APPALACHIA AS A WAY-STATION

Lucy May Pinkerton Strachan, 16 years old in 1925

My mother’s papers are mostly about her family.  She was a proud Daughter of the Oregon Trail, which records the origins of the travelers -- in her case Kentucky and Missouri.  She grew up at the southern end of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, hill country not unlike the Ozarks and Appalachia.  But she scoffed that some there “live in the hollows and pool their ignorance.”  She was talking about her in-laws.  The Pinkerton girls went for education, the Hatfield boys went for land, and the two families were joined by three marriages, three brides for three brothers.  These same marriages also split the families through rivalry over who was the Alpha.

The Appalachian mountains themselves were created in something like the same way.  A collision of the underlying tectonic plates threw ancient bedrock up into mountains higher than today’s Himalayans, wore them down but then split them to either side of the growing Atlantic Ocean basin so that half ended up being the island and peninsula countries of Norway and Britain, on south to the Atlas Mountains of Africa.  The other half is what we call the Appalachians today.  The migrations of humans across the Atlantic ocean merely made threads across what had once been contiguous, esp. for Scots/Irish people.  To them the soil, the vegetation, and the coal mining were familiar.

At first the new coastal colonial nation was content to accept the remnant range of Appalachians as a natural barrier marking off the Indian lands beyond.  But the coast filled up and newcomers crowded over the mountains.  The French and Spanish circled around to the Mississippi River and ascended into the prairies along the drainage of the Rockies.  The fertile Ohio Valley area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi grew in a three-way settlement pattern among Brits crowding over the Appalachians, esp. after the Irish famine and the Scots land clearances;  French preserving their empire; and the Native Americans trying to maintain their own Five Nations and more.

The Old Northwest, a Territory or a Colony of the new nation, USA

The Old Northwest, a distinct political entity, formed around the waterways represented by the Great Lakes.  In my paternal grandmother’s time, (b. Oct 28, 1871, Quincy, MI, just south of Lansing) this was still forested country and she told about walking with her mother on a path where a group of Indian men stood aside to let them pass.  The NA tribes had also formed a nation around the connected lakes but now they dwindled to an interstitial population hardly recognized by others until the recent renaissance of consciousness.  Hit hard by Euro diseases and finally exhausting their wealth of beaver, many became Metis, then even paler, or moved on farther West.  

The land went to agriculture.  Canals were dug, railroads built.  This is where the main culture we accept as American was formed -- in the “middle.”  By mid-19^th century when the farms and towns had finally committed most of the land and the prairie clearances of tribes had ended in the first treaties, movement still farther West began, often launching from St. Louis, which was supplied by steam boats from New Orleans.  

Now my mother’s direct ancestors began to move along the Oregon Trail behind ox-wagons.  These are her “provenance”, her mother’s “tribe.”

From the Kentucky/Missouri complex:  

1845 James Cochran and Elizabeth Bevins; 

1847 William Cochran and Mary (Polly) Johnson Cochran.  

1851: William Philpott from Virginia; Sarah Darby from Kentucky.  

1852: James Cochran.  

Then those who arrived through birth:  

1851: William Thurston Cochran and in 

1857: Lucy Jane Philpott.

These last two married and became my maternal great-grandparents, forever locked into arrogance about their origins which was tightly connected to church affiliation, the Cochran rigid Presbyterianism v. the more graceful Philpott Virginian affiliation which I suspect was Episcopalian.  Lucy Jane, a high-spirited woman, died young because of complications of childbirth and WT remarried a woman called “Sarah,” whose step-children did not like her.  They called her “Sairey”. These patterns are hard to discard.

Massive sweeps of human population go back to the primal migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa far back in history but nevertheless governed by bodies of water, mountain walls, tribes, commerce and disease.  “Gunpowder, Germs, and Steel.”  Never resolved, always contending (push those neanderthals out of the way), always creating new extinctions and metis groups.  We pretend it’s about religion, but that’s the consequence rather than the cause.  Sometimes the ferment comes to rest for long enough that a generation can grow up.  They think, “Oh, this is the way the world is.”  And they fight to keep it that way -- if it’s to their advantage.  They lose anyway.  Eventually.

