DECIPHERING DESTINY

karl horst hodicke

Looking back at how and why I came to where I am, living in solitude in Blue Ridge Mountains, specifically the central Blue Ridge, it looks like divine destiny from forty years after. Yet, at the time, I only knew place as rural. It felt more like stepping into the unknown than some high sounding word like destiny, like I know what destiny means. Bob Dylan defined destiny as, briefly, what one already knows about oneself. Whatever that means. I feel like it gives me something to go by, a place to start looking. From my own point of view it was arbitrary as spinning a quarter on a tabletop and betting on which side turns up. I knew woods were plentiful and the people were old-timey. Purpose, manual labor on a farm as caretaker, somebody who had never cut down a tree or driven a tractor. I learned fast. Every fall I had to cut firewood for four houses through the winter. That's a lot of wood. I only cut dead trees, of which there are plenty. We seldom think about trees growing old and dying, but they do. Fallen tree trunks lie everywhere in the forest in varied phases of decay. Some will stand for decades before they fall. I have actually witnessed two locust trees fall over. Each one I just happened to glance at movement that caught my eye in the near distance and it turned out to be a locust tree on its way down. I say, "actually," for it being so rare a thing to see, like witnessing a deer give birth, which I've seen once.

karl horst hodicke

The top of the list of the unforeseen is that I choose to stay here unto my last day. To have been told any time during the first ten years that I'd be here for life, I'd have felt like it was a prison sentence. Right away, it felt like home, familiar in ways I could not make out why. The first familiar was everyone talked like my grandmother Worthington, who grew up in Kansas. I wrote it off to a universally American rural accent. That was as far as I could get making out how it was familiar. The people I met along the way were natured like my grandmother, philosophically minded. I don't mean philosophical like resignation, but thought about questions they had, worked things out reasonably and morally in their minds. My friend Justin is a good example of the old-time mountain way of thinking. He has a conundrum, he goes fishing, works it out in his mind. Last year he had such a conundrum he asked Crystal to allow him to be off to himself a couple of days. He slept in his sleeping bag in the deer blind, stayed to himself, went fishing. By the third day, decision made, he was fresh and ready to go, the burden that had grown onto his back fallen away. Justin's practical sense of morality blows my mind the times I've seen it in action. In this I see him carrying the heart of the mountain way of life as it's fading fast by generations. It was not intimidated into him by church, but worked out in practical everyday life with a philosophical mind. I've seen the same reasoning in the people gone now of the old culture, Jr Maxwell in particular. They had active philosophical minds. I don't mean they read Kant and Heidegger. Their reading amounted to the Bible, philosophy from front to back. 

karl horst hodicke

I got my philosophical-minded ways from grandmother. By the time of my parents' generation, the Bible was reduced to a book of rules you dare not question. My generation of people brought up by religionists value questioning. Many of us questioned our ways out of religion. I reached a place where I saw religion is fake, though was unable to see beyond religion, a projection of the human mind, associating religion with God. I had to let go of God. Soon after, I found that God indeed is, but not much like I got from religion, besides verses the preacher never interpreted to my satisfaction, like, God is love. In the church I came up in, God hated an awful lot and was the Supreme Judge. Of course, the white people were God's chosen, specifically American with English names. For many years I disliked my name because it was too much like a name on an office door. I had a problem with that until one day I realized my name does not make me, I make my name. My name means who I am. To some it means an arrogant asshole, to some it means a jackass whisperer, to some somewhat likable, to some a friend. The name appears to be destined for an office door, but not necessarily. I never had an inner need for my name on a door. What I wanted for myself, without knowing it, was to be where I am now. In childhood, my grandmother was my comfort. Also, with extensive woods nearby, the canopy of trees were my other comfort. With her and in the woods were the places I could be who I am.

