We’ll take a Sunday drive, but first, about “hollers” – they’re the little valleys, here in Appalachia, where creeks run. When the wagon roads first came into these hills they followed the creekbeds through the hills and we have roads now where the wagons or horses could navigate. But they could also trace a feeder creek upwards to the ridge top, because traveling the ridge you could see across the hill and holler ripples, all the way to the horizon. So now we run the ridges from holler to holler.
“Hollow” originally, I suppose, but nobody says that. Holler is the word for those who live there. Even I never said “holler”. Maybe it was snobbery; in the West Virginia town of 3,000 where I grew up as the city cousin, “holler” was a hillbilly word, mocked by teenagers and other dumb people. But a mere twenty miles into the countryside from my town the folks who live on this road still say “holler”. You live up the creek or down the creek, you drive up the holler or down the holler.
So, in about a half-hour, we drive from where there no hollers to where all is hollers.
Now that we’ve driven up the holler to the top of the first ridge, our gravel road will start winding back down the other side. But let’s slow the car here on the ridge. Look down through your window to the tops of trees. And down there just a half-mile, off the road to the right, under that far forest, is the Rockhouse, a smooth cave scooped back into the hillside rock. I do want to take you to the cave, but the walk there and the walk back are just as important, past the cemetery where my mom and dad are buried. It will all come into view out your side of the car. We start down.
We have to drive slow here, because if we meet another car on the one-lane, somebody has to pull off the gravel into the ditch to let pass.
I don’t really know the people who live on this road now, though the last names on the mailboxes are familiar. Their houses are still spaced far enough apart that each one is around a bend from his neighbor, and usually separated by cow-pastures.
The neighbors really do care who drives along the road, though. They peer out their windows at the sound of gravel under tires. You’d care too, if you lived somewhere where all cars had better have a reason to be there.
The dots on that little hill are gravestones. Here is our turnoff. We’ll slip down this even smaller road which is just a grass path with tire tracks. It will take us to the graves.
Though the cemetery road is just car-ruts through the pasture, the drive gear will move us fast enough with no gas pedal. I always imagine the car has remembered where we’re going, like it is an insensate machine in the city but out here it gradually awakens – or maybe it’s just that at this spot there is literally no-where else we can possibly drive. At any rate, I can let go of the wheel and take my foot off the gas.
We glide down slightly for a hundred yards then back up, through golden rod and high alfalfa. Then out into the mowed grass which circles the graveyard knoll. We can park anywhere. The grass is mowed a couple times in the warm months, out far enough around the hill’s foot to make enough parking space for all the out-of-town cousins at once. Cousins of anyone buried here.
My mom and dad and my sister Christina Fawn are sleeping on this hill, but let’s skip that for now, I want you to see the woods. We’ll walk around the bottom of the hill and down into the trees toward the creek. Further down and further back.
Down here into the forest rooms, the green ceiling of maples blocks even the mean August sun, but occasional lights dapple our feet and freckle the may-apple leaves. May apples are like little fairy parachutes. As we walk further, even the dapple light loses to the leaf canopy, and we are soon in all shade. Leaves underfoot are spongy, decades deep, and soak up sound. Moss climbs the grey rocks and the grey beech trunks. Each time I return, the intense green of the moss is always a surprise; there are colors in the woods that exist only on the retina because the memory can’t store them. Jack-in-the-pulpit nods in the slight wind, sleepy from his own sermon. My father had told me that plant name when I was a boy, probably right about here, and I would have pictured him in his own country pulpit, preaching past dismissal time, the church windows dark.
This walking holler is actually the ancient flood-bed of the creek, 50 yards across. But the creekwater normally is just as wide as my dad’s stride, and it runs an inch thin on slimy rock. Broken cliffs, veined with roots as thick as an old man’s thigh, rise on both sides of the little holler. From the road we drove in on, you couldn’t see that there’s a rock canyon back in here, and as we look back to where we parked, from here, on foot, we can’t see the car or the road or any houses.
We used to follow this little footpath beside the stream on summer nights. And sometimes step the flat stones. Down from the graveyard, into the woods, back into the holler, back again beneath the rock face where the creek had long since cut under the upper forest at a bend. This sensation of down and back and more down and back, deeper into the womb of the countryside, is what I’d feel when I was small and my mother would bring us back to her home on weekends.
