“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. “
- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"Most Americans think West Virginia is the middle of nowhere. And most West Virginians think the little town of Wayne is the middle of nowhere. And the good people of Wayne, if they even recognize the name, think Petercave Road might be out there in the hills – the middle of nowhere. Deep in those layers of nowhere my mother was once a girl. Now she’s buried there, just a Sunday afternoon walk from the house where she was born.
Let’s pause right here and ask what we’re doing here: what does it mean to be from a place? Doesn’t it mean that the stuff of that place is thick with stories, and you’re in them? Houses, roads, trees, rocks, storefronts, signs. When you look around and each little thing prickles with story, then that’s what makes that place, for you, home. What matters is what you did there, and with who. Even natural beauty, great as it is, isn’t enough to make a home. Stories do. And there is no place that is not full of someone’s stories.
The sights and sounds of your drive back to a homeplace are not separable from the stories in your memory. These all live together in an indissoluble union, which unites what’s inside your head with what’s out there – rather, allows both what’s in your head and what’s out there to actually exist. Simple perception is a value hierarchy, and there are no values not from a story. So: no landscape but in story. As the ancients thought that the eye emitted beams of sight which, in some way, created the visible image, your story reifies your world, not the other way around.
So, as I drive along Petercave Road on a June day, slow enough to count the leaves on clover at the roadside, I’m moving through a different place than someone from another family. Another family won’t see the clover, they’ll be in another landscape that sits, invisible to me, on top of this one.
This is not to say that what you see and feel as you drive your road is not real. No, all the stories are really there, layered on top of each other, thicker and thicker with each generation. A palimpsest is a manuscript hand written over an older text; each bend in each country lane is a palimpsest with a hundred layers.
There are ugly stories, too. Stories of cruelty or abuse. These stories also lie around on the landscape and the surfaces and make those places hell, not home.
Camelot was an invisible castle except for those with the right eyes. If you didn’t understand the story you were a character in, you couldn’t see the Stranger who joined you on your walk to Emmaus. Just so; this middle of nowhere, Petercave Road, is invisible to most and you can only go if I take you. I’ll take you.
We drive the two lane hardtop out of town, past the funeral home, and up into the hills. Miles out, here’s a narrow gravel spur off to the right. There was never a roadsign there. You can’t see the words “Petercave Road” anywhere. If you needed a sign, you should be somewhere else. Nobody turns off here unless they’re looking for family.
We turn. The gravel road crosses the railroad track, then over Twelvepole Creek on a stone arched bridge, and then disappears deeper yet beyond the hill. It’s only gravel or dirt from here. Now no car can see us from the main hardtop.
As we drive it, you must imagine us walking it in summer, mom and me and brothers and sisters, along with uncles and cousins, 50 or more summers ago. The ringing of locusts, the musk of azalea. She’d talk about her girlhood, another 40 years further back, or she’d sing “que, sera, sera” – “whatever will be, will be”. She’d lean across the ditch toward the hillside, into the sassafras, and come back out with the tender sprig and show me the parts to chew. If you had been on that walk, you’d now pay attention to what overhangs a road, and what is back there in the shade. You’d pause where the road is wide, for a moment, and remember there is some story of hers about this wide spot. But you’d forgot the details.
Maybe it’s just this, this where she said “here, taste this sassafras.” And the outstretched hand, the leaves a few inches out from her fingers, the minty humus smell. The taste of teal shade. The taste of sunny ponds.
So this roadside is special to me, of course, because the trees and bushes and the air feels thick. You know how places feel thick? They feel thick when there’s a memory – any memory – overlaying the visuals. No-one else, driving this road, would ever be aware of the thickness here at this spot in the road.
But, then, everywhere is thick, every bend in every nowhere road, every clearing in all the nowhere woods. And almost all of the thickness is invisible to any one of us. Every thicket has stories upon stories composting in the undergrowth. The writers of the world are always trying to salvage them. I’m torn over this; I imagine myself knowing them all, seeing all the thickness around me, and I feel sick to my stomach with grief.
I imagine myself knowing them all, then I remember that God does know them all, and I think it positively breaks Him, this curse of knowing all the stories. The preachers talk about His omniscience as if that is something to shout and sing about, but it sounds to me like suffering. Jesus asked His hapless followers how the Messiah could possibly not have to suffer…I suppose He was talking about prophetic texts there, but He could have made the same argument just from the fig trees overhanging their walking paths.
We drive on further. Let’s pause again: over there on that knoll is the graveyard, at the end of that one-car track across the meadow. Here, where that grassy track first takes off from this gravel, there was a house – right here, where you see this weeded depression in the ground. Mom’s friend lived here, and the girls would spend the night here, and would look out from the bedroom window across the night fields in search of floating lights over the graves — their people. Sleeping just a shout from the graveyard you’d expect some mischief, and, sure enough, in the middle of the night some ghostly presence kicked the mattress up from beneath the bed. Mom told the story for laughs, not fright. The ghosts are the familiar spirits of the hollers: they belong.
The Bible is important in these hills, and Paul says “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord…” So they have no geography for ghosts, no…ghostology. But ghosts are here, as sure as the sassafras. They appear when the evenings are warm. With no ghostology, the spirits are a little unnerving, since there is no story for them here, but they are not malignant, since there is no story for them here. My mother taught me to walk that road at night with no flashlight, and she did not cross to avoid the deep shadows under the trees. The ghosts are not angry; they have no goals, except to loiter where they loved. The occasional acts of mischief are simply what children do who are seen but not heard.
