MY TEACHER TOM PRUITT

grandma moses

 

Earlier today I sat with a notebook kept from seven months before the move to the mountains through the first five months in the mountains. I read a few pages, the first time visiting Tom Pruitt in his home, working with Bill Pruitt and getting to know him. It brought memories, but the writing was dull and boring. I have tried keeping notebooks and journals, over and over falling into the same ditch, until I see no point in writing to myself. It has never clicked for me. The writing starts boring and degenerates to brief notes and found quotations, fades out. I thought I'd try an online journal. I would be writing to myself, examining self, but some other people see it, so I can write to people besides myself to inspire writing to myself. You reading these writings give them life. I write much better for you than I do for myself, though I attempt to write to my own higher standard writing to you, more than I do for to self. I can't help but think I already know what I'm telling myself at some future date when I may see it or may not. It feels pointless down deep. When I do look back at it, I'm bored. The best the notebook does for me now is trigger memories. And that's a good thing. I like remembering my early experiences getting acquainted with people I would call my teachers in later years. The notebook helps remember forgotten details. I'd forgotten Bill told me about the hell his wife put him through over the last two years since their divorce.

 

grandma moses

 

I'd forgotten how radically different Tom Pruitt was from anyone I'd ever known or met. Maybe my grandfather's brother, Uncle Frank, was something like Tom, though I only knew Frank in childhood thinking he was an interesting character, but far, far away, another Age, another Time. I wanted to know him, but couldn't. People of his generation didn't talk to kids but to tell them what to do. And this kid, age ten, did not know how to talk to an eighty year old farmer. Whenever I was around him, which wasn't much, I watched him in curiosity from afar. Bib overalls and white hair. I never knew my grandfather Brink's family very well. They were Germans and his wife, my grandmother, did not like them. She said of grandpa's older brother, Herman, he was one of them mean Germans. I was afraid of them. They talked hard to kids, threatening, and the kids my age were feisty and mean. I just wanted to float down the river, like Hiawatha, supine in my canoe. I did not want to fight a bunch of third and fourth cousins I knew could kick my ass and laugh at me doing it. Tom Pruitt was as different as grandpa's brother, Frank, not as distant, though from a place as distant in time from the world I knew as Frank.

 

grandma moses

 

Tom could talk, liked having somebody to talk to who listened to him. Tom was not threatening in any way. He was more like a monk than anything else I can think of. He lived in solitude, could sit in his house days in a row all winter long looking at the wall, keeping the fire going, spitting into a Maxwell House instant coffee jar on the floor beside his chair. In my note about him, I mentioned he looked like he never washed. He wore khaki pants and long-sleeved shirt, and was in his stocking feet. They had holes in the toes. The room he lived in smelled of wood smoke and dried snuff powder. It was not an unpleasant aroma. Three calendars on different walls. None were the same year and none the same month. The most recent one had been there several years. He kept his .38 handgun in a shoulder holster hanging over his bedpost. He tucked it in his belt when he took it into the field after the bull reached a certain age. He said you can have a young bull that's tame and friendly, but after a certain age, you can never be sure about a bull. He told me several bull stories of his experience and people he's known. He carried his gun because no bull was going to run him down. He knew he did not have a chance against a bull without a weapon. His telling was instruction as well as recounting experience. He never steered me wrong in his instruction. Tom was a teacher I could count on.

 

grandma moses

 

He took me to a Regular Baptist church meeting one Saturday night after I'd been here a year, they meet Saturday night and Sunday morning once a month, to hear a preacher from West Virginia to be preaching that night. Over the course of a year he'd told me quite a lot about the church, their beliefs. He'd told me that when the Spirit enters the preacher, the whole house feels it. He said you feel a rush up your spine, you look around and you'll see everybody else felt it. That night, the West Virginia preacher couldn't make it. Four Union Baptist preachers were there, evidently to hear him. It was Tom's brother Millard's church,  Laurel Glenn. Two n's. A mistake that stuck. Four preachers got up, one at a time, talked, hopped about, pretending to be in the spirit, but not there. At the end, Millard stood up to dismiss everybody, talked some and the Spirit hit him. He took off like a rocket. I felt the rush up my spine, looked around and everybody else was feeling it. I noticed while the other preachers were talking, people all over the house were talking to each other in whispers. After the Spirit hit Millard, not a word was spoken by anyone else. Everyone's undivided attention was on what he was saying. The people in the church listen especially close when a preacher is in the Spirit. I went back the next morning, and continued to go back for the next fourteen years.

 

grandma moses herself

 

 

*

 

 



YES TO DIVERSITY

diego rivera

I'm having a drink of half Canada Dry, half Jumex mango nectar and a squirt of lemon juice. The mango nectar is a bit flat; the Canada Dry spritzes it with carbonation, the nectar flavors the ginger ale, and the lemon juice adds a zip. Good drink. I'm glad we have a Mexican aisle in the grocery store. I like black beans and everything else along the aisle. I like seeing Mexicans in the grocery store and around town. I grew up with Mexicans and found them to be as good a people as the Anglo kids. Only the Mexicans did not have in them the arrogance of whiteness; thus, I preferred them. We were segregated then. Anglo kids were afraid of the Mexicans and the Mexicans were afraid of the Anglos. It was commonly understood the Anglo kids were superior in numbers, if no other way. I think I identified with the oppressed races because I was oppressed at home by white man. I knew that the white world would be willing to give me a chance for my whiteness, and if I, the same person, were in Mexican skin, it would not be the same. I did not feel right with the privilege that went with white skin. Never have. By this time in the life, a lifetime of experience seeing how arrogant white people automatically present themselves to black or tan people, I'm embarrassed in the company of someone black or tan. I want to say, "I'm not like that," but know how empty it sounds before saying it. And am not so sure I'm not like that. I only know it from my mind, not from my behavior as seen by someone black or tan. If I'm really not like that, let it show in my actions, the only place it counts.    

