NOBODY GOING NOWHERE

vada by cheyanne

I don't know if the answer is ignorance, or if it is far-seeing foresight, or if it is trained into us over centuries and millennia, or if it is from feeling powerless without a voice, or maybe from collective experience, but the question is why do we lay about and hope a benevolent force will come to us from outside to rescue us from ourselves? The hope that flying saucers would rescue us from hard-edged absence of caring has been with us since the Fifties. A website, paoweb, has "updates by Sheldon Niddle," purportedly channeled from galactic federation wise counsel. I've looked at it occasionally over the last several years to find over and over that "first contact," when a mass landing will announce we are being watched over by beings more intelligent than we; they're just around the corner, any day now, soon now, coming to set us up in an ideal society under the galactic federation. Whatever. A few years ago, a definite date was announced. The date came and went. Oh, well, no problem. Some things were not in place they thought were in place and it turned out the timing wasn't right. Sounds like Fundamentalists announcing the end of the world and then it doesn't happen. There was a bunch in southern California some years ago who poisoned themselves because a comet was passing by and it was here to collect their souls. Sometimes I need some input like this to remind self that our inept government is not the only dysfunction going around. It galls me to think the people in DC actually represent us. They do not represent our interests, but they do represent the greed, the I'd-rather-be-watching-tv mind, readiness to lie to get what we want, the way we look up the ladder not down, our style of looking the other way when we see somebody down and out, our self-centered focus that says all for me, screw everybody else. In that way, they are a mirror to American motivations.

 

vada by cheyanne

 

Sparta has been down and out since the year 2000. It was limping along before, but since 2000, businesses go away, new businesses start up and go away. For awhile the talk was tourism, get people to come in here from other places to save us because we can't save ourselves. And factories. Maybe a factory will come here and save us. How much of that mind that we cannot save ourselves comes from religion, a totally different kind of "salvation?" An old joke came to mind. A man fell overboard from a cruise ship. He's in the water praying to God to save him. Somebody threw him a floating ring, but he wouldn't touch it, God's going to save him. He drowned and went to heaven. He asked God why God didn't save him when he was calling for help. God said, I threw you a floating ring and you wouldn't have it. I take it to mean an element of self-help and accepting help is part of the deal. Seems like if we take care of ourselves, the desperate prayer to God to fix us may not have to be so desperate. I like to live my belief that God's counsel, scriptures, are here to help me make my own decisions more in line with the reality of the moment and not feel the need for the Unknown to hurry up and save me from the results of my own dim-witted decisions. I believe that in this time, historically in the evolution of consciousness, the mental exercise of making decisions is important in the soul's growth and the brain's development. I never learned about decision making until I was away from parents who permitted no decision making. I came out of the experience dreading, afraid of making decisions, not having experience. Right away I made some disastrous decisions for myself because I did not know how to decide, how to be impartial. Up to age 23 I was ruled from outside myself; parents, marriage, military. The next 5 years after leaving parents were taken up by forces outside myself making my decisions. I gave myself to them. By the time I left the Navy and marriage at the same time, I was suddenly able to start thinking about making my own decisions, and became jealous of making my decisions. Nobody makes my decisions without my permission. Anyway, that was the dream. In this time of the life, looking back, I was then, and am able now, to hang on to original purpose.   

vada by cheyanne

I can't say I've always made the best decisions or even rational decisions, even sensible decisions, but somehow I've made it to today. I started college on my own, making decisions for myself. I was not aware in that time of the importance of decision making. This is hindsight talking about the importance of decisions. Then, I dreaded having to make any decision. Didn't know what to do. I was on my own first time like a dog that had lived on a chain since a puppy set free. The dog runs heedlessly in any direction chosen at random. It just runs. Inevitably, like a bird that escapes a cage does not know defensive flying and gets nailed by a hawk first day, the dog runs across the road in front of a car first day. I was determined not to be heedless with my freedom, which allows me to be sitting here today writing about it; otherwise, I'd have gone the way of the bird and the dog. Made some decisions I would not make today, explaining why I have a little bit of peace of mind in this time of the life. For one thing, I tried to learn how to be social, how to be charming at a cocktail party, how to be seen with the right set, shit like that. It never took. Never found comfort in a cocktail party. Then, I knew people I would totally stay away from now. Also, the other side of the coin, found a handful of the best friends of my life unto death do us part. Knew some wonderful people, too, people I recollect with warm feeling in the heart. It doesn't do to get in touch with people I have not seen since that time. They've gone to careers, families and new cars, bought the package. I've gone hillbilly, live on a back road with a cat, two donkeys, and drive a twenty year old car with rust places. I'm really at an ideal place in the life. I've lived the ideal that I don't want to impress anybody. I'm there. Nobody going nowhere. I don't impress anybody who lives by the way of "the world," the human mind. I need the freedom to let go and let God, as they say, let things around me happen their own natural way with the least of my interference. It may not be good husbandry, but it is how I'm comfortable.

