The Parkway Cometh

In 1937, the following scene probably happened somewhere near where we live in the Blue Ridge, North Carolina:

“What does it say?”
Jake handed the letter to his father. “There’s a lot of gobble-dy-gook there, Pa, but it says the land stopped bein’ ours when they posted it down at the courthouse.”
“Posted what?”
“The map of all the land they need to take.”
Jeremiah turned around slightly. Casting an eye on his nearby rocker, he carefully took aim and seated himself. Looking up again at his boy, “Well they ain’t paid us for it yit.”
“That needs to be decided yet, Pa.” Jake shook his head slowly. “It’s lookin’ like this is gonna drag on fer awhile.”
“We told that inspector fella we’d take forty.”
“It ain’t that simple, Pa. Them lawyers down in Raleigh gonna pay us whatever they say it’s worth.”
“Damn, son! What is this? Damn communists!”
Jake set the letter down on the side-cabinet. He had managed to glance through it and get the gist. “Shit, pa, it ain’t that bad. They’re just tryin’ to build that road real nice and scenic so’s people’ll come drivin’ up here and spend their money.”
“Well I guess that’s all well ‘n good, son. But I ain’t been down to the courthouse to see what they posted. Don’t seem right that we ain’t got payment, and we don’t even know how much we’re gonna git!”
“It’ll all work out, Pa. At least they’re only takin’ one side of our land. Watsons and Purlears got their places split up. And from what I’ve heard from Miller up in Ashe, them that got their land split up won’t be able to even drive from one side t’other. So be thankful for what you got. Ain’t  that what the Book says?” Jake looked his father in the eye. “Be thankful we’ll still be able to drive the tractor from one side all the way across the field to the other side.”
 “Yeah, what’s left of it,” Jeremiah mumbled as he commenced to rocking. He looked out the window, through the porch at the front yard. “Hell, I don’t know what this world’s coming to.
Jake was reading another letter, silently. His attention riveted there, he said nothing, just nodded his head, looking down at the script on a letter from his aunt Polly in Foscoe.
“New Deal, I guess,” his father continued while Jake folded Polly’s letter and picked up another piece of mail.
“Yeah, Pa, I reckon it’s the New Deal. Did Sally say what time they’d be back?
“’bout four, I think she said.”
Pa had been pondering. “Son, did you know they posted that map at the courthouse?
Jake sighed. “Yeah, Pa, I knew about it. I went and looked at it on Friday when I was in town. Roby Watson told me about it while I was in Goodnight’s pickin’ up feed.”
“I guess you didn’t wanna tell me, huh?”
“Nah, pa, I just forgot about it.” Jake sat down in his easy chair. Now he was reading something else.
“You forgot about it.”
“Yeah, Pa.” Jake nodded his head slowly, preoccupied with his bank statement.
Jeