FORTY YEARS ON A BACK ROAD

tom pruitt's house today

 

Forty years ago, this day, this minute, 9:20pm, I was driving on the Parkway in the densest fog there ever was. I understand some of the fog in the Pacific Northwest is thicker. Absolute white like inside a cave is absolute black. The fog that night was dense. I'm used to it now, though it is never easier to drive in than it was that night, my first experience. Could only use first gear and creep. Had to hang head out the open window and look down at the tire and hold it next to the double yellow line in dim light. The fog absorbed the headlights in a white-out. I think of those nights driving when it is so dark it's pitch black, the headlights seem to go only half as far as usual. Stay in the rhythm of keeping the tire next to the yellow lines. Until a place where a road came into the parkway or entrance/exit to an overlook where the yellow lines ended for a space of about thirty feet. I never knew if I'd find the yellow lines again. I wondered if loaded pickup was headed toward the ditch and down the side of a mountain. Then the yellow lines appeared, I'd been on track. Ten or more years ago the maintenance crews painted segmented lines through the open spaces, a welcome assist.

 

the goat rock from waterfall road

 

I mused at how interesting it was to enter my new life, my commitment to the unknown, to chance, passing through a dense fog the last five miles. So smitten by the symbolism of it, I embraced the fog as a passageway into a new life of I did not know what. I had committed by giving self no option. The decision was settled. Whatever hardship went with it, I'd learn as time went by. I knew it would be intense hardship. No running water in the house, and an outhouse. Took water out of the creek behind the house in buckets. That wasn't anything. The first month, the month of November, cold to somebody from coastal South Carolina, frequent snow on the ground in the mornings, Tom gave me a job with a bush axe for clearing an acre of saplings and briars that had grown up in a meadow he wanted to return to meadow. I realized later he gave me this job to see how long I'd last before turning around and going home. I used it for boot camp. I wanted to work myself into shape and find the rhythm of hard labor, my purpose in going to the mountains to be a caretaker of a farm with beef cattle, totally inexperienced. 

 

waterfall road the backside

 

Somehow I knew without knowing that the mountains would be the place I live out my life. Looking at living my life, the mountains are the place to do it. Looking at making a living, the mountains are not such a good place to be. I could have found work that rewards a college degree, but did not want to wear a tie, work in an office and tell people what to do. I wanted to commit to hard labor. I had fallen in with Meher Baba a year before, which turned my inner direction 180 degrees around. I see my life an arrow shot straight up, going away from its source full speed. Momentum wears itself out, the arrow stops, falls back, turns around and flies full speed returning to its source. The first year was the turning of the arrow's direction. Most curiously to me of all is that these mountains are my blood source, which I didn't know for the first 25 years, as well as what I call the home of my soul. And that's not symbolism. It is best I came here from outside. I could not live here after growing up here. Much as I love the culture, I would need to distance myself from its control. As it is now, I honor the culture without it having controlling interest in my life. I've let the culture be my graduate school.

beside waterfall road the backside

This house was the Air Bellows School house. I've known well a handful of people who went to school and have met and spoken with another handful. Altogether, I've known ten people who went to school here. I've met people who were saved here at revival meetings they had sometimes in schoolhouses in the old days of horses and wagons. I feel a reverence for the house considering what all has gone on that these boards experienced. I feel a reverence for the house as itself without any mental references. It was constructed by the people of the community, some of them carpenters. The simplest possible construction, so simple it is almost in the Japanese style. This spot of ground is, indeed, the home of my soul. After living here around twenty-five years, I had a feeling that seemed like it came from higher self, that I now have my PhD in mountain culture. Not an academic title from reading, rather experiential, first hand, listening to old people tell their lives, working with mountain people, drinking with them and going to church with them, learning their theology, incorporating what I assessed the best of it into my life. Leave off the male hierarchy in the churches and I'm all with their theology, though in different words from what they use. I am post-round earth, post-evolution, post-the science of psychology, post-the 20th Century renascence, the new classical age for the future. I regard that unimportant. I was with old man Tom Pruitt, it's all in the red letters. The rest of it is history.  

