RUINT

 

Earlier, I saw a movie the second time, Lawless. It would be categorized an independent, not made in Hollywood by Hollywood formula. Singer/songwriter, Nick Cave, wrote the screenplay. John Hillcoat directed it. The film was made from a true story written in book form by the son of the young guy, Jack Bondurant, whose perspective the story followed, The Wettest County In The World, by Matt Bondurant. The time was early 1930s, prohibition days. The place was Franklin County, Virginia, which runs between Martinsville and Roanoke in the southwestern region of the state. The Bondurant brothers were making liquor and shipping it to Chicago in the back of an Model A truck with a wooden bed. They made some good money fast. The Feds send in a G-man to take care of business, an arrogant lawman above the law. The story is around his arrival and the eventual killing of him by the people he'd made life rough for. It brought to mind the end of Peter Matthiessen's novel, The Killing Of Mr Watson, where everybody concerned shot him down.

 

the brothers Bondurant

them's some hillbillies

 

Lawless is a well told Southern story that brought to mind two films made from stories by central Tennessee writer, William May, That Evening Sun and Bloodworth. This movie, Lawless, came to mind to see again after I heard about and bought  from the liquor store a pint of some white liquor, moonshine, a new brand, Broad Branch. It is made from the formula of a man whose liquor spoiled me years ago. He stopped making it and evidently worked out a deal with a small distillery around Winston-Salem to make liquor commercially from his, heretofore secret, formula that came down from his great great grandfather. It has his name on the label, "Frank Williams Method, spirits distilled from a mash of grains, cane and hops." Frank is an artist of the pure. This Broad Branch spirits is 91 proof and only sold in pints, the curved pint bottles that fit comfortably in pockets. This is good sipping liquor. It is the only liquor I've bought in a store that is the equal of Frank's. His other would be around 140 proof. It will get you there in a hurry.

 

mountain spring water

 

This bottle I bought is from batch 001. I bought two to give one to Justin. He wants to keep his unopened. He'll put it in the safe with his guns and ammo. I thought about keeping an unopened bottle and first thought was, Why? I don't have half a century of future like I did half a century ago. I have so little future left, it encourages me to focus more on the now, which I like. It is nice not filling in the blanks of unknown future with I'm-gonnas and I-oughtas, just leaving it free to be the now when now gets there. I wanted to taste the liquor, not leave it in a bottle. It seems too much like breaking the flow to leave it in the bottle. The bottle is its vehicle of transportation from where it's made to my tongue. This is the liquor I will drink from here on. It's somewhat ideal to be able to go to the liquor store and buy the liquor that ruint me about a decade ago. I've been tipsy a few times drinking with Frank at Jr's house with Jr and Jean and me at the kitchen table with Frank over the best liquor there ever was. Frank kept us all bent over with laughter. Frank is a classic storyteller, tells the stories from his adventures along a lifetime of a multitude of adventures, the kind most of us don't want for ourselves for being so mortally dangerous.

 

air bellows drive-thru art museum night

 

Frank has a brilliant mind, has an infinity of knowledge in his head, knowledge from first-hand experience. He becomes a master at whatever he turns his hand to. He buys a house that needs some repairs, subtracts the cost of the repairs from what he pays for the house, makes the repairs himself, fixes the house up like new, inside and out, lives in it awhile and sells it for a good profit. He makes good money buying and selling. He has the air of a man comfortable talking with men, center of attention, the kind of man men are drawn to for the masculine performance, tells good jokes. Frank does Man well. He has the knack for the American, and in his case Southern Appalachian, vision of what constitutes a man. He's comic and friendly, loyal, and when Frank is your friend, he is the very definition of a friend. He's good people. I'm grateful to him for making his secret art form available so readily. It is so good, I can only come close by calling it liquid candy.  It is for sipping, not for gulping. I don't like getting fuzzy headed anymore. This time in the life when I feel the beginnings of the fuzz, it feels like I'm wasting good liquor. I drink it not for the fuzz, but for the taste and inhaling the spirit in it.   

