The Vagabond

Appalachia is a strangely enchanting place. It's impossible not to be taken by its immense natural beauty, and then, after a while, by its deep sense of lore and mystery. There’s something about it that draws you in and arouses a childlike sense of curiosity and wonder. The way the mist descends upon the hushed valley and spills over crags, then seems to float across open pastures is a sight to behold for those who’ve never seen it. It inspires a sort of reverence, and when I first saw it in the early hours of the morning just after dawn, I thought it almost looked like incense being offered in the sight of nature’s cathedral. It’s a wonderful place to feel lost, and there’s no shortage of places to do it, especially at dusk as the sun starts to set behind the rolling mountains, setting the sky ablaze with one final flourish of its crimson brilliance before conceding the governance of the heavens to its nocturnal counterparts.

On clear nights in autumn and winter, you can look up into the inky blackness and high above the trees you can make out the cloudy bands of the Milky Way, stretching across the heavens from one horizon to the other, around which all the ancient myths almost seem to come alive while in the midst of playing out their eternal celestial dramas. And under the watchful gaze of these great luminaries, flickering puddles of yellow light and tiny plumes of chimney smoke sparsely dot the great hillish heaps of dark in the distance. But perhaps its most noticeable feature is that the air is so clean and crisp, --the difference is unexpected, and something you don't fully realize until you’re miles away from the nearest city.

I first met the Bradley boy after I took a job at the local sawmill and lumber yard. I was hired as little more than some hired muscle to help move around giant logs and then guide them down the conveyor belt that led to the whining band saw at the end, though sometimes we’d spend entire days planting loblolly pines, --hundreds of them in tidy little lines, straight as we could make them.

His real name was William Bixby Bradley, the latest in a long line of Bradleys of the same name, but everyone simply called him by his familial name, it being specific enough for any colloquial use. His family owned the mill, or had at least for generations, but their history in the Callaghan valley was said to be roughly contemporary to the incorporation of the nearest town of Covington.

Much like the largely undisturbed countryside that surrounded it, Covington was quiet and though it boasted no substantial population, it seemed at peace with the fact that its existence was to all accounts a well-guarded secret of the Appalachian foothills. It lay at the fork of where Dunlap Creek met the Jackson River and whose waterways into the mountains had once been essential to the town’s logging industry. Its small network of streets spread themselves out in a roughly southeasterly direction from this junction, but the old town’s Main Street could still be found most proximate to it, closely hugging the shoreline of the river. It was a lazy street, --only a few hundred yards long, if I had to guess, --which required only two traffic lights, one on either end where it intersected with busier thoroughfares. Much like many another rural streets of the same name, it was flanked on either side by two-story buildings with wide brick facades, in the middle of which were awnings of different heights, colors, and styles that spread themselves over the narrow sidewalk which ran beneath them. But the most conspicuous building on Main Street was the US Post Office. It was a quaint colonial-style brick building with an ornate cornice and a recessed portico, which was flanked on either side by two sets of tall single-glazed windows. It felt somehow out of place among the more crude and rustic buildings which surrounded it, but was at least complemented by the wrought iron street lamps which ran down both sides of the street at equal intervals, and had no doubt been retrofitted for electricity sometime later than most in the previous century.

Alleghany Street, however, was the busiest and transected the town from north to south and at its upper end, just before it resumed its identity as State Highway 220, stood the lofty whitewashed steeple of an old church, built originally by a Methodist congregation as a sort of wooden slat-framed structure, but having been in more recent years renovated with red brick. Its pulpit was now inhabited by a man fresh out of the preacher mill, --as I once heard the Bradley boy put it, --but to all appearances he was not without his talents and was able to draw a reliable crowd of the elderly for his twice-weekly sermons. His face may have been young, but the old ladies attested that the New Testament pages of his Bible were well-worn, which was apparently a good sign.