the goat rock from waterfall road the back side

 

 

 

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BETRAYAL AND READING HENRY MILLER

wassily kandinsky

Today I've been filled up with a loving feeling for my four-legged friends and the winged friends. With that inner joy comes its balance, sorrow that the world I live in has so little use for anything living, even human life. After more than six thousand years of religion, the humans of the world still get their greatest kick out of killing. In the time I was new in the mountains, in awe of the natural world, I saw a blue heron in the lake one day. A lake here is a glorified pond made by a bulldozer, or bull-noser as they're known by the men who drive them. Later in the day, I told old man Tom I'd seen a heron. He said, "Kill it! It'll eat up all the fish in the lake!" I thought, All the fish? The bird isn't big enough to eat all the fish. It was passing through, saw a restaurant and dropped in. I did not kill the bird. The thrill of killing was one of the first characteristics I learned about old man Tom. His eyes sparkled when he told about killing something, anything. The thrill was the kill. I wondered how a man who talked about Jesus with genuine adoration, obeying God and love for God, can want to kill everything around him. In his later years he sat in an upstairs window facing his garden at sunset. I would hear a .22 rifle shot and know Tom shot another deer. He would wait for them to go into his garden he did not keep a fence around, shoot them in the belly with a .22 "so they'll go off and die." He didn't want them to fall down dead in his garden. Set up internal bleeding and they'll go away to die. He talked of it with fascination like he'd figured out something really special. He hated the deer. I asked him about the snakes in my first year. His answer, "Kill ever one ye see!" I didn't follow that counsel either.  

wassily kandinsky

Tom's brother, Millard, an old-timey Regular Baptist preacher. Brilliant man. Bible scholar. Truly inspired in the pulpit. Killing was his answer to solving problems. Seeing the evening news with him one evening, Iran and the Ayatollah issue was on. His recommendation: Nuke em. I said to him, You nuke this one you don't like, another one you don't like, there will come a day you've nuked everybody and you're the only one left. "That'd be all right." He meant it. I wanted to take it for humor, but it wasn't. He meant it. And it fit his character perfectly. Though he preached Jesus and love, outside the church love was a four-letter word and he didn't like hardly anybody. A Reaganista. The part that gave me pause was these are Americans from the traditional belief system of the time before electricity. These are people who call land "improved" when all its trees are cut down. Tom was not above pulling power on me to make me do his will. One example, I had a maple tree growing close to where I park. It was a nice tree. I liked it's color in the fall. Tom told me to cut it. I said no. He went to Ted Stern we were both working for and told him to tell me to cut it down. Really pist me off. I was told to cut it down because Tom wanted me to. After reasoning over it a day or two, I cut it down to keep peace and made firewood of it. Tom said he likes a place open. He can live in a damn desert if he wants to, but leave me alone about my trees! Next spring three sprouts grew up from around the trunk. I let the three maple trees grow in the place where there was one. The tree is even more beautiful now. This memory brings up a time he lied to me looking straight into my eyes. I told him I didn't believe it. He said, You calling me a liar? I had to say, Reckon I am. An intense moment. I did not see myself getting to my car alive. I did expect to be shot there and then. His eyes became shotgun barrels, and I felt like I was shot in his mind. I had nothing to do with him for four months after that. I couldn't even look at him I was so outraged by the betrayal. I thought we were friends after about five years. Turned out we were not. Ok. I never got over it. 

