Issue 3:1 | View | Rob Merritt

 

Hugo East: The Mountains Map My Soul

Rob Merritt

 

 

 

I look out of my office window, obsessed with mountains. Teaching at a college on the line between Virginia and West Virginia, I listen to the mountains a lot, and often I feel a darkness, an energy working against me. My spirit is not uplifted.

 

When I go to downtown Bluefield, I see the trainyard where John Kennedy once stopped. Booming with coal money, the town exuded energy. Traffic jammed Bland Street; Montgomery Ward and the Roma Club were packed. Now: broken windows. “Lefty”—they say a train clipped off his arm as he slept on the tracks 20 years ago— waits for you to get out your change for the parking meter at the library before he asks. Dr. X, not content with his income as a podiatrist, owns “Girls, Girls, Girls,” with “exotic” shower rooms.

 

I see in the people the wounded, vengeful resistance of a land that has watched its intestines spool out upon traincar after traincar of coal and timber until land is shell, violated and wary like the high school girl raped on prom night, each person in the community a part of the stain.

 

* * * * *

 

Yet, I have been drawn to mountains since boyhood in Piedmont North Carolina. From those foothills, I could glimpse Pilot Mountain, aloof, beckoning, pointing toward the Blue Ridge. The Saura Indians called it “Jo Me Okee”: The Great Guide.

 

I picked up some chiaroscuro signals in those days. I spent a summer in the Pisgah Forest succumbing to the pull, camping alone in the woods. I kept a fire going all night and gathered words from Look Homeward, Angel “inchoate,” “esymplastic,” “loam.” I read The Inferno and savored morning misting through the pines. In Asheville, I bought a cigar in the drugstore where Wolfe had wandered, drunk, one Christmas Eve. In the backyard of his house on Spruce Street, I felt what he meant, cornered by geography and family: “hill-haunted,” “mountain-walled.” Yet, working the shipyards of Newport News, he dreamed hills. His father’s tombstone shop is now the Pack Square Fire Station. Dying, broken from family, W.O. Wolfe sat amid rectangles of granite, drinking whiskey and watching dust settle through sunrays. He did not speak so that his son could.

 

* * * * *

 

The sun is long coming up over East River Mountain. Bland County, Virginia, basks in December morning while Mercer County, West Virginia, the next county north, waits in the frosted dew of lingering night.

 

As I sit grading my last few exams, I am convinced the energy is bad in this part of Appalachia. A librarian had a tumor the size of a grapefruit removed from her brain. I know well three people here who have died of cancer in the past four years. Cancer wells up from the earth. I tell the land, “I did not harm you.”

 

The dark pattern of exploitation continues with the doctors who come here. They falsify Medicare reports. One doctor registers his Mercedes in North Carolina so that he will not have to pay West Virginia taxes; another has an "offshore" account and pays less tax than I do. Whatever inhabiting a place means, whatever returning something to the community means, this is the opposite. I struggle with my desire to leave versus a desire to stem the bleeding.

 

A student, B.J., comes into my office with his late essay assignment. He has shown interest in the modern literature class, but I suspect he has read few of the assignments and has relied on his native intelligence to breeze through class discussion. "I just got behind, and my Irish heritage keeps me from asking for help. I thought I could get by." I remember I was like that. I never had a conversation with a professor. Even now, I try to fix my lawnmower by myself.

 

He has already made a “20” on the final. I anticipate failing him in the class. Yet, he has left me an essay on Richard Hugo, a poet I have been drawn to lately because he writes of the same broken down towns in Montana that I see here, where people either search for escape routes or succumb to the exhaustion of the land. Hugo, looking like a meatpacker from Milwaukee, gently uncovered the solace of deserted farms, of "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg": "the huge mill in collapse/ for fifty years that won't fall finally down." But "the girl who serves your food/ is slender and her red hair lights the wall." He shows me how to use gray surroundings as a screen where imagination can project color.

 

I read B.J.'s essay; he has relied on a rough facility with language and a quick Internet search. He has, though, stumbled across Hugo's essay, "The Triggering Town." In "The Triggering Town," Hugo said, "The place triggers the mind to create the place." Hugo doesn't stipulate the picturesque, a Grasmere or Sourdough Lookout. "The true or valid triggering subject is one in which physical characteristics or details correspond to attitudes the poet has toward the world and himself. To me, a small town that has seen better days often works." I am sitting here reading a predominantly plagiarized essay by a procrastinating student and really getting moved.

 

This isolation and betrayal I sense in the land (and I still know a lot of it IS there) is connected to my attitude toward myself. The shadows of the mountains are the recesses of my memory of abandonment and loss that I am not brave enough to write at yet. Jo Me Okee guided me here to face myself emblemed by the mountains: torn up, vengeful, resilient.

 

These beat towns and decayed mountainsides goad the eyes to notice the way sky highlights snow on limbs today. Place makes movement. This oxymoron has been offered to me in an overdue essay with clip art of baseballs and trout.

 

And somehow I am feeling better. I am concerned that I am justifying where I'm at because I cannot fathom a way out, but there is a grandeur in grayness. Triggers come from the humble places. B.J., in whom I see something of myself, a messenger who knows not the message he bears, shows me we need black and gray. The footprints in these hollows mark the way in and the way out, and the dancesteps we make from minor chords.

 

Richard Hugo understood the close connection between homelessness and being at home anywhere. I am homesteading where the land dares me to turn my back on the crags that objectify my soul

 

* * * * *

 

The year before I arrived here, a massive hurricane hit the east coast, going ashore at Charleston, South Carolina, running up I-77 from Charlotte to Bluefield. For a few tree-root wrenching hours the mountains were home in the sea again. The hurricane's name was Hugo.