Category: Travel

I don’t get off the mountain much, but when I do, I tend to blog it.

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What grows

I remember as a child being especially fond of songs with accretionary verses. You know, like the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” or “Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.” A collection of Pennsylvania German songs in the book Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (edited by George Korson, Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), which I picked up at the same used book sale where I found Gerard’s Herball last month, includes some charming examples. Here’s one I especially liked.

I have, perhaps foolishly, mucked with the rather stilted translation a bit, despite my complete ignorance of the source language. According to the modern German-English dictionary I consulted, the verb wachs-en (wachst) means grow, sprout, come up, extend, increase, thrive. This verb is dropped in the middle verses (in favor of is), then reappears in the last two. Though in the latter case I have elected to go with “lies (with),” the choice of the original (and possibly prudish) translators, I think the shared meaning-element of growth and extension is a key to the whole song. Complimenting this verb, the noun Hecke also occupies a pivotal position, and seems to mean copse, thicket, hedge, underbrush, and also branch or twig by synecdoche, as with the English wood (a cognate of wild) coming to mean lumber. This simple song speaks volumes about the pre-modern European way of seeing the forest. I’ll give the German for the first and last verses and for each new noun as it crops up.

Was wachst in diesem Wald? (What Grows in This Wood?)

Sung by Emma Diehl at Freiburg, Snyder County, Pennsylvania, 1938. Recorded by Thomas R. Brendle and William S. Troxell.

Was wachst in diesem Wald?
En wunderscheener Bí¢m.
Bí¢m in di Hecke,
Zwishich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

What grows in this wood?
A very beautiful tree.
Tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this tree?
A very beautiful limb (Nascht).
Limb on the tree, tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this limb?
A very beautiful branch (Heck).
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree . . .

What grows on this branch?
Very beautiful leaves (Lí¢b).
Leaves on the branch, branch on the limb . . .

What is in these leaves?
A very beautiful nest (Nescht).
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch . . .

What is in this nest?
A very beautiful egg (Oi).
Egg in the nest, nest in the leaves . . .

What is in this egg?
A very beautiful bird (Vojjel).
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest . . .

What is on this bird?
A very beautiful feather (Fedder).
Feather on the bird, bird in the egg . . .

What is in this feather?
A very beautiful bed (Bett).
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird . . .

What lies in this bed?
A very beautiful woman (Dí¢m).
Woman in the bed, bed in the feather . . .

Was wachst in diesem Dí¢m?
En wunderscheener Schatz.
Schatz im Dí¢m, Dí¢m im Bett,
Bett im Fedder, Fedder am Vojjel,
Vojjel im Oi, Oi im Nescht,
Nescht im Lí¢b, Lí¢b am Hecke,
Hecke am Nascht, Nascht am Bí¢m,
Bí¢m in di Hecke, zwischich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

Who lies with this woman?
A very beautiful lover.
Lover in the woman, woman in the bed,
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird,
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest,
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch,
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree,
Tree in the thicket, among sticks and leaves.
What grows in the wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

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Appalachian ghosts

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Blogging the Appalachians

 

If I had to choose one word to describe the Appalachian region, it would be haunted. The mountains are full of ghosts. Gone are most of the Indians, their languages and oral literatures with them – unique and irreplaceable ways of looking at the world. Gone from the east are the bison and the wolves, except for a tiny pack of inbred red wolves in North Carolina. Gone forever are the heath hen, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, a single flock of which could once darken the sky for three days with its passage. The mighty American chestnut, source of the strongest timber and some of the best wildlife food in the mountains, has disappeared except for the runty sprouts that live ten or twenty years before succumbing to the blight.

Gone is the great eastern forest, and most of the soil with it. People tend to think of a forest chiefly as a conglomeration of trees, but that’s not the half of it. The few remaining tracts of eastern old growth are qualitatively different from the surrounding woods, most noticeably in the depth of the humus, which teems with fungal and microbial life two thirds of which probably belongs on the endangered species list – not that anyone has ever bothered to study and classify it. Only in the last couple of decades have ecologists begun to appreciate the extent to which trees depend upon their fungal associates to perform such basic tasks as nutrient and water uptake. Some of these fungi only produce fruiting bodies underground, depending on animals such red-backed voles and northern flying squirrels to disperse their spores. What happens when one corner of this three-legged stool is removed?

Erosion following repeated clearcutting and associated fires removed 11,000 years’ worth of accumulated humus on many steep mountain slopes. Now, non-native, invasive earthworms are rapidly colonizing soils throughout the eastern forest, preventing the formation of new humus and changing the soil chemistry in the process. The Southern Appalachians contain the most biodiverse temperate forest in the world. They are, for example, a major center of terrestrial salamander endemicity; absent a humus layer, it’s difficult to believe that very many of these forest floor denizens will survive.

Another familiar and cherished measure of Appalachian biodiversity is the wealth of spring ephemeral wildflowers, slow-growing perennials whose very names are magic: ginseng, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Solomon’s seal, wild sarsaparilla, wake robin, may apple, foam-flower, spotted mandarin, trailing arbutus, yellow lady’s-slipper, goldenseal . . . These plants are rapidly becoming scarce throughout their ranges, threatened by a seemingly endless litany of threats: acid rain from coal burning power plants; an overabundance of deer; competition with invasive plants better adapted to an earthworm-infested soil; clearcutting; suburban and exurban sprawl; the conversion of hundreds of thousands of acres of rich, moist, mixed-species forests into red pine plantations; and – most horrifying of all – mountaintop removal, a new, more extreme form of strip mining in which vast portions of mountainous West Virginia and Kentucky are being turned into rolling, grassy uplands drained by dead streams and unlikely to support true forests ever again.

The violence of the frontier never really subsided. It merely grew less personal, more institutionalized. While the people who lived here before Europeans came were not exactly peaceful, the idea of conquest was largely unknown to them. Intertribal wars, where children of the enemy were kidnapped and raised as full members of the tribe to replace slain warriors, resembled the low-intensity ground fires the Indians set every few years to promote the growth of deer browse plants and blackberry thickets. The Indians aimed at a rough equilibrium between opposing forces rather than the subjugation or obliteration of a hated foe.

The concept of a nature apart from humanity has no real equivalent in indigenous worldviews. But the essential dignity and integrity of non-human beings – their self-willed quality, their wildness – was respected. Greater-than-human realities were revered, including everything that we understand by the word wilderness and then some. It’s all very well to say that our thinking has “advanced” to the point where – perhaps – a bare majority of American citizens might have some appreciation for these perspectives. But until the underlying social and economic structures change, all the sympathetic understanding in the world won’t do much good. The very people who claim to care the most about nature are the ones building new homes on lots gouged out of the forest. The conquest continues.

STORIES AT EVENING
(A Suburban Mother Tells Stories to Her Son)
by Louise McNeill

My great great grandpa Jethro walked
The wild savannas deep in grass;
He saw the herds of buffalo
File westward through the mountain pass.

Great grandpa William in his time
Remembered pigeons wild and gray
Whose thousand wings beat out the sun
The morning that they flew away.

My grandpa Frederick could recall
The wild trout flashing in their school;
He set his stick of dynamite
And scooped a hundred from the pool.