My mother left a pile of clips, photos, letters and so on, which she did her best to organize before her death.  The individuals named above settled mostly in the Willamette Valley and did well, though there were eccentrics and black sheep among them.  Clergy, judges, businessmen.  There were still full-blood tribal Indians in my mother’s girlhood (b. 1909, Payette, ID). She took great pride that during the Roseburg Strawberry Festival, the chief of the Calipooyas chose her serving table and accepted his bowl of berries and cream from her own hands. All this material remains for me to convert into what some might call a novel.  Her predecessors belonged to the great triple movement across the Atlantic in Colonial times and on over the Appalachians after the American Revolution and then to the coastal green West across the arid sea bed of the high North American “desert”.

The progression across the continent went parallel to time, at right angles to time, in opposition to time.  Ways of doing things changed, persisted, became irrelevant.

My father’s father was in Scotland until the end of the 19th century.  But the family namesake fortunes were also related to the Atlantic Ocean since the Strachans, though the present descendants are barely conscious of it, were involved in the Great Triangle of trade: sugar cane, rum and slaves.  

Selwyn Strachan

The proof is a complex of Caribbean people named Strachan, who are black.  Former slaves took the names of their owners, or were assigned them.  In some genealogies, one traces back several generations and then hits a research barrier.  I think this is one of them.

By the time of the Boomer Generation, which I barely precede (b. 1939), there is even more emphasis on national origins because of the bookend Great Wars displacing peoples.  The Great Depression in between was a monster that still haunts everyone.  And now there is much awareness of the “Spanish flu” that was the shadow of WWI, because it seems a foreshadow of Ebola.  Flu nearly killed my mother as a child and did kill her doctor.  Her younger sister, who did not live long enough to become an aunt, was killed as a teenager in a car accident.  A great industrial powered mobility resulted from the invention of the automobile and the webwork of highways Eisenhower mandated.

My maternal grandmother @WWI.  The baby is the girl killed in an auto accident as a teenager.  

The older girl served as an Army nurse during WWII.  My mother may have been in bed with the flu at this point.  

Aliene may be the bump under the apron.

None of this means much unless it informs our futures.  War, economic depression and industrial developments still threaten us, nibble at our edges, put damp poisonous hands over our mouths and noses.  The one saving grace seems to be electronics but we forget that the sun itself could flare out to fry our infrastructures, satellites and all, with one burst of cosmic energy.  Some of us -- in black moods -- think that might be a good thing.  Others think of migrating to the stars.  And still others fancy going back to visit their roots, to see what is there now.  But it all depends on which roots one chooses to claim, doesn’t it?

Most of my life has been on the Lewis and Clark trail.

In fact, I'm living on it right now in Montana.

"OUT OF PEEL TREE" by Laura Long: A Review

From the outside, the Appalachians look quaint or deprived or trapped or something else sociological and graphable.  But to themselves they must be like the stories in "Out of Peel Tree", just going along in their lives -- in and out of old houses, friendships, love affairs, jobs, prison, college, and -- wait now!  Here’s an assassin!  Are there assassins in West Virginia?  (Aren’t there assassins everywhere?)  

This is story shading into poems, acutely intricate, some short glimpses, some a little longer, until a town forms from the relationships and a meaning forms from the knitted metaphors.  There’s a kitten unraveling an afghan but it might be Penelope’s shroud or it might be Indra’s net.  No one will force you to see more than you want to.  It’s just that things go along through time and sometimes they’re a big surprise -- like the old lady who traps an intruder who tries to rob her.  Sometimes the story has a sharp niggling hook, like that assassin -- who can’t quite forget a twitch in the corner of his victim’s mouth, like an insect trying to get out.  Or maybe the last humanity of a person trying to be a blank.

If you’ve seen the documentary “Following Sean” you’ll remember how people sort of wandered along, searching for their thalwag on their way to the sea.  And that was in San Francisco, which is not like the Appalachians at ALL.  Isn’t that right?  The smoking, the fantasies, the little projects like gardens or knitting.  Events go along, developing inevitability like roots seeking water, or reaching towards something indescribable like branches spreading towards sunlight.  First thing you know you’ve got a tree.  Another metaphor.