 

air bellows drive-thru art museum night

 

 

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THE POPLAR WALKING STICK

judy's walking stick

This afternoon I sat on a step and whittled on a walking stick for my friend Judy. She and Lucas go walking when they're visiting, taking walking sticks found someplace. Nice sticks, old and dry. I made this stick for Judy, for her own personal walking stick that was made with her in mind. I cut the poplar sapling to length last year and let it dry after cutting off the limbs with clippers. Today was a sun shining day after a dry day following two wet days. Justin used the good weather to put a fresh coat of stain-sealer on the south side of the log house. I went to be there for company and for backup considering he was working on ladders. I sat on the step using my pocketknife, a Case XX stainless single blade with black handle. It's been my knife for over thirty-five years. It's called a "clod buster." Why? I don't know. I used to have pocket knives with two and three blades. I never used more than one. I like a knife with a single blade. I sat on the step to the deck shaving the top layer of the bark in careful slices. I wanted to leave the under layer of the bark, a light tan that would darken with oil. I whittled each place a branch came out from the trunk down to a smooth bump. Poplar wood is almost white. These places have a target in the center, the beginnings of rings, inside a white semi-circle, looking somewhat like an eye. I think of them as eyes to assist walking, watching for serpents in particular. A seeing eye walking stick. I don't like fancy walking sticks. Seems to me like a walking stick in these mountains is best like the way of life in the mountains, plain, uniquely itself. It's designs, the circles, I thought would make a good repeating pattern along the length of the stick showing the pattern of the branches growing out from the trunk. The pattern of its design is itself, its unique and solitary self.

the handle

 

I was of two minds about finishing the stick. I wanted to leave the rough marks left from slicing strips of bark onto my lap and the step between and around my feet. I wanted to sand it too, make it smooth. I liked both ways of seeing it in my mind's eye, though preferred smooth. I chose to leave the upper foot of the stick, the part the hand holds, semi-rough to let the beauty of the shaving lines have their place. Instead of being a length of it like a handle grip, I made the end of it rough and smoothed it slightly down the part I think of as the handle, fading into smooth the rest of the stick's length. It is forty-six inches, two inches shy of four feet. A walking stick really doesn't need a crook like a cane. A crook becomes an obstacle to deal with using it for a walking stick. A cane is more for keeping balance and favoring a leg. A walking stick is for moving ahead, sometimes an assist uphill or downhill when a third foot would help. The stick is smooth from one end to the other with soft bumps for the eyes, no sharp edges to snag a finger. The skin that is the under layer of the bark has intricate patterns of vertical flow lines similar to the lines on the outer bark. The lower three feet are a soft light brown and smooth as a woman's leg in panty-hose. The tung oil is bringing out the honey brown of this layer of bark I'll call the skin. The end of the stick on top is whittled into a smooth hump and sanded even smoother. Three rings for the heart of the tree and the white wood around them makes another eye, an inch in diameter. Poplar is a deceptively light weight wood. The stick has a few of my mistakes on it, places I cut too deep and exposed the white wood. No problem. It's the accidental element in the design, the human element that says a machine did not make this stick out of lumber. I want its design to be the flow lines of its life. I thought for a short time about carving a ring around it to designate handle. It was too conscious an interruption from outside the stick. I didn't want any of its design to be made by my mind. I thought about stripping a band down to the white around it in places where I slipped and exposed the white. No. Mind again. Let a few unintended nicks make their own design.

 

the human touch

 

I want the only part that is of the human mind to be the stick itself. It did not cut itself to this length or whittle itself. A walking stick is a human thing, a product of the human mind. As a walking stick, I hoped it could be its own design. A poplar is a beautiful tree. A pair of tulip poplar trees were in full flower the first time I saw this house toward making the decision to pick up and go to the mountains and start my new life working a farm in the place where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart (WB Yeats). Thoreau's Walden was one of the first books I read upon moving in during winter. Thoreau was instrumental earlier in my life by way of civil disobedience learned toward dealing with the madman at home. My first lesson in the Tao; resistance by way of nonresistance. I wanted to face solitude, learn to handle it. Comfort with solitude took awhile taking root. The tulip poplar flowers struck me at the time an affirming sign. Poplar leaves turn yellow in the fall. They will be all yellow and the leaves drop, one at a time, until the tree has a sprinkling of leaves like stars, and they hold the look for quite awhile. Not far from here on the road to Whitehead, a stand of poplars on a ridge in the near distance makes a sight a photograph only diminishes in the fall when the leaves are gone and these poplars sparkle with random yellow leaves like stars. I know a place in the woods where the ground is so nearly straight up and down, rock for the ground covered with layers of decayed leaves, very difficult to walk on. Need a fifty foot rope to walk in that place. It has the biggest poplars I've seen. They're giants that grow straight up, huge trunks. In the 1920s or 30s, lumber companies came through these mountains buying all the timber, causing erosion problems that washed away sides of mountains. Evidently, they couldn't reach these trees. Yes, I'm a tree hugger. I hugged one of them, honored them for being the elders of the Air Bellows trees.