diego rivera

I am so tired of racial tension after a lifetime of living with it, in it, aware of it, not in denial, it's become one more of the reasons I left "the world" and came here to Air Bellows Mountain where racial tensions don't apply. Nor does any other sort of tension, except drama for the sake of drama. Plenty of that goes around. I prefer not to think so, but plenty of drama for drama sake goes on inside my head. It's what gossip is about. Even continuous drama on television does not supplant gossip. It seems like gossip is a way of making celebrity of the familiar. I'm recalling my first years in the mountains, listening to old man Tom Pruitt talk about different people, who, in our way of seeing, are just ordinary people, talk about them the same way people who watch movies and television talk about the stars, the celebrities. It struck me curious why, when he talked about a preacher who once lied about something Tom said, his reason he left his church, he talked like he expected me to know who he was talking about. He lost respect. He spoke of the preacher the same way people like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher talk about lying Republicans. Louie Gohmert said, Joni Ernst said, Ted Cruz said. A celebrity said. Tom's brother, Millard, too, when he talked about the people of his life, I had the same feeling of listening to a celebrity talk about a celebrity I never heard of, but should have. The only television Tom watched was baseball and the news. He didn't get a tv until he was seventy, given to him by a neighbor from Away who believed everybody must have at least one. It's a sight how many used tvs I've been offered, even told in no uncertain terms to take.

It wasn't right, no tv in the house. I need to be connected to what is popularly called the real world, the world I turned my back to as too unreal to sustain life. A human without a tv was unexpected and weird as a rock on a fence post. It's even more now, but I have good camouflage. I bought a tv to watch movies with when so many movies became available on VCR. Netflix sends three movies a week of my choice from a selection of almost everything. One of my major sacrifices coming to the mountain was giving up movies. Had to drive seventy miles for an America movie, a hundred miles to see a foreign film. Now I can have film festivals from almost any country. The tv is not connected to cable, antenna or satellite. The people that freaked out because I don't have a tv in the house are ok about it now. He conformed at least a little bit. He's toeing in. He's slow, but he'll get there. When they put him in a nursing home, he will have no choice but to watch tv, like when he's in a hospital. I suspect the reason I noted how the old people of the old ways talked about each other, is taking it for granted I knew who they were talking about, the way Dick Cheney is mentioned on the evening news, assuming the name needs no introduction. Evidently, before television, people talked about each other the way we talk about celebrities now. We talk about each other and we're talking about people who don't figure as celebrities, what they call on the news, ordinary people. All who are not celebrities, whose names it is taken for granted we do not know, are the ordinary people. We used to be the common people. Now we're the ordinary.

diego rivera

Becoming aware that the people pre-television talked of each other as stars everyone knows, I began to take exception to we who live in the world of non-celebrities, nearly everybody, being reduced to a non-person, a statistic, the viewing audience, ordinary, finding it socially troubling. I watch the people of the world I live in accepting themselves as the ordinary to the point of not even noticing. And I withdraw to home, reminding self I'm not here to change anybody, only self. I want to flow with the living flow of the world I live in. Without wanting to be of it, I have no choice but to be in it. Since I'm in it, I live best flowing with it. My world is three-quarters right-wing statistically. but it doesn't mean a wall is between me and the rest of them. Everyone I know thinks different from how I think. All have opinions different from mine, and very few intersect with my opinions. I don't care, because I assess opinions the same as nothing. Some of my best friends want to bomb Iran and say Obama is a monkey. I don't care. It only tells me what they think about one subject neither of us knows anything about, but what we get from different propaganda sources. No matter where I live in America, I live among people with no interest in art, reading, poetry or foreign films. I talk with people of similar interests, and we never agree where opinions are concerned. One may say Picasso is the great artist of the 20th century, while another says Duchamp. Both for valid reasons. I'm uncomfortable with this time wherein we are expected to be in full check-list agreement with somebody or they don't like you, you get labelled. Whenever I hear somebody describe themselves, very liberal, it puts me on alert to watch everything I say.

diego rivera himself

*

   

A SPARTA EXPERIENCE

found art

The last couple days have been peculiar in such a way I suspect an arrangement of the planets. Here at home, quiet, staying out of other peoples' issues, an email invited me to participate in a civic project I questioned seriously for three days and said ok. A couple weeks later the one who emailed me before, announced she has other things to do and I'm to call so and so and tell him what I want to do. I see no reason to call. There's nothing I want to do. I was asked to do something I hesitate to get involved in and now am told to ask permission to do what I don't want to do. The end. I'm not going past this. Something that starts crazy stays crazy all the way through and ends crazy. It's a natural law. I did like the frog that was dropped into boiling water. Gone. Then I learn one of my friends has pulled some undermining shit on another of my friends. I wasn't even disappointed, it was so in character. Today I saw two women I know hate each other playing like best friends, sweet and happy. No more working on projects that are not my own and no more civic anything. I had my learning years ago. I jump into what I already know is there, get burnt, jump back and laugh at self for not paying attention to self. Told to ask permission to do what I was asked to do pushed me over the edge. It's what I call a Sparta Experience. The part that blew me away, I didn't even have to leave home to have a Sparta experience. It came to me out of the blue. This was the very thing I was wary of that made me hesitate three days to answer. I don't want to do it anyway, and I sure don't want to do it told to ask permission. I saw another friend today throw away a really good and good-paying job out of neurotic fear having to do with self-esteem, unaware yet the job is gone. 

found art

I want to stay home, yet it finds me. Last week a form letter in the mail telling me to report for jury duty in Statesville, an hour and fifteen minutes interstate run, each way. It gives me the willies to think about driving on the interstate, bumper-to-bumper, side-to-side at 75 mph in packs like in a nascar race. I'm not in that much of a hurry anymore and don't care that much anymore. Fortunately, I'm in the age zone excused if requested. Requested right away. The form went out in the mail same day it arrived. Notice came yesterday I am excused. Thank you with all my heart court system of North Carolina. This jury duty form letter came at a time in the life when I don't want involvement in other people's business. It's the freedom that goes with being outside the circle of "making money." Like this craziness that flew in out of nowhere. Other people's mental energy zoomed in on me makes me crazy. It's one of those come-here-I-love-you-get-back-I-hate-you gestures. It's not a matter of being mad. I'm not mad. I've just learned, well enough to get it. Back in 1983, after I'd been here seven years, thought I'd check out the arts council, see if there was anything going on. Preacher Millard Pruitt, whose church I was going to at the time, said, when I told him I'd connected with the arts council, "That'll last about a year." My back went up. I took it for a smart-mouthed thing to say, chose to ignore it. The arts council turned out to be a High Meadows country club women's club. After a year of dreary meetings I committed to involvement in something participatory and egos exploded in my face. Had I not left of my own will, I'd have been invited to leave. 

