I am a boy of 4 or 5, standing in the cold morning air of
the Blue Ridge, dressed in my Sunday best. Beside me, my sister Diana squints
into the frosty sunlight as my mother, Joyce, a slim, nervous woman from New
Hampshire, with dark hair and a wonderful smile, peers through the horn-rimmed
glasses that were stylish at the time and holds her daughter gently but firmly
in place.
My father is Gilbert, Jr., a slender man still in his
twenties whose face is too serious by far for the laughter it owns. Braced against
a great black car, a Packard, I think, his shoulders are square, the hair above
his well-shaped ears a thick golden frost, still shorn in tight military buzz
from recent service with just a touch of rise to a flat-top in front, a short
wave front of individuality. He is holding my hand, limiting me to small arc of
movement I have explored endlessly until the moment in which the picture is
taken.
There is wood smoke in the air, the rank smell of livestock
and the green of a nearby garden, still thriving below the frost thanks to
dozens of carefully-placed milk jugs and a half-dozen feed sacks. Cats mill
around the back door, unmolested by the short, fat mongrel dog, Poochie, dark as
a sausage and just as round. Chickens scratch and cluck at the red and yellow
soil through patches of blackberries and rank mountain grass, fearless and too
feral for hawks, serpents, cats or hound, as if aware of their eventual date
with an axe and frying pan.
Beyond the white-painted wood and screen door voices mix
with laughter and the clatter of plates and pans as a shifting breeze carries the
smell of cigarette smoke, coffee, scrapple, bacon and eggs, onions and potatoes
frying in the lard of sausage freshly made from hogs which have grown to
maturity in the hog wallow behind the cinderblock garage, beyond which the
mountain drops down in a steep tangle of cedars, greenbrier, locust trees
wrapped in honeysuckle, goat’s head thorns waiting for unwary feet in the poor
soil that gives way to a boulder field.
Above, the Blue Ridge Mountains rise away in a shadowed mass
of hardwoods, sprinkled with ancient cedars and groves of pine, bone white
sycamores, catalpa and sumac adding their bright colors, fox grapes draping the
trees shadowing forest floors covered by pine needles, skunk cabbage and the
ever present poison ivy. Deer move through meadows bounded by autumn olive and
mountain laurel, sometimes bear and bobcats and the rumor of a ‘painter’ or
panther, something forest biologists deny with all their might despite persistent
rumors.
Skunks and possum and raccoons inhabit the forest, garter
snakes slipping through the leaves, vicious
copperheads and rattlers “big as your arm”, black snakes scaled like dragons
chasing wood mice, moles and chipmunks, squirrels leaping madly through the
high canopy, scolding the robins, sparrows and finches that hopped and flew
through the branches, jays gossiping loudly as crows and blackbirds fight their
age-old duels against the deep blue skies, buzzards riding thermals toward the
clouds, transformed in their grace from scavengers to aerodynamic wonders. A
red-tailed hawk screamed from somewhere, challenging the world, and locusts
begin to sing in the rising warmth.
My grandfather’s land is perched high on a ridge in Kite
Hollow, and across the steep narrow defile, through the towering sycamores, a
grown-up might glimpse the trailer of my uncle, Philip. In the distance, the
mountains roll down, hiding the valley surrounding the tiny, distant town of
Stanley rising abruptly into the twisting mountain folds that are home to the
Skyline Drive, once the hunting trails of the Seneca and other northern tribes.
Trash is taken to the boulder field on a regular basis,
often burned, leaving the stench of charred plastic and paper, the reek of the
hog lot and the faint undertone of rotting food hanging over this beautiful
vista in a miasmic cloud.
The stench is the smell of Progress; at one time, ‘trash’
consisted mostly of cracked cups, broken plates and jars and broken wooden
furniture that would burn. Food was not thrown away in a family that had known
the hunger of the Depression; leftovers became new meals, and what few scraps were
created went to the hogs, the legion of cats, and Poochie. Waste is not a
plague among people who reuse jelly jars as glasses, whose food is grown or
shot within sight of home, who catch their fish from rivers and streams within
walking distance.
Society has moved away from simple containers to a world of petrochemicals
and plastic, creating barren forests and toxic streams that require constant
stocking, mountains of trash which will last forever. When one considers the
vast quantities of household and industrial waste which are transported into
these places and buried by contractors who profit from pollution, the small
transgressions of an impoverished generation seem miniscule by comparison.
When even the burned debris piles up in ‘the dump’, someone
with a machine is called in to push the berm of melted glass and unburnable
debris further down the hill, although this has not been done in some time.
Local legend holds that there is a bulldozer operator still on his machine
somewhere in one of the numerous unstable talus fields that dot the steep
mountains of the Blue Ridge, taken down by overconfidence and stupidity, buried
alive.
As a child, I recall being briefly convinced that the talus
field in the story was the one behind Granddaddy’s hog lot and that the ritual
burning was to cover up the smell.