vada by cheyanne

I have, I actually have held as a guiding light for self, to be somebody who does not impress anybody. I don't want people looking at me with the I'm-impressed look, or sucking up to me because I have power and influence, or wanting to rub elbows because I have more money than they do, or introducing me to people I don't want to meet, a great big expanse of expectations I don't want to pretend to live up to. I want the world of commerce and whatever else they do out there, that whole system of taking other people's money legally, I want them not even to know my name. I want them to see me the way they saw old man Sherman Scott who drove to town on his red-belly Ford tractor and wore his bib overalls and work boots to church. Just an old nuisance nobody much knows, he sees just a few people and stays to hisself, not looking for nothing but to live in harmony with neighbors, friends and the people he knows. Articulating it like this, in retrospect, I've made it. I spend my own time studying, learning, not in a structured, academic way. Like, for some reason I start wondering what is going on in China. What news we get about China is propaganda. So I start at zero. I know nothing about China. I found some contemporary Chinese films through netflix, found Chinese fiction and poetry through amazon, then wanted to read a history of China. Came upon the time of Genghis Khan. Two pages. All I knew about him was cliché stuff. He seemed awfully interesting in those two pages. I put the marker in the Chinese history and found a biography, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Found him much like King David; genocidal warlord, brilliant mind, a heart as big as Mongolia, became the Founding Father of the nation that formerly had been continually warring tribes. He really was a great man. This was a man who could jump on a wild horse and ride, only rode wild horses. This is how my study is done my way. A little bit at a time over several years, I'm familiar now with how people live in China. This just one of many veins I follow with no purpose but the guiding light of curiosity.  

cheyanne selfie

 

*

 

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

 

*

 

 

 

 

HILLBILLY BARNYARD WINTER

 

ice in the grass

The day was cold and wet after a night of light rain and fog at 30 degrees that put a coat of thin ice on twigs and leaves. It made the ground slippery covered with last summer's grass and pine needles ice coated. It was only on a slope of the ground that it was slippery. The donkeys had frosted hair tips and their black manes were tipped in silver. I wanted more shelter for them, but they did not seem to be suffering. The two calves go into the shed at night to get out of the weather. It's their toilet. The floor is getting thicker with mashed cow pies. The donkeys don't seem to take an interest in the place. The calves don't even seem to notice. I'd like to clean it out for them, but not every day in the winter. The shed was one of those good ideas that only works in the realm of ideas. Out here in everyday life it doesn't work. In the morning and later in the day I carry an armload of hay out into the meadow to spread around for them to eat with plenty of room for the birds-on-a-wire phenomenon. The birds stay a pecking distance apart and the donkeys eat best out of kicking range. Jenny and Jack are jealous when they eat too close together. They act like children saying, "Mine!" Ears go back and they start kicking. I enjoy feeding them. I like going out in bad weather to take hay and grain to them. I like being with them. I like their personalities. They are very different and at the same time both donkey natured. Though their eyes are exactly alike, they are very different eyes to look into.  

 

frosty manes on the donkeys

 

I go out in the morning to take hay to them. I don't want to put a whole bale out when the weather is so wet. I like to take them enough to last a few hours, then take them some more. They like to stay up close to the fence, the warmest spot in the meadow, sheltered from wind by the house and under a big maple tree, where they can keep an eye on me. It turns into slipping and sliding as soon as I step through the gate. Mud, cow shit, donkey shit, doesn't matter, it's all slippery. I dodged the big lumps first day, but it's nothing anymore. It's just the surface of the earth I have to walk over to get out into the meadow where I can spread the hay on the ground and it not be a toilet. By the Hindu standard, this makes me an untouchable. It's looking like a hillbilly barn lot out there. It's the way farms looked in my early years here when a few farms continued to function. The donkeys are not messy with their droppings, but the calves let it go wherever and whenever. The physical part of feeding them through the winter is good exercise. It gets me out of the house. It gives me a chance to walk a ways, stir my blood, and to visit with the donkeys and the calves. It gives me opportunity to step out into the weather, whatever it is, to feel it for a short time, just enough to get the feel of it. Taking hay to them carries me back to winters feeding the cattle with Tom Pruitt, standing in the back of Tom's pickup, cutting the baling twine with a pocketknife, tossing sections of hay bales off the back of the truck, Tom driving through the meadow and the cows following us in the snow.  

