Southverve

All day it rained, all day I thought of that rain from the loft of the shack, me looking out at the field, long square pasture fenced in by the Davis family pines, rain coming on.  The cows were hiding out somewhere—some other field, the little pond maybe, our woods.  The shack, what my father had built from the kitchen of an old shotgun house that his mother’s parents had lived in when they first moved down to Pitts, Georgia, the shack had a tin roof new and silver.  I don’t know if you’ve ever heard rain hit down on a tin roof like a million hammers, like crickets, like the loudest crickets you’ve ever heard, and you beneath that choir.

When it rains all day, I wait for the sound of rain on tin roof to happen, but everything is insulated now.  And I’m far from that shack.  My father spent a whole summer putting in those windows so I could see the boundary of his field, make sure his cows didn’t find a break in the fence to the Davis land. He put sliding glass doors downstairs, a thick ladder to the loft made of old joists.  He painted one wall his version of Saturn, the colored rings stopping at the roof, but you knew where those rings were spinning to.

Then he was gone the rest of the summer, teaching for the Navy, a ship out on the Mediterranean.  With all the hammering and sawing and painting ended, I went up in the loft, stared out the windows and watched for the cows trying to sneak away, watched the rain come on, that slow curtain-hush until it came over me so loud on the tin.  And I stayed there until I got too hungry, too tired to stay.  That rain and the sound of it were the most beautiful things in the world to know.

The cicadas take over where the wind hustles down, dies into branches.  Even under these courtyard lights, stars point to where the planes come across.

Then the wind comes back stronger, sheens through, makes the sound of that word, sheen, a glistening brightness.  But it is dark and just the sound of the word that you feel.  From over the mountain, clouds and their lightning, and the smell of rain.

All week, we’ve shifted through one hundred degree days that can’t last forever, like the lights when the sun comes over them, like the sun when it goes out.  Fire and Ice, Frost wrote.  Some say the world will end in fire.  Some say in ice. All week it’s been fire.  All week the cicadas have clicked back their wings.

My feet perched on the rail start to get wet, and I have to pull my chair under the porch roof.  With the rain, I can smell the dog that used to live here, the thick oil of its skin.  A lazy dog, the heat now gone from its body, its fur, and above us our stars and planes washed from the sky.

What I notice most about the South in August is the heat.  Early morning and the intensity of the sun already on you, the humidity building thick.  Five minutes and you sweat.  100, 105 by midday.  Every time I get into my car, the windows have bottled up the heat and made it stronger.  So difficult to cool off until late afternoon.  Then everywhere I look, storm clouds come on with lightning divining holes through gravity quick.  At night, those leg-strikes turn the dark away.  Thunder echoes where the flashes vanish, having passed through your eyes, leaving you filled with a hollow black until they return.

My son and I stood in the pool last evening where we now live and around us storm clouds swirled gray and from them a brilliant white cloud as if the sun was still just above, ready to break.  “Eye of the storm,” he said, pointing.  Around us, somebody getting rain, but not here.  Only the wind sweeping under the young poplar branches and beech of the courtyard and the slatted steel fence around the pool.  That water so warm having held the sun all day.  A Bermuda high holding down the southeast.  And the wind cooling.  And the lightning picking its way to the center.

One from a car window on the MLK Bridge as the rain starts, and she moves, palm up to catch the rain.  Still muggy, still so hot here, but that rain is cooling.  We’re going east.  Below us, the I-71 traffic going north-south.  She keeps moving her fingers up-back like playing a piano upside down.  I stretch my fingers on the wheel and they crack dry.

Two hands fence off a cicada just up from the ground yet to break from its shell, wobbling, blind toward the street.  The rain has stopped and I’m stopped at the traffic light.  She lays her hand open, lets the cicada climb on.  “Feels like a tiny crab,” she says, scooping it up, raising it against gravity, then letting it fall to her friend’s wrist who doesn’t say anything, who doesn’t, can’t move.

A man etches something into a brick wall on Taft.  Red brick.  An old apartment building with plywood windows buckling and broken glass windows—long sheets of torn glass.  But on the sidewalk, the man keeps digging at the brick with a knife, a pen.  He won’t turn around to the traffic, show us what he’s done.