One cut in the rock in particular is deep enough to call it a Rockhouse. It will shelter a couple dozen cattle in a storm. The rock overhead is higher than a small maple and is rippled like water, and blackened by the smoke of a thousand fires like the ones we were sure the Indians built, and the ones we built, for roasting marshmallows. I’d lean back on the log where I’d sit, away from the fire on my face, and strain my neck further back to watch the sparks shoot up into the black night. They’d streak red and yellow as they tracked the rock face out and up to where the crickets sing in the root balls of trees above our faces.
It may have been there one night I first felt that, simply by not knowing, I was a carrier of injustice. I’ll say I was 10. It was a feeling that I’d be able to name only years later….something like embarrassed at being in a place without knowing those who had been there before. If I came to their place, didn’t their feelings and memories also remain there? And who would carry those on if it wasn’t me?
We were always told the Indians had lived there a century before, but it wasn’t the romance of war whoops and war paint that drew me to picture them in the back of the cave beyond the light. I’d think of a 10 year old Indian boy, and of his mother, and of the day he died, and of how his mother felt, and how could I pull her sorrow out of the sandstone where it had soaked in and…do what with it?
Sentimental. All my life I’ve been secretly worried about all the laughs and deaths hidden under the bushes and in the weeds at the side of the roads. Even in the deep hollers far off the road, in the woods beyond the graveyards. Sentimental is as good a word as any, I won’t argue with you, but then again I don’t seem to use it for this feeling when I stare inside to name my parts. It doesn’t seem quite accurate.
I would look across the fire and see my mother, young and pretty, laughing with her brothers. We were the city cousins, come back here to the country many weekends in the summer and this cave was as deep in this country as she could burrow. 30 years before that night, before she ever thought of me, she would have been right there as a young girl, sitting at another fire.
So there, there is one connection: she watched the sparks go to heaven when she was 10, and she led me there when I was 10 and I leaned my face back into the dark at the same spot, at the same age. Before her? After me?
More than one broken chain. Many.
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Have you walked in the woods at night with no flashlight? I mean the deep woods, not a thicket beside the road where you can still hear the rumble and swoosh of traffic or trains. The deep woods, where you can stand without motion, close your eyes in order to point every neuron toward your ears, but still get no sound that is not a forest sound.
You have to stand in that type of woods to be free of the compass. Our ears are powerful: the slightest sound of civilization always comes from one direction more than others and so it orders the circle around you into one safe direction and then the others. But in the quiet of Appalachian woods there is no order. There is no safe direction unless you learned it from your people.
Near to midnight we would put out the fire (usually by peeing on it; this was more practicality than mischief) and walk out of the holler without lights. Out of the Rockhouse onto the old footpath, which could only be felt but not seen. Overhead, no stars or moon, only thick summer canopy. No light, no sound from outside. Even the breeze couldn’t find its way into the holler. Along the path and across the trickling stream there are slight slippery silvery sounds plinking off the little sandstone steps. A chipmunk skitters, unseen. Frogs burp, unseen.
Now, on the right, the tree canopy ends and up there is the rise of the cemetery knoll, though it was still too dark to see the jagged teeth of the headstones against the sky, like you saw in the daylight when you walked in.
The old ones were perfectly comfortable walking in the woods at night past the cemetery which they all believed exhaled will’o’wisp and apparitions. No light, no sound, and the haunted graves, but as comfortable as sitting at the kitchen table playing cards.
I’ve written about their ghost-ology. Yes, they told stories of late night appearances of dead ladies in flowing white dress, standing beside the road needing a ride, let’s say, or walking down a stairwell formal-like (ghosts never hurry). They told stories of the sounds of weeping babies among the graves, or flaming crosses a head high above the far field which does not illuminate, by its blue light, anything around. Like all cultures do, they told these stories: around the card table, or while walking at night.
But an anthropologist who grew up in the city could easily project his disdain for other elements of the culture and falsify the entire matter for a Ph.D. Supernatural activity in this culture is not explaining the unknown, is not scaffolding a religious worldview — the ghosts who drift across these fields in fact do not fit into the religious worldview, but contradict it.
It is affection. People do not see the landscape inhabited by the spirits of their elders unless they love it, love the old ones, love the places, love the night as much as the day, love the earth which gives potatoes and takes back mother and father.
It is not fear or need for order which writes those stories, but affection, and that’s why the old ones were never slightly chilled those midnights as we found our way back to the cars, where they’d turn a moment, hand on the car door, and glance back at the graves for movement, not wishing to be elsewhere.
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