. Even young yellow birches are fun to look at, and I enjoyed all the yellow birches at Bear Heaven because it’s one species we don’t have here in Plummer’s Hollow. It’s a slightly higher-elevation or more northern species, even if sometimes I have to drive down to West Virginia to see it.

The outcroppings we were exploring were on the leeward side of the ridge, which appeared to foster a moist microclimate. Many of the rock faces were thick with moss as well as lichen. One of our most interesting discoveries that morning was a large beech tree whose trunk had been colonized by rock tripe — something I’ve never seen before.

Red spruce — once dominant in all the higher portions of the Monongahela, and the tree that gives its name to Spruce Knob — is making a good comeback at Bear Heaven, intermixed with eastern hemlock. The following picture of a red spruce growing on the top of a tor shows why these trees tend to dominate rocky, infertile sites: they don’t need much soil to get by.

As with yellow birches and hemlocks, red spruce roots are adept at exploiting every crack and crevasse in search of water and nutrients. In addition, they form symbiotic relationships with a species of truffle and an associated species of bacteria, which together help them obtain scarce nutrients such as nitrogen. The spruce and truffle/bacteria combination are two legs of a three-legged stool. The third leg is the northern flying squirrel, which likes to eat — and incidentally plant and spread — the underground fruiting bodies of the truffle. Widespread cutting of old-growth conifer forests throughout the northeast, combined with incursions of the more numerous southern flying squirrel, which carries a disease often fatal to its northern cousins, has almost wiped this species out in Pennsylvania. In West Virginia, a subspecies called the West Virginia northern flying squirrel enjoys federal protection as an endangered species. Here’s how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes it [PDF]:

Imagine if small families of mastodons lived in isolated areas on mountaintops. People would think such creatures were very special and that it was remarkable, possibly miraculous, that these animals from ancient times were living in our present age.

A subspecies as old as mastodons lives today in isolated clusters atop the central Appalachian Mountains in the highest elevations of West Virginia and adjacent Highland County, Virginia. A relic of former ages when the earth was very different, the West Virginia northern flying squirrel was isolated from the northern flying squirrel species when ice sheets covering North America receded about 10,000 years ago.

West Virginia northern flying squirrels live in high-elevation, spruce-northern hardwood forests of the Allegheny Highlands consisting of red spruce, fir, beech, yellow birch, sugar or red maple, hemlock and black cherry. The squirrel historically lived in the old-growth spruce forests that dominated the highlands until extensive industrial logging decimated this habitat between the 1880s and the 1940s. Even in the wake of this landscape level of habitat loss, West Virginia northern flying squirrels were resilient enough for a few residual populations to survive in small, scattered patches of less than ideal habitat while forests regenerated over the following decades.

The brief document continues with descriptions of an on-going, large-scale red spruce restoration effort in the Monongahela and adjacent areas — a rare example of the kind of habitat restoration mandated under the Endangered Species Act — and concludes by saying that, while the West Virginia flying squirrel will never be common, its population seem stable and its long-term prospects look good. (I wish we could say the same about the northern flying squirrel in Pennsylvania.) I must admit, I wasn’t thinking about flying squirrels on our latest visit, but even if I had remembered to listen for their soft, high-pitched chirps after dark, I doubt I could have heard them over the high winds.

Our biggest discovery of the weekend, where Bear Heaven was concerned, was that there was a lot more to it. In the inclement conditions of our previous visit, we hadn’t noticed the small picnic area, which features but a single, dilapidated picnic table and a pump that dispenses sulfur-tasting brown water. The attraction is its proximity to another whole series of rocky tors. On Sunday morning, before we left, we walked over and were impressed by the difference a few hundred yards could make. This rock city was higher and dryer, much less mossy and relatively less lichenous, though that may have been due to a greater number of visitors climbing all over them and breaking the lichen off in their eagerness to get a view from the top. Whereas the leeward rocks were covered in many palaces with polypody fern, the windward rocks harbored woodfern.

The most striking difference was in the shrub layer. Among the leeward rocks, the dominant shrub was mountain holly, which took us a while to identify since it isn’t such a common species back home. The windward rocks, by contrast, rose from a typically dense thicket of rhododendron, which must have been beautiful during our July visit, if only we’d known to look for it.
__________

Don’t forget to send any and all tree-related links to Rachel of frizzyLogic, who will be hosting the next Festival of the Trees on November 1. Address your emails to: festival (dot) trees (at) gmail (dot) com, and send them no later than October 30.

Four men stand talking and moving their arms in the parking lot below, gesturing toward the GP station, the Shoney’s, the Wal-Mart Supercenter – maybe even toward the hills. I can hear every word, but understand nothing. Can my Spanish really be that rusty?