karl horst hodicke

My relationships with adults amounted to obedience. With grandmother, it mattered that I was a sentient being who thought about things and wanted to learn. In the woods, I felt the closeness of the world of nature. I knew the renewing quality of a canopy of trees. I learned after about thirty years in the mountains that my grandmother's parents moved to Kansas from Pulaski County, Kentucky, southeastern Kentucky, explaining her accent and her philosophical mind. Even before realizing she was a transplanted hillbilly, I had referred to these mountains as grandmother's arms. The woods, the trees, I need like a bird needs feathers. This is my destiny, the place my parachute landed me, in a little empty house on a back road, a place I can walk among trees all day long and never be far from home. In my early years, people from Away would want me to drive a couple hours to someplace to go hiking in the mountains. I only went once out of curiosity and found the same as I have here someplace else. Never felt the need to go hiking. I step out the door, cross the road and I'm on a path in the woods beside a mountain stream. I've walked all over the woods of Air Bellows and some beyond with the dog of my life, Sadie. She came to me already named or I would have called her Louise. So she was Sadie Louise. My destiny turned out to be the places of my childhood I felt safe, the places I felt were real in an unreal world. How I found the place that is just right for who I am by a seeming throw of the die is beyond my ability to see.

karl horst hodicke

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BLUE RIDGE MY HOME

 



Spent some time among the trees today. Took my time. Sat down twice to be still and see my world up close. I looked around in the woods, snapped some photos. The ground I was standing and sitting on was my home, the Blue Ridge Mountains. Everywhere I look, I see the Blue Ridge Mountains on the inside among the trees native to the region. On the highway driving through wooded areas, I look as hard as I can at the leaf-covered ground, the tree trunks, the rocks, the ferns, and dream for a moment of walking in there, feeling the ground, seeing the scene from the inside. I can't look so hard when driving, but I take glances with focused attention for a second at a time. I love being in the woods. And I love being in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I feel a stillness among trees, a calm that brings me into tune with the slower life forms. Our human minds race so fast, we surely freak out the trees just walking among them. Or maybe they like the energy of our minds. More and more I like silence, seldom even put on the radio for news. Don't care much who is killing how many this week. The mountains, the trees around me were something of a free flowing mantra going on in my mind, the Blue Ridge Mountains, my home. Recently, everywhere I go in the mountain, out among the trees, walking in the meadow with Donkey Jack, driving, I see and stand upon my beloved mountains.

I like to see the mountains in the distance, big gray and white clouds boiling in the air currents I've learned in this southeastern quadrant of the county. I love it that I am able to look out over the Glade Valley and Ennice townships from Air Bellows Gap Road and see the clouds drifting in their currents of air flow. Today was a perfect day with clouds to see all the currents at once. I did not think to snap a picture, I was so engaged in seeing the clouds mapping out the flow in the air. In the woods I am in what for me is real church. The real deal. No collection, no preaching, no singing, no being nice when you don't feel like it, no wishing you were someplace else. When I sit down in the woods I am in stillness sublime. In the early years when I traveled all over this and surrounding mountains on foot, a dog was with me, a dog I loved to go walking with, Sadie. She was a tan and white fox dog, Airedale mix, good mind. She was only limited by my inability to teach her. Out in the woods, she was at home, just like I was, but even more for a dog. She could smell the tracks of every critter that had passed by in the last few days and nights. She read trails in the woods by scent when all I had to go by was sight. I'm like Mr Bo Jangles in the song, his dog up and died, after twenty years he still grieves. She was an ideal walking companion.