 

hillbilly barn lot

 

I have created a barn lot right here beside the house. Cracks me up. I do like the scent. This is what the air smelled like all over the world in the time before it smelled like petroleum smoke. This new scent in the air of my immediate world is so refreshing I feel as clean as after a shower. This new scent coming into my air space coincides with letting go of concerns about the corporate takeover of my democracy, the cancer in American politics, ignoramuses front and center in the news. I have cut the umbilical cord that connected me to the country club belief system that only money matters. Paying attention to that mind, I carry in myself its belief system. The mind those people represent is the mind that, in fact, worships Mammon, holds money (gold) up the highest of the high, is actively destroying my earth on such a scale I can't do anything to stop it or slow it down. I can only accept that's how it is and watch the logging trucks carry mountains of trees by on the highway. What can I do? Live out on the mountain where I can't see or hear the highway. I see pictures of Obama and think he's president of something that is not my country anymore. He's president of a corporate league, president of the corporations. He and the other politicians are supported by, dined by, talked to on the golf course by, talked to over drinks by corporate execs in high style. Not one of their decisions takes me or anyone I know into consideration. I have no recourse in the court system. Why do I pay attention to people who are only arrogant to me, dismissive? Fake people all the way around, from the soul to the surface. I can do nothing to change their thinking, stop them or get their attention. I have withdrawn my attention and will not give them my power by way of paying them anymore with attention.

 

jack and jen with frosted manes

 

Certainly, I have to participate in all that goes with driving a car, owning a spot of property, eating, and listening to music. It's all corporate. That's the nature of the landscape I live in. I can't help it that Florida grocery stores sell California oranges. I can't help the population explosion. I can't change poverty. I can't stop racism. I can't make any difference to the educational system. Nor do I really want to. The only thing I can do with any actuality is let it all take care of itself like water flowing in pipes and stream beds, trust that the whole game of humanity is being played out on schedule, all the parts in place. The pace is crazy now and what we call reality has become false. I've worked at labor jobs to keep out of work situations where I have to pretend to believe what I don't believe, the belief system of Mammon culture, the Bank, corporate hierarchical mind, identifying with a medium of exchange. It's the same as identifying with the body, an extension of it, branches of it. The body is the frame my consciousness operates like driving a car, the car being my body's tool, this laptop my mind's tool. I have never been able to identify with one thing throughout my entire life. Of course, I can identify with God, when you consider that God is consciousness, which is your very self, my very self, the part of self that sees our dreams, that never sleeps. I can identify with consciousness, and I can identify with mind, not as something accurate, but familiar, where my own customs live. I can identify with the body in that it's the body I'm familiar with that carries my consciousness from place to place, person to person, adventure to adventure, keeps it in motion, tries to prevent consciousness from being too bored.  

 

ice tree 

 

I am happy with my own personal livestock next to the house. I have certain old shoes to wear out there. They used to have a kind of tread on the bottom that is now smooth, the reason I put them aside for newer shoes. Lots of sliding about. And I don't dare fall down. I probably will fall at least once before the end of winter, but it will be a goal every day not to. It makes me laugh to myself at what a surprise from last winter to this winter, two donkeys, two calves, and suddenly the meadow is alive with livestock and I'm playing farm again. I think of the old feller Sherman Scott, who was probably about the age I am now, walking through the herd of his cattle petting them, talking to them, his friends. People who drive up and down the road get a kick out of hearing Jack bray. He cuts loose with one several times a day, three, four or five. Depends on motivation, whatever the motivation may be. Feeding livestock through the winter. It feels good to be shifting my mind from inside my head to outside it at least a little bit. Having animals to take care of is a kind of zookeeper. I saw Marlin Perkins at YouTube a few days ago on his tv show Wild Kingdom from the Chicago zoo. I watched him for years on Zoo Parade, then Wild Kingdom. I watched Marlin Perkins like other people watched Captain Kangaroo. I had forgotten about him until this video I saw of one of his Wild Kingdom tv shows about the Bush people of the Kalahari. Marlin Perkins taught me a great appreciation for animals during my childhood. I had not thought to give him credit for his role in that aspect of my life until I saw him on Wild Kingdom again after so many years he looked to be from another consciousness.  