On Vine, four kids run down, coming to the end of the sidewalk fast, and one girl, the oldest, skinny, yells out to the youngest up front to stop and throws her hand out at him, but she’s three kids back and her arm and hand aren’t a lasso that long and that fast.  She yells again, sharper, louder.  And he stops, shoes right on the curb’s edge.  He looks into the street, turns around.  She’s up to him now, raising her hand firm, getting it ready, but he just keeps still.  She puts her hand to her hip, shakes her head.  When he smiles, she warns him not to.

There are the ones grabbing hold of bike handles, the front rails of a porch, fingers wrapped in plastic bags full of groceries, strollers, on the phone, flicking ashes from cigarettes.  My own hands are splotched, missing pigment that you can’t see in winter, fingers too dry to open all the way. Driving around this city, its boxed streets, to the river, over, back up the hills through Eden Park, Westside, College, circling, driving, getting darker now, more rain promised.  I wonder where the woman is, if she’s still got her hand out a window catching cool rain.

One guy used to be a boxer or wants to be, and he’s on MLK going back and forth across the bridge jabbing at the air with purpose, protecting his face with gloveless hands.  All winter he did this and even with the July rain coming, he’s here now where I am.  He shifts his feet, pushes back at the clouds and air.

At Spring Grove cemetery, the trunk of a sycamore leans out over a pond, ready, it seems, to dive in if only the roots will let go.  The other night at a concert at Seasongood Pavilion in Cincinnati’s Eden Park, I lay under two sycamores with their splotched bark, layer atop layer of leaves, and small, round fruit.  It took a long time for the dark to come on, the five-point leaves slowly turning into shadow and the blue and clouds becoming a singular white, then gray, and all the time music playing up front by Lagniappe, the Rumpke Mountain Boys, and Anna Beljin—local folk bands.  I’ve written in these pages about pines, but when I walked through Spring Grove and saw that sycamore’s trunk angled out against the water, I slowed down to listen for the dive to happen, and around the curve of the pond another sycamore with its low branch reaching far to the pond’s center, I worried that gravity would break it, or I could break it or someone, anyone, who tried to ease out on that branch and dip his feet in.  But the branch held there and did not give.  And that it was rooted so strong, could hold itself like that—I didn’t want to leave.  My father planted a sycamore at the top of the hill from our farmhouse in South Georgia.  As a kid, I walked to it amazed at the rings of bark peeled off on the ground, and the brown fruit of seeds that in winter doubled as Christmas ornaments.  Then the other night at Seasongood, the light faded and shrunk the world.  What was left, those splotched trees.  My wife has an oak that she stares up through when she’s running and calls the eye of god, staring through layered branches, crossing each other as they rise, the wind shifting the pieces of sky she can and cannot see.  Beautiful, what she sees.  And as I stared up into the sycamores I couldn’t help but feel the same way, the eye of god—something about the pale green underbelly of leaves and watching the shadows spread down the trunk, the splotched bark, its whiteness turning black, the branches and leaves turning black, and this moment gone as soon as you get up and walk away.  At times the music on stage held me—violin players coming across with their bows, and the mandolin players fast—then I leaned down on the blanket, breathed in deep the humid July under those sycamores, thinking I could trap time in my lungs.  As if time could be trapped, measured in this way.  But I could no longer hold that breath than I could rest under sycamores forever.  The ache became too much.  I let the breath go.  The music poured in, and the black, and a cooler wind, and I thought of the other sycamore, the one leaning over the pond and imagined its roots snapping free, letting its trunk go, splashing into the colder water.

On the fourth, I drove to Spencer Overlook for the firework shows in the small Kentucky towns across our river.  And the backyards in those towns, too.  It’s not the grand display that Cincinnati puts on with its rocket shots aimed at the moon.  Once the center of those rockets catch fire, the white opens green or red-blue, spreading as if wanting to overtake the sky.  In Newport, Kentucky and Bellevue, the flashes sparkle out quickly.  Sometimes they fizzle just above the roofs before you can take a breath.  Then tiny white rockets slice the air like World War II bomb drops in reverse.  They crackle like fried bacon and are gone.  That fireworks remind me of food—I have to laugh at myself on that one.  Nothing in this sulfur-air is like food.  Down from the bluff, a knot of boats in the Ohio.  All night their lights trap the smoke crossing the water.  The smoke sinks, rises, swirls, and sinks again, filtering the view from Fort Thomas to the I-75 bridge.  In between, the firework shows come on and turn off at their own pace.  Trying to create a single unifying rhythm out of the light and noise is impossible.  But what’s revealed here, for me, what I’ve never discovered anywhere else, and why I come here every fourth, and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, is that sense of the sporadic, disjointed, uneven, but still persistent desire to celebrate our country’s birth.  Every town, everything happening all at once, joyful and booming.