found art

I told Millard Pruitt what happened and asked, "How did you know it would be one year?" He said, "I know Sparta and I know you." He had worked in the Dr Grabow pipe factory, managed an Esso gas station that is now the Exxon, drove a mail route, kept a farm and was active in the county Republican party. Politically, he thought Jesse Helms was too moderate. He wanted to nuke Iran and blow up the world with Reagan the Great pushing the buttons. He had a brilliant mind outside politics. In politics he was a cement head. He was the embodiment of the Groucho Marx song, Whatever it is, I'm against it. He was everything Yankees like to point the finger at the South about. He was all the words that freak out young liberals, bigot, racist, used the enword, anti-women's rights, a John Bircher Baptist, the Republican party today. Going by what I've learned by now in my own experience, who I am now would say the same thing to who I was then, it'll last about a year. And my reasoning would be the same, I know Sparta and I know you. Then, Sparta and I were mysteries to each other. Now, Sparta and I know each other fairly well. They're glad to see me stay home and I want to be at home. I always see people I am glad to see in Sparta. This is the aspect of Sparta I appreciate most. It's where I see people I know. I like Food Lion because I always see someone I know to speak with for a few minutes. Drug store, hardware stores, bank, gas station, and I head home. Town people and country people are two different cultures. I like people of both town and country. And I like the people I know from Away. 

found art

It sounds like I'm coming from a love/hate thing for Sparta. No. I don't have a hate thing for Sparta in any degree. Only a love thing for Sparta. I accept Sparta's personality as I accept the personality of any of my friends. It is a place to see people I'm glad to know, glad to live among, glad to be in their world. Driving to and from town today, I saw familiar houses of people I know and don't know, and fields, seeing familiar mountain landscape in foreground and background. Everything I see is home. My life before the mountains I hardly ever remember anything from. Still have friends from before the mountain experience, just a few. I don't keep in touch with relatives. We live in such different worlds, we don't have a lot to talk about anymore. They think I live in the toilet of the world and that's where I think they live. They don't want to come here and I don't want to go there, so we don't see each other. I've lost touch with all my cousins. They don't mind and I don't mind. I left everything that went before in my life when I settled into the mountains. I set out to be a solitary, though the necessity of working to generate income took awhile to transcend. I have come into my solitary time and love it, keeping a good flow in motion that isn't too fast. I've worked consciously with my own psychology such that mind is quiet by now. It rattles my flow when a Sparta Experience drops in at home. I apply the rigor learned along the way: if you don't want it started, don't start it. I have a choice. 

vada and found art

*

I AM SABE

karl-horst hodicke

My world is peaceable and calm. I turn on the radio, it's dissent and turmoil, talk today that the liberals are getting Mad, meant to imply that liberals can go into action and make a difference politically now that they're mad. Gotta get mad first. It cracks me up when I see an intro to an article that says, "This ought to really make you mad." Why do I want to see something else to make me mad? What if I don't want to get mad? What if I've already been mad and learned that when I get mad over some politician's public persona I go around with a mad attitude all the time. This one aint right. That one aint right. Recalling a conversation with old-time preacher, Millard Pruitt, who went to school in my house and grew up a third of a mile up Waterfall Road. I was at his house visiting, the tv news was on. It was the time of the Ayatollah, Iran, hostages, Reagan. The news video showed a few seconds of a big square full of people on their knees praying. Millard said, "They aint no religion over there." He paused and added, "I'd go so far as to say they aint no religion outside these United States. I'd go so far as to say they aint no religion outside Alleghany County." I stepped in, "And they aint no religion outside Laurel Glenn church and they aint no religion outside that recliner you're sitting in." He said, "No, I wouldn't go that far." I said, "That's the direction you're headed." He didn't mean it like that. This was in good humor. We were not getting excited about it. Just talking like a cat ran across the lawn out the window. Another time in the same news cycle he said of the network's standard prayer shot for whatever country USA is attacking or threatening to, in this case Iran, "We oughta nuke em." I said, "You start nuking everybody you don't like and the time will come you're the only one left." He said, "That'd be all right." And the time we were watching klansmen taunt a 5 year old black girl walking to school, every one of them with a beer bottle in hand, beer bellies and white tshirts that read, Invisible Empire. Millard said, "Now, there's a bunch of boys I'd like to be with." I said, "What? You want to drink beer with them?" "No, I wouldn't need the beer." 

karl-horst hodicke

Many times I felt an urge to address his racism and contempt for foreigners. Always came to it's his business, it's his life, he's 80, it's his culture. It's not my place to correct anyone. It is only my place to correct myself. If I don't think racism is the way to go, I don't have to go that way. I was wanting to learn the ways of mountain culture. I don't learn anything if I step in and correct every opinion I don't share. That would only alienate the people I want to know. I never talked with Millard like I shared his racist views or his Reaganista views. I listened to him talk, astounded that someone whose life has to do with God, love, can use God so vehemently to justify hate. It was too complex. More evidence that the human mind can justify any kind of thinking to whatever the occasion. I feel like it is a self-unaware mind while at the same time self-centered. It is the self-centered part that prohibits critical thinking around self, inhibiting self-awareness. I was thinking self-awareness the path. Know thyself. I told myself many times with Millard that his path is his path, my path is my path. Sometimes I felt sad for him with such limitations, then I'd ask self, Why? To him, it's the nature of the universe, the way things are. He was on track. I was the one out of step. I was looking for something in Christendom I could live with. Never found it. I came to a place where I accepted that the way of negative mind is just right for the ones who embrace that mind. Early on, I too entertained negative mind. Negative thinking fell away from me over my time of self-education until I was not comfortable with the negative minded anymore. I told Millard when I started the church that I would leave one day, I didn't know when. I knew it was a step along my way, not the end. When the time arrived, I told him I had to leave, he took charge and let me know in no uncertain terms my decisions are not mine to make. I differed, but didn't challenge him. I just did like I said, stopped going. Big problem. I reminded him I had said before I joined, a day would come I would leave. It wasn't allowed. Uh, yes it is.