 

 

All these pictures were made from sitting in one spot, the scenery I was facing. This is where I felt in touch with the mountain today. I know this particular area very well from years past in days out walking with Sadie, and after Sadie, Aster, exploring the mountain, the trees, the water, the rocks. My house has pocket-sized rocks everywhere. Outside, I have rocks scattered about that I've brought home. It was in these mountains that I learned aesthetic appreciation for rocks. A rock is already the ideal sculpture. I picked up a nicely-shaped white one today, but did not want to carry it home and left it on an old stump covered with moss. Out walking I like to pick up the rock that calls my attention, the one I notice that says this is the one, the souvenir of the walk, pocket-sized. I have carried some fairly heavy ones home, too, believing at the moment I needed it someplace where I could see its beauty often. Along the walkway by the house I've placed rocks as big as both hands could lift into the back of the pickup from Whitetop Mountain. Whitetop has rocks like I've not seen anywhere else, not that I've seen everyplace, just that I think they're beautiful, angular, looking chiseled into abstract forms. I think of every rock as God's sculpture. Each one is shaped by its own experience. Some have rolled under glaciers so long ago it's inconceivable. Originally, rock was molten something on the order of lava when the earth was a ball of fire. I see the rocks as chunks of ice, frozen magma.  

 

 

 

 

I don't know if I get "renewed" spending time in the forest. I tended today to think about the mountains, the Blue Ridge, how happy and grateful I am these mountains are my home. Today in the woods I felt embraced by spirit. I don't mean in a woo-woo way, but a clarity of mind, joy in everything I saw. These photos were all made from the same spot, the place I chose to sit down, not because the scenery in this spot is better than any other, only because I didn't feel like walking any further without a rest. It's no good to rush through the forest anyway. It is best appreciated sitting still. Without meditating I felt like the experience of this wooded area in this time was just right and put me into a meditative mind. I'd not seen this place in several years. It was a review of the mountain I love with all my heart, walking on last years leaves and ground spongy from a summer of rain. It felt good underfoot, the ideal carpet that your shoe sinks into just enough to give good traction. Patches of ferns I walked through carefully. I don't like to break them and don't like being unable to see the ground where I put my feet. The ferns are pretty but I'd rather walk through them with a dog leading the way. The serpents of the region are colored like the ground. A dog's awareness and senses are sharper than mine. I have to pay more attention without a dog.

 

 

 

 

Nothing in particular was on my mind. It drifted around in appreciation of the Blue Ridge, again, joy and gratitude that I'd found these mountains and become so well acquainted, know them on so many levels, and best of all, know them in my heart. The heart is where I know these mountains. These mountains helped to open my heart in very important ways. I've learned the landscape so well that in my later years, like old man Tom Pruitt, I don't need to get out there and see it much. It was like the mountain was telling me that I and the mountain are one. Today was a joyous review of a place I'd not seen in many a year. I feel like I know the different places I like to go to personally as a kind of spirit. Again, not woo-woo, but the clarity of the world outside the ways of the human mind. This is the world that inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The trees are air filters for all the critters that need oxygen to inhale. We complete the cycle with the trees. They give me oxygen, I give them carbon-dioxide. Possibly freshness of air is what feels like spirit to me among the trees. Perhaps the fresh air is what I'm breathing and it gives the place a golden glow in the mind's eye. It's the stillness that makes me want to put up a tent and move in. 

 

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

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UNREPENTANT HILLBILLY REBEL

willis lake in air bellows

photos by tj worthington

Just now read an article from what I suppose is a blog by Terri Barger of Nashville. The Social Prejudice Against People Who Speak With a Twang, is the title of the article. Very well spoken account of the actual prejudice against people of the mountains when they're outside the mountains. I've experienced that prejudice without even leaving here. Yankees coming in here and telling us hillbilly gum-chewers how to talk right and clean up our yards. Every time I've been outside the South somebody has to make remarks from on High like their ignorance is important to me. All they do is piss me off and make me want to say something hurtful or turn around and walk away. With Southern politeness a part of the Southern way, I can't let myself just walk away from somebody unless I'm at a place where my arm is livening up and I'm ready to stop a smart mouth with Xtreme prejudice. I really don't want to make a scene and I would rather use a pipe than hurt my knuckles on some knucklehead Yankee who is prejudiced against Southerners for being prejudiced against black folk, who doesn't know whether I'm prejudiced or not.