My father, Douglas, saw the trees.
Across this bare, eroded land,
He saw the tulip tree and ash,
The spruce and hemlock – virgin stand.

And I myself at morning saw
The chestnut on the ridge – its living green –
The blue-fringed gentian . . .

Listen now, my son –
Stories at evening – wonders I have seen;
And as we sit, look sharp and well remember –
Your son may hear the strangest tale of all:
How little rabbits hopped across our garden,
How grass grew by the wall,
And there, one night, when you were six or seven,
You heard a bobwhite call.

(Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)

Since McNeill wrote that poem, in the late 1960s or early 70s, populations of northern bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) have declined throughout its range. In all my 38 years, I have never heard a bobwhite call.

*

Thus, the ghost stories we love to scare each other with this time of year point to darker realities, for me. Of course, the Appalachian region abounds with stories of witches, haints and other uncanny beings. I say “uncanny” rather than “supernatural” because some, such as the fabled white stag or Will o’ the Wisp, have a basis in reality.

When my brothers and I were young, we used to go trick-or-treating over to our only neighbor’s house largely for the legends and lies Margaret was all too willing to feed our young imaginations with. One she told might be called . . .

The Headless Hunter

Way back in the late 19th century, two teenage boys were hunting deer on the end of the ridge above the railroad tracks. When darkness came on, they started down the knife-edge toward their homes in Upper Tyrone Forge. Only one boy carried a carbide lamp, but the other walked confidently in front, shotgun slung over his shoulder. When he tripped over a root in the darkness, his gun discharged, blowing the other boy’s head off. For ever after, until the last house along the crossing was abandoned in the 1960s, folks in Upper Tyrone Forge said they could look up at the mountain on dark nights in late October and see a light moving through the woods where the dead hunter was still looking for his head.

For another of Margaret’s “Legends of Plummer’s Hollow,” I’m indebted to the superior memory of my brother Steve:

The Phantom Fallen Woman

One summer in the early years of the 20th century, George Plummer brought a mysterious young woman home from Pittsburgh with him, and informed the family of tenant farmers living in what we now call the Guest House that she would be staying in the main house for the rest of the summer. They thought it peculiar that she almost never showed herself outside during daylight hours, spending all her time in the dark, upstairs bedroom at the north end of the house. It seemed that she had musical training of some sort. Mr. Plummer – by this time, a wealthy man – bought a small church organ at auction and installed it there for her, and the tenants told Margaret’s mother that they often heard her playing the organ and singing concert music in a fine soprano voice.

Late in the summer, the reason for her visit leaked out: she was unmarried and with child, and as a friend of the family, it was said, she had been invited to spend her period of confinement in the welcome solitude of Plummer’s Hollow, far from wagging tongues. She gave birth to a child at the end of the summer and returned to Pittsburgh, where she died shortly thereafter. (My brother says Margaret was fuzzy on the details: how she died, and whether the baby lived.)

In the years following her death, a number of families living in the tenant house reported hearing the sound of an organ coming from that upstairs room, though oddly this never happened during the summer, when people were living there, only in the long months when the house was shuttered up. As late as 1970, someone walking across the back slope claimed she heard the unmistakable sound of a woman’s voice singing a very strange-sounding song with words she couldn’t make out. She was frightened out of her wits and fled down the hill as fast as she could run.

With the arrival of the Bonta family in 1971, as my brother put it in an e-mail, “the unquiet spirit of the fallen woman seems to have found peace.” We have never seen or heard anything uncanny here in all our years of occupancy.

Well, almost nothing. Living in the aforementioned Guest House – also once thought to harbor a ghost – I have grown accustomed to a huge range of noises that might spook a visitor. The house was built in stages in a rather haphazard fashion, which resulted in an unusual number of crawl spaces above, below and between sections. I’ve gotten used to scraping, sliding, chewing, and tapping noises, things that go bump and things that chatter their teeth, things that wail and whimper and moan. I generally ascribe the uncannier noises to either raccoons or porcupines; the others could be anything from mice to woodchucks, bats, flying squirrels or one of three species of snakes that I know share the house with me. When it gets really cold in January, the plank walls can pop audibly as they contract. And once in a rare while, I do hear a sound I simply can’t place. Sometimes, the hair rises on the back of the neck despite my best efforts to laugh it off.

I guess we’re a lot less fearful about living way out in a lonely, northeast-facing hollow than a lot of folks might be. One of my cousins from suburban New Jersey won’t spend the night in our guest bedroom because, she says, she finds the silence itself unnatural and unsettling. To us, living with an interstate right over the ridge to the west and a noisy quarry to the east, it’s never quiet enough. We mourn the fact that generations of fearful white folks with guns have left us such a tamed and diminished land. This mountain probably hasn’t had any rattlesnakes in a hundred years. Until the late 1980s, black bears were a rare sight. One of the last wolves in Pennsylvania was shot on this very mountain back in the 1870s or 80s. Coon hunters still scare themselves with tales of coyotes following them and their dogs through the woods at night, their howls growing nearer and nearer . . .

Our own hunter friends are pretty commonsense folks, but they never mind telling a good story on themselves. One of them, Jeff, once told me about an incident that befell him early one morning, well before daylight. He had parked at the bottom and was climbing the side of the hollow, heading for his tree stand, when he heard something rustling close behind him in the dry leaves. As soon as he stopped, the noise stopped. He started up the hill again and there it was, following just as close. He walked faster, but whatever it was kept right up. “Finally I was just running, you know, but I got out of breath and had to stop. That’s when I noticed there was a long strap hanging out of the back pocket of my coat!”

His brother Troy told a more spooky, but still believable, tale about a time when he was still-hunting for turkey, leaning up against a tree over in Margaret’s Woods, dressed all in camouflage. Suddenly he heard a loud voice: “You can’t hide!” He looked all around, but nobody was there. Then he heard it again. “You can’t hide!” It was coming from right overhead! He looked up into the branches of the tree, and there was a crow staring back at him. It cawed as if it were laughing at him, then flew away.

Troy is not a man given to wild flights of imagination. “I ran back to the truck,” he told us, “and when Paula come down, she seen right away something wasn’t right.” “He was white as a sheet!” his wife confirmed, adding that she made him tell the tale a number of times before she finally believed him. They both seemed relieved when my dad described a talking crow he had seen as a kid. “It’s probably someone’s pet that escaped,” he said – and thus another potentially supernatural story was brought to earth.

*

Margaret’s house has stood empty for over a decade now. We were able to buy the property when the lumberman was done with it, and we maintain trails and a parking lot for our hunter friends over there. Kids from the valley have snuck up and gone through the place at least once; Dad and I boarded up the windows and doors to try and prevent liability in case of an accident. Even before that, it was depressing to go in there, with the moldy flotsam from two generations of lonely and impoverished mountain people scattered all around. Margaret was, in life, a paranoid and suspicious person with a great local reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. According to a now-deceased hunter friend of her brother’s, some prostitution went on in the house back during the Depression. (I’m paraphrasing; the exact words were, “They used to run a cathouse up there, you know!”) But for all that, as far as I know, no unquiet spirits have been seen or heard there in the thirteen years since Margaret died.

LEAVINGS

1.