karl-horst hodicke

I had to flush that adamantine attitude out of my mind, absolutes, good and evil, no shades of life in between. Living everyday life is about sin, beware, sin. One day with Millard, in our lengthy conversations, I said, "If everything is a sin, I'm free. I can do anything I want.When everything I do is a sin, and I can't avoid sin, then sin ceases to matter." His reply, "It don't work like that." I said, then sin is just another word for experience. We can't avoid experience. I don't go about feeling guilty because I have multiple experiences each day. What it came down to, it was a sin if he didn't approve. He had the rule book in his head, knew all the laws. Zero tolerance. Millard and I drifted apart. I didn't believe his theology and grew weary of negative mind, grew weary of dancing, drinking and playing cards the cardinal sins. Drinking beer was about the worst sin of all, but it was ok when Ronald Reagan drank beer on tv. He's running for president, he has to, to win votes. I told him I'd driven to Winston-Salem to see Coal Miner's Daughter when it was new. He said, "I wouldn't go into one of them houses of sin." I said, "You bring it into your living room. You made your home a house of sin when you brought in the television." No, it aint the same thing. I was playing with him. I knew he could not entertain any point of view but his own. I found when it was over that I did not miss Millard, not even a little bit. I did not grieve when he died. It was like the same as nothing. I've never visited his grave. It's not that I have a bitterness in the heart toward him, not at all. He would never accept I have a right to my own decision making, and I would never turn my decision making over to him. It came to the irresistible force and the unmovable object. The very same stand-off as with my mother. Seeing the pattern repeated, I said, this is it, no more humoring Christendom. I will not put aside my own understanding to let a preacher, who doesn't even practice what he preaches, judge my life. If he knew the kind of music I listened to at home, The Clash, Nina Hagen, Patti Smith, he'd have paid for me out of his pocket a one way ticket to hell.

karl-horst hodicke

To celebrate leaving that mind to the past, I drove to Raleigh to see Siouxsie and the Banshees and Jane's Addiction in concert. Loved the concert so much, I almost felt guilty. Sixteenth Century mind was interesting to know in someone as adamantly pre-Copernicus as pre-Darwin. We had two cosmologies between us. And the bridge was out. I liked going to the church until it became oppressive. It became oppressive the day they denied the old black man, Sabe Choate, his humanity as I watched broken-hearted. I knew in that moment I did not belong there. They snubbed me later and I was glad. I felt like the new French phrase going around the tv and internet, je suis Charlie Mine was, I am Sabe. I can say without exaggeration, Sabe Choate was perhaps the most honorable man I've known in my life. I've known several I'd give the title to, but Sabe comes out on top. For his humility. Sabe told me after a trip to Chicago to see his daughter, "They was so many people, if a man was to fall down, he'd be trampled to death before he could get up." He had a good old dog that was his sidekick, rode on a hand-made wooden trailer that Sabe pulled behind the tractor to carry his tools. I felt like I chose life over living death, the very same as the first time I left church upon leaving parents. The idea behind living a dead life is God never changes. It is, therefore, God-like never to change. And my interpretation of God is continuous change, never a repeating pattern. The best thing for me to do is stay outside religion, any religion. Religion is of the mind. I was unable to see in my early years that religion and God were not the same, no more related than salad and Exxon. It would have helped my understanding a great deal to see young that God is beyond mind and religion is indeed a creation of mind. I had to throw out God with religion, the baby with the bathwater, and sort through the debris for something real.

karl-horst hodicke

*

     

THE BACKSIDE OF WATERFALL ROAD

trees beside waterfall road

Drove to town today to pay a few bills due tomorrow. I set out on a leisurely drive. Didn't need anything from any store, my coffee shop friends don't go there anymore, no reason to stop there. I told self to spend no money in town. Don't need gas. Drive up to each of three drive-thrus, envelope in drawer, "Thank you, have a good day," never turn off the engine, drive on through town and make a circuit. Drove into town by way of Pine Swamp Road and returned by highway 18. Felt relaxed the whole time. No radio in the car, no problem. I'd actually rather listen to the tires sing on the pavement. New tires on the road have their own sound. I listen to the motor. It is a near perfect engine, the 93 Buick Century 3300 v-6, a classic motor like the Chevy Nova slant-6 that is used all over the Third World running pumps long after the bodies have rusted away. My motor is such a fine motor, doesn't burn but half a quart of oil per 3,000 miles. A healthy motor. All problems with the car are external to the engine. I love the engine as much as I love the car. It starts right now, in zero degree air as in seventy degree air. The car runs so reliably, just driving it makes me happy. I went on the one-gallon of gas round-trip to Sparta, out seeing the landscape, the slant of the light, the shadows on the ground, the trees, the houses, the sky, the mountains. Out for a drive on a sunny day. Took camera along, saw one scene of an old-time loading pen, a dozen black cows grazing nearby and a tree, stark winter shadows. I'd already passed the only place I could pull off the road and park. I'd need to turn around, go back, etc. Too much. 