poplar bark

The woods on the mountain are all new since the mountains were stripped of their trees and the owners of the land made a little bit of money to help paying for a new house, and new fields cleared to plant oats and corn on. I think of the forest here virgin forest. The trees and growth in the woods all started growing less than a hundred years ago. Some less long ago, having been corn fields for cornbread and oats and hay for the horses. What's left of hay fields has largely gone to Christmas trees, purveyors of cancer to residents of NW North Carolina. It's ok. They pay a lot of taxes, the county budget couldn't make it without them. I was thinking today while whittling on Judy's walking stick of all the farms that were on this mountain, big farms that raised food for work horses and milk cows, chickens, family to live on through the course of a year. This is where making liquor came in. Liquor making was the only way a farmer had to make some money. It worked pretty well until it worked too well and the liquor-making corporations lobbied laws to prohibit a man from making liquor on his own land. A really good movie was made about that time not far from here around Stuart, Virginia, across the state line from Mt Airy, NC. It starred Val Kilmer and a lot of local people from the area. In scenes where a lot of men came together to stand up against the G-man, I saw local faces galore. I felt at home among them. It was especially refreshing to see mountain people portrayed accurately by way of film, even sympathetically as something besides toothless. Lawless is its title. The story was written by the son of the man the story follows, the film made from his book. The history of these hills is in Judy's walking stick that grew out of the ground of its own accord within ten feet of the house. I've put one coat of tung oil on it with bare hands. The stick soaked the oil up immediately. I'll put another coat on it later, and one a day for several days until I feel like it has done what I want it to do, preserve it as a walking stick and bring out its inner beauty, the beauty of its unique self.  

 

stick from the ground up

 

 

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MOONSHINER'S CODE

Today has been an all day review of where I came from inside myself to where I am now inside myself. Sandy, son of the farm I used to caretake, was here for the first time since he became the owner of the mountain house. I had not seen Sandy since before he started Law School, and he's been lawyering for 35+ years, as long as I have lived in the mountains. We used to be from the same culture, urban. He still is. In the time he's been practicing law, I've been a minimum wage laborer in a remote region of the Blue Ridge, living in mountain culture long enough that I have over time faded into the culture to the point it is now my own. I love the culture and the people I know so much I get choked up and teary-eyed talking about them. A few times talking with Sandy sitting on the deck I choked up telling him a little bit about this world. It is a different world from the world he knows. He asked about finding some white liquor. I said, You have to know somebody. I told him as a lawyer he surely knows somebody who can find him some at home. Right away, he knew who it would be. Moonshine is the only thing people from outside the mountains think they know about the mountains. First thing they say is where can they get some. I don't know. You have to know somebody. I've learned the moonshiner's code and value it as a worthy code. I've taught myself to live by the code, even though I don't know how to make liquor.

I learned the code best from Jr Maxwell, and Tom Pruitt before him. Jr lived by the code because his life from birth was this world. Everybody in the mountains lived by the code until the drug business came along. Old-time liquor makers don't like and certainly don't trust any drug people. They rat before they're charged. The moonshiner's code is the mountain code. Don't rat, ever, for any reason. Keep everything you know about certain things to yourself. In the old days, the code was created by the threat of revenuers where somebody who ratted might end up dead or their house burned down. It was a serious time. Everybody stood behind their own people in the face of outsiders. The movie LAWLESS, starring Guy Pearce, is a good story of liquor makers in the 1930s. Pearce's character comes to the region from Chicago, an arrogant slick dick. The film was true to the mountain people, even respectful of them. Mountain people were used extensively in the film as extras. It's a true story told originally in book form by the son of the man whose life the story tells. Seven years I listened to Jr Maxwell tell me his life, the people he knew, experiences in his bluegrass band, how he drank while he played. He said drinking while making music, in his case banjo, you play better and better to the point where it starts going bad. He would drink to the point of his freest picking and hold it there. One of his fiddlers, his favorite through all the years, would drink all the way to oblivion before he stopped drinking. Jr understood his liquor very well. He used it for medicine. He drank a little every day. He told me, "I like to work like hell all week and get drunk on weekends." That was the rhythm of his life. I've been slightly drunk with Jr a few times. He is a fun drunk and I am too, so we didn't get in a fight. We laughed til our ribs were sore.