Over the years we bought it piece by piece,
this hollow that still bears the name
of its 19th-century homesteader on the topo maps.
Lawyers framed the title transfers in proper terms
& the county courthouse took note,
whiting out the now-redundant property lines
on its own maps that admit no extraneous detail:
no creeks or contours that might signal a watershed,
no shading (say) to plot the alternation
of field & “unimproved woodlot,”
the land parceled out in jagged shards.

But for all that our deeds were driven
by our love for the uncut forest, who are we
to put our name down here as if
it were some magic seed that could set
root overnight? It’ll take us years
to grow out of our wariness,
skulking like feral cats around Margaret’s place.

2.

Twenty years ago, in the flush of first purchase,
in between battles with blizzard, flood & drought
my father followed every lead
through a century of local newspaper files & tax records,
unearthed the barest of clues to the hollow’s history:
Margaret’s artist mother must’ve
married a ne’er-do-well, for she had
half her land lumbered in 1901 to pay
back taxes, & sold the other half for a song
to settle a grocery bill, her own
uncle Jacob calling the tune.

The scarred land healed. By the 1970s
the third-growth woods gave ample cover
to the shadiest of dealings,
bore witness to a separate truth – soon enough
to be violated in turn. While each
of the two elderly cousins – arrogant
nouveau riche and “poor white trash” –
ravaged by alcoholism, however genteel –
strung up for us the other’s skeleton
in a common closet of lies.

3.

One hot June morning I amble over,
shovel in hand. You never know,
treasures of dubious lineage keep turning up.
Like its late occupant the place still holds
a few cards close.

Below the house the huge
catalpa tree’s in bloom, littering the driveway
with pale monkey-faced blossoms,
& the other catalpa up by the outhouse
harbors in its dense shade a weed-free iris bed
& a mob of sweet william gone native
with multihued abandon. At 96 degrees Fahrenheit
the cumulative scent from the yard becomes
an almost visible miasma.

I nose about the grounds, sizing up
the ancient fruit trees:
Keifer pear, a thicket of plum,
Concord grape on a stalwart trellis,
a half-dead quince
& the sprout-clogged branches that already droop
with this year’s apple crop:
Baldwin. Pippin. Winesap. Smokehouse.
The mottled trunks of these last survivors
from an orchard abandoned in the ’40s
could exhaust an artist’s palette.

The house has proved less hardy.
Two winters of heavy snows & a rampant wisteria
have conspired against both porches,
& the whole back half of the house
meanders on a collapsed foundation,
senile with rot.

4.

Fifteen feet away I come to a stop.
Memories of Margaret’s ghost stories
from childhood Halloweens
are summoned up by a multiphonic hum
and an odor overpoweringly sweet.
I look up: honeybees beard the attic gables
crowding the cracks like subway commuters at rush hour.
These are, no doubt, distant descendants
of the bees Margaret kept for decades
in boxes above the orchard – my pets,
she used to laugh. I press my ear
against the faded clapboard
to listen to the roar: no seashell’s
echo of my own bloodsurf, but the actual
pulse of the house, murmuring
like an industrial loom from
the gentle fricative welding of warp to weft.

I step back to watch the bees.
After a while I start to see a pattern
in their lines of flight, spokes
of a spinning wheel drawing in nectar
from every blossoming corner of the yard.
The hive couldn’t have found a fortress
more impregnable to marauding bears
than these catacombed walls.
From every crevice their coffers overflow
& Margaret’s house weeps honey
the way a tree leaks sap.

5.

Groggy from the heat, awash in sweat
I resume my walk, if only for
the illusion of a breeze. A pool of shade
beckons from behind the tumbledown shed
where the steel-ribbed frame of a chaise lounge
flowers orange with rust.

I weave through the trees above the spring,
leap the low mound with its stray runners
of barbed wire marking the old line
& plunge into the field, a cloud of pollen
from the brome as I swing my shovel,
clean blade catching the sun.

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“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.

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Almost heaven

The bi-weekly Ecotone topic is Energy of Place. “What the hell am I gonna write about that?” I thought. But a weekend jaunt in West Virginia gave me plenty of material, as it turned out.

It was a cold, windy night. I had a knit cap pulled down over my ears, but several times an hour I was awoken by especially strong gusts that made my jerry-rigged tent fly flap violently, like a large bird trying to gain altitude. I dreamt not of flying, but of walking through endless, enclosed spaces where some sort of conference was in progress. I also dreamt that all the other tents but our two had blown away, and we woke to find ourselves alone in the campground.

*

I get up at 5:30, brew coffee in my tent, get bundled up and sit outside to drink it, gazing at the stars. At ten after six there’s still no sound from the other tent. I’d better start walking if I want to stay warm. It can’t be more than a mile and a half to the trailhead at Seneca Rocks.

The highway passes a couple of small farms with yard lights. I wonder briefly if people who install yard lights are more likely to vote Republican? I’m heading northeast, more-or-less, which means that Venus is a little to the right of straight ahead and the big dipper a little to the left. Just after I pass the last farmhouse, a meteor streaks through the bowl of the big dipper. Fire in the hole!

I cross the acres of empty parking lot and reach the bridge over the North Fork at 6:45. All but the brightest stars have faded, and the jagged outline of the huge stone fin known as Seneca Rocks looms above the trees. I decide to follow the trail a little ways into the woods, pausing at a bench that affords a good view of the Rocks through thinning foliage.

At 7:05, ravens start calling from the vicinity of the Rocks – I presume they must have a nest somewhere on the ridgetop. Their first cries are high, like the wails of lost children. It’s now light enough to distinguish yellow from green in the trees around the bench.

The wind up on the ridgetop must be terrific – the pine tree growing out of the cleft in the middle of the Rocks is dancing wildly against the lightening sky. Now the ravens are calling hoo HAH, hoo HAH.

7:10. The red from the red maple trees is now visible, along with dark patterns on the cliffs – patterns that will, I know, soon resolve themselves into ragged files of table mountain pine trees, growing from cracks and small ledges. It amazes me that these trees can grow without any soil, other than what they bring with them. If anything ever killed all the pines, I wonder, would Seneca Rocks get more than a small fraction of the visitors they attract now?

It occurs to me that this bench was situated solely for the long-range view; the foreground view of trees and boulders is more impressive a little farther along, I recall from the day before, and decide to walk on.

I pause to admire the fur of miniature shelf fungi on the north side of a monstrous dead tulip poplar beside the trail. Just as I look up, a raven circles through the window of sky above the bare limbs. It lets out a series of ruarks – the sound ravens make when they’re enjoying themselves, surfing in a high wind.

Small cumulous clouds are sailing rapidly across the otherwise clear sky. From my perspective, each cloud disappears behind Seneca Rocks, as if dropping into a toothy maw. At 7:30, the sunrise turns them pink. The first sunlight glows along the crest of the Allegheny Front.

7:40. I’m back on the bridge with its unobstructed view of the Rocks. Now all the clouds’ bellies are golden, and I notice that each has a backspin. That is, they’re rolling on their axes as if to travel west, but the wind pulls them rapidly to the east. Yellow sycamore leaves ride the wind above the river. Since this is the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac, I think, I could spit in the water and it would get to Washington.

At 7:45 a blue jay calls; at 7:50 I hear a flock of white-throated sparrows in the thickets along the river. It’s time to head back.