 chance installation

Drove through Sparta feeling good, brief verbal exchange at each drive-thru window, pull up to the red-light in the middle of town on hwy 18, turns green and I'm on the way home. At Whitehead, I decided to drive up the back road, the beautiful road that goes through the woods and hasn't been messed with ever, but to throw gravel on it from time to time and let it wash down the roadbed in the side ditches every big rain. Big rocks beside the road that takes a ridge up the mountain, a more direct shot than taking Air Bellows Gap Road up the mountain, though rough, so rough I go slow and straddle ruts the best I can. It's an easy road to drive, just have to drive it like walking. It's a hurry slowly road. I passed some icicles hanging from a rock formation. Pulled up a ways to a place I could get off the road. Nobody uses the road, but sure as I park in it, somebody will come along. It's a natural law. I walked back to the icicles, got some pics of it, some rock and some trees the other side of the road. The road goes up the spine of the mountain. It is the old wagon road to Air Bellows. At the top of the mountain, the sides of the road are like any other. The pavement ends at the top and the further down the road you go, the sides of the road rise gradually as walls. By the bottom, the walls are as high as the car. A few centuries of erosion down wagon tracks in mud, the roadbed becomes a river during a torrential rain washing the mud away. Such a rain happens at least once a year. 

merlin the shop cat

In Whitehead, before driving up the mountain, I stopped at Maxwell Equipment to see whoever was there. Ross was on the phone. It was cold. The building is made of wood framing and tin-roofing walls and roof. It's merely a windbreak. The temperature outside and inside are the same. Ross had the stove going. It made a pleasant zone in a radius of about five feet. Chairs around the stove. Merlin the shop cat was in there staying inside the stove's aura. He sleeps in a stack of insulation in a high corner of the building. Merlin is a good old neutered Tom cat with a white hairs sprinkled randomly through his black pelt. He likes the shop for the mice. Must have left wherever he lived before. Ross and I sat by the stove talking and somebody came in for some minor work, and the three of us talked awhile. Harry came in and the four of us stayed near the fire and talked. Harry lives up the hill behind the shop. Merlin took up with him a few years ago. Harry and Ross needed to drive to Wilkesboro for some steel or a part. I came on home, driving slowly along Air Bellows Gap Road looking at landscape in afternoon winter light. This is where I decided to go up the mountain on the back part of Waterfall Road. The part of the road houses can be built on are at the upper end of Waterfall Road. From the point where the pavement ends, on down to the bottom, the banks are almost straight up on both sides of it. There are so many trees, it's not a concern leaving the road. I have walked the road with dog and photographed it many times. It was one of my favorite walks. In late winter when the two roads coming up the mountain are so rutted that getting stuck is an in-yer-face issue, I take this back road. People with new cars don't know they really can drive over it easily, so none of the new people ever use it. 

icicle and rock

In winter with snow and ice, when the other two roads are nearly impassable, I use the old wagon road. It's like a bobsled run going down it on ice, a slow, very slow bobsled. I drove Ted Stern, whose farm I once caretook, down the the wagon road in his new Cadillac. He was mortified, but I never scraped bottom one time. I'd walked the road so many times, I knew it intimately. One winter, I drove preacher Millard Pruitt down the bobsled run in good packed snow in my 78 Toyota pickup, blue with the driver's side door red. He grew up on the mountain and this was the road he grew up on. I wanted to show him the old road of his childhood. I knew I could easily make it. It was just snow and ice. His eyes were bugged out all the way to the bottom. Never lost traction one time. It was the smoothest the road ever is. A few people like to four-wheel on it in winter. They pack the snow down good to make an easy road to drive. One of my favorite memories happened one day in winter, several inches of snow, walking along the road with my dog Sadie. A crow flew up over the ridge from one side to the other, passing just a couple feet above my head. I heard the wings, thought of the hymn, Come Angel Band, "I hear the sound of wings." In a world of white, one crow, appeared, flew over my head and disappeared down the other side. I felt like that was one of the most blessed moments of my life. The waterfalls are down the very steep bank beside the road. I decided to go to the waterfalls by that way one day years ago. Took a fifty foot rope to tie on a tree at the top. The first thirty or so feet was sheer rock covered with leaves, slicker than ice to try to walk on. It was a fun journey. At the bottom, close to the waterfall I came upon a huge area of jack in the pulpits. Big ones, maybe two feet tall, covered the bank above the water. It's an ideal a Japanese garden designer reaches toward, natural, the way God flung it.  

rock and growth

*

A DEAD BATTERY AND HILLBILLY PREACHING

joel shapiro

The car is driving me wild. Dead battery again. I'm thinking I've found the source of the drain on the battery. I have thought it was the gps plugged into the lighter hole. But it was there for a long time not draining the battery. A few days ago I pulled a fuse thinking it might help the door latch that was locked up to operate; the door locks and interior lights work on this one fuse. The door latch started working again after the temperature rose above freezing. The battery was fine. I put the fuse back into its slot when the door latch started working. Dead battery. Whatever is draining the battery, I suspect, is in the realm of that one fuse. I can get along without interior lights and without door locks. The door locks annoy me anyway. The doors lock automatically when I take the transmission out of Park. I don't like that. If I need out of the car in a hurry, I don't want to be fooling around trying to get it unlocked first. I carry a small flashlight in a pocket. Around here, there is no need to lock a car, unless it's near Christmas and the car is full of boxes and bags in a parking lot at night. There is an old country saying that locks keep an honest man honest. They don't stop thieves with intent. I never keep anything in my car to tempt somebody walking by. When I leave camera in car, I bury it under papers, trash, a jacket, a hat. I pulled the fuse again today, this time to stay out, at least long enough to see if the battery will keep a charge without it. First thing I checked this morning was the water level in the battery. It was fine. Tomorrow morning, neighbor Allen will drive over and let me jump my car from his battery. Come to think of it, that won't work. He's borrowed an old Studebaker pickup from a friend for hauling in some firewood. His car is not here. So much for that. The Studebaker battery is probably a 6 volt, and mine is 12. I'll figure something out. The battery can't get any deader. Late afternoon, my friends Lucas and Judy will be arriving for a few days. Their car's battery will accord with mine.  

