How time can just ruin a man

I’m sitting here in the cabin with NFL Primetime on the television, Rudy outside barking, the wood stove emanating warm dry heat and a bluish moon rising over Cornbread Ridge. I spent the entire day with my buddy Curt. We drove into Princeton and ran errands which included going to Lowes and buying new bars and chains for our chainsaws and then driving out True Road in Summers County, visiting with my friend Josh, his wife Ginny and their two adorable youngsters. We took in breath-taking southern West Virginia scenery all day, driving back roads up and down and over mountain after mountain until finally dropping down beside Bluestone Lake. It was frozen over from shore to shore. Barren mountains formed a ring around the body of water.

We crossed over into Hinton and went to see Curt’s brother, Kevin, who is just a few years older than me, who is at a nursing home after a tragic and horrible motorcycle accident several years ago. I hadn’t seen Kevin since I lived up here when I was 23, over 15 years ago. Back then I had spent a good deal of time with him. I used to go cutting firewood with him. He cut it and I hauled it into the truck. One day I remember we brought back 4 regular-size pickup truck loads to the cabin in just a few hours. He was full of life back then, wiry and muscled, tan and more than a little wild. We used to listen to Bocephus in his red Chevy z71 truck while barreling around sharp curves on dirt roads above the hollow.

The man I saw today was just a husk of the man I once knew. I followed behind Curt as we walked down the hallways of the nursing home, past other men and women in advanced stages of decline. We arrived at Kevin’s room and found him slumped in a wheelchair asleep. Curt began crying as soon as we entered the room. He went to his brother and lovingly cooed words to him while petting his head and kissing it. I stood to the side and just witnessed. Curt is one of the toughest men I’ve ever known…perhaps the toughest. His hands are thick and strong and rough as sand paper. He held his brother and wept. I was grateful to him for letting me in, for not being ashamed or embarrassed to share this moment with me. He tried to wake him but Kevin only opened his eyes and looked at us. He was confused and distant, mumbled a few words and drifted back to sleep. We only stayed for 20 minutes or so. As we left I put my arm around Curt and patted him on the back. Once outside the depressing building where people go to die Curt’s spirit lifted and we took off again on mountain roads towards home.

We drove to Nimitz and then got on Ellison Ridge and dug the countryside as the sun began sinking in the western sky. Enormous meadows stretched out in open spaces between steep mountainsides. We talked about old times, Curt spinning yarns about being a boy in this country wrecking cars, hunting deer, growing weed and chasing girls. Later we filled jugs with gasoline and headed back to Wolf Creek Hollow. Back at my cabin we tuned up our chainsaws and went out into the cold night and sawed firewood.

Mountain House of Rock and Wood

Lovely images come forth in my mind of the home I am in the process of building. A spacious, warm, loving environment for family and friends from near and far to come visit, spend time, relax, dig the West Virginia back country and share our lives and experiences. This thought excites me the most. I picture my big mountain house of wood and rock, built from the land around it, with a steady stream of loved ones flowing through throughout the year. That is what I want. That is what I desire more than anything else in my life I think. I truly feel like I am home and I want to take care of this place, treat it right and share it with my dear ones.

The summer cabin I am living in and working on right now should be completely finished in a couple of years. At least that is the time I’m thinking and hoping it will take. With the wages I earn working as a chef I am able to buy materials and it may take that long to be able to pay for everything. The work I am doing myself with my friend and neighbor Curt’s invaluable help. But when it’s done it will be paid for! Then I will begin the process again on a proper house and when that is finished the cabin will open up (as well as rooms and living space in the new house) for friends and family to visit on a more regular basis. I see meals shared on a big table in the late summer evening of vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses…grown, raised and fixed right there on the farm. I smell campfires at night. I hear the telling stories. I see beautiful faces of friends illuminated by the fire. Huge Christmas feasts with a house overflowing with friends, family and love.

So tonight as I sit here at my desk with the lamps burning and the wood stove glowing red from the heat of roasting logs, Muddy Waters on the stereo, the hound dog stretched out on a fleece blanket next to the stove, tonight it may just be me and Rudy down here in the holler but I know others will be arriving shortly in the scheme of things. Won’t you pull up a chair, kick up your feet and have some laughs with me on the porch? Later I’ll take ya frog giggin’!

Things I must earn

And there are those nights when I am driving to the store with my hound dog sitting there in the cab of the truck with me, and the darkness all around, the road bumping and looping and whirling around mountain bends, snow beginning to fall. The blower is on blasting the dash and windshield with hot air, melting the ice crystals and burning the moisture off the glass. Again I am listening to the Big Dog radio station out of Beckley and that same high school sports announcer again, this time calling the Woodrow Wilson Flying Eagles Varsity Boy’s Basketball game. The announcer’s voice takes me once again. My childhood in Raleigh County blossoms forth in my mind’s eye again. I attended the games at the Raleigh County Armory with my parents and my sister Julie. My sister Beth was a cheerleader so she would be down next to the court jumping and cheering and smiling a lot. I’d get permission from my parents to run around the hallways with other boys my age sometimes. It was a real treat to go out to the games. Dad always bought us a coke and some popcorn. During halftime my sister and the other cheerleaders would throw out little small plastic basketballs with the Flying Eagle logo and a sponsorship from The Raleigh County Bank where my mother worked as a teller. Outside in the cold winter nights of my early youth frost was building up on the little league baseball fields just outside the armory. Beyond the baseball diamonds cow pastures stretched into the whispering darkness towards distant mountain ridges.