A Southerner in Yankeeland gets treated like an American in London. After I'd spent some time in London, friends back home who were planning a trip to London asked me what to expect. I told them they will return with an understanding of what it's like to be black in America. They came back saying, Right! They were Southerners not prejudiced against black people. The English are even worse than Yankees about American Southerners.  I know so many Southerners not prejudiced, most of my friends, that it runs all over me when a Yankee tells me what's wrong with us ignernt prejudiced Southerners. The Appalachian accent is treated the same way throughout the South. Everybody likes to laugh at hillbillies; Dukes of Hazard, Beverly Hillbillies, Andy Griffith, Lil Abner. Some years ago a woman from the Florida keys visiting friends of mine here in the mountains asked if the people here are like on the Andy Griffith Show. I said there are no people anyplace like on Andy Griffith. Pissed her off and she wouldn't have any more to do with me. Another fantasy bubble popped. Oh well. I think: are you blind? We have brick houses with central heating, paved driveways, lawns, cars, 5 Walmarts 30 miles from Sparta like the points of a star, shopping centers, Pizza Huts. Everybody has television. We have universities too. Not all hillbillies live in trailers up in a holler with black teeth from crystal meth. Hillbillies were no more stereotypes in the old ways than they are today. The hillbillies I know are proud of being hillbillies. They can't be insulted for being a mountain goat. We stand on hillbilly pride. Talk down to the hillbillies I know and you'll not find an apologetic audience. Hillbillies are Southerners too and know how to tune somebody out like muting the volume.

I went to a particular pub with a name I don't remember one evening in London to carry a greeting from friends at home who knew the pub owners. I went in, sat at the bar for a beer. I didn't like bars and was way outside my comfort zone. A man at the bar, an empty stool between us, heard my Southern accent and started with, "I know about you Southerners. I've been in the South." He told everybody in the pub, speaking to me loud enough for everyone to hear, about the South of his experience, which told me he only knew about the South from television. I knew he was lying about his absence of experience, but did my best with Southern politeness to put up with him. I sat there thinking, all I have to do is extend my left arm such that my fist connects with his chin, he falls over backwards with the stool, hits the back of his head on the floor and dies: suddenly I'm the American in an English prison. I saw a guy of my generation sitting at a table. I picked up my glass, walked to his table, asked if I could sit at his table and calm down. I told him I was on the verge of breaking and didn't want to. He said, "Don't pay any attention to him. He's an asshole and everybody in here knows it." I told him everybody in there was about to find out I'm an asshole too when I deck the smart-mouth bastard. We talked pleasantly a little while, I finished my beer and thanked him for lending me a hand when I needed one. Never stepped inside a pub again.

old turd hillbilly

I've no interest in returning to London. I felt too much like a black person feels in especially the South. I don't like that feeling. It makes me want to lash out physically. I understood better than ever before how black people felt. I thought I had some understanding, just from empathy before, but London taught me that white people are really mean to black people. I'm not and people I associate with are not, so I don't see much of it, except in police behavior, public news items. I can't change social situations, but I don't have to participate. I made it a life commitment to regard people of all races with the same respect as for white people. Why not? Alas, that makes me vulnerable to "reverse prejudice." I've known a few black people since then who alienated me with their racism. Racist black people are the same to me as racist white people. I attribute racism to absence of self-awareness. If I want to convert someone from racism, I need to work on their self-awareness first. But it's not my place to fix other people, so I just stay away from people who annoy me with their particular style of egoism. That's all prejudice is, uneducated egoism. I don't mean school uneducated, but experience uneducated.