joel shapiro

If all my neighbors were country people, I could stop any car driving by. My neighbors are city people, Republican exurbanites. They don't like to be bothered. And I don't like to bother them. I'll work it out. The county changed after 1980 when the farms went away. The old people who kept their farms died out and the heirs divided the farm into lots, making subdivisions and a lot of money. Some sold the farms to Christmas tree growers. Much as I regretted the Bush-Cheney economy, it put a stop to suburbanites getting away from the enwords. They watch so much tv they think the enwords are lurking in every shadow to rob and kill them. They can't sell their houses in the city to pay for their mountain houses, and they can't sell a mountain house. Several of them have gone back to the city. It's rough on the contractors and carpenters and the town merchants who had begun to count on people coming in here from Away. They stopped coming and the town is now languishing, just short of plywood on the windows. It's not mine to wish it was one way or another. It's mine to go on about my life and let the world around me change as it will. It's mine to do, because that's how things are. I like it or don't like it is neither here nor there. What matters is that I have peace in my heart. I don't have a great deal of time left and am glad of it. My house is one of the last original houses in Air Bellows. Allen, my next door neighbor, lives in a little old farm house he's restored. Old man Tom Pruitt's house has been let go down since he died. The owner won't sell it and won't fix it up. It was twenty-four years ago he died. The house has been empty ever since with a poacher staying in it during hunting season until he stopped hunting. He hunted anywhere he pleased, on anybody's land, on Parkway land. The law knew about him, but never caught up with him. The beautiful old house, built a year or two after 1900, made of oak, now looks like a haunted house and is past restoration. 

joel shapiro

Yesterday, riding with Melvin on the way home from watching tv football at Justin's, we passed Laurel Glenn church, where I went regularly fourteen years and left twenty-three years ago. They locked the door and turned off the electricity twenty years ago. It was one of the beautiful mountain churches of an architecture so simple it had Japanese style. No steeple, no cross, a plain white wooden building with a silver tin roof. It had an outhouse among the trees out back. Seeing it go by in the foggy night, white in the darkness, I felt again my fondness for the building itself and what I know went on inside. I stopped one day to look in the windows. Everything was lined up like when it was living, covered in a film of dust. I loved that place in a deep heart-felt way. Much love energy flowed inside those walls and beautiful hillbilly singing. Originally, it was the church in the Glade Valley region the black farmers of the area went to. It was the black people, the Choates, who built the church in the 1920s. Their cemetery was the other side of what was then a dirt road. The door faced the cemetery, south, where it could be seen from the pulpit at the opposite wall. In the 1950s, white Regular Baptists bought it after the black population thinned out so much they had to shut the church door. Most white kids leave here after school. All black kids leave, with rare exceptions, the exceptions that prove the rule. And some kill themselves. The white people changed the door to a wall facing east where they put their own cemetery the other side of another dirt road. They built a pulpit area on the opposite wall and covered the old walls with wood paneling. The floors were pine with so many knots I sometimes thought of it as the night sky with stars. It never failed to amuse me when I thought about the little church with the most vehemently racist man I've ever known preaching in what used to be a nigger church. 

joel shapiro

In the old Regular Baptist way, the preacher was just a man like everybody else. No collection plate. He worked, had his own ways, beliefs, temperament. He did not have to be educated, not even able to read. The old-time preaching way works best with the least education. It's a matter of opening up to be "a vessel" for the Holy Spirit to flow through, a voice for the spirit to talk with. I found in all the different preachers I heard that education past sixth or seventh grade inhibited the freedom to open up and allow the spirit. Millard Pruitt, the preacher, grew up in old-man Tom's house up Waterfall road. He was Tom's youngest brother. I felt like they were each other's favorite brother. They were the last two to die out. Millard was a man braced against everything and everybody. He'd make me think of William Blake's line, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He was all about condemning, punishment, overseeing with the most judgmental eye I've known. And an ego that was outta sight. He had a loving heart, told me hundreds of stories from his life, stories of the people that lived in Air Bellows, Whitehead, the county. He was adamantine in every part of his mind, unyielding. It even embarrassed his wife how much he hated niggers. It bothered me for quite awhile until one day I realized I am not here to change him. I appreciated him as an intelligent man in many ways, a brilliant mind in a Sixteenth Century theology that goes back to medieval and perhaps neolithic. Would not entertain any notion that the earth was round. The Bible says it has four corners. I had never known anyone like Millard. I found him fascinating all the years I knew him. I respected his theology as John Milton's. I wasn't there to judge, but to learn what the old-time religion was like, to see what was there for my own spiritual path. He gave me the best education I could ask for. In the pulpit, Millard had a facility for receiving the spirit that made other preachers jealous. When the spirit o'ertook him, only love flowed on his voice. The only subject I ever heard him preach was love. This was my evidence that what was coming through had no part of his mind in it. It was such beautiful preaching I never allowed myself to make a tape of it. It was too spontaneous for the moment, for the moment only. 

joel shapiro

*

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

*

CONTROL ISSUES

william blake

Today is race day. I'd like to see it, but this weekend my friends from Georgia are here and I feel like I'd rather spend time with them than the television this weekend. This will be the best race there ever was. Whenever I miss something, it was the best ever.  In my church going time of my own volition, every time I'd miss a meeting, I'd be told later I should a-been there, it was the best meeting there ever was. It was so consistent, it wasn't but the second time that I realized the statement was more about me not being there than the thrill of the preaching. The preaching was the same as usual. It's just an opportunity to make me feel guilt, a control device. Preacher told me it was my duty to go to church every meeting. I told him it was not my duty, clarifying, "I don't do duty." I'm s'posed to. No I'm not. It was the same as with my mother and with a three-year old: Is-is not-is-is not-is-is not, until somebody hollers, Stop it! I was a little too old and a little to independent-minded to be treated like I was ten. I finally had to leave the church over control. The preacher had a belief that the church house, itself, was God, and he, himself, was God's law enforcement officer. Another preacher had come in to replace Preacher Pruitt, and this old boy couldn't even "try to talk." The preaching was graded such that a preacher who really preached in the old-time way gasping for breath; preaching from the spirit was said to be "preaching." The ones who don't connect with the spirit and act like they do, it's said they're "trying to preach." When it's just talking and there's no spirit or "preaching" in it, it's called "talking." It was said of the ones like this old boy who replaced Millard Pruitt, he "tried to talk." I couldn't listen to it. I'd heard he said of his wife years before from the pulpit that she needed about ten inches cut off the end of her tongue. It meant she was a "long-tongued" woman, a gossiper, a woman who talked too much in his estimation. She divorced him. I looked at him as somebody who mistook big ego for the call to preach.