In 2009, Southverve focused on my summer book tour.  I wrote essays about the south I remembered and how it had changed.  I also wrote about Cincinnati, Ohio where I’ve lived for seven years.  But in August I’m moving to Birmingham, Alabama.  I want to write down my impressions of Cincinnati, its people here, the river before I’m gone.  Then I’ll refocus on the journey south.

There is mud-water today and flecks of light coming off the clouds onto the surface, the Ohio River bending to Pennsylvania one way, to the Mississippi the other.  Here, one slice, the cool winds blowing northeast against the current.  The sun on the water leaves pools of white in shelves of ice slivers, but it is autumn, no where near that cold, and therefore a trick of the sun. 

A teenager a little further down the brick wall we sit on to watch, eat, read — he lifts his younger brother, stands him on the brick and says, “King of the world.”  We are all kings here, lucky for this day from this place as if we are on top of a mountain.  Below, a long shadow takes over the white pools, a long cloud falling behind the sun or maybe it is the sun falling and the cloud rising into vanishing.  

It is a day of exchanges.  Sun to cloud, river to light.  The boats turning to catch shadows.  But the boats are even slower than the sun and come away empty into blinding ribbons of current.  Or they are overtaken, all of us, by the shadows.  

These clouds move like glaciers would if they were above us drifting, refusing to sink down.  No we are more like glaciers, thick with water, weighted to this point of the earth watching the afternoon shift and break us free from ourselves.  But I like to think of the clouds as glaciers, free of gravity, moving wherever they want.

An airplane, tiny, slips through the white clouds that turn and curl around themselves, vanish into the sun.  I have to close my eyes because the sun is too bright.  To open them is to see the slipping and falling away of the world.  I wait for the sun to fall behind a cloud, the wind to cool my face.  

When the sun returns, it sears orange behind my eyelids, all that holds me is this warmth.  The clouds break apart, reattach with their own gravity like swirls of river water finding edges of current, swirls of sky streaked by blue and yellow and bright fragments where I place myself under again and again into this world.

It was a tough week for my family.  My sister had surgery, and everyday I got in the car and drove, drove toward work or the river, drove and drove, kept looking into the water and beyond it, always beyond it, somewhere further south where she was having her surgery and hoping she would be okay.  If I could dive into the water or wheel into the sky.  If I could make that jump and live to tell it.  In those seconds not a death, not terror, not a slipping and falling, but flight.  If I could do that and find her okay.  If she would be okay.  

All week, I kept a friend’s music with me.  She gave me bluegrass violins and mandolins I had not heard.  A gift.  Always like this when I hear new music I love.  It sweeps through me like well water sunken two hundred feet under mud and rock, drilled through and brought back up cold, then down again slipping into the lungs, building a river out of the soul.  The water like music like air across the Ohio leaves you thirsty.  Drink and drink.  Never enough to fill you. 

Where is that point where music becomes water becomes air into blood?  Your compass stops turning, points you to the river, to your sister, to one concern.  Day after day, I waited and slipped from myself into the possibility of flight, hoping she would be okay.  

And she is.  My father called to tell me.  So I walked away from the river and back to my car.  I’m still trying to relax.  But the music stays on.  I can’t turn it off.  I don’t know what to do with it now.  It pours and pours into my body.  Somewhere it must be slipping out of me because there are only so many branches and arteries walled inside this skin.  I wonder what the river carries away when it leaves, and where it’s going and will I ever travel far enough to recover the pieces.

I’m on my porch in Cincy, and today the wind is firing down from the north, cold, the first signs of autumn here after a week of rain.  The rain has left half the sunflower heads in my garden black with mold and white webs.  I cut them from the stalks, turned them up on the deck to dry in the sun.  One head is full of striped teeth, sun flares tucked into its core that will not rot.  These will be planted next spring. 