I'm seeing in this time the people who watch television, everybody, have been dividing up between conservative and liberals, hawks and doves, though by now it's breaking down into stupid and not quite so stupid. The problem I have with teapartiers is not so much that they're confrontational, but they never shut up jabbering republican parrot talk, "What about Benghazi," like they're inspired by original thought. I find them too boring to be around, so I just stay away from them. I don't even look at short utube quips by Hannity, Beck and Limbaugh. Even though I turn on one of their videos to see what the parrots are saying, half a minute into it I can't tolerate hearing the egoic ignorance and turn it off with a vengeance and a short run of cuss words. When I was a kid I believed adults were intelligent, had knowledge, had experience and maybe even some wisdom. Did I ever find out that was a fantasy with no foundation in anything but maybe a child's hope that he is ruled by people able to make intelligent decisions. Growing up into the world of adults it's depressing to see how wrong I was. Then deal with the depression. Prozac Nation. I tried it for a few years and really liked it. I was in a good mood all the time. After some years of being in a good mood, I missed myself. I felt like I was existing apart from myself. My self was like in a box and I was living sort of separate from myself.

It wasn't like an identity crisis, just that I take the wave of a period of feeling "good" and a period of feeling "bad" for the flow of forward momentum. I just missed the part of myself that was not necessarily happy. So what if I don't keep an artificial level of bliss going? I want to deal with my own issues as myself, not just a part of myself. I want to live my whole self. It felt like my light side was getting all the attention and my dark side left in the dark, something like the moon that doesn't rotate. It's the rotation that makes the heat of the sun bearable and the cold without the sun bearable. The moon cooks on one side and freezes on the other. I want my planet to turn. I don't mind it when I get in a pissy mood. I don't care to be around anybody much when I'm feeling low without explaining I'm in a mood so I won't be any fun, and I don't want to pass it on. But I do want to live it. If I want to go around here cussing under my breath, depressed over seeing what I see everywhere around me, people trading in their humanity for the promise of a little bit of money, I feel like that's as important a part of self as the side that smiles a lot. At a friend's house I see kids on American Idol desperate all the way to the soul to become a corporate product. I think: Why? Fame and money? And when they get it, it aint as pretty as they dream it when they don't have it. Then I tell myself it's the nature of the arts. It's like auditioning for a role in a Broadway play. Many audition, few are chosen. If you want to play the game, you have to be able to take rejection. Artists understand rejection very well. Then it gets kind of interesting and I understand why so many people like it.

These Blue Ridge Mountains pulled me like an electro magnet. Air Bellows Mountain it turns out is the home of my soul. I'd rather live with hillbillies than any other kind of people I know of. I had to rethink the nature of intelligence, just out of the American educational system that taught me school is the only legitimate source for knowledge. NOT. Right off, the hillbillies I worked with and came to know as neighbors showed me that these people got a whole lot more on the ball than I did. I found everyone I met with fast, retentive minds, people who can do a lot, like fix automobile engines, raise cattle, market cattle, weld, shoot a gun impressively, know how to clean a gun, figure out how to do something they've never done before, cut a tree so it will fall exactly as aimed, drive really fast on mountain roads, like really fast. Nobody I went to college with could drive a mountain road at 140mph and drift the curves at 100. I began to redefine intelligence away from the white middle-class version of it I'd learned all my life. In 1983 I volunteered at the high school as a tutor to help a kid having a hard time. They gave me a senior in last semester. He needed the credits to pass so he could graduate, illiterate. Everybody in the office and some teachers told me he was just dumb. On sight I saw he was not. Walking down the hall to our room to work I said, "What's up? You're not dumb." He said, "I know it." Continually failing in school, unable to read, he took a Mustang motor apart and put it back together so it ran better than before, unable to read the manual. That's not dumb to my way of seeing things. There was no time in my life I could have done that.

freaked out fish

 

 

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MY BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN HOME

selma

This evening as light was turning to dark I went with Justin to put out corn and apples at two sites where he keeps some high-tech infra-red cameras attached to trees, triggered by motion. He saw a new buck today he'd not seen before. No bears today. Evidently the bears are rambling. He gets the same bucks and does every time he checks, except for today's new buck, a 5-pointer with a black tip on its tail. I have to confess to some ill ease assisting a hunter on my land I've allowed no hunting on the whole way along, until Justin became a hunter. By now I have learned it's silly not to allow hunting. Personally, I don't like killing. That's my own thing for myself. Justin is not somebody who will kill a buck, cut off its head and leave the rest to the dogs and other night critters to feast on for awhile. He goes all the way, butchers and fills the freezer with good deer meat. He likes deer jerkey.