I recall hearing Queen’s We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions being played loud over the PA system and the smell of popcorn and soda pop. The cheer of the crowd and the loud boos when the home crowd didn’t agree with a call. Afterwards we would file out of the arena and into the cold lamp lit night. Tiny snowflakes would cascade down in columns of bright white lamp light. All of the cars in the lot would be covered in snow. Every single one of them! It was such a thing of beauty. Especially those first few moments…before anyone arrived at their cars, when the blanket of gathering snow was at its purest and most pristine, no footprints yet, maybe two lonely car tracks leaving out from someone who exited the game early. I can hear the sounds of windshields being scraped, motors starting and idling, a radio blasting rock into the silence. I can see puffs of smoke from the exhausts of the automobiles huddled in the cold. I’d huddle in the backseat with my sisters and we’d snuggle with each other to get warm. Dad would drive and mom sat in the passenger seat and they talked about the game and talked to Beth about it since she was down by the court most of the game. I never, not once in my life, ever felt scared for even a second in the car with my dad behind the wheel. It never even occurred to me that there might be some kind of danger with the condition of the roads and all. My dad was an excellent driver. Truly he was one of the greats. He knew his vehicle inside and out and was one with it on the road.

All of this flashes by in my 38 year old noggin’ as I navigate the four wheel drive down increasingly snow-covered roads with one arm around my dog Rudy and the other wrapped on top of the steering wheel. Insouciantly I pilot the truck down the same roads my father used to drive me down and I feel connection in the night, connection to the Holy Spirit of eternal mystery. And my mind rests for a moment of reverie on the true nature of T I M E : Things I must earn.

Things I must earn.

The Pilgrim's Path

I have a pot of green tea steeping in the kitchen. I’ll only be a minute. Things echo off the darkness. The cabin is still and quiet in the night. I can hear and feel both the fire in the fireplace and the fire in the wood stove across the big room. They’ve both been going for days now, constantly burning, embers flaming and then waning with every descendant load of wood that gets added. Did I mention how quiet it is? It is mind-shatteringly quiet here. The hillsides are barren of leaves and undergrowth, bluish white snow carpets the midnight Appalachian Mountains. There is a red hound dog asleep on the bed. Her legs and arms are outstretched as if in mid run. Occasionally she will have a fit in her sleep, dreaming of chasing deer I imagine, and her legs and arms will twitch and jerk and she will begin to talk and howl in her dream.

Well I made it here. Moved up here in late May of last year and writing this as of January of 2011. It was a bit of stunt to pull for sure. Even for me. I’d lain really low for six years and licked my wounds after having to come to terms with my alcoholism and drug addiction. I’d just buried my dear father and off I go and decide to move once again to the farm in West Virginia. There was definitely more than a bit of grandiosity to it. But there always was in the past too. My mind has a real love of grandiosity. Anyway, the difference this time has been being a man instead of a boy. I really can’t put it any better or simpler than that. My heart has shifted significantly over the past several years. I’ve grown and there’s no sense denying it…I’ve aged.

I haven’t been listening to music much here at the cabin. I prefer the silence. I listen to the fire burning, the crackle of wood in the flames, the creaking of the old cabin, the wind howling on the window panes and through the fluted trees. I can literally hear

the snow melt, the drip drip drip off the roof top, the sound of slushy week-old snow under boot. I’ve long admired the pace of nature, the rhythms of the natural world. I’ve always sought to get connected. All my life I’ve wanted to live here on this farm so I could be close to nature, so I could learn from it. I’ve learned the ways of the cities of the world. It’s not for me. It never was for me. But I played along. I chased it. I thought I’d find happiness behind the wheel of the latest new thing all the while knowing what my heart truly desired was ancient wilderness.

Is it in fact feasible and possible to live a different kind of life? The kind of life I’ve always dreamed of living. Well, I’m finding out right now. Once the grandiosity of the Big Move wore off it was down to brass tacks and daily living in a 40+ year old summer cabin with often dodgy utilities. And it’s been a crash course in country living for this suburban boy ever since. This place is already marking me up, claiming me as one of its own once again. In all honesty, I fit right in here. I’ve been reconnected to my tribe, the hard-working blue collar people of southern West Virginia. From them I arose into life and to them I now return. I left when I was twelve years old, a neat bookend to my childhood, a closing of the door on that wondrous time of life and the opening of another door into the whacked out mania of puberty and adolescence. Then of course young adulthood with its own dramas and comedies…and now…middle age.

My past has been full of more twists and turns than these mountain roads I now drive daily. And everything, all the minutiae of my personal path and journey has led to this dead end road down in the holler. This is truly the end of one long and winding road for me. I’ve not made it through the winter yet but I know I will. I won’t be run off like I was those other times. This time will stick. I’m making a home here, a base, a pastoral life. Everything I’ve learned up to this point is golden, every experience, every failure, every struggle, and every disappointment. They are all like money in the bank. Things I thought I’d never be able to understand are now just common knowledge to me, no big deal in the Grand Scheme of things. The seasons shift, the heavy snows and icy throes of winter will blend into the muddy rains and pale green longings of Spring which will ease almost imperceptibly into the bright neon green leafy glory of a warm summer, that then slowly fades as the light recedes, leaves fall, temperatures drop…and the snow comes again.

And I’ll be here, living, watching, learning, growing…listening. Just a pilgrim on his path.