 

william blake

 

I felt I needed to be straight-forward and not hide my reasonings. I had to tell Preacher Pruitt I couldn't go to the church anymore for being unable to go out the door, drive for 25 minutes, listen to nonsense, turn around and drive for 25 minutes, walk in the door exhausted, day shot. I was told I could not stop going. I was bound by my duty to go every time because I'm a member. I was not given a choice or a consideration. Left to myself, I chose to withdraw my membership. I was told point blank that it is his responsibility to control me because I'm a member of his church. Easily solved. It tore everybody up, all half dozen of them, that I left. They asked if I was mad. No, I wasn't mad. Nobody takes control of my life without my permission. He knew that. I'd told him. But, my point of view meant nothing. Only his word had conviction, because God was behind him, not me. Whatever. God commanded you.... No he didn't. It's your duty. No it's not. He'd never known anybody who would stand up to a preacher like I did. I didn't want to, but he left me no options. I'd made it clear over several years of knowing him that nobody controls me without my permission. He had never asked permission and I'd never volunteered it. As I saw it, he was out of order. He saw me out of order; I said no to God's authority. I did not take him for authority. That's where our differences lay. His ego had him sitting on the right hand of God. His pronouncements were God's. I'm not exaggerating. It wasn't just him. It was the tradition. He liked his role for the authority in it. I have a fair idea of the difference between ego and the spirit. It's a big difference, not at all subtle. He'd never been around anybody who took him for just a man, instead of an authority, as he saw himself. He made it clear I could not leave the church and continue to know him. Ok.

 

william blake

 

He didn't want me around so I didn't go around. A couple years later he called me one day and asked me to come see him. I went, we had a good visit like usual, but he used it to drive home to me his authority is not something I can say no to. It's the same as a commandment from God. Its God's will. Ok. Whatever. Never went back. Nobody from the church would have anything to do with me. I'd see some in the grocery store and they'd look the other way. I'd think: Great, judgmental Christian, if that's how you are, I don't want to talk to you either; thanks for saving me the bother. I heard he was in the hospital and went to see him a few times. His wife and daughter in the hospital room made it clear without saying it I was not welcome, so I didn't go back. I saw daughter in post office and her nose went straight up. Saw wife in grocery store and her nose went straight up. He died and nobody let me know. The obituary always shows up in the paper after the funeral, and I didn't even see the obituary. I've never been to his grave. I've been to his brother Tom's in the same cemetery, but never took the few steps to stand at Millard's grave for a short spell. It wasn't a matter of purpose. I just didn't realize it until several years later when I noticed I'd never been to Millard's grave. And still have not. I don't feel compelled in any way to go. I go to Jr Maxwell's grave once a year, not because I believe the corpse has any meaning. It's more to be with the headstone, all that's left, a record of a memory. Fifty years from now, no one will remember who that was. It will be like when I walk through the cemetery seeing names of people on tombstones I never heard of. Junior periodically had a need to visit his mother and dad's graves. In his last years when he was unable to drive, he asked me to drive him around to the two cemeteries that would be in sight of each other but for trees. First we went to his dad's grave in Liberty Church's graveyard. I went with him to see the grave. The old man's tombstone was a rectangular block of polished black marble with no words, no numbers, nothing but the beauty in the stone. It stood on a small foundation, and in the foundation was Maxwell spelled in raised letters covered by the grass. I thought: there is the tombstone of a man of constant sorrow. His oldest boy had killed himself in middle fifties and made a terrible mess of things in the process, un crime passionnel. He wrecked the family name in the county.

william blake

Junior's mother's grave is in her family cemetery, the Whitehead Joineses. At both graves, Junior walked up to the grave, looked at the headstone, turned and walked back to the car. He saw no need to linger. Seeing the tombstone was his reason for going, paying his respects. Once he saw it, that was it. His brevity caught my attention. Twice I took him around to the graves; saw him do the same both times. I thought: this fits Junior's character like a latex glove. I see no importance in visiting a grave but for self, a memory. I find I'd rather remember my friends some other way besides a tombstone. I tend to see a mummified corpse just a couple feet below the grass. I don't like to walk on graves for its creepiness factor. My mind's eye sees rows and rows of mummified corpses, and their relatives believing something is important about it, leaving plastic flowers. I don't want to end up a mummy in a vault beneath a lawn people walk on and nobody puts plastic flowers on. I want to do better than that for my mortal frame. Not that it matters to me, one way or the other, except it's just plain gross to have my bag of shit mummified in a vault for however many centuries until even the steel casket and vault have returned to dust. I want cremation and the ashes (ground bone) strewn on the forest floor. Talking with Junior one day about such matters, I said, "I want to be fertilizer." He said, "Y'already are." I don't want a tombstone. The death record in the Register of Deeds tells everything a tombstone can. I don't have anything cool to put on a tombstone. Yeats did it the best. On his, it's carved in stone, Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman pass by. I've seen a few clever quips on tombstones, clever the first time you see them. What Yeats had to say has some power in it with meaning every time I see it or think it. I feel like it's of relative importance to leave a record for genealogists of the future, which is taken care of by the county. I want soul completely free from body, nothing left for soul to cling to if it turns sentimental and wants to stay with a corpse and be a ghost suspended between above and below. I don't want to do that. I want to see what's next too much to risk lingering over wanting to see my baby friend Vada grow up. If I want to badly enough, I might return as her baby brother for the opportunity to sit with her in the back seat of the car, be picked on and adored by older sisters.

william blake

 

 

*

 

FOLLOW THE FLOW

 

 

 

all pics by tj worthington

 