It was hard for me to understand the reasons behind the
dump, hard to understand my father’s embarrassment for the place and life in
which he had grown up, for the necessity that created the short arc between the
hillside garden and smoke house filled with hams and bacon to the trash-strewn
mountainside
Down the hill, out of the fall line of both the unstable
boulder field and the spreading delta of trash, well out of sight of the family
homeplace, live my great uncles, Shirley and Dick. Once, long ago in the era of
great promises known as the New Deal, this generation of Grays had joined the
masons who every day climbed down into the Potomac, trusting in great coffer
dams to hold back the mighty waters of the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay as
they mixed mud and laid the millions of bricks that formed the foundations and
soaring columns of the Memorial Bridge, an architectural triumph of function
and beauty that became a landmark in Washington, D. C.
It is often the fate of those whose hands create great
marvels to be forgotten, too often to live in obscure poverty. Although one of
the greatest cities on earth lay less than three hours away, actually within
sight of the highest peaks of the Skyline Drive, there was a vast disparity
between what folks in the hollows of the mountain considered ‘well off’ and the
Capitol’s bloated, self-serving definitions of that condition.
Different worlds.
At the time, I did not understand poverty, did not yet understand
history, and had no concept of how it had shaped the cultures of the Appalachian
Mountains for better and for worse, and created a mythical place called
Appalachia, “a place about which more is known that is not true than any other
place in the world”, and a population that is still the most unrecognized
minority in America.
Although there had been many storms and oceans of passage in
a life so short, for the most part, the world was still a bright parade of days
and dreams; I knew only that these were my relatives and this was where he
meant when my father said “Home”.
I could not understand why going there made him so happy and
being there, so sad.
My grandmother is revealed as the door opens with a rusty
squeal of hinges and the musical twang of the spring; she waves away a passing
June bug and calls out to us.
“Y’all come eat!”
Hilda is a short, round woman, with red cheeks and a wide
smile of bad teeth, thick strong arms and hands, bright eyes and a wicked laugh
that can turn nasty or sink to a loving chuckle at a moment’s notice. Whether
company comes at break of day or middle of the night, Hilda is always ready
with a pot of coffee and a plate of food, and no one is turned away from her
table hungry. Her grey-streaked hair is pulled back and she mops sweat from her
neck with a damp cloth as she talks softly to the milling cats, promising them
treats as Poochie waddles past, into the cooler kitchen, in search of scraps.
My grandfather is a great, stooping bear of a man with a
face that I see more every day as I look into the mirror, although mine carries
none of the incredible weariness that comes from being born and raised, then
starting a family of your own, looking for work in the grinding poverty and
lack of opportunity in the wake of the Depression. Perhaps it is because of
those years that he is always ready to smile, and his eyes, netted in folds and
creases, twinkle as his mouth fights against a grin.
Granddaddy is not a saint, by any means; he talks rough and
he smokes Pall Malls and he has a past with parts he’d rather not talk about,
like anyone who has lived through hard times. But he is one of the deepest
loves of my childhood, a figure and a force that has shaped all our lives for
generations.
Standing, looking back, I believe that whatever harm folks
think he might have done in the world, he surely did a lot of good, as well,
building monuments, working like a titan for every dime he earned.
Now he snatches me up, freeing me from my father’s firm grip
and his rough stubble of beard scratches at me as he hugs me close, smiling and
laughing gently as I giggle and squirm, his lips against my face, the smell of
his aftershave and tobacco a cachet that is love. His rough workman’s hands
tousle my hair and he puts me down, says something to my father about ‘growing
like a weed’, and turns to reach for my sister, who stretches eager arms and
laughs as he swings her around into another hug and kiss, then hands her back
to my mother, whom he calls ‘pretty as a spring day’. She blushes and smiles, a
shy Madonna revealed, moves toward the house.
“Come on, Gilbert!” Hilda calls. “Don’t let it get cold!”
“Well,” Granddaddy’s voice is the rasp of a lifetime smoker.
“I reckon we’d best git t’the kitchen, a-fore Hilda takes a switch to us.”
“Road kill?” my dad asks, despite having spent the previous
day among the folks cutting up butchered hogs, grinding sausage and pressing
out lard.
“Gil!” My mother’s voice is scandalized despite having heard
this joke a hundred times.
“Reckon we can rustle some up in you’ve a hankerin’.”
“Well, as long as it has Hilda’s tomato gravy on it, I guess
we can eat it.”
Hilda’s gravy, liberally sprinkled with black pepper and the
occasional flake of wood ash, is legendary in the household, and deservedly so.
“Don’t get none o’ that gravy on your head, boy.” Granddaddy
says and winks at me. “Your tongue’ll slap your brains out tryin’ to git it!”
I laugh because it is an old joke, one of the best, and
because it is so good to see my father smile. My sister laughs because everyone
else is laughing, a high, pure sound of joy.
My mother shakes her head, a grin breaking through the
disapproval.
Together, we walk down an ancient path into morning, dappled
in the shadows of the Blue Ridge.