 

jack

 

 

*

 

JENNY ALPHA DONKEY

jenny

 

Things have changed in the barnyard. Today their second day together, Jack is shy of Jenny, who stands over him, Big Mama in charge. She looks at him like she dares him to take one step toward her, he turns and walks away. He steps too close to her, she whirls around and lets him have it with he back feet perfectly aimed. Jenny is frisky, the woman in charge of the situation, on guard all the time, keeping that teenage sex maniac off her back. She's had to slap him down and put him in his place. She's in the phase today of keeping it fresh in his understanding that she is bigger than him and he already knows she can kick his ass. Jack is sore all over. He lopes along with head down. He didn't want me touch his body today. He liked me to rub his legs, but he was sore everywhere else. Jenny did not want me giving Jack attention, would interrupt us and run him off by turning her rear end to him like she was going to kick. They did kick. Jack was kicking her when she came near him and even the threat of coming near him. Standing between two donkeys kick-boxing turned uncomfortable in a hurry. I had to get out of there, just step aside and give them a chance to cuss each other with their back feet until they were satisfied they'd got it said. I don't know Jenny well enough yet to have any certainty she won't kick me. I knew Jack would not kick me, unless he missed a lick at Jenny, but they don't miss. They are aware of their back legs like I am aware of my arms.

 

jack a-walkin

 

 It's been something like a month or more I've known Jack. In our first days I told him I wanted to learn Donkey nature and asked him to teach me Donkey. And he did. He has been aware of teaching me his ways. I've learned that humility is as much donkey nature as forgiveness is in a dog. I don't mean they are inert. Humility is active in a donkey, not passive. My bluegrass banjo picking friend, Jr Maxwell, had a donkey's humility. It took a long time knowing him to see that he may have been the most humble man I've ever known. He didn't show it. It was automatic in him as it is in a donkey. It was a major part of his nature. His wisdom was the same way. He did not know he had wisdom and would laugh if told he was a model of humility. He'd say you need your head examined. A donkey's humility is like Jr's in that they don't need to advertise it and tell you all about it, it's just part of who they are. They don't even know they have humility. Especially when they start kicking each other. A donkey is a powerful being. They look like ponies with a full-sized horse's head and long ears. Spindly legs with knees that look like a knot in a rope don't appear to have much power. But they do. The muscles of the upper back legs is where a donkey's power is centered. Rubbing Jack's legs I feel a sense of power in them. I talk with him and say things like, "Powerful donkey legs," and sometimes I call him a big powerful donkey. I'm not exaggerating or fantasizing. He likes to hear me tell him he's powerful.

 

donkey rumps

 

I learned very early with Jack that he understood what I said to him. The first learning was the first day I spent time with him, feeding him carrots, rubbing his back and neck. Jack's dinger started swelling up. I backed away from him saying, "We're not going there Jack. That is not what this is about." I would not touch his hind quarters for several days because I did not want to stimulate him sexually. He kept telling me with body language he wanted me to rub his rump. I said Ok and rubbed his rump the same as I rubbed his front shoulders. It did not stimulate him. This was my first learning that to a donkey their rear end is equally important as their front end. They are their full body, not just the front half, is what he was telling me. Rubbing his rump I learned that is where their power is. Big muscles. Seeing Jenny kick and seeing Jack kick, standing on their front feet and using those rump muscles all the way to the knee, snapping those hooves into the target with measured force, I was able to see how good they are with their kicks. Their kicks today were not power kicks. Jack was intimidated, sore everywhere on his body. He kicked Jenny to say, Stay away from me! She kicked him to say, Stay away from me! Like kids in the car's back seat. I have a feeling she hurt his neck; an attempt to bray ends abruptly in pain. She has him beat down in full understanding that Big Mama Donkey rules. She hurt him and she's proud of it. She looks at him with an eye that says: I can kick your ass all over this meadow and you know it. I'm about to start right now. It is a look I have seen between cats. Dogs do it too. Humans do it. Today Jack made a sound I'd never heard before when Jenny approached him in a way that could be taken for aggressive. The sound was a grunt and a groan. I took it for something like a growl in a dog.  