*

By 11:30 we’re at the parking lot at Spruce Knob, at 4,863 feet the highest point in West Virginia. We might have gotten here sooner, but kept stopping to admire the snow. When it rained yesterday afternoon at Seneca Rocks, some two inches of snow fell above 3,500 feet. It’s especially striking against the orange and yellow leaves of sugar maples, but here on the crest of the Front and on the rolling plateau beyond, most of the trees have already lost their leaves.

The short trail around the summit is called Whispering Spruce Trail, after the almost-krummolz forest of wind-buffeted red spruce. But today, the spruce aren’t whispering so much as roaring. We have a hard time standing upright in the strongest gusts.

On the southwestern end of the summit, we look down across open talus toward the brown, Novemberish hills for a few minutes, then retreat to a large grove of spruce where the wind immediately dies and yesterday’s snow, sheltered from direct sunlight, still lies deep. The contrast between the fury without and the stillness within points toward something deeper than words.

We find a seat overlooking North Fork Mountain and the other ridges of the folded Appalchians, still a mix of green and orange and yellow. On the northeastern end of the summit, the Forest Service has tastefully situated picnic tables among the trees and patches of open rock. Each table is invisible from the others, and each is spread with its own serving of snow.

A small tower gives an unobstructed view in all directions, but after a few minutes I climb back down, find a nice, sunny spot out of the wind and take a brief nap. A., wearing a wind-proof parka and lined pants, enjoys the experience of being rocked and buffeted by the wind far more than I do in my quilted shirt and jeans. But I understand the attraction. One can get almost drunk on a wind this strong. Between the wind, the snow cover and the strong sunlight, the overall effect is mind-altering – especially for minds still attuned to the look and feel of mid-October. Theories of aesthetics err, I believe, when they ignore the connection between the experience of beauty and the experience of power from outside or beyond the self. That connection, and the joy that accompanies it, is one experience denied to the powerful themselves, I think. But I could be wrong.

*

This part of West Virginia is exactly like central Pennsylvania, only more so. The same geological formations cap the ridges, but they’re much harder farther south as a result of being more tightly compressed during the main Appalachian orogeny, 210 million years ago. Thus, the Tuscarora quartzite that forms talus slopes of smallish boulders along the crests of mountains in central PA, such as the one I happen to live on, can produce spectacular fins in West Virginia, most famously at Seneca Rocks. In other words, some of the mountains in the Mountain State have so much attitude, they actually sport mohawks!

We take a roundabout route home, driving first northward on the Allegheny Plateau, past Canaan Valley and the town of Davis. A line of giant wind turbines looms over the horizon like the invaders from War of the Worlds. Their triquetra-shaped blades are spinning merrily, though a bit more slowly than I would’ve expected. I think about the conservationists I know who are contesting plans to situate wind turbines along nearly every ridgeline in the area, posing unknown hazards to migrating birds and bats. Now, seeing a large wind farm for the first time, I want to cry: Hand me my lance, Sancho! But the things do have a bit of grace.

We follow a long, lonely road to the east. “INDUSTRIAL PARK – FOR LEASE” says a sign just outside Davis. There’s nothing there but trees and little wetlands. But after a few miles, we begin passing active and abandoned coal strip mines. Just west of the Allegheny Front, we are startled by a high wall along the highway that turns out to be the breast of a dam for a large reservoir. Smoke billows from smokestacks in what we presume to be the power plant.

There’s just enough daylight remaining for one last swing through the ridge-and-valley section before heading home on U.S. Route 220 – as it happens, the same highway we returned from the Adirondacks on two and a half months before. If we had had more time, a longer hike would’ve been nice, but it’s enough just to drive in a place where virtually every bend of the road discloses another stunning view: a rocky gorge filled with long-legged rhododendrons, sunlight glinting off foaming water. An unpainted house flanked by apple trees and a clothesline flapping with brightly-colored scraps of laundry – or are they prayer flags, transplanted from Tibet? A high, steep pasture with a white horse grazing halfway up it, and a black horse immediately below. One faces north, one south. Both raise their heads to watch as the car speeds by.

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Life under capitalism

Greyhound buses – the analogy runs – are like prison ships, ferrying the urban poor from one ghetto to another. It turns out that this is almost literally true. Greyhound Bus Lines, Inc. has an arrangement with the federal government to transport paroled felons, who get vouchers for tickets home upon their release. As such, it is but one of a rapidly growing number of companies who rake in sizable profits from the “captive market” that prisoners represent.

I learned this and much more by eavesdropping on a conversation between two just-released felons yesterday, as I rode back from an overnight in Pittsburgh. One of the men, a heavily tattooed white guy in a sleeveless undershirt, had gotten on at Pittsburgh, and I was surprised by the fact that he had no luggage or carry-ons whatsoever. He sat down right behind me. He had the rank smell and motor-mouth tendency of someone who has been riding the dawg for two or three days.

Three stops to the east, at Greensburg, two men dressed in identical brown slacks and white t-shirts boarded the bus, each carrying a couple of bulky cardboard boxes, which they wrestled onto the bus rather than stowing them underneath in the baggage compartment. One stop later, at Johnstown, one of the two men – a 20-something Hispanic – came back to use the john in the rear of the bus and was hailed by Tattoo Man.

“You guys just get out?”

“Yeah, man. You?”

“I got out of Texas state prison two days ago. Huntsville, Texas. Heading home to Altoona.”

“Damn! We just got out of Greensburg. I’m goin’ to Allentown, he’s goin’ to Harrisburg.”

I wanted to take notes on the conversation, but something told me I better just listen. It was a fascinating exchange. Tattoo Man had also done time in the Pennsylvania correctional system, so they had lots of fun comparing notes. I was surprised by how quickly their conversation got political.

“Yeah, you know everyone’s got a hustle going here, it’s just one big hustle. Everyone wants a piece. You know that prisons are the single biggest moneymaking industry in Pennsylvania?”

“Yeah, and it really took off under that fucker Tom Ridge. No surprise he got where he’s at now – Homeland Security. He got lots of practice from bein’ governor. That’s why Bush picked him. ‘Course, Bush bein’ from Texas, that’s the worst state there is! They got more prisoners in the state of Texas than in all of Russia!”

“Yeah, when Ridge was governor, that’s when we first started getting the Acts, you know, that’s what they call it. Getting the Acts. Every year they pass a new one that’s worse than the year before. Every prisoner is under some Act, it’s hard to keep straight – ‘cept for the guys that have been there a long time.

“You got to make up for what you did, you know – that’s alright. But they make you pay for everything else now, too. And at the same time, you get less and less money for working. They give you a “raise” – one penny at a time! It’s not even enough to pay for cable. Man, you have to have someone sending you money or you ain’t gonna survive!”

“They still give out TVs?”

“Hell no! They make you buy these little ones, K televisions – total piece of shit. It ain’t even color! Fucking black and white little piece of shit television! And you know how much they charge you for it? One hundred and fifty dollars! And now they got a rule against giving them away to someone else when you get out. I didn’t want the motherfucking thing, but they made me take it with me – new rule. That’s so everyone has to buy one. K Television.”

“That’s a generic brand, you know, can’t even buy it on the street.”