There are a lot of blurbs in the front of this book -- after all, it’s a slender book and you’ll want to make sure you get your money’s worth.  Not to worry.  But Sara Pritchard nails it when she says that for her the recurrent word was “tenderness.”  I see that the blurbs are mostly by other writers, which is a phenomenon we’re all used to, but I begin to see something behind it besides sharing and sympathy, etc.  When a person is reaching into the deep aquifers of memory and distilling it for writing, there’s a kind of trance that forms, a dome over a virtual world, a sensibility the reader can enter and that becomes realer than real.  You could say “immersive,” but in this case it’s not just suspense or the slam of extremes that pulls you in.  Nor is it as banal as having tea on a shaded porch with a nice new friend.  It’s more like feeling a pulse: warm, intimate, and steady.

People pass in and out of houses, grad school programs, marriages, childhood, jobs, prison and affairs.  They discover so many surprises and you’d think some of them would change everything, but not so much after all.  The material culture is what we know: grandma’s teapot, a kitchen linoleum pattern, bedding.  Some people will get a sheet of paper and map out the relationships, make a time-line, but I’m learning not to do that -- just to let the stories unfold like a flower blooming so as to pay attention to the scent.  Not that it’s all pretty and nice, neatened up, tied with a bow.

How does a person learn to write like this?  Laura Long sent me a chapbook of poems along with the stories.  “The Eye of Caroline Herschel: a Life in Poems” is based on a real person, a female astronomer who discovered comets and planets. One of the “rules” about writing is supposed to be that one must “show -- not tell.”  What Herschel “did” was mostly sit in the cold dark and peer through a telescope at the galaxies far far away.  But Long knows how to inhabit such a woman, so what we realize is that there is a sociological web of rules trying to prevent her from doing this quiet, private thing, but that she manages to slip through them in various ways, and the small blips of light have huge implications, even for the mad King George III who takes a kind of hallucinatory sci-fi approach with his entourage of near-alien females.

Here’s a poem for Herschel’s nephew, whom -- like the telescope -- she borrowed from her brother.

BRINK

Rocking you, I invent new words

to old lullabies while five in the morning

turns to six.  Any minute now the world

will pause, pushed to a brink by your eyes,

where every face becomes a field

of possibilities, a guiltless geometry.

A thrush sings the day into light

as a thrush sang a thousand years ago.

The day rubs the dark off its hands.

Rocking a baby and singing is a “showing” more than a telling, but what is pushing a world to the brink by your eyes?  A thrush sings, but does the day have hands, much less rub dark off them?  Of course.  Long inhabits several worlds at once and gives us access.

This poetic ability is what she brings to the narrative in “Out of Peel Tree.”  The book begins with a dream about a returning lover (there are several in these stories) who brings a burlap sack:  a sack of winds?  Pandora’s box made fabric?  “The trace of longing that remains after hope disappears.”  The lover in the dream says, “I don’t want you here.”  I had to read that six times to make sure I read it right.

Here’s the whole plot of the sum of the short stories:  “She was crazy for a man who could repair broken-down objects.  She had grown up in the middle of West Virginia with close to nothing after her dad died, when she was eight.  She had a sweet kid brother, but she grew up with a soused, screwball mom whose second marriage brought twin sisters that she, Corina, took care of.”

Each chapter notes which character is the center of that particular story just then, but at the end of the book Corina is still taking care, this time returning from the funeral of her grandmother Essie, one of the best episodes.  As a writer myself, I always pay a lot of attention to the last paragraph of a book.  Here’s this one:

“Now a midnight wind cry-pries through a crack in the window and snarls my hair.  A ghost-memory of Essie brushes my cheek.  I want to drink coffee with Ruben in the morning and feel the spinning edge of being awake when I’m exhausted, the deep crash of kissing him when I feel cut through by a strange road.  I burn through the dark over an earth my grandma’s shell lies beneath.  My blood sings me forward, caught between the quick spin of a continent, slow burst of a star.”

This is the new religion of ordinary folks: neither pie nor Big Guy in the sky, but only the stars.  What makes it qualify as salvation, redemption, forgiveness of sins, is participation.  They were there together.  They were paying attention.  They are woven into it along Indra’s net, each a pearl, each a dewdrop.

Be awful keerful whut u dream.