 

jenny

 

In town today, I stopped by CJ Hardware for a 50 pound bag of sweet grain for horses. The woman I bought Jenny from said she gave her sweet grain by hand. I watched her show her granddaughter to put the grain on her hand and let the donkey pick it up with her lips. I took a plastic bowl of the grain and three carrots to the field. I like walking out in the field among them. I like having them around me, touching, close. A memory of an old boy I knew years ago surfaced. He died so long ago I don't remember, around twenty years ago, Sherman Scott. He grew up on the next farm up the road from me. In his later years he lived on a small farm in Pine Swamp, a nice spot. Lived in a little house, lived simply, half a century of grime on everything in the house. No problem. Wood stove and bed in one room. All the other rooms just happened to be connected to the room he stayed in. He was somewhat simple minded, something like a child, though easy to talk with. A round-faced man who wore bib overalls and a plaid shirt, who could not drive a car, could not pass a driving test, but it was legal in NC to drive a tractor without a license. He made a small wooden box, maybe about the holding capacity of a five gallon bucket, but square. He fixed it behind the seat on his red-belly Ford tractor. He drove the tractor to the grocery store, the bank and whatever else business he had in town. Always about half a mile of cars would be following him down Hwy 21 toward Sparta, all the drivers cussing, even the preachers. Sherman had a herd of about twenty cows. One day he took me to show me his cattle. He walked among them in the herd packed together fairly tight in the place they were standing, talking to them individually, petting them as he passed between them, pushing them just enough to let him by, gentle as a child with them. I could feel the joy in the cows that their human was walking among them. It was one of the more memorable moments of my life seeing Sherman walk through his herd, all of them his pets, all of them loving him like faithful dogs.  

 

jack / jenny

 

It felt a little testy going out into the field today with Jenny a frisky Alpha Donkey on full alert, but I also knew she was as gentle as Jack with humans. The day before, we became acquainted. I get down with her and with Jack, eye to eye, when I talk to them, looking into their eyes and them looking at my eyes. They read eyes and I wanted to show Jenny that my eyes have only affection for her. By now, Jack and I know each other very well through the eyes. I have found it important, more than I imagined the first time I thought to bend down a bit and look at him eye-to-eye, as equals, not as me with power over him that he has to look up to. I don't want my relationship with them to be a power-over issue. I don't kick them, they don't kick me. I ask no more than that. Jenny is in a new place, misses her goat friends and the loving people she was taken from by force, is suddenly in a strange meadow with good grass and a teenage boy with nothing but sex on his mind. When she gets haughty with Jack, I think: Honey, there is coming a day you will be backing up to Jack and it won't be to kick him. Today was not that day. Jack has taught me donkey nature well. On sight when I saw Jenny I had a feeling for knowing an awful lot about her. She has a personality difference, but that's about it. Both are African herd animals, well-tuned, and each has it's own personality, like every living entity. Marsha Wagoner, who knows horses awfully well told me they will be friends inside a couple weeks. She said Jack will come back as an assertive male and they will live happily ever after. I believe it because I can see it. Jenny is in a strange place with a donkey she doesn't know that is single-mindedly wanting to hump her. It's like Jenny is saying, Slow down, dude, I don't even know if I like you. And Jack is a man, liking has nothing to do with it.

 

jenny found a scratching post

 

*

 

 

 

 





OLD-TIME HILLBILLIES

osborne homeplace



Driving up to the stop sign on Wolf Branch Rd at Mahogany Rock Rd, I saw on the right a house I hadn't seen in a very long time due to foliage grown up around it. In my very first years here, late 1970s, a couple of old Osborne brothers lived there, John and Dewey. I'd never seen Dewey, as far as I knew. Maybe once at a glance, maybe drugstore parking lot--no recollection where or when. I'd heard people tell about him that when he came back from Korea he wasn't right. His brother John stayed there with him, both in their 70s or 80s then. John I saw around town a good bit in a 56 Chevy, one of those old boys you don't want to get behind on a road with no passing lanes. In that time there were several old men around the county living mostly alone on the old homeplace after everybody else was gone; parents to the grave, sisters and brothers to the cities. There are still plenty of them scattered around the county, the next generation. Old man John wasn't right either, but he could get around pretty well.