Some houses in need of a fresh coat of paint were scattered around the periphery of the main street, but most people lived outside the town limits in the surrounding countryside. On a clear day, you could see the hills dotted with small clearings at the end of unpaved roads in which were nestled homes and homesteads of various sizes and states of repair. The best were those most recently built by folks looking for some quiet retirement away from the Beltway. The worst were little more than compounds of double-wides streaked with green mold wherever the rain most easily ran off their roofs. These were more common than the nicer homes, and spoke to the areas depressed economy. Few people in Covington are rich, even fewer in the Callaghan valley.

I had first come to Covington after an old Chevy truck headed north along Interstate 81 had responded charitably to my extended thumb as I walked along the side of the road just south of Roanoke. I hadn’t hitch-hiked much in my life, but I had been told it was common enough in those parts, with passing motorists often responding generously to the sight of unshaven men with large backpacks and hiking boots. They see them every summer when people make the trek from Georgia to Maine along the Appalachian Trail. From what I’ve been told, it’s not many who complete the ordeal, but there’s enough folks that try to make people like me a common enough sight.

I hadn’t intended to stay long. I never did when backpacking my way through places which most preferred to be left alone, and out of a sort of mutually understood respect, I usually only remained long enough to earn a little money to fund the next leg of my wanderings. But for whatever reason, this time I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Somehow, amidst the sawdust and grime and the foul language of these hard-living men, there was something about this remote pocket of Americana that wouldn’t let go of me. Perhaps it was that the dull routine of working in the mill was easy to get used to, or that after a hard day’s work I was too tired to think about leaving. Then again, maybe it was none of those things, and rather the simple implicit expectation that I would be there in the morning, bright and early, which persuaded me that I shouldn’t disappoint them or give them reason to talk badly about me after I’d gone. I couldn’t explain why, but I cared about what they thought of me. Though perhaps the real reason was that, --whether it was the mountain air or an effect of the hard work, --it was a place which made me feel alive and I enjoyed being there, even if my best explanation for this was that I had been overcome by its enchanting spell.

For better or worse, my introduction to the true character of the people who lived in the Callaghan valley was the Bradley boy’s first words to me after I had begun work at the sawmill. “Judas priest! What in the hell do you think you’re doing! You’re gon' git yerself killed standin' there!” he had barked in my direction, reprimanding me for being a useless nuisance and endangering myself. I was well-used to taking odd jobs by that time, and prided myself on being able to pick them up quite easily, but working at the sawmill was a first for me, and there was little patience for someone without experience.

A large man in canvass coveralls had quickly shoved me aside and applied himself to what I apparently should have been doing the whole time.

“Who’s the new feller?” the Bradley boy bellowed at nobody in particular, his voice barely audible above the groaning din of the saw-blades. “You, yes you, what in hell are you doin'?” he continued, pointing a finger at me while walking in my direction. Then passing the large man who had pushed me aside, let out “Dammit, Blanton, I don’t pay you ignore the greenhorns. Maybe show ‘em what they’re s’posed to do for fuckin’ once.”

The Bradley boy was the foreman of the place since he knew its operation better than anyone. He didn’t need the work, but feeling a sense of obligation to the place, agreed to undertake the position after his family had sold it. And right then, being the foreman now meant taking me aside and chewing me out in a tirade of language I barely understood.

It was a good thing I needed the money so badly, or else I would have quit right then and there, like I had so many other times before.

In a way, I had been a kind of nomad my entire life. I hadn’t much liked growing up where I had, a string of places no so remote as this but rural enough for a young mind to find them impossibly dull. My parents were from the Midwest, but I had never lived there myself. I spent my childhood waiting for to find out where we would call home next, and became well-accustomed to living out of cardboard boxes, sometimes for months on end. I could remember daydreaming about what existed beyond the horizon, and never more so than when I could hear my parents fighting loudly in the kitchen. At the time, I couldn’t help but wish that I could be someplace else, always believing that wherever I found myself next would be better than the last. Maybe there, things would be different, I told myself. Maybe there they wouldn’t have so much to fight about. But it was always the same. I can’t ever remember what they fought about, but you don’t ever need to when you always knew what it meant. It couldn’t last, and sure enough it didn’t. They ended up getting a divorce shortly after I started high-school.