I call my linguist brother over to the window. “That’s not Spanish. It’s some Eastern European language, I think.” After a few minutes, they arrive at some decision, get into their pick-ups and drive away.

I listen to the semis going by on the wet highway – shhhhhhhUSHHhhhhh. Something triggers a car alarm in the distance, a plaintive beeping that goes on and on without stopping.

*

Ten-thirty in the small reception area at Scotty’s Discount Tire and Muffler in downtown Summersville, West Virginia (population 3,900). I return from a walk with my umbrella in the on-again, off-again drizzle and find my brother reading a history of India as he waits for news about the car. A small, white-haired lady in the next seat over is singing about Jesus.

As I stand gaping in the doorway, a middle-aged woman walks over, leans down and asks the other woman if she’ll be coming for supper that night. “Just nod your head if the answer is ‘yes,’ mother,” she says. The singing woman nods, then goes on slowly nodding, keeping time to one gospel hymn after another: jubilant words in a voice as sad and quiet as the rain.

*

Twelve-thirty at Fran’s Restaurant, catty-corner from the courthouse, waiting for lunch at a table facing the street. We can just make out the sign for another body shop, which appears to be closed – Rusty Auto. “Too bad they’re not open – that seems like the place for us,” I joke.

Steve swats at a persistent fly and misses. “Clap your hands in the air above him – that always works,” I say. “Oh, I know. But I prefer to catch them,” he says, “Like this – ” and as the fly makes its next pass low over the flat monotony of imitation wood, his hand darts in from behind and scoops it up. “So the question now is, how to get rid of it?” he asks rhetorically, and proceeds to demonstrate, dashing the fly against the table so it lies there, stunned, waiting for the hand’s deliberate descent.

Staying on the strip (first at a Super 8, then at a Hampton Inn), I’ve been forced to think about this most ubiquitous of American landscapes…

Strip. Lay down your overburden, bare your black seam of heat where the shovels can reach it. Let rains tease your acids from the rock.

Strip, stripe of concrete between gas stations & inconvenience stores, chain restaurants, big box stores, motels, each marooned on its own island of tarmac. We are all strangers here, even the natives.

Strip: supposedly comic, unmoving pictures starring the same faces, day after day. We grimace at the punchlines: Neighborhood Grill and Bar, says the Applebee’s sign. Oh, do let’s take a stroll ’round the Village Square!

Stripped of wheels, we navigate the strip on foot, automatic jaywalkers. The smell of fryer grease mingles with exhaust. Under one streetlight, we step carefully around the corpses of three starlings. We could be anywhere. This might as well be home.

The problem with stories is that they never tell the whole truth. For every god you invite to the feast, there’s a demon that needs to be driven out of the kitchen. I am reading a love story, a book about a woman with multiple personality syndrome and the therapist who treats her, and I’m thinking: this is how we should try to love the land, honoring each strand of myth. Wilderness might be the core personality, but there’s always a small piece of garden, too, beholden to its stern angel with flaming sword. After the wildfire, seeds dormant for a hundred years can have their brief day in the sun: blackberries, fireweed, fire cherries. A tree near timberline abandons its assault on the sky and goes crawling on multiple bellies, out of the wind. A plant or animal set down in a new land, freed of its former constraints, can be fruitful and multiply beyond all reason. Or one can find a sudden dearth of fossils, for example in the very stratum where my house sits: a story line cut short by some unimaginable horizon.

How to make one journey out of so many roads and trails, hikes cut short by thunderstorms or insufficient daylight? How to get past the chasms, the time lost in suspensions of disbelief? We climb as high as the land lets us, taking in as much as we can in a single glance. We fantasize about a sudden plunge, overtaking our shadows, following green rivers to their source. Charley Patton is singing on the car stereo, his hoarse voice deliberately slurring the words:

I see a river rollin’ like a log
I wade up Green River, rollin’ like a log
I wade up Green River, Lord, rollin’ like a log

Through the pops and hisses on the old recording we can barely make out the guitar’s crisp weave of voices, a three-minute fraction of a song that might’ve lasted half an hour live. On another track, Patton talks back to himself as the guitar plays all sides of a single chord: oh, that spoonful! Unspoken after the first line, the ——– hangs just out of reach. The next day, before we leave, we’ll stop along the road where the birthwort sends its runners into the oaks, and I’ll use a walking stick to knock down one of the fluted, green pods. It will take pride of place in the well in front of the gearshift, rolling like a log on the long ride home.

Below the pulloff for the roadside view, the vine called traveler’s joy sprawls over the rocks.

A wood lily rocks gently in the wind, doors thrown open to all six points of the compass.

Yellow birch: the straight & narrow path is never dull.

Ground beetles take the place of dinosaurs in a forest within the forest where flowering plants are still a distant rumor.

Rank & deadly, false hellebore raises a green panicle above leaves already half-dead, turning color for no one.

On the summit where we found snow in late October, fireweed blooms against the spruce.

Last week my friend L. & I spent some time in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest – our third visit in less than a year.

We take our umbrellas walking, slower & slower.

I hear springs gurgling under the rocks. Small, dark pools appear among the rhododendrons. In one, a red maple leaf floats, already orange with autumn; the surface of another is covered with hemlock needles – tiny green rafts going nowhere.

We overtake a snail traveling in the same direction, gliding along under its spiral backpack.

Rain rarely reaches us unmediated by trees. The sun can come out long before rain has finished dripping from the leaves. As slowly as I walk, my glasses still fog up every time I stop.

The already wet trail grows wetter. One rock hisses under my boot.

We stop for lunch – instant ramen – and a spot of tea. I set my tin cup in the creek to cool, keeping watch to make sure the rhododendrons don’t drop a blossom in it.

With thunder rumbling in the distance, we dangle bare feet in the water. I watch a pair of crayfish battling a few feet away. The loser scuttles over & gives my ankle several exploratory taps.

I watch water flowing around a large rock, its translucent body a net of shadows as it folds back against itself. After ten minutes or so, I think I might understand something fundamental about water, its impetus to condense, to fall, to plumb the depths. But then I glance just a few feet to the left & am completely flummoxed by a large drift of foam. I had forgotten about tannins. The water is never just one thing, I think.

The storm breaks. Tree trunks become rivers flowing in two directions at once, outside & in.

On the way back, I stop to eye a large hemlock with limbs like reverse mouths for the sun. The tree reveals itself as a condensation of need, or needs. (Who knows if all aspirations can be reduced to a single breath?) Things turn inside out before my astonished gaze. With each footstep, I realize, we are helping to hold down an insurgent earth.

What I am calling need might be a kind of thirst or hunger, but it seems risky to try & grasp it through analogy with human desires, which are so wrapped up in surfaces. The non-human world seems much more rooted & constrained by custom. And what these others lose in flexibility they gain in the directness of their access to what we call the divine. For them, there is no gap whatsoever between spirit & matter.

A torrent of thoughts under my umbrella: Every element of Creation seeks redemption from its uncreatedness, its just-so-ness; death & decomposition represent only a temporary setback. Life is continual recomposition.

Spirituality is almost beside the point, considering that the body is already a temple and the digestive system is the most perfect altar imaginable. From the belly’s faithful service we can learn the art of letting go, a kind of sympathetic magic aimed at getting other things to let go of us. However hungry it may be, the panther knows better than to try & sever the jugular of a mountain stream.

Done scribbling, I glance up from my pocket notebook. An open space under the hemlocks is illuminated by a single, fist-sized clump of rhododendron blossoms. “What are you writing?” L. asks. “Oh, silly stuff,” I answer truthfully.

A half-mile farther, another open grove shimmers with the endlessly supple song of a winter wren. A second thunderstorm rumbles in the distance. The sky grows dark.

An hour later, we’re back at camp. I’ve carried my folding camp chair over to a house of boulders, where I sit admiring the arrangement of space & the spill of light where it opens to the sky. The boulders are green with moss, & each is capped with a dozen or more large, leathery ears of rock tripe. The resident hermit thrush draws near, playing his crystal flute. For several long moments I feel confirmed in whatever it is I’ve been trying all afternoon to intuit. Then a fly buzzes through without even slowing down – zoom. It is the most thorough & devastating refutation I can imagine.

And if you think the world is recalcitrant now, I say to myself, wait until you’re in your 80s.

I go looking for my hiking partner & find her sitting under another rock shelter, spying on the forest road below. I return to camp & start on supper. Later, she tells me that when a pickup truck finally did drive by, she couldn’t look.

the song of the winter wren goes spiraling
into the treetops down cliff under ferndrip ledge
follows the loop of a fox grape vine
& lodges in the bend of birthwort’s
pipe-shaped flower

it twines across the altar of my concentration
electric now with offerings
every part of worry anxiety hope

& tunneling through a weave of rhododendron
the trail goes straight, gently undulating
like the narrow-gauge rail bed it once was
carrying out trees in short sections
from what somehow managed to remain wild
high bowl of a remote mountain watershed
& freed from any need to watch our feet
we scarcely notice how much we have climbed
how much we have left behind

I glide as through a gallery, hungry for visions
saunter as if along a city sidewalk
each tulip tree and oak another body
to measure against my own
each of us a stranger only to ourselves
the slick fictions we grow year by year
in rings around the so-called heartwood
where sap long since ceased to flow

I see myself held in an eye of wood
I am implicated in a ripple of grain laid bare
when the bark dropped off

but the plant people if you want
to call them that are far more timid than we are
we look at them carefully out of
the corner of an eye & pretend
only to care about identification
as if membership in a tribe or species
tells us anything beyond what name to use
when talking behind their backs
what they really have to say I think has
something to do with how to hold our ground

even the most active beings can make me feel
less like a discoverer than the discovered
is this for example the same tiger swallowtail
weaving drunkenly above the water
for the last three miles
every time I catch a glimpse of the creek?

the trail wanders past an old cellarhole with a new
display of plastic flowers that spell “Mom”
& a garden site gone wild with mountain mint
we stuff our pockets with the fragrant leaves

we pause at a spring where mossy stones sleep
like small green bears
I pull out my camera & my friend bares her teeth

here’s a veery, descending call
like a flute inside a bottle as
my friend puts it
or perhaps two flutes played by a single flautist

we cook lunch among the boulders on the creek
& afterwards go browsing for lichen patterns
my friend seeing endpapers for hand-made books

I spend a short century in a smiling contest
with the mossy head of a demiurge of stone
rising from the water, lines of bubbles
swimming slowly through its patch of sun
rich baritone voice in a language I feel
I can almost understand
& all around it the creek in shadow

& I am whispering encantado,
desencantado like a child
slowly plucking the spokes of a daisy
cantar is still the commonest
verb for “sing” in Spanish so
to be encantado really means to be caught
in a web of song I muse
focusing one at a time on each
voice in the watery chorus

on the walk back we find a redrock shelf
at the edge of the creek pitted with potholes
some empty, others cupping moon-shaped pieces
of sky & a few mosquito larvae
wriggling back & forth in what
doubtless only looks like ecstasy

I can say anything, I think, arrogant
in my power to make little worlds from words
but anything I can say falls short of this world
its liquid laughter pure from the beginning
free of the salt of tears

just before leaving we stop at a spring with a waterfall
& a black PVC viaduct strung on a cable
gravity water for someone whose dog barks
from the other side of the creek
we fill all our bottles
& thrust cupped hands into the flow

surely water clear as glass should let us
see into some kind of future
or at least as far as the mountain’s stone heart
but it’s my own arteries I see
throbbing in my wrists
I lower my face to the would-be window & drink

the next day on the flat-topped Allegheny Front
I study the cousinship of peak & bog
the same plants so often growing on both
& here the two kinds of places merge into one
when I piss at the edge of a dry boulder field
I hear the splash of water into water

Dolly Sods is still beautiful still teeming with life
despite its horrific usage by arrogant humans
who saw nothing but timber, pasturage
& a bombing range during World War II
natural extremity makes it at once more vulnerable
& more likely to resist the tendency of the badly used
to become ugly common & mean

& I know nothing, I think, suddenly ashamed
of my inability to look beyond wounds to
the grace & power of the wounded
which includes virtually every part of this land
which has been your land and my land for far too long
& needs to be its own land again

an interpretive sign explains how
wind-tortured red spruce trees grow branches
only on the leeward side for decades until
other spruce grow in around them & then
they knot their roots together among the rocks
gather stillness & the spongy beginnings
of new humus between their trunks
make a place too moist for lightning
to strike a spark & then all together
they rise up

on the drive home the edge of my concentration
grows blunt as a butter knife
which is to say I lose my temper
& my ordinarily kind companion loses hers
& we ride in silence for a while
discoveries made in a mountain state
must not be transferable I think glumly
everything we found remains behind

but the truth turns out to be otherwise
because unbeknownst to us
three craneflies got into the car at the last stop
before our long descent
& we can’t get rid of them
rolling down the window at the strategic moment
only blows them into the back of the car
& though for a while we think they’re gone
eventually they reappear
dancing in front of the windshield on flimsy wings
their long legs dangling & we give up
& laugh & let them ride & by the time
we get back I’ve forgotten all about them

I carry my gear into the house unpack & sit out
on my front porch watching the fireflies blink
under a second-quarter moon
until my eyes won’t stay open any longer

where state lines fall is an accident of history
& come to think of it I have yet
to leave the mountains
we will keep on returning whichever way we travel
the mountain state is still there & so are we

High in the mountains
one hayfield remains uncut.
A doe’s ear twitches.

Bed of the Dry Fork
scored for tic-tac-toe: water fills all
the squares with zero.

Camp at the woods’ edge.
Morning sun brings rhododendrons
into your tent.

Steep banks, big boulders,
pools – everything but otters
in Otter Creek.

At Dolly Sods
when the wind slows down, it’s delicious:
wild azaleas.

When they cut the forest,
the soil burned off. Bleeding hearts
bloom among the rocks.

On two different hikes
I looked at lichens & left
the map in my pack.

Visit the Monongahela National Forest webpage for more information about some of the places referenced here, including Dolly Sods Wilderness (history here) and Otter Creek Wilderness. For a previous Via Negativa post on West Virginia, see Almost heaven.

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.

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.