We sat in his truck, smoked a cigarette talking, I got out and he drove on. Walking to the house both sides of the stone walkway are thick with waist-high jewelweed (touch-me-nots the old-time name) in flower, little orange orchids made for hummingbirds. When I walk through there after a rain, the legs of my pants get soaked. I don't care. It's summer. Wet dries fast. This evening walking to the house through this great bed of jewelweed, I said out loud, "My Blue Ridge Mountain home." When I step into the grove of trees around the house, the first step beyond where the car parks, I see my trees, feel the peace I love inside my little forest beside the road. It lightens my heart to make that walk toward the house coming home from somewhere. Sometimes I speak to the green things all around me. This is my own little personal preserve. I'm the guardian for this plot of ground. It belongs to the Creator, and I let it be what it wants to be.



It always feels good walking to the house along the stone pathway to my Blue Ridge Mountain home. Not long after I came here, I found an album of Dolly Parton with her song My Blue Ridge Mountain Home. Quite a beautiful song. It was true and full of meaning. That was my beginning. By now I have evolved to the Carter Family, the source, and Ralph Stanley whose new gospel album should be in the mail this week, A Mother's Prayer. He is the voice of the soul of the Southern mountains. The collection of the Carter Family songs is the songbook of the mountains; their gospel songs are in the hymn books. AP Carter was a songcatcher; he drove all over the central Blue Ridge looking for songs, an early folklorist in that way. They sound as contemporary as you might hear at a music place in the mountains. And they are from another world. They were from the time only a few people had radios. Neighbors would gather at the house of someone with a battery-run radio and listen to the Carter Family live.



I am happy to find the mountain religion, the old-time religion that goes all the way back, that the others broke off from. I am happy I found the music of these mountains, the people of these mountains, the roads of these mountains that hold your attention, the relationships in community where everybody knows people of all ages. When you get a divorce and your X was related to half the people in the county, you go about imagining half the people in the county know all your weaknesses and hate your guts. I don't have a problem with gossip. It's a community's way of keeping up with each other. It triggers imagination that the people around you know more about your life than you do. A lot of people leave because they don't like everybody knowing their business. Everybody has their own way of living in a world of gossip. Some, like me, never hear any and therefore never pass any on. Exceptions occur (shit happens) from time to time, but not in a passing judgment kind of way. I'm always the last to hear anything, so it wouldn't do for me to pass anything along, because everybody already knows it.



This morning I woke late and missed an appointment. When I woke, Caterpillar was on the floor looking at me like to say I've been in the bed long enough. I looked at the clock and I was already late. Sigh. I made a call and explained, arranged for another time. I'd already planned in my mind that I was having morning coffee at Selma's, so I drove to town and had some French-press Kenyan. It's the same as honey to my palate without the sweet. That kind of smoothness. It's not as thick as honey, but it has the same fullness. If that has any meaning. I must go to the coffee shop at least a couple times a week, to see Selma and whoever is in there at the moment. Today it was Joe Allen Delp, one of the regulars I like quite a lot. He has health issues around cancer that keep him rather debilitated much of the time. He likes to tell stories from his drinking days. They're always funny and he's always lit up in good spirit telling them. He's a regular at the Jubilee too. Seeing Selma adds a certain light to the day for everyone. Again, I thank you, Fidel, for running Selma out of Cuba. I'm happy her parachute landed her here. Sparta is fading all around her, but her place has people in and out all day every day.



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