wassily kandinsky

I tend not to get over betrayal. It's not so much a principle I cling to, but deeper than that, down in that place I don't have a lot of conscious control over. Throughout childhood my mother betrayed me every opportunity. I learned early on I could not count on her. She taught me to lie to her. I became a private child. I couldn't count on either parent nor the church. I could count on school. School was my home. Loved going to school in the morning, hated going home. By the time I got into factory school, the fun of school went away. I've had a fondness for school, because that's where the love was in childhood, the other kids I was growing up with and teachers that really liked the kids. A second time, school put me on my feet by way of a small Southern college that was intimately small with a largely good faculty. I came to the mountains and moved into a schoolhouse. The house is the old Air Bellows school house. Now, in this time of the life, the place I call the home of my soul is a schoolhouse. I put all this together and see school in childhood was my refuge, and now in my adult life a schoolhouse is my refuge. My schoolhouse is loaded with shelves and stacks of books. At home with parents I was not allowed to read. If you got time to read a book, you got time to cut the grass, wash the car, wash the dishes. So I watched television. No consequences. As soon as I was in my first apartment, I stayed in and read as much as I could. It was like the dam broke. All I wanted to do was read. It's been that way ever since. I can't read Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum; that kind of writing spits me out before the end of the first page. Instead of turning to page two, I close the book. There is so much that is good, I'm unable to waste my time on pop testosterone fluff. Thomas Powers wrote a fabulous biography of Crazy Horse. I'm glad I did not miss Saul Bellows' Mr Sammler's Planet by reading some espionage nonsense of the day. 

wassily kandinsky

Something else I'm seeing the first time tonight, my adult life is characterized by reading. It's not the act of reading I like so much, but what I'm learning. I've been in cultures all over the world by way of reading. I read a nicely written novel from China and get a keyhole glimpse into the culture there. Reading takes me inside the minds of some brilliant people. Russian artist Kandinsky wrote two small books on art that taught me some important qualities of color that inform my every use of color. Poetry has been one of the great loves of my life. Reading it more than writing it. I have to thank Allen Ginsberg. He wrote in such a way a high school graduate could read it and feel like he got it, at least somewhat. Next, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the greatest introduction to poetry there ever was. I may have to find a biography of him. Everything I've seen about him over the years has told me this is an intriguing character, a man who truly took his own path and made it work for him. I still love his poetry. It blows my mind he wrote Coney Island of the Mind in the 1940s. Henry Miller's writing was astonishingly contemporary to today in the 1930s and 40s. He was writing in a place and time, but it's more like he was writing in that time, not of that time. His writing does not date. Nor does Ferlinghetti's. Miller's Tropic of Cancer made a sensation with its American edition around 1960. It was originally published in English in Paris, 1934, and I have a copy. It's still contemporary. I love Miller's writing. Reading him, I'm observing his thought process, his attitude toward life, his associations. I feel like he was so formative in my early reading life that now, diving into his mind again, I feel like what I'm reading was written by a close friend I understand well, just from reading his story. I admire his character. I admire the man. I admire who he is. I learn from him. Perhaps his most important message he had for his readers was to love your life and live it. Every page I read by Miller I'm in awe of his beautiful writing, how he tells a story, the freshness of his mind. If I'd spent my life watching television, I'd have never had the opportunity to know anything Henry Miller had to say. A tragic loss it would have been.  

wassily kandinsky himself

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A QUIET PLACE TO GO

The cold is moving in. This year I must find some fleece-lined indoor slip-on boots to wear in the house on the cold floor. And some heavy socks. This floor is so frigid in winter I want to stay in bed all the time or sit with feet up. I don't mind, however. Humans have lived with cold floors in winter as long as we've had houses. I don't care to spoil myself to central heat, air conditioning and the other luxuries. I like living with the elements, like living in a house that is not air tight. I like to feel summer and feel winter and all the weather in between. I like intimate association with the weather the same as with the world of the living, such endangered species as trees, rhododendron, ferns, running water, the animals that come out at night. I like having them around. I like it that coyotes and bears roam freely around my house. The only marauder I have is a coon that is throwing the roof off the birdfeeder in the night to eat leftover sunflower seeds. It's easy enough to replace the roof in the morning. Three possums lived under the house for awhile, until coyotes ate them. Hawks get the birds that come to the birdfeeder. They can't maneuver in among the trees; they wait outside the trees for birds flying out of the tree zone. I dreamed a few nights ago of a big pileated woodpecker pecking on the side of a dead tree, the standing trunk all that was left, the bird clinging to the trunk like they do, that red hammer-head digging for snacks.