After that, I remember feeling no special sense of attachment to either of them, no matter how much they tried to bribe my affections in the aftermath. I left home as soon as I could, which meant whenever I was old enough that neither of them could stop me from going. For my eighteenth birthday I bought myself a backpack and a pair of boots with whatever money I had saved, and never looked back.

I had been determined to see everything in my younger days, traveling the world over to experience all that it could offer, from the great cities of Europe, to the mystical temples of the East, to the ancient wonders of the Americas. I had felt that surely they possessed the secrets to a better and happier life, and I was anxious to learn from them. And yet, try as I might to believe or convince myself otherwise, I knew I was never more than outsider anyplace I went, intruding upon the long-established customs and lives of others whose daily routines I had treated like a quaint, interactive exhibit in a museum. There was always a point at which I left and the locals remained, as tied to their land and labor as they had ever been. I got the sense that they well-understood this about me and while they anticipated my leaving, undertook their responsibility to make a good showing of themselves and their culture for transients such as myself admirably. Looking back, I can’t help but imagine that the exuberance and smiles which I had taken for granted were merely the hospitable mask of a people annoyed by my wide-eyed gawking and wonderment. I couldn’t help but imagine that all they really wished was that I would leave so that they could speak freely in their own tongue and get on with their lives. I was an unfortunate interruption, made necessary by their dependence on people such as myself, and I imagined that they were saddened by the reduction of their culture to a pantomime of its formerly genuine expression. Eventually, the appeal of endless novelty lost its luster and new things simply reminded me of older ones. Everywhere I went, people were much the same and I was never one of them.

And it was the same in Covington. It couldn’t have mattered less what stories I could tell about the places I’d been or the things that I’d seen, least of all to the Bradley boy, and especially that first day at the sawmill.

It was painfully obvious to me then that he would be another of those locals, whose indigenous concerns would persist long after I had gone. Being the lifelong vagabond that I had been, I thought that I would probably move on and remember the Bradley boy vividly, but it was unlikely my significance to him would endure more than a day or so longer than I was his responsibility.

This was never so evident as when after a day’s work, the sawmill’s workers, exhausted and covered in tree sap and grime, would gather at the local dive for some gossip and several pitchers of cheap beer. The Bradley boy would join his workmen frequently, and it was then that I understood the reason he commanded such respect from the men at the sawmill, and it had very little to do with the fact that he guaranteed their paychecks.

On any such occasion, gossip inevitably turned to stories, with memories being swapped and retold dozens of times over, and certain favorites being recited upon request. The Bradley boy was the custodian of many of these favorites, and though still quite young, certainly no older than myself, he spoke like someone much older, someone whose family had been long entrenched in that town and embroiled in its various affairs. Every word he spoke seemed saturated with its unconscious history and as a matter of course, and in the perfected natural rhythm of his native dialect, I noticed that he would often, even glibly, make reference to people and places and times meaningful only to those familiar with them. His were the stories of that town and its history, the people who had been present at its founding, and then shaped it into what it had become.

Absent the context of his surroundings, it would have been easy to suppose that most of his stories were a preposterous charade of his imagination. Any story which recounts the drunken exploits of a gangly and bookish preacher who mistakenly confessed his love for another man’s wife only to be chased away under threat of a loaded shotgun, rang false to my ears. If anything, it seemed most likely to me that it was but a thinly veiled plagiarism of a certain schoolmaster’s legendary misadventure in Sleepy Hollow. But the knowing nods and laughs which the recounting of this tale produced in those gathered around him, young and old, was all the testimony necessary to satisfy even the most cynical incredulity. And even if they were somehow embellished with the patina of myth and legend, it seemed to be well-understood that the flourish with which he told them was the expected alchemy by which they were advanced nearer to the real truth of things, almost as if their subtle alterations were the necessary process of distillation by which their preservation and lessons were made secure. There, in that place and surrounded by his native kinfolk, his was the voice of authority and wisdom, and it was well heeded.