It is late September, but part of me thinks the north wind is actually calling from my father’s farm in Georgia, that same wind I walked through and wrote of this summer that connected thunderstorm to thunderstorm, brought rain and lightning over my brother’s fields.  As I wrote in an earlier blog, the wind through the pine needles in South Georgia is the beginning place of the wind itself.  

It has now slipped over the world, covered it whole, and found me on this porch waiting for its return.  I know if I walk from these steps, allow the wind to lead me far enough away, it will carry me to next summer and I will again be in my brother’s fields.

I want to direct your attention to a New York Times article by Paul Krugman on the rapid changes in our climate. He’s right: Every day that goes by, every day that we do not demand and push for changes to our current environmental polices, we risk damaging our future and the future of the planet. Here’s the link.

This Sunday night at eight you can listen to an interview I did for the show Cover to Cover with Jesse Freeman of Georgia Public Broadcasting. Just go to this link and click on Listen Live.

(Below is the final blog about the hike to Brushy Mountain in June)

We keep going.  The hike always becomes this – keep going no matter how tired until you reach the top of something.  On this day, it started with the four hour drive from Cincy to the trailhead in the Smokies and up.  Already there have been two haunting moments – the flight down the mountain my son talked about and slipping behind the loud rush of Grotto Falls. 

Now the path winds up the mountain until we reach Trillium Gap and a sign splits toward Mount LeConte or Brushy.  We always take Brushy Mountain trail.  The path here is basically a creek bed, a tiny rill of mud with moss on either side.  The air is thick with humidity because of last night’s rain, and if not for the elevation, the humidity would be unbearable.  

In the last stretch, the rhododendrons lean over, some still blooming pink in late June.  We try to walk on the moss banks and avoid the mud rill as much as possible.  The moss is incredibly spongy, and at any moment, you think the ground will give way. 

Then the canopy opens, and we are at the crest, surrounded by laurel with tiny white-pink blooms, just beyond, the peaks of other mountains.  The trail winds around and we lose each other – Dylan is somewhere up ahead with his sketchbook, and Jana behind us taking pictures.  

Along the white blooms are bees and sandfleas.  I go to an outcropping and yell, “Here.”  Just that one word.  It hurts the back of my throat as the echo becomes distorted, vanishes.  No one answers back.  But still I breathe easier, having made it again to the top of Brushy Mountain.  

In the distance are the blue fanned ridges of three mountains; to my right a mountain with a gray cloud perched on top, and below, a long line of stick trees that have lost all there needles.  Why that side of the mountain while other places flourish?  It is like this in all of us.  As pieces of us die – old skin, simple cells, the cutting away of memory – other pieces of us live on, thrive, recover, exist. 

I look down and think about what my son said of flight, the kind he wanted, a flight that does not end us along the endless branches of trees, but instead carries us and carries us.  

“Here,” I yell a second time as if one sound can lift the world and me with it.  Even the dead branches.  But where to?  Where is this lifting going?  There is no other place.  We’re at the top.  And yet yelling the word reaffirms and grounds, the same as it releases and lets go.  Freedom is that contradiction.  Always.  My wife tells me my thinking is too binary.  But to yell at this spot on this mountain that holds me and let’s me go, becomes something more, as if all the world is suddenly uncontainable and yet shouldered by mountains with a loneliness that gnaws inside us, freeing and as vast as our own sound carrying across the sky.

On my last day in Georgia, I climbed Blood Mountain with my mother.  The trailhead is just north of Dahlonega and part of the AT.  Though I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was at how much the mountain reminded me of the Great Smokies – especially a canopy of rhododendrons near the top that was much like Brushy Mountain off Roaring Fork.  

As we ascended, we came across a sour orange smell – I don’t know which plant it came from – but it was the same smell from my June hikes in the Smokies.  Smell, I’ve discovered, is my strongest sense for memory and location.  Every time I’m home at Swamp Hollow, it is the smell of pine straw and swamp-mud and, of course, cow manure that my kids hate and make awful faces at and say, “Gross” whenever we’re in a field of my father’s cows.  But for me, it’s home, familiar. 

It was a day of low clouds on Blood Mountain and half way up, the mist spread through the pine and oak branches like the cool mist that comes from exhaling in winter.  My mother stopped for small purple flowers and red flowers she especially liked.  I took pictures of the white light cutting through leaves, around the wet boles.  And finally at the crest, the two of us sat on a sheet of rock and looked out into the mist.  