Two old boys I drove to church for several years, Sherman Scott and Bert Holloway, were neither one of them "right," but they could get about and do their business. Sherman drove a red-belly Ford tractor to town with a box fixed to the back to carry groceries, and not a very big box. Lines of cars half a mile long would follow him in and out of town. You can drive a tractor without a license in NC, or could then. Bert didn't drive. He'd ask people he knew for rides. One time I was in Food Lion and saw him walking around in the store like he was looking for somebody. At the checkout counter he saw me, someone he knew, and asked me to drive him to his house. Of course. Men of his generation told me he was mean, he'd fight ye. They said when he fought, when they was kids, he'd take a board to ye, anything. Nobody picked a fight with Bert, because he went full-tilt wild man aiming to create some pain. He was the one to pick fights. Make him mad, he'd lay into ye. I only knew Bert as an old character who talked about girlfriends and money all the time. He lived in a little cinderblock cottage in Pine Swamp, inside the bend in Pine Swamp Rd where Fraser Rd comes into it.



Sherman Scott lived in Pine Swamp too just off of Bullhead Rd in the one bend in the paved part of the road. His farm is now divided up into tracts with houses on them. I can't even make out the landscape there any more it is so radically different. He lived in a little house he lived in with his mother and dad, Charity and Jim. Sherman lived in one room, like old man Tom up the road from me. Sherman grew up here at Air Bellows on what is now the Willis land, then known as the Jim Scott place. He was a slow kid who took to math. He grew up among a rough bunch of boys, between the Pruitts and the Caudills. He went to school in my house, which was then the Air Bellows schoolhouse. Then, the house was located a couple hundred yards to the west of where it is now, in the place that served as the loading pen for Stern's(Caudill's) farm. The driveway to Jim Scott's house went by the schoolhouse.



Sherman and Bert in the seat of my pickup riding to church and back was a good time for me. They were so funny that when they made me laugh, it made them laugh. In a stretch of the imagination way they brought to mind Laurel and Hardy from the slapstick early movies I saw on tv as a kid when tv was new. Goofy is what they were, but also good people, good as gold people. They made me happy I was able to allow people who weren't quite right into my life. I didn't see them as not right. I saw them as people just like the rest of us with a little twist in the mind that makes their reality a little bit different from ours, but not much. I'd rather wash feet in church with one of them, which I have done several times, than just about anybody else. I didn't realize it at the time, but washing feet with someone in an old-time Regular Baptist way makes a spiritual bond that never goes away. Driving Sherman home from church after washing feet was a good drive. The best part was that Sherman was the only individual in the house whose feet needed washing. A truly humble man.



It may have been around 1980, in the time when Lowe's was located in the parking lot and county jail lot behind the courthouse. I was approaching the stop sign on the street that ran between the two at Hwy 18. Old man John Osborne spoke to me through the side window, his car parked in the space behind the courthouse, and asked me to help him out. His car, the 56 Chevy, wouldn't run, he couldn't get it going, the battery was dead, he didn't have any money to get it fixed. I thought if he wanted a ride home, I'd take him. He wanted me to tow his car behind my truck with a chain. He had the chain. I saw the road between there and his house in my mind's eye, and by the time we arrived, the front of his Chevy would be bashed so bad the radiator would be in the fan, and probably tear off my back bumper. I couldn't see that done without incident, the Chevy handled by a really good driver.



A tow bar is what was needed and I wasn't equipped. I offered to give him a ride home. No, he needed to get his car home. We parted and I figure he made it home somehow. He was at home in Sparta. A lot of people knew him, ones who really could help him out. As he was one of the people God takes care of, I turned him back over to God. Next time I drove Mahogany Rock Rd his car was parked at the house. It looked abandoned when they lived in it, but for the car. I was curious to see the interior, as I knew it would be looking way back in time, but never enough to knock on the door. Eventually, I heard Dewey died, and they might have put John in a nursing home, because I never saw or heard of him again. The house has been so surrounded by growth for at least the 35 years I've seen the place, thicker all the time, I've never really had a good look at the house. I drove up on it Thursday looking naked. Remembering Jr when his mind was gone, the time a hospice nurse was bathing him in his wheelchair, he said, "I'm ashamed." I saw that little old house of another time standing alone on its barren ground, being dismantled, exposed, ashamed.