So it went with a whole litany of products and services, including extra food. The company store charges outrageous prices, to hear them tell it, and in Texas, the prisons even have a hustle going to take advantage of parolees. It seems there’s a law that requires the warden to give every newly released prisoner fifty dollars.

“But they give you this clown suit to wear: great big shoes, pants don’t fit, no belt. Unless you want to ride Greyhound looking like that, you got to walk across the street to buy some clothes right away. Jeans, $30.00. This shirt cost me $6.00, can you believe it? I refused to give them any more money than that! But that’s how they get you. That fifty dollars is gone!”

They discussed the difference between Pennsylvania and Texas prisons in great detail. Not surprisingly, Texas is more severe in almost every respect. The gang warfare is much more dangerous there, Tattoo Man said, and membership in a gang is virtually unavoidable. The white guys have a choice of three different “families,” whose names each begin with the word “Aryan.” In addition, there’s the Mexican Mafia and the Crips and Bloods.

“They got Aryan Nation up here now too, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. But that’s still just an optional thing, right? Not too many members?”

“Yeah. But any time there’s a riot, they put us on lockdown for a month!”

“Three months in Texas. You have to go anywhere, they put on a gag, handcuffs, shackle your feet. Five guys pick you up and carry you.”

Most shockingly, according to Tattoo Man, Texas prisoners no longer have the option of not working – and they are paid nothing. “Eight hours a day, man. No air conditioning, either. It was 110 degrees there when I left! Texas is fucked, man. You can’t get money from the Outside, you ain’t worth dogshit.”

Friendly as their conversation became, I noticed that they were careful not to give out their first names. The Hispanic guy addressed his fellow Greensburg parolee as “Harrisburg,” after his destination. Tattoo Man didn’t say what he was in for, though his interlocutor did mention at one point that he’d been convicted on drug-related charges.

It was touching how animated the former Texas prisoner became as we neared his hometown, behaving like a tour guide: “Now up here’s the stadium they built for the Altoona Curve baseball team. It’s nice, man, check it out! We’re gonna get off at the 17th Street exit. That’s where they been building this mall right on the side of the mountain – tearing it up for years now and they still ain’t got one building on it! You’ll get a better look when you get back on the highway.”

He moved up to the front of the bus and talked to the driver in a vain attempt to get him to stop a few blocks short of the station. It was, he’d told his new friend, a long walk back to his old lady’s house in the pouring rain. When the bus finally pulled into the station he disembarked without a backwards glance, grinning from ear to ear.
__________

Experts on the U.S. prison system point out that we would be in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention if it applied to the treatment of domestic prisoners.The latest report on U.S. prisons from Human Rights Watch observes that

Across the country, inmates complained of instances of excessive and even clearly lawless use of force. In Pennsylvania, dozens of guards from one facility, SCI Greene, were under investigation for beatings, slamming inmates into walls, racial taunting and other mistreatment of inmates. The state Department of Corrections fired four guards, and twenty-one others were demoted, suspended or reprimanded. In many other facilities across the country, however, abuses went unaddressed.

Overcrowded public prisons and the tight budgets of corrections agencies fueled the growth of private corrections companies: approximately 100,000 adults were confined in 142 privately operated prisons and jails nationwide. Many of these facilities operated with insufficient control and oversight from the public correctional authorities. States failed to enact laws setting appropriate standards and regulatory mechanisms for private prisons, signed weak contracts, undertook insufficient monitoring and tolerated prolonged substandard conditions. In less than a year, there were two murders and thirteen stabbings at one privately operated prison in the state of Ohio.

Sexual and other abuses continued to be serious problems for women incarcerated in local jails, state and federal prisons, and INS detention centers. Women in custody faced abuses at the hands of prison guards, most of whom are men, who subjected the women to verbal harassment, unwarranted visual surveillance, abusive pat frisks and sexual assault. Fifteen states did not have criminal laws prohibiting custodial sexual misconduct by guards, and Human Rights Watch found that in most states, guards were not properly trained about their duty to refrain from sexual abuse of prisoners. The problem of abuse was compounded by the continued rapid growth of the female inmate population. As a result women were warehoused in overcrowded prisons and were often unable to access basic services such as medical care and substance abuse treatment.

A columnist for the Toronto Star recently noted that

At Abu Ghraib prison, the alleged main perpetrator is staff sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick, 37, the senior of six non-officers charged with cruelty and other mistreatment. He is a part-time military policeman called up last year for service in Baghdad — and was a prison guard for six years in Virginia.

To get involved in prisoner outreach and solidarity efforts in your community, consider becoming active in a local branch of the ABC Network.

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Back of beyond

Adirondack is a modern coinage, applied by a state geologist in 1836 to a previously unnamed blank space on the map. But Ebenezer Emmons didn’t make it up out of whole cloth: it is a word of Iroquioan ancestry, meaning something like half-breed or resident alien. As the poet Roger Mitchell puts it, Adirondacks resembles the “Mohawk for Frenchman, Huron for Rock Clan, Iroquois for French Indian, Mohawk for Huron, all of them speakers of slightly different languages.”

Our five-day sojourn last week had an odd symmetry to it. Both coming and going we had to pilot the small Honda through torrential rains in northern Pennsylvania that at times obscured the view and required intense focus on the road ahead. On the way back, in particular, flash flooding slowed our progress to a crawl as we forded streams and rocky outwash deltas covering one or both lanes of U.S. Route 220. Finally, we were forced to abandon the highway altogether and take an alternate route because of a stream that would’ve swamped the car had we attempted to push our way through.

As a consequence, in my mind’s eye I am unable to stitch together the landscape of central Pennsylvania, where I live, and the Adirondacks, some nine hours away. It’s like trying to watch a movie with one missing reel of film.

I’ve always had a hard time adjusting to the physical and cultural geography of upstate New York as it is. Although the northeast and northwest quadrants of Pennsylvania were glaciated, the northern border roughly approximates the southern limit of the Wisconsin ice sheet. The spectacular gorges and waterfalls of the Finger Lakes region are almost without parallel in Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the granitic peaks of the Adirondacks, which predate and stand apart from the Appalachians altogether. They are mountains of the classic type, in stark contrast to the nearly endless, low ridges of the folded Appalachians that I call home. And whereas in the Adirondacks one has to climb many thousands of feet to see bare rock and twisted trees, here one can find open boulder fields and wind- and ice-shaped vegetation at the crest of nearly every ridge, no matter how puny.

Pennsylvanians tend to think of the northern portion of our state as the far north, home of the severest weather. In fact, on portions of the High Allegheny Plateau, the weather is more severe than one would encounter in much of upstate New York, outside Buffalo and the Adirondacks. At any rate, I was amused to discover that our Northern Tier Counties border what New Yorkers evidently call their Southern Tier Counties!

The socio-cultural landscape of upstate New York can also take a bit of getting used to. As many times as I have visited it, I still have a hard time with the idea that some place so close to home could be so different – in accent, in politics, even in architecture. New England-style connected houses alternate with flat-roofed Italianate dwellings; yellow is a popular color for both. Very few of the barns have forebays and earthen banks leading to a second-storey threshing floor – the classic Pennsylvania barn look. Cupolas are less common on barns and more common on houses. Farms appear, in general, a lot poorer, and the countryside shows much less evidence of suburban and exurban sprawl than most parts of Pennsylvania, where greater political fragmentation, proximity to major population centers and an aversion to zoning have enabled building booms even in counties with stagnant or declining population growth rates.