 

 

One summer afternoon some years ago I was in the woods across the road, standing on a moss-covered rock beside the creek that runs to the waterfalls. I heard yip-yip-yip-yip, looked in the direction of the sound and saw a pileated woodpecker flying between the trees straight at me with another one close behind it. Both flew about two or three feet above my head, both yipping, like two jets flying through the trees. It was a thrilling experience. Another year in winter I was walking on the old back road along a ridge that dropped off rather steep on both sides. A crow flying low in the trees flew up over the ridge just a foot or two above my head. I heard the sound of wings and thought of the old hymn, Come Angel Band. Once, driving down my road from Air Bellows Gap Road , a crow flew a couple feet above the hood of my Toyota pickup, about where a hood ornament would be. It flew there looking back at me on either side as it flew. It went about a tenth of a mile with me. Twice I've had a redtail hawk do the same in the same stretch of road. The hawk, too, would turn its head sideways and look at me. I don't know if they were telling me they recognize me and my truck as a friendly who doesn't use a smoke-pole, or having a look at the human inside the moving shell. I've had this affection for the living beings I share my world with as long as I remember. My grandmother taught me appreciation for the world of the beings that can't talk. She taught me to transplant flowers so they don't die. She was the best teacher of my childhood.

 

 

I've come to see that this forested mountain I live on, and the culture of the mountain people, as well as the house, all come from the places I found comfort in childhood. A large acreage of woods was beyond the back yard, giving me a great area to play Indian in. The woods were my playground where the tension I carried from home relaxed. It was a safe zone where I was not being punished or berated. My grandmother lived in a room over the garage. She was my comfort in that she knew what I was going through and she allowed me to spend as much time with her as allowed. We worked jigsaw puzzles, listened to Grand Ole Opry, and talked about whatever came up. She always had a male canary singer. She borrowed a hen from a neighbor and her beautiful yellow singer produced little ones. She gave me one of the babies, which I kept until it eventually died of old age. She taught me to love canary song. She taught me how to catch a bird in a cage without hurting its wings. When I was new in the mountains I noticed everybody talked country talk like she did, using words like aint, them and other colloquialisms my parents corrected me for using. They didn't like grandma. Grandma was my lifeline. None of her kids liked her. I heard from different sources that she was a difficult woman not many people liked. She was the one I loved in the family. She was my mother hen. We kept a family of Cochin bantie chickens, a half dozen, started with a hen and rooster. They were black with feathers on their feet. She was particular about her chickens like she was with canaries. The four chicks became my pets.

 

 

I did not learn until I'd been in the mountains about thirty years that her mother and dad went to Kansas from East Kentucky, Pulaski County. It explained why mountain culture was so comfortable to me at the beginning, because familiar. It was my culture as I picked it up from grandmother, who was the same as a mountain woman, though she lived in Kansas. I've heard that two of her brothers were fiddlers. She played a guitar. And I learned her husband, my grandpa who died seven years before I was born, came from East Tennessee, Bledsoe County. Both places are in the Cumberland Plateau. I now live among the woods that were my childhood refuge and grandmother's culture. It's the world I live in. Also, my house used to be the Air Bellows School, where they held revival meetings in the evenings during summer. In the house I have school, another refuge in childhood. I loved going to school, hated going home. It was so very good to be someplace where the teachers that also served as guardians were affectionate in their attention. They were sensible, never flew off into an egomaniacal fit. They were intelligent, even rational. They were the guardians of my world that was safe. Punishment was not the purpose. The schoolhouse is the other part of my world that came from the places I went to for shelter from the storm of undiagnosed mental illness. To a great degree the church was important in childhood for refuge. The preacher was a man I could respect, a man who read books and studied the Bible deeply. The church was a comfort zone. Daddy was on good behavior in church.