I had been told by a friend that the view from here was amazing, but all there was to see was mist, the low clouds, a blur of whiteness.  It made the immediate rock and trees more prominent, and I thought to myself, this place, this moment is all we have.  

All week my mother talked of her belief in God and heaven, that place that exists only after death.  And I talked about our moment here – this life, this earth, the people we love now.  

Just beyond Blood Mountain was Slaughter Mountain and Springer and pathways to Desoto Falls and Neels Gap leading home.  But what was beyond the mist did not matter.  What mattered to me was that my mother and I were sitting on this rock, catching our breath after a long climb, a little dizzy, our legs and backs aching, resting.  Soon we would head down and restart time in another direction.  But before that moment and the moment after that, was this moment, all that we had and needed.

Wanted to thank everyone at Joseph-Beth for putting together the reading last night and wanted to thank all of the people who came out.  I’m back in Cincy, and the southern book tour is done.  Through the fall I’ll continue to post blogs about the trip, and then I’ll take a break until next summer’s journey south.

I’m heading back to Cincy after a day on Blood Mountain in Georgia and will be reading and signing books at Joseph-Beth this Thursday night, September 3. The final stop on the summer tour.  If you’re in the area, come by.

At night, when a wind comes through, the pines bend around the stars. 

Over and over until the black and sway of the world begins to lighten, making everything under the eyelids of sleep white, whiter until the sun’s insistence wakes you. 

Straw catches on top and brown leaves all summer.  Underneath, spiders take the corners, wait for mosquitoes; the shell of their bodies drop to the bed.  

If the rain is long and sustained enough, it will find a path through, drop slowly and steadily, creating its own time. 

I’ve seen the glass iced, separating the angles of the sun. 

I’ve seen it sweltering with condensation. 

In the clearing always, the needles curve to the light, returning the shape of the sky to us.

As my father and I walked to the old town, I kept my head up and back, so much that the stars were dizzying and I couldn’t at times keep straight to the road.  Next week in Cincinnati, the sky would be pink with light only a few stars could burn through, and the moon could make it through, and that would be all of the sky. 

My father’s cat followed us, and he threatened it and stomped, but the cat kept in the ditches and called to let us know it was there or maybe to make sure we were still there as we slipped from the dirt road to old town, my father telling the history of the houses we passed. 

He told me who lived in them now, who lived in them before and what happened to the families – almost always a death or scandal.  But some of them had simply disappeared.  He didn’t know where they had gone.  Some of them were in their living rooms, exhausted, the blue TV light in the window.  These people chose to never come outside and speak for themselves, but my father knew of them and what they had become. 

It was a warm night and the wind slipped around our ankles, the crickets calling one another in waves.  We returned to the dirt road and the few lights of old town gave way to the black, again, the wide stretch of stars.  I wanted to stare at them until I had them all in my view.  How many? I wondered.  Impossible to count.  Would they be here when I came back next summer? 

My father’s cat was still calling, but further down, nearer our farm.  And my father stopped and looked up.  No more histories to talk of, just the sky, all we could see and know.

Look for volunteer peanuts along the plowed edges.  Volunteers come up first and are usually ready in mid to late August.  The runners set down by a seeder and lined in rows have a few weeks yet. 

Pull up four or five plants, shake off the dirt, and throw them on the tailgate with roots exposed.  Make sure the peanuts tangled in the roots are mature enough, the pods filled out, ready for boiling.  My father always eats a few raw ones.  

Snap them.  The dulled shells are the ones to get; the pale ones still too young.  Toss into a boiler. 

At home, wash in the sink.  Fill the boiler up three, four times and swish the peanuts around, empty the mud-water, repeat. 

Draw enough water to cover and place on stove. 

Add salt.  Estimate.  My father pours it in from the Morton container, about he says, three tablespoons. 

Bring to a boil.  His is a copper pot, turning green in splotches around the lid.  When it heats up, it rattles. 

Let boil 10-15 minutes.  

At ten minutes, taste. 

At eleven minutes, taste. 

At twelve minutes . . .  if cooked too long, they’re mushy; not long enough and they’re too firm.  We turn the eye off at twelve minutes and remove from the heat. 

Let peanuts sit and cool for an hour, let them draw the saltwater through the shell.  

Taste until the salt is right, and it’s what you want.  

Drain. 

Eat.