I was walking out this morning with rambling on my mind.
—Sara Carter
There’s a curve in the road, and a slow curve in the land,
Outside of Barbourville, Kentucky, on U.S. 25E,
I’ve always liked
each time I’ve passed it,
Bottomland, river against a ridge to the west,
A few farmhouses on each side of the road, some mailboxes
Next to a dirt lane that leads off through the fields.
Each time I’d think
How pleasant it must be to live here.
_____
In Kingsport, when I was growing up,
Everyone seemed to go to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, up U.S. 23,
All the time.
Everyone had an uncle or aunt there,
Or played golf, or traded cars.
They were always going up there
to get married, or get liquor,
Or to get what was owed them
By someone they’d been in the service with.
Lone went up there more often than anyone else did,
Part of his territory for State Farm,
somebody said,
Without much conviction.
When the talk turned to whiskey,
and everyone dusted his best lie off,
We all know, or thought we knew, where Lone went
With his funny walk and broken back
He could hit a golf ball a ton with,
even if he did stand sideways
Like a man hauling a body out of the water,
Being the real owner, we thought, of that gas station out on the Jonesboro highway
You went to the back of
for a pint after 10 p.m.,
Lone getting richer and richer until the Moose Lodge
Started to take his business away
by doing it legal, and during the daylight.
So Lone went back, we all thought,
To stumping around the golf course, still
Hitting it sideways, still selling whatever he could
To anyone foolish enough to play with him and pay him,
Old Lone, slicker than owl oil.
_____
It was all so American,
The picket fence of wrought iron a hundred years old,
Lilacs at every corner of the lawned yard
in great heaps and folds,
A white house and wild alfalfa in scattered knots
Between the fence the cracked sidewalk,
The wind from the Sawtooth Mountains
riffling the dust in slow eddies along the street
Near the end of June in Hailey, Idaho,
The house where Pound was born,
with its red maple floors
And small windows two blocks from Idaho 75,
Hemingway ten miles on up the same road between two evergreens,
Nobody noticing either place
as the cars went through town
All night and all day, going north, going south . . .
_____
Another landscape I liked
Was south of Wytheville, Virginia, on U.S. 52
Just short of the Carolina line,
a steel bridge over the New River,
Pasture on both sides of the road and woods on the easy slopes,
Big shrubs and trees lining the riverbanks like fur,
The road and the river both
Angling back toward the Iron Mountains,
The valley bulging out to the east
in a graceful swirl,
The dead chestnut trees like grey candles
Wherever the woods began . . .
What is it about a known landscape
that tends to undo us,
That shuffles and picks us out
For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine
Seen in profusion deep in the timber
Suddenly seems to rise like a lavendar ground fog
At noon?
What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
when something is given back
We didn’t know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?
_____
Today, at midsummer noon, I took the wooden floats
To the Yaak River, the small ones I’d carved from the larch
And cedar chips,
and loosed them downstream
To carry my sins away, as the palace gardians did each year at this time
In medieval Japan,
Where the river goes under the new bridge
on County 508
And the first homesteaders took up their quarter sections.
From Sam Runyan’s to Susie Speed’s
Through white water and rock and the tendrilous shade
Of the tamaracks,
out into rubbery blotches of sunlight,
The floats’ shadows hanging beneat them like odd anchors
Along the pebbled bottom, the river slowing and widening,
The floats at great distances from one another
Past Binder’s cabin under the black
of the evergreen-covered dam
And over the falls and gone into foam and next year . . .
_____
In the world of dirt, each tactile thing
repeats the untouchable
In its own way, and in its own time.
Just short of Tryon, North Carolina, on U. S. 176,
Going south down the old Saluda Grade,
kudzu has grown up
And over the tops of miles of oak trees and pine trees,
A wall of vines a hundred feet high, or used to be,
Into South Carolina,
That would have gone for a hundred more with the right scaffolding,
Rising out of the rock and hard clay in thin, prickly ropes
To snake and thread in daily measurable distances
Over anything still enough long enough,
and working its way
Out of the darkness and overhang of its own coils
To break again and again
Into the sunlight, worthless and everywhere,
breathing, breathing,
Looking for leverage and a place to climb.