Focus this week is on my relationship with nature, the natural world, the uncultivated world, the wild things, the four-leggeds, the winged, the ground, the green things, earth. This world, my mountain, is my refuge, my home, my need. I know this region of the mountains so well it gets taken for granted, but not too much. I went out on a small lake in a boat fishing with Justin. It was his day off and he had to get some fishing in. Fishing recharges his internal battery. He catches a fish, kisses it and throws it back. He stopped by to pick me up and I rode with him to the next farm down the road, turn up a long gravel driveway to the lake. It's called the Willis lake. The owners live in Winston-Salem, my neighbors Allan and Gary have a stain glass studio where they support themselves selling their wares. Allan takes care of the land, a few hundred acres of largely meadow. It was the old Jim Scott place. Their boy, Sherman, went to school and revival meetings in this house. Sherman has been dead quite a while now. He was a humble man. In NC he did not need a driver's license to drive a tractor on the roads. Sherman fixed a small wooden box to the back of his old Ford red-belly to carry groceries. He drove the tractor to town for the bank, the doctor, the lawyer, the drug store, leading a long line of cars snaking slowly  toward town, temperatures rising, road rage in abundance, but nobody made a problem. Sherman's going to town day. It was excruciatingly maddening to fall in behind Sherman. Couldn't pass. There you are, 10-15 mph and can't do nothin about it. Sherman was a little bit slow and had a good mind too. The people I've known who went to school with him said he was a whiz with numbers. His mother and dad wouldn't let him play with the other boys, retarding him somewhat. The lake was put on the farm after Jim Scott sold it.

 

 

 

 

The temperature was mild enough, but the air had a chill in it and a constant wind. Three guys from town we knew were on different banks fishing. Three geese swam together out in middle of the lake. Putting the boat in the water did not scare them off. They continued to swim and watched the boat as a curiosity. The wind on the water was cold. Justin threw the lure toward the bank letting it splash into the water like it jumped from the bank, then wiggles to the bottom and swims. He did not catch one fish. He said the water was too cold. I don't care anything about fishing. I go along with camera. First time I had camera in the boat, I went for landscape pictures, none of which was ever worth looking at. This time I sat and waited for It, whatever It may be. Sitting quietly in the boat, gazing all around, even the sky, nothing took hold of me. Suddenly, I saw the surface of the water like I'd never seen it before. It was familiar. Everything about it was familiar, but I was seeing it the first time. I found a zone five to ten feet from the boat where the water made changing patterns with light so fast the eye sees colors in motion. The camera stops the motion. I zoomed the camera down pretty close and pointed at the zone where the patterns were flowing and clicked. Could not see the viewing screen for the bright sky all around, so I'd point the camera at the zone I wanted and clicked. Most often had no idea what I was getting. Some were out of focus, some so blurry it was nothing, and some with sharp clarity. I made pictures of the lake's surface from distance and up close. Sunlight was dancing on the water in sparkles in certain places. The only one I aimed was the goose. Couldn't aim it but by landscape around it and zoom in from there.  

 

 

  

 

Tapped into the zone close to the boat is a very different experience from gaping at the surface of the water. Out a little ways it turns into waves on water. In this zone five to ten feet from the boat I found continually changing abstract patterns that move so fast the eye cannot see the patterns the camera stopped. Following the patterns in swift change, I'd think of how fun it would be to stand in front of a painting by Clifford Still and watch the colors change patterns so fast the eye couldn't follow. Right away, the eye understands there is no keeping up, eye relaxes and I relax. It's like watching a fire, the changing shapes and images, a quickened flow of the clouds. My Swiss cheese memory is recalling that I believe it was Pablo Neruda said the bridge between matter and spirit is water. I can't affirm or deny it, but it's awfully poetic. I think about such ideas gaping at the water in a minor trance, a meditation, fixed on the rapidly changing flow of light reflecting on water. Every living thing grows by principles of water flow, water being the earth's blood. I stand in Spring Lizard Creek that runs beside my house and someone stands in a creek in southern China, we are standing in the same water. Maybe not the same molecules, but water everywhere on earth is connected. Our blood that runs through a vein in a finger is the same blood that keeps feet warm. Justin sat at one end of the boat and I at the other, almost never talking. Not keeping quiet for any reason but we just didn't feel like talking. He was working the fishing reel with what he had on his mind and I holding the camera taking pictures of reflections on the water with what I had on my mind. We don't talk a lot. Something I learned from country people and Justin learned from mother's milk, that presence is the same as conversation. Conversation is about enjoying the presence of the other. Talking does not always have to accompany presence.

 

 

My old friends, Tom Pruitt and Millard Pruitt, brothers, grew up in what ended as Tom's house, visible from the boat. They went to school and Regular Baptist revival meetings in my house. Both have been dead about twenty years. I went to Millard's church for fourteen years. He lived in another part of the county called Glade Valley. Tom and Millard were less than ten miles from each other and had not seen each other in a number of years neither one of them knew. I suggested I take Tom in his later years to visit Millard. He liked the idea. They sat in their chairs and never spoke for an hour. Tom stood up and said it was time to go. A year or so later, I took Millard to visit Tom. They sat in silence for an hour and Millard was ready to go. Both in their late 70s. Snow was on the ground, quite a lot of it, though the paved roads were clear and the gravel roads had the snow scraped off them, snow scraped off the ice on the bottom. Both roads up the mountain were terrible with ice. My 78 Toyota pickup had one-wheel drive in the rear. Not proficient on ice. But I knew what it could and could not do. I suggested I take him down the mountain on the old wagon road that ran the ridge parallel Waterfalls creek beside all three waterfalls. Couldn't see them from the road, but can hear them. I went down the bank once looking for how to get to the third waterfall from there. I tied a 50 foot rope to a tree and used it like a stair rail walking down it backwards, leaving rope in place for the return. It was steep and sheer rock under layers of old leaves. I knew the back road would be in good shape. It doesn't melt during the day and freeze at night. I knew it would still have the snow pack on it. I know the road from driving it a thousand times and walking it a hundred times. It's bad. But I've driven a new Cadillac and a new Honda down it, owner sitting beside me chewing a hole in the seat, and we never scraped bottom once. In snow the road looked like a luge track. Millard's eyes were big as Ping-Pong balls, and we never lost traction. At the top he didn't believe I could do it. At the bottom he didn't believe I did it. It was a smooth ride compared to the others. All it took was following its flow.

 

 

 

larry

 

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