 

 

I had no idea what lay ahead in 1976 when I settled the plan to move to the mountains and work manual labor on a cattle farm. It was  the same for me as throwing a dart at a map. I stepped into the future with no idea where I was, except on a map. I'd never heard of anything around here. All I knew was Blue Ridge Mountains, gravel road, lots of woods, lots of meadow, a couple of cemeteries, some old homeplaces, remains of family farms. It seemed to somebody who had never been out of a city, but on the road between cities, like the edge of the universe, land's end, the boonies to the max. That was all I knew. Of course, I'd heard of Appalachian poverty by way of photographers Walker Evans and Doris Ullman, who made Appalachian poverty beautiful. I never saw any of that Appalachian poverty. I saw old farming people. The poverty pictures come from coal mining regions, and there's no coal mining here. We have plenty who have gone to West Virginia or Kentucky to work .in the mines and retired back home. The hands of every coal miner I have shaken are hard as stone. The old time hillbilly farmers had hands of stone too. No matter what the man's character, a man with hands of stone I respect for all the really hard work in those hands. In a way, they intimidate me, because I have some insight into their commitment to a lifetime of hard labor every day, getting drunk on weekends. It's what you do until you die. I could not live a routine that goes on without end, never anything different or new, no curiosity, bent to the plow, a human mule paid the same as slave wages, not quite enough to get by on.

 

 

When my parachute put me down in a remote spot I'd never heard of, it seemed random in the doing. It seemed like chance and circumstance, like letting go and floating free to see where I land. In that time of the life, I was paying close attention to chance, playing with chance, even attempting to flow with chance and see what happens. I let go and gave chance the rein to see where it might go. I'd made nothing of my life using mind. Thought I'd give not-mind a chance. I wrote mind off as a failure---my mind, anyway. Been through a lot of school, read a lot of really good books, known some interesting people, and still didn't know anything. I continued adrift at sea within. I'd thrown everything to do with God out of my life. I gave no attention to the supernatural. I became an existentialist, not the intellectual writing books kind, but the everyday life kind, the kind that sees this physical lifetime is it, same as the church I grew up in. The preacher was a Swede from Minnesota. It was the same religious belief system in childhood that made Ingmar Bergman the existentialist he was. It did the same to me. It seems like I feel Bergman films from the inside, because we were created by the same belief system that both of us rejected as a dreadful fairy tale. I first discovered reading by way of fiction by Camus, deBeauvoir and Sartre, for two years. I had found writers who saw it as I saw it. DeBeauvoir and Sartre, each had a series of novels of the French Resistance during the German occupation. I read all their novels through the course of time in the Navy and some of their philosophy, plus plays by Sartre and Genet. I was using this time in the Navy to learn how to read with comprehension. These are the people who taught me to read. They prepared me for Freshman English.

 

 

By the time I came to the extremity of needing a major change, giving chance a chance, the Divine hand started guiding me in seemingly supernatural ways, like messages in everyday events, things people say. It seemed kind of eerie, like a consciousness was watching me. It also felt interesting. I'd been reading some Hindu and Buddhist writings. These chance occurrences began to have an order and pointed me to Meher Baba's center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, a hundred miles north on highway 17. I wanted nothing to do with anything like that. I was bored with rock stars and gurus. I wanted a quiet place where I could be entirely alone and not be bothered. My initial plan was to take a bus to some unknown small town in South Carolina, rent a cheap motel room until I ran out of money or got it, whatever it was. During three days and nights there, I got it. The direction I called Forward turned 180 degrees. I think of it as the turning point. Shoot an arrow straight up, the farther it gets away from the source, the slower it goes until it finally stops, turns and falls back toward the source. I'd spent my adult life, theretofore, running away from a stifling belief system's interpretation of God. In just a few days at the Center, all my questions were answered by picking up books of Meher Baba's words from a communal bookshelf, opening one randomly and reading the first paragraph my eye fell on. Each time I did that, it was a direct answer to a question that was in the front of my mind. Looking back from now, I can see those three days were the where and when my light was turned on. All my questions were answered and I came away with a whole new set of questions. Mountains seemed like a good place to go.