_____
It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.
Going west out of Kalispell, Montana, on U.S. 2,
If you turned at Kila,
and skirted the big slough
Where Doagie Duncan killed three men some seventy years ago
After a fight over muskrat hides,
Then turned south toward the timber
and higher ground
On the dirt road to the Flathead Mine,
Past Sundelius’ homestead and up toward Brown’s Meadows,
Then swung down where the mine road
branches right and doubles back,
You’d come through the thinning spruce and fir
And lodgepole pine to suddenly open hillsides
And deep draws
of the Hog Heaven country
And start to see what I mean, the bunchgrass and bitterroot
And wild clover flattening under the wind
As you turned from the dirt road,
opened the Kansas gate
And began to follow with great care
The overgrown wagon ruts through the blowing field,
the huge tamarack snag,
Where the tracks end and the cabin is,
Black in the sunlight’s wash and flow
just under the hill’s crown,
Pulling you down like weight to the front door . . .
The cabin is still sizable, four rooms and the walls made
Of planed lumber inside,
the outside chinked with mud
And cement, everything fifty years
Past habitation, the whole structure
leaning into the hillside,
Windowless, doorless, and oddly beautiful in its desolation
And attitude, and not like
The cold and isolate misery it must have stood for
When someone lived here, and heard, at night,
This same wind sluicing the jack pines
and ruined apple trees
In the orchard, and felt the immensity
Loneliness brings moving under his skin
Like a live thing, and emptiness everywhere like a live thing
Beyond the window’s reach and fire’s glare . . .
Whoever remembers that best owns all this now.
After him it belongs to the wind again,
and the shivering bunchgrass, ad the seed cones.
_____
There is so little to say, and so much time to say it in.
Once, in 1955 on an icy road in Sam’s Gap, North Carolina,
Going north into Tennessee on U.S. 23,
I spun out on a slick patch
And the car turned once-and-a-half around,
Stopping at last with one front wheel on a rock
and the other on air,
Hundreds of feet of air down the mountainside
I backed away from, mortal again
After having left myself
and returned, having watched myself
Wrench the wheel toward the spin, as I’m doing now,
Stop and shift to reverse, as I’m doing now,
and back out on the road
As I entered my arms and fingers again
Calmly, as though I had never left them,
Shift to low, and never question the grace
That had put me there and alive, as I’m doing now . . .
_____
Solo Joe is a good road.
It cuts southwest off Montana 508 above Blacktail Creek,
Crosses the East Fork of the Yaak River
and climbs toward Mount Henry.
Joe was an early prospector
Back in the days when everything came in by pack string
Or didn’t come at all.
One spring he shot his pet cat
On the front porch with a rifle between the eyes
As she came through the cabin door.
He later explained she was coming for him
but he got her first.
He drank deer’s blood, it was said, and kept to himself,
Though one story has him a gambler later downriver near Kalispell.
Nobody lives there now,
But people still placer-mine in the summer, and camp out
Illegally on the riverbank.
No one knows anything sure about Joe but his first name
And the brown government sign that remembers him.
And that’s not so bad, I think.
It’s a good road, as I say,
And worse things than that will happen to most of us.
_____
The road in is always longer than the road out,
Even if it’s the same road.
I think I’d like to find one
impassable by machine,
A logging road from the early part of the century,
Overgrown and barely detectable.
I’d like it to be in North Carolina,
in Henderson County
Between Mount Pinnacle and Mount Anne,
An old spur off the main track
The wagons and trucks hauled out on.
Blackberry brambles, and wild raspberry and poison ivy
Everywhere; grown trees between the faint ruts;
Deadfall and windfall and velvety sassafras fans
On both sides . . .
It dips downhill and I follow it.
It dips down and it disappears and I follow it.
from The Other Side of the River (FSG, 1984).
Collected in The World of the Ten Thousand Things (FSG (1990)
Reprinted by permission of the author.