I usually sat by myself at these gatherings, and in truth, it wasn’t any mystery why. Even after I had been there some months, I was still only the newcomer to them, and they saw no reason to disrupt the course of their own lives to make accommodation for me. It wasn’t that they were hostile, but rather that their long-entrenched friendships spanned entire lifetimes from childhood to their elder years and had been made little by little on sometimes decades' worth of seasons and experiences. Their friendships were the stuff of hunting trips and weddings and birthdays, pot-lucks at the Methodist church or pretendings to be busy while manning a booth at a fundraiser, --a station whose mundanity was only made tolerable by the aid of large coolers filled to bursting with ice and whatever canned beer happened to be on sale that weekend.

I could not help but marvel at this deepened sense of being, of belonging to a history, a lived history, the kind that stores itself in insignificant details and keeps eternal company with the ancient trees, each sworn under pain of solemn vow to keep each other’s secrets, no matter how much the sighing wind might try and tease them out. There was a sense in which these stories belonged to this place and more importantly to its people, living within their collective memory, and serving as the proverbial legislation for the conduction of their affairs. In this respect, they were a moral people, and their character and honor lived on in the stories that were told about them by their surviving friends and then inherited by their children.

There was no sense among them that it was even possible to uproot themselves and belong to someplace else. Whole generations had come and gone before them in that place, something solemnly affirmed by the family names that were inscribed on the headstones in the cemeteries. It was as if they understood themselves as belonging to the land itself, they being as immovable as the very mountains that they called home. They knew their every hill, hollow, and glen, --foraged new paths through the wooded and leaf-carpeted slopes upon a whim, --and knew their every critter and bird, from barn owl to junco, by both sight and call. It was as if knowledge of that place had woven itself into the very marrow of their bones, rendering them unfit to exist in any other. They knew they belonged to the land as much as it belonged to them, and could neither fathom any personal ambition nor stomach any foreign interference which might steal them away from it.

It was a realization that made me restless and impatient for that same experience and delivered a bitter and aching wound to my soul. I knew, or perhaps rather intuited, in a moment of stark and instinctive sobriety, that histories like what I was heard in that Covington dive bar, --histories like the Bradley boy’s, --were as roots to a tree, roots that took time, perhaps even generations, to grow. More wounding still was the realization that the fruits of whatever tree I planted would only be harvested long after I was gone.

I knew too, however, that if such a thing as this were as invaluable as I esteemed it to be, --and it must have been for how much I envied it, --there could be no greater task to undertake nor a greater gift to bestow upon those who might come after me. It would be the gift of the one thing I had always desired and sought endlessly to find. There was certainty in such a thing, something immovable, something enduring. In my wandering days, I would have had such disdain for the monotony of it all and blasphemously condemned it as boring, or some other ignorant and silly word. But now I understood the comforting assurance that, for all my efforts, things might indeed change very little and that all of life could perpetuate much the same as it had before under the nagging reprimand of unperturbed nature. The rain would fall in spring and the humidity of summer would inevitably succumb to Autumn's wildfires of foliage, set ablaze in its chilly air. Winter would always be for the fireside and family, until at last it too gave way to its annual thaw and spring would once again re-emerge triumphant. All seasons coming and going as they always had, but yet made evergreen by the levity of feast and festival.

It was as if in a place like this, time itself stood still and instead revealed itself in new wrinkles upon the foreheads of the old or new inches added to the statures of children, who would in no time find themselves counting the heads of their own broods as they bustled off to church on Sundays.

I found it strange, even irritating, that the hidden grammar of life could be so simple. I had always wanted what they had, even if I could not imagine it then, but even now, I somehow wished that the secret had been less obvious or more glamorous. But happiness, it seemed, was content to find its repose in the simple and the mundane, rather than some strange addiction to novelty.

And if I was to believe in such a thing, it was necessary that I console myself with some humble resignation to hope. It was necessary for me to believe in the eventuality of that wonderfully elusive peace, --that glory of things unseen, --and dedicate myself, heedless of the sacrifice, to its rendering. I vowed then, as certainly as others had done so long ago, to remain there and plant my wandering soul in that place, --it being as good as any other to begin again.

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