The huge Adirondack State Park and Forest Preserve, with its “forever wild” status written into the state constitution, is without parallel in the East. Restrictions on construction and various other activities extend to private lands within the designated boundaries of the region. Thus, one encounters the very un-American prospect of a heavily touristed landscape where commercial sprawl and ticky-tacky are kept to a bare minimum. If there’s an equivalent to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, I haven’t seen it.

All of this is a long way around saying that, for me, the Adirondacks remain exotic and disconnected from everything I know or have grown to expect from the familiar East. Like one of those vast mirages glimpsed by polar explorers, they hang suspended in the air, defying the ordinary warp of my mental horizon. I am already planning my next visit.

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Climbing Algonquin Peak

This is Via Negativa’s 400th post. I think I’ll also make it my submission for Ecotone Wiki’s bi-weekly topic, Weather and Place. I feel very fortunate that the day we picked (last Thursday) to climb Algonquin – the 2nd-highest peak in the Adirondacks – featured a mix of sun and low-hanging clouds. Views are best when not everything is revealed at once.

The approach passes through alder swamp, sugar bush, hemlock stand. Here and there the rotting hulks of beeches, killed by the blight. A couple of rumbles usher in a brief rain shower. Afterwards, the scent of balsam seems even stronger than before. Sometimes you see it first, sometimes you just smell it.

*

From the base of the mountain all the way to the timberline, the one constant theme is paper birch. All else seems mere punctuation. Yet the guidebook claims this is a modern aberration, the legacy of fires that followed the clearcuts a hundred years ago. The short-lived birches rot as readily as they burn. Someday soon the conifers will reclaim all the upper slopes, and lightning won’t be able to take any more than it can touch.

*

The trail maintenance workers have placed stepping stones through a slough of mud. I hop along awkwardly in my heavy boots. My daypack flaps against my back, canteen flops against my belly. I wouldn’t remember any of this were it not for the soundtrack provided by a winter wren, its long and liquid air. I stop, taking in whole lungfuls at time.

*

Higher, climbing into the blossoming of plants in berry down below. Water trickles from the mountain’s every pore.

*

Generations of hikers’ boots have cut this mountain to the bone. We scramble up a bare granite trough through the ever-more-compressed forest of birch and balsam and spruce. The rocks are scored with shallow scratches, too brief and random for a glacier. Very large dogs with unclipped toenails, I wonder? Just then two hikers round the bend wielding alpine hiking poles – imagine ski poles without the horizontal projections for grabbing the surface of the snow. I envy their superior footing, even as I wince at the metallic racket. On either side of the trail the moss and humus lie thick as a mattress under the tangle of krummholz.

*

The trees start to shrink at a most convenient elevation. Every pause for breath takes my breath away. I peer out over the tortured crowns at the grand sweep of lakes and mountains stretching off into the haze. My hiking companion gathers spruce needles for our noontime tea. Clouds and the shadows of clouds. The shimmering lakes. The dark mountains.

*

What’s this, a black-capped chickadee singing in a foreign language? No, a separate species: the boreal chickadee. I had forgotten such a thing existed, if I had ever known. Strange to think they’ve been here all the time, with the equally unfamiliar Bicknell’s thrushes and pine martens. And how must we appear to them, popping up out of the elfin forest in our brightly-colored gear? Like chickadees everywhere they can’t resist coming in for a closer look.

*

For the last mile, a series of signs has warned sternly against the folly of proceeding any higher without the proper gear, and has exhorted us to protect the vegetation by staying on the trail. Now on the summit, we encounter an actual plant cop, on duty here all summer. “Hi, my name’s Kristen, and I’m the summit steward today!” I resist the urge to ask for fresh ground pepper in my soup. The truth is, I’m envious of her job.

*

When the clouds roll in, one thinks: this could be the coast of Labrador. Those waxy, pointy leaves wearing thick coats of down on the side away from the sun – that’s Labrador tea. Those yellow flowers like a child’s crayon sun: alpine goldenrod. We spot three-toed cinquefoil, mountain sandwort, various branched and crustose lichens. Something very small that darts behind a pebble. Two bold juncos.

*

We find a shelf of rock facing east where we can sit and watch the clouds swirl past, ogling the iconic, landslide-scarred face of Mt. Colden whenever they clear. The lunch is as luxurious as I can manage; my only regret is the absence of a white linen tablecloth. After tea – Earl Grey steeped with spruce – I sit with my back against the stone. My companion lies supine for a while, and finally says, I can feel the whole mountain underneath me.

*

I do not need to be alone in the wilderness, though I do share King Cormac’s view that one should speak quietly in it, if at all. I like watching the tiny figures of hikers moving around slowly on other, nearby summits, and imagining all the folks congregating on Mt. Marcy, still shrouded in clouds. And I’m impressed by how many people have carried stones to the summit. This smacks a bit of carrying coal to Newcastle, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s needed, but it is a neat way to get people involved in “healing the wounds.” The summit stewards are restoring the fragile vegetation one square foot at a time. Each rescued patch must be edged in stones to ward off careless boots. People who come here want to do right, most of them. The summit steward has a kind word for each hiker who eagerly tells her they’ve carried up a rock.

*

The way back down is slow, each step studied carefully in advance. The farther we descend, the more the massed mountain above us weighs down our feet and makes our legs tremble.

*

The return along the approach trail seems endless and unfamiliar. How could we have missed it on the way in, all this sameness?

*

After supper and a brief walk to the lake, I crawl into my tent and collapse. I lie sleepless on my back for hours, feeling the mountain in every bone and muscle. I don’t remember my dreams.

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From the “Why I Love America” Dept.

My brother Mark once suggested that a useful exercise for us anti-government types is to compile a top ten list of Things We Love About the U.S. of A. His list included things like free public libraries, the world’s first National Park System, the Bill of Rights and the Freedom of Information Act. Actually, it was such a good list, I couldn’t see how to improve it, so I never did follow his advice.

But in any case, I am sick to death of the America of grand gestures and grand self-delusions. Who, after hearing Governor Bush bray about how They Hate Our Freedoms, can ever again view the export of our political ideals with less than a jaundiced eye? What I want to do here instead, through this occasional feature, is to highlight much smaller things, publishing links to articles or sites that somehow inspire me with affection for my native land.

What could be more all-American than the World’s Largest Pile of Empty Feed Sacks? Actually, that was a Garrison Keillor invention – an ingenious parody, I thought.

The World’s Largest Collection of World’s Smallest Versions of World’s Largest Things, however, is for real.

This one of a kind roadside attraction and museum travels all over the country, stopping at World’s Largest Things, community cultural centers, roadside attractions, colleges, universities, art events, and museums. Originally a public transportation vehicle for the elderly of Anderson County Kansas, the bus has been transformed into a traveling museum by artist Erika Nelson. This customized bus contains display space for its unique collection of miniature replicas of things such as badgers, otters, bulls, balls of twine, and baseball bats billed as World’s Largest.