As we move on from here pay attention to the grade of the road. The roads all run the slopes, the slopes are all footed with creeks, and so it is really the creeks that map the countryside and the lives. You grow up “on the creek”, you travel “up the creek” or “down the creek”.
Let’s climb this road up the creek and stop at the high point of the ridge, then look down the road as it drops through the leafy tunnel on the other side into the next holler, the next creek, and then rises eventually to yet another ridge. Look down; in this holler is the house where mom grew up without her dad, who died when she was two, of some disease that he would survive now.
The older brothers had to take his place. They worked the garden and were men enough to kill black snakes in the path to the well. Eventually they left the green country to fight in the War. All came home, miracles, and then became carpenters mostly, house-builders.
I remember those uncles, gone now, as silent men. When they’d rest, they’d look off down the creek, or up to the top of the ridge to check for clouds. Like many of that generation, they had no interest in introspection or suffering. The depression generation taught them to be quiet, the War made them quiet, Appalachian fatalism made them quiet, and they were men, so they were quiet. She was their baby sister, and so, quiet. But what about that little sister? I should have asked her before the Alztheimer’s changed quiet back to silent: did those brothers all together feel like a father to you?
If you grow up too fast, is there a black hole in the memory? She never quite talked about her girlhood the way I am now talking to you about my boyhood. Like the unschooled knight in the grail legend who never asked the right question to resurrect the countryside, I never quite asked her the right question. So I never heard her story, not as a whole. She’d sing “Que Sera, sera, whatever will be, will be…” and I had the sense that as she sang she was looking back along all the thick thickets and sassafras hedges for some trace of a girlhood dream. But I might be making that up.
The brothers. They all loved this place and lived as close to it as they could, till they died of old age, but I never heard any of them try to articulate their affection. This is just where their people were.
We turn here and the crunch of gravel under tires gives way to the swish of the grass drive up to the house. What town people would call the driveway is just a whiter track through the grass. We can park in the yard, anywhere, a little ways from the front porch.
She did tell stories. During the war, she said, they would put the radio up here on the porch and put chairs out in the yard and sit at twilight listening to the news of the fighting. Lightening bugs would glimmer all around. She would have been a teenager, brothers in danger, dad long gone, and slowly becoming aware of her own mother’s exposure to grief in the quiet of the huddle at the radio. So I at least got from her that the porch is for listening.
It was here I first heard a whippoorwill, and a bob white, the twilight birds. The call had come from somewhere up in that same willow which must have been smaller forty years ago. Tonight, the moon glows in the upper branches. The same moon that had smiled at my childish effort to mimic the bird’s call and draw him in closer to the house.
It was here I first heard a dog howl at the moon. City-folk don’t hear that sound; we hear whole nights of barking and occasional moans at sirens but not that howl which makes you part the curtains and look down to where the road uncoils and slithers up to the yard. That sound is the closest to fear I’ve felt among the country ghosts. Old people say dogs see the souls of the newly dead as they cross the moon. I guess the ghost must see the dog, too, and the dog knows it, and there’s something in the face of the ghost the dog is trying to report. This is a mystery, yes. Few understand that report. It isn’t safe to try to understand it. There are those in these Appalachian hills who do, but the price of creating your own ghostology is dishevelment all around: they live alone, their hair is unkempt, their houses have rats, their teeth rot. They live too close to the weeds.
But don’t look down on my people as if you’re smarter. The dog isn’t stupid or just yelling his head off out of boredom. We fell with Adam, the country preachers say, and so I think there are fallen liturgies, ceremonies, which are fragments of a story so they have jagged edges. They fell into the thickets and got lost to us under the brush. When someone dies in the house, and the house is far enough from all car headlights, elemental spirits try on those liturgies, like children try on costumes from long ago, and shapes happen in the dark. The dogs see the spirits make their mocking faces. Just leave them be. They have nothing. This is not your mother, tell yourself, this is a shadow. You can’t talk with it. She is now in the sassafras.
I know. It is a common sentiment, this fuzzy nostalgia, this wondering about lives, this feeling of lives in ancestral places. But it won’t go away — lives, lives, lives. If it is common, that must mean it is a question needing answered. And here is how I want to put it this time: if your mother knew how to chew sassafras when she was 10, what else does knowing her even mean? The philosophers talk about the essence of a thing hidden by the surface, the accidents. But this has misled so many to think there’s a core reality underneath the sights, smells, or touches from another hand. No, we love the accidents or nothing at all. We love each story or it falls into the ditch among the weeds, leaving only a light floating above the graves. God has to know each story because He can’t help it. So when a story full of accidents isn’t passed on in the concrete world, He is one more story more alone.
We go through that sophisticated stage. We want to throw off the accidents of the nowhere we came from, and put on the accidents that mean something. So, country kid runs away to bright lights and big city. By now this escape from nowhere to the city has become a part of our American myth. I gotta blow this place, and all that.
But this myth is adolescent. A few outgrow it and discover that they never needed to run. They discover that all the accidents of life are equally connected to what finishes our hunger. Though meaning is more than the sum of the accidents, meaning is only an emergent property from deep within the accidents, and within them all equally. Start from anywhere or nowhere. It doesn’t matter, because it all matters.