Visiting with Sandy and Eric today I was all over the place in my mind. Seeing Sandy took me back to Charleston years and the College. I saw him after all the years and it was like it had been a week. I was flashing on changes in my attitude toward life in my time in the mountains. Today I found the mountains, mountain culture, the people I know and have known, the very best influence I could live with regarding my spiritual path. The mountain people are God loving people to such a degree I feel like I am living in a place I could easily call holy in that so many lovers of God live in these mountains. Of course, there are the society church goers where they look down on the country churches. It's in the country churches that the spirit is alive and well. It's in the music too. It is tradition in the mountains that a bluegrass band play gospel songs in their song list. Bluegrass albums until recently have had gospel songs sprinkled among the others. When Ralph Stanley sings a gospel song, his fans love it in a big way. He can make you feel a gospel song. That's what is outstanding about Ralph Stanley, he makes you feel the song he's singing, whatever it is. For one thing, I have found Ralph Stanley's music one of the most enriching aspects of my life. And mountain music all the more. My mountain friends add a richness in my life, too, that I could not find living in a city. Eric tells me I have to see Portland. I'll love it. I have to see Oakland. I'll love it. I told him I don't go into airports anymore, because I refuse to submit to police state. Then I can drive. Cities have no appeal for me. These are different. He said, Tell me one thing you know about Portland. I said, It was once a redwood forest.

I was looking today at the people I've known over the years, the older ones all dead. Now I am one of the older ones. Now, I'm telling stories from the past, filling in younger people on how their ancestors lived and the kinds of people they were. While I was taking care of Jr, Lisa Tucker from Social Services came by a few times before we got involved with hospice. I knew her great grandparents. I asked her if she ever knew them. They died before she was born. Nobody had told her anything about them. I told her they were some of the best people anybody could know. The old man's name was John.  This is from over 30 years ago. They were very well respected people. I told her, "You come from good people." When she told me she was a Laurel Springs Tucker, I felt like I already knew her. This is another aspect of rural life I like a lot, knowing people by their extended families. It sometimes makes me long to have had the experience of a loving family. I tell myself what I had was right for me. And it was. The farther I get away from it in time, the more I'm able to see I needed grounding at the start. It set me into an adult life of re-parenting myself, teaching myself, learning as much as I can take in, driven in reaction to the force against knowledge I grew up in. I was not allowed to read in the house, so I learned to isolate myself to read. Reading became a passion because it was forbidden. Not forbidden like told not to. But, if you have time to read a book, you have time to mow the grass, wash the car, whatever came to mind. That was my message to stop it. My adult life has been spent reading as much as I could, and now in the later years I want to go back and read certain ones again. I'd like to read War and Peace again, but oh it is so long. It is also so beautiful a story told so well that when I finished reading it the first time, I couldn't read anything for several weeks, because no writing could satisfy the taste for beautiful writing Tolstoy spoiled me with.

Especially today I was looking at Justin, Crystal and Vada. I've known Justin all his life and Vada all her life. These are people I love as though they were my own. A year or so ago a man I know started running down Justin to where it was about to warm me up. I said, "Before you go too far, I have to tell you Justin is the same as my own." I felt satisfaction saying it. I knew it would be spread all over Whitehead by end of next day. That was ok. I wanted Whitehead to know it. In my heart, Justin, Crystal and Vada are same as my blood. Sandy assessed today that my love for the mountain people is a love of drama. I affirmed it, without really meaning it, though could see a case can be made for it. It's really not the drama. The drama makes good stories to tell, but the stories one tells are not necessarily the ones close to the heart. It's the character of the mountain people I love. I know people in these mountains, Whitehead in particular, I can trust totally, and they can trust me the same. Jr Maxwell, one of the first people I met here in 1976, withheld his trust until he saw in his last year that he could trust me when he couldn't trust anybody else. A month, thereabouts, before his spirit left the body, just before his mind went away, he said to me, "We're closer than friends. We're more like brothers." It was one of the great honors of my life. At about the same time within a week or two, he said, "I wish I could pay you for what you've done for me." I said, "You paid in advance. I'm paying you back. Five years of sharing with me the best liquor made on this earth is worth something to me." Another was the day Jr's spirit left the body. Two men at different times in the day said to me, "You get into any kind of trouble, all of Whitehead will back you up." A woman who had grown up with Jr, same grade in school, a neighbor all their lives, said, "Now Whitehead knows who you are." It may not sound like much to somebody else, but to me those are among the most valuable moments of my life. Earning the trust of mountain people is no small thing. I feel more affirmed by the trust of mountain people than anything else in my life. I value their trust absolutely.

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

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