 

 

 

 

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LENDING A HAND

 

 

all images the air bellows outdoor museum of art

The theme song of my life sang in the front of my mind today every time I settled and relaxed. This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. If heaven was not my home, Oh Lord what would I do? This heaven that is my home is here, now, my real self, which I have a feeling is opening itself slowly, more quickly in this time of the life than before. It has to do with secure in myself, in who I am, in my own validity as an individual whether treated like a criminal by law enforcement or thought too well of by people who don't know me. I value individual rights, probably because I was taught it all the way through school as American freedom and liberty. The rough edges I'm experiencing in this time of the life is seeing the tightening down of laws and attitudes. The people running things now were schooled by a generic educational system that went by true or false, multiple choice. It's like in school all the time in our lives now. Make a mistake and you lose points, get a bad grade. We're so hyper detail oriented now as a society because our education is about memorizing details. A head full of details is what we call knowledge. It's definitely not wisdom. After sixteen years of school, my head amounted to a trivial pursuit game. Would John Berryman be:  a) symbolist poet, b) beat poet, c) confessional poet, d) concrete poet? True or false: Herman Melville wrote The Tropic of Cancer.

As an individual who has lived in this body awhile, long enough there comes a time when going on out looks like the best way to go. We are souls with bodies. Take off the body like taking off clothes for a shower. Shake that old skin loose, wiggle out of it. It's hard for ego to conceive of nonexistence, hard for mind, too. By nonexistence I mean without the body, thinking of the body as existence. But I question it being that narrow. It's the soul with a body we call existence. The soul without the body also "exists," if it can be said that spirit exists. I'm inclined to think it does. Seems like the spirit would be the core of existence. The issue that bothers me about living so long is the tightening down. It's come to the place we need a filing cabinet in the house, a tall one. The computer has tightened us down in an advanced way. The society all around me is tightening down like a plumber's wrench twisting a bolt with intent that it will never come loose. Over the years this progression has been the way of American society, I've been loosening myself from the belief systems that go with making money, allowing my own flow. My human flow is slower than the pace of keeping up with all around me. Withdraw further inward. Stay home more. Paint more. Read more. Work on projects at home. I don't understand the world around me. And don't want to.

I like living in a rural community where an awful lot of people like their neighbors and even speak well of them. There is always gossip, but I've come to see gossip as another ingredient in the glue that holds a community together. The people of this county I know look to others with an open readiness to lend a hand whenever needed. Last week, some people from Winston-Salem walking to the waterfalls parked in a place they did not know was soggy ground after much rain. Stuck. I was appealed to for a shovel. I stood around and talked with them and didn't do anything. When they came out of the fix, gratitude was heaped on me, and I was thinking, for what? All I could say was, "It's what we do in the mountains." There was never a thought of inconvenience. Somebody appeals for help, you go do what you can. It's a silent mountain code, one that nearly everybody lives by, simply because it is a belief in the culture, mother's milk it might be called, and daddy's knots on your head, you give help where help is needed. As long as I've lived here, it has been a truth that when something happens to your car, you're on the side of the road unable to go, the first pickup that passes will stop and ask if you need help. The population is now half people from city suburbs who don't know about the code. Those old cultural attributes of the mountains are specific to the mountain people.

 

 

 

In the coffee shop yesterday, somebody asked why I live here, meaning it. My mind went empty. I couldn't even imagine compressing it into a phrase, even a paragraph. It's my entire being that wants me here. This is my home that was waiting to be found. It was waiting for me, the old Air Bellows school house, live-in graduate school. Move in and learn. I didn't say any of that. All I could say was it's the home of my soul. To explain beyond that would have to be at a table with some good liquor to sip and a lot of time. Nobody who asks such a question ever wants to hear the story of its inevitability. He wanted to know if I knew somebody here or had relatives here. It didn't compute with him that my path led me here. I didn't know anybody. Didn't have any idea of the culture I had moved into. I set out to learn mountain culture from my school house of one. When it comes to ideals for education, seems like a school of one is the ideal. Learn by experience. Learn by knowing people. Learn by working. Learn by listening. I don't know even close to what can be known about mountain culture, but I know enough to respect the culture itself and the people who live it. My respect is such that I aspire to many of their values. I don't have it by mother's milk, but I have it by grandmother's love and grandfather's blood. This is the place where my soul is satisfied. This is the place where I have learned to have a heart affection for my neighbors.

 

 photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

 

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