*

NEW ALLEGHANY BLOG

queen anne's lace

We're a third of the way into August. Signs of autumn in the trees. Locust leaves are turning brown. In some of the trees I see a brown haze entering the green. Queen Anne's lace all over the meadows and unmowed places. They're thick this year. Black-eyed Susans among the Queen Anne's lace and heads of red clover. Two crows perched on fence posts. One crow flew down in a wide circle dive, extended its feet, slowed the flight down to a stop with a sweep of pinioned wings, and landed on the fence post. They come to a halt in the air just above where they want to put down, then drift 2 to 3 inches to landing site, a weightless landing.

Billowing clouds continue to ride the current of the New River channel west to east. This may be the hottest day of the year. It has a Tennessee Williams feel about it, too hot to do anything but sweat and talk Southern. The air is still. Crows walk about Jr's lawn looking for remains of apple slices I threw out earlier.

I've been wanting to tell you about a guy with a blog called Bear Bottom.

http://bearbottomsparta.blogspot.com/ He and his wife are brand new here. New as new gets. He started a blog when they bought the summer house, which is to be for a grandchild born not long after he started the blog, which tells about the birth of the child. I don't mean like a movie from Sweden showing a baby being born, just a baby picture at home a little while after it's born. He tells that he is writing the blog for this child so when he gets to be of an age, he can read grandpa's writings lto have a picture of grandpa's life and know a little bit about who grandpa was, as what he writes in the blog is like an open letter to the newborn child.

His name is Wendell Rowell. He writes well from the perspective of somebody brand new here discovering every weekend they spend at the mountain house, an aspect of where they are. Curiously, they have a few acres of Sherman Scott's farm in Pine Swamp. Sherman was someone important in the first half of my life here. He grew up on the farm next to me at Air Bellows. Jim and Charity Scott were Sherman's parents. They sold their farm in the wind tunnel of Air Bellows Gap, moving down out of the wind in the valley in Pine Swamp.

Sherman went to school in my house. He grew up among Tom, Millard and the rest of the Pruitts and Caudills of Air Bellows. Sherman was a bit slow. Tom said he was good in arithmetic, and didn't play with the other kids. They were probably playing rough and Sherman was a gentle lamb, possibly doted on by his mother who saw to it her disadvantaged baby boy was cared for. I picked him up for church meetings as we both went to Millard Pruitt's church. In the way he talked and the subject matter, he seemed a child, but he was also not a child. In some ways Sherman was an elderly man, and in some a little boy. On his farm, he was a boy. The cows were his pets.

I saw him one time walk into his herd of 20 or so head, arms out over their backs petting them and talking to them. They packed in around him and I was concerned for Sherman's safety, until I realized he did this every day. He loved them and they loved him. It seemed so intimate I felt awkward seeing it, but not for long. A beautiful moment. That's how I see Sherman when I remember him. And driving to town on his redbelly Ford tractor with a wooden box on the back, driving down Hwy 21 going to the grocery store in Sparta, 50 cars lined up behind him. He didn't have a driver's license, and it's legal to drive a tractor on the roads without one. Sherman was best known as the man driving the gray tractor.

Bert Holloway would sometimes ride with us. Bert was a little bit loose in the head like Sherman. To and from church, they would talk about girlfriends and money the whole way there and back. I have to admit it was funny. Their understanding of what they were talking about was like that of 6 or 7 year old boys. They were giggly and twittery about girlfriends and stone serious about money. Sherman lived on the interest from money his dad left him along with the farm.

Old man Jim Scott they said had every cent he ever earned. He was one of the people of these mountains who didn't trust banks and when the silver tongue of the mortician's son charmed him and so many others in this county, Jim Scott gave all his coffee can money to a bogus credit union. The man who did it is now unwelcome in his own county. In Sherman's personal mythology, he's the devil himself. He hurt a lot of good, honest, hard-working people, which I don't mean to sound like a cliche. It's just that's what they were. Innocents. He ruined his family name.

Years ago, a woman from the Florida Keys visiting here asked me if the people here were like on Andy Griffith Show. I automatically said, "There's nobody anyplace like on the Andy Griffith Show." Turned out that was a bit vehement a response to something meant simply to be nice. Another of those moments I'd have done better keeping my mouth shut or just say, I don't know. But I aint dead yet.