But wait, there’s more! Much, much more about very small reproductions of very large versions of ordinary-sized things – and other wonderfully campy roadside attractions from America the Beautiful:

This one of a kind collection is displayed (when parked) through the passenger side windows, while the interior front space is open to visitors. Inside are additional displays of Roadside Attraction mineatures (such as Carhenge), photos and meta-photos of World’s Largest Things, a library of research materials and documentation of sites, and gift shop. When traveling down the road, the curtains act as a carnival-esque tease like an old-time sideshow, complete with theme song and barker broadcast (written and performed by Big One Man Band – a rockabilly group of one, who plays everything you hear simultaneously!) on a 103.1 FM frequency so cars around can tune in their radio and learn more about it.

Don’t these sound like people you’d want to party with? Hell, they bring the party with them – all you’d have to provide would be the drinks and eats, I’m guessing. Just this past week, says the website,

Winlock Washington convinces the Traveling Roadside Attraction to extend its planned 1/2 hour stay in to a week long extravaganza of egg-citing egg-tertainment, leading up to Egg Days June 25, 26, 27 2004!

One gets the impression that they may be having entirely too much fun. The website has a kind of haphazard look, as if it only gets updated when the one-man rockabilly band needs a break from performing for the World’s Smallest Traveling Radio Station.

One handy feature they have uploaded, however, is a list of the World’s Largest Things in the United States. The number of entries for Minnesota is indeed impressive, including an outsized doorknob, a couple monstrous ears of corn, numerous gargantuan fish, and the world’s largest ball of twine. But alas, no artificial, mystic energy-channeling, roadside mountain of feed sacks – yet.

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Heart’s Content

My second maxim was to follow resolutely even doubtful opinions when sure opinions were not available, just as the traveller, lost in some forest, had better walk straight forward, though in a chance direction; for thus he will arrive, if not precisely where he desires to be, at least at a better place than the middle of a forest.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

The buzzy songs of half a dozen species of wood warblers accompany my surfacing from the shallow waters of an uneasy night’s sleep. What in the world could possess an otherwise fairly sane human being to spend ten dollars a night for the privilege of sleeping on the ground? It’s 5:30 on an overcast Sunday morning in the Heart’s Content campground of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest, “Land of Many Uses.”

I fire up my backpacker’s stove, boil water and, with the help of a cloth filter, turn myself into a percolator machine: drip, drip, drip at about the same speed the coffee will exit my body an hour later. The trees still drip from yesterday afternoon’s soaking rain.

The mostly full campground is quiet. I can’t get over being amazed at how many people, some of them not even active outdoor recreationists, will go to such trouble to get out in the woods on a rainy weekend. I admit that this is a pretty nice spot, as campgrounds go. Though bordered on three sides by a 45-year-old red pine plantation, the campsites themselves are tucked into a maturing deciduous forest, each with just enough vegetation around it to lend an impression of privacy and intimacy. I think about how most of the time that people spend in public lands is devoted to doing fairly simple things: eating, sleeping, tending campfires, walking or driving around, looking at stuff.

By contrast, the official management philosophy of national forests stresses Multiple Use, with a strong bias toward economically productive activities. In the Allegheny, this includes primarily logging (especially of black cherry, a fast growing, first-succession species prized by the furniture industry) and oil and natural gas drilling. The Forest Service also favors high-impact, industrial recreation, especially on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and snowmobiles. Yet statewide surveys show that most outdoors-oriented people can’t stand the noise and (in the case of ATVs) the destruction caused by these machines, which represent exactly the sorts of things that the average forest “user” goes to the woods to try and escape. Surveys also show most people are against commercial timbering on public lands, even though its cessation is currently outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

I wonder, as I drink my coffee, whether it would be possible to start a movement to counter Multiple Use that would advocate “no use, just appreciation”? I guess the way to sell people on an alternative philosophy like that would be to emphasize the extent to which wild places should be above and beyond all considerations of utility and profit. Then I remember the unofficial slogan of the Rainbow Tribe, which a few years ago held its annual gathering just about a mile from this spot: “Welcome home,” they say. Imagine if that were written at the bottom of every National Forest sign, in lieu of “Land of Many Uses”!

But the forest is a very different kind of place for humans to come home to. When we try and impose our own aesthetic values, the results can be frightening. Leaving the campground for an early morning walk, I cut through the pine plantation and am able to walk in a perfectly straight line between rows of virtually identical trunks to reach the parking lot on the other side of the road. There is almost no ground cover, only a scattering of star flowers and a couple small patches of hayscented fern. From one patch a fawn leaps to its feet and clatters awkwardly away, visible for many hundreds of feet in this unnaturally uniform, Cartesian space.

I’m surprised to see a total of eight vehicles in the parking lot, which also serves a trailhead for the Hickory Creek Wilderness Area, the only area so designated in this national forest (except for a few, tiny islands in the Allegheny River). It’s a fairly unexceptional stretch of forest; the fact that so many people are backpacking through it on a rainy weekend testifies to the magic of the word “wilderness,” with its implicit promise of ultimate escape.

For me, however, the allure was the 120-acre old-growth remnant at Heart’s Content – and the more than 4,000 acres of old growth contained in the Tionesta Scenic and Research Natural Areas, where we planned to spend the rest of the day. We had botanized happily in Heart’s Content for several hours the previous afternoon; now I simply wanted to discover whether it’s possible to get lost in such a small tract of old growth. It is!

When I return to camp an hour later, refreshed by the rich sights, smells and sounds of a natural forest, I’ll be surprised to find I’ve been sapped of enthusiasm for theorizing about forest values – or much else. In fact, I’ll be uncharacteristically taciturn for much of the rest of the day. I realize I may be a little more impressionable than most people, but once disoriented, I find it difficult to re-orient, even after many hours of hiking and successful pathfinding in the Tionesta. A day later, back on my own front porch, things will still seem a little “off” to me; I’ll be struck by the oddness of the straight line of the driveway against the edge of the woods, for example.

I’ll still be puzzling over how, when I left the loop trail in Heart’s Content determined to “walk straight forward . . . in a chance direction,” I could’ve ended up back on the same section of trail I left – still inescapably “in the middle of a forest.”

But unlike Descartes, I am perfectly happy to be here. “Trees, trees, murmuring trees!” sings the black-throated green warbler. The long and endlessly supple call of the winter wren is a rare treat, and I could listen to the piping of the hermit thrush all day. So whence this nameless clutching in my chest, whence this hollow thudding, this clatter of hoofs?

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Subtropical interlude

Here’s something for everyone who’s getting tired of winter. In June of 1995 I spent a couple of days on the Caribbean coast as part of a six week stay in Honduras. It was absolutely sweltering; the humidity was intense. I fell in with some Garifuna (Afro-Carribean people who have maintained a very West African culture and language) and smoked some really strong ganja – which instantly made the heat not only bearable, but pleasant. The ocean began to talk to me.

Postcards from the Caribbean Coast

A piece of banana leaf serves as a wrapper
for a loosely rolled joint–
Me and him have two fincas allá en la montaña
& the rastaman bundles his hair up into a topknot

*

The guidebook recommended a restaurant called
Luces del Norte, “Northern Lights,”
where electric fans are aimed at every table
& the black waitress has mastered the art of killing flies

*

A puff of sea breeze accompanies each wave
up the beach & dies in the dunes

Sitting on the sand in the stifling heat
one quickly learns how to breathe
in time with the sea

*

A pimp & three young girls from town

The sea keeps on wagging
its swollen tongue:
Todo . . . Nada . . .
Todo . . . Nada . . .

***
Note: a finca is a small farm or simply, as in this case, a large clearing in the jungle [montaña]. Most Garifuna men are fluent in both Spanish and English, and switch rapidly between the two when addressing non-Garifuna.

***
There’s something vaguely fraudulent about travel poetry: one must live in a place for some time, I think, to really learn anything useful about it. On the other hand, the visitor experiences things perhaps more vividly than a life-long resident can ever hope to. Though the tourist’s gaze may not penetrate too far beneath the surface, surfaces themselves – clothes, masks, fur, bark, surf, the trembling ground in a cloud forest – concentrate mystery of a particularly elusive sort. (See Deeply superficial, on Mark Doty’s poetics of surface, and Mask and pageant.) Then, too, there is the problem of what to leave out, how much to reserve for the notes? The following two pieces avoid this dilemma by remaining in prose form. I am deeply indebted to my brother Mark’s expertise as a cultural geographer and long-time resident of Honduras for much of the information in these essays. (Hot tip for writers of place: go on tours with professional geographers!)

***

Excerpts from a Travel Diary: The Geography of Power

You could say that Carí­as is governing us from the grave. I read somewhere that he adored birdsong, and that while he listened to the birds he often ordered an assassination or an imprisonment.
Roberto Sosa, 1981 interview (translated by Jim Lindsey in The Difficult Days)

Back in our hillside barrio after a trek through the cloud forest–a landscape so strange most ordinary terms, including landscape, don’t really fit–the backyard birdsong sounds so homey, so familiar. I hear robins almost like ours, & the breathier counterparts of mourning doves; & from sunup to sundown a pair of wrens, exuberant cousins of the Carolina wren, finish each others’ riffs with the virtuosic speed of tenor saxmen in a head-cutting contest.

So runs the soundtrack to my day-long fever, penance for drinking unboiled water in the campo. A fever that leaves me literally emptied, flat on my back & ready for at least a taste of that tropical specialty, the fever dream. Perhaps if I raked open the scabs on my legs, offered the god of mosquitoes a little more blood? I need to understand some things, like why the shadows take on such striking colors.

Because even the sun is a bit of a stranger here–sudden in its comings & goings, & omnivorous as the god of Abraham and Lot. I think of the Mayas, their storied temples collapsing into the forest, kings turned to pillars of stone like the arrogant little girl in the Hans Christian Anderson story who trod on her mother’s loaf & was swallowed up. Paralyzed in the underworld: a stinging & biting half-life of vengeful familiars with claws & tails & wings. Condemned to listen as the gears of their pitiless calendar go on grinding, driving the turbines of El Cajón, the largest hydroelectric plant in Central America.

I remember my guided tour through the bowels of the dam, after a long, winding descent past campesino shacks without electricity. It was cool and damp and full of tremors, like a cave with six heartbeats. Banks of knobs and dials looked as if they’d come from the set of a 50s sci-fi film. And the engineer in charge deferring to my friend, the park superintendent. It’s widely acknowledged how tightly the fate of the reservoir is tied to the fortunes of the cloud forests in its watershed: they act, as the popular image has it, like giant sponges. Aquifers on the peaks; the mirror images of glaciers. So when too many trees are cut–whether by desperate peasants or wildcatting transnationals–all the country’s lights go out.

And of course the city water supply is even more tenuous. Here in the barrio La Leona the water comes on once every third day, announced by a kind of death rattle way down in the pipes. No wonder the most expensive hotels, like the Hotel Maya with its foreigners-only casino, depend exclusively on their own buried generators. While the U.S. embassy, swollen lymphatic node of a more abstract kind of power, draws water from its own wells–even has its own septic system to demonstrate Environmental Sensitivity. The John Wayne behind bullet-proof glass at the cafeteria demands a You Ass passport as collateral for a drink at the water fountain.

The lush lawns of the embassy compound provide little nesting habitat for native species; only the invasive grackles and English sparrows flourish. From the window of his high air-conditioned office the ambassador must enjoy an uninterrupted view of the familiar peaks with their scruffy wet backs of cloud forest. Ah the range of possibilities on the horizon for this fledgling democracy, he may actually find himself thinking, forgetting for a moment the papers covering his desk, the thicket of bureaucratic prose waiting to be cleared with a few powerful strokes of his fountain pen.

***

Notes on the Economy of Scale in Tegucigalpa

Tegucigalpa was a mining town–& probably a colony as well–even before the Spanish arrived with their Mandinka engineers. Its name means “Hill of Silver” in the language of the Aztecs. The streets are said to follow the miners’ paths. My brother, the geographer, once saw a picture of a web woven by a spider on caffeine, & pointed out that it looked just like a map of Tegucigalpa.
*
It makes it easier if you think of the beggars as spiritual ATMs. At any hour of the day you can toss spare change to the halt & lame in hundreds of convenient curbside locations. They sit like yogis or cigar-store Indians, blanketed in diesel fumes, open hands resting on their knees. And if there’s a lull in the traffic, you might catch a bit of their patter: non-stop blessings, as gentle as an all-day rain.
*
Children here sing nursery rhymes about the black vultures. These beloví¨d birds waddle around the streets like enormous bald pigeons & eat the garbage, scouring the banks of the river–which in turn provides several essential services, free of charge, to the body politic. Across the river is a separate municipality, Comayagüela. People go there for the sprawling indoor/outdoor market, an organic accretion of very disparate parts, redolent with sweat & peppers & the cheap perfume of fresh mango peels, dangerous with garlic- & guaro-breathing drunks. Light years away from that expatriate Nicaraguan, Rubén Darí­o, & his immaculate black swan.
*
If Tegucigalpans were ever to change the name of their city, they could save trouble by choosing “Coca-Cola.” That’s what the huge, Hollywood-style letters on the mountain south of town spell out. (San Pedro Sula–Teguz’s commercial rival to the north–sports a similar mountainside sign for Pepsi). But at street level, the Coke logo is one of a pantheon. This is a poor country; why pay to paint the front of your store if someone will do it for free? In 1995, that someone seems most often to have been a hireling of the American Tobacco Company: the trademark for Lucky Strike, so uncommon in the States, was ubiquitous. Wherever in the city I wandered, I always felt as if I’d arrived. Because somewhere not far away, a big, red target marked the spot: Lucky Strike. A pictograph even the Aztecs would’ve understood.

***
Ugh! Too many ideas, too many adjectives. Now I remember why it’s best to stick to poetry . . .

Hotel Agua Azul

Held captive for the diversion of furtive
couples on weekend flings,
below the terrace a spider monkey
swings by his tail, kicking off
the tree trunk with one hind foot
while the other clings to the chain
dangling from the collar. He keeps it up
for hours, as if driven by hidden
gears & springs. But draw a chair
within range & the pendulum stops,
he clambers onto the deck & slings
a hairy palm in your face, importuning
food, trinkets. Whatever brings relief
to a life of boredom, you think,
searching your pockets, going through
your things. How friendly he seems–until
you notice the strength of his grip,
how he enrings your leg. It takes
the help of half the hotel staff
to pry him loose, & days later
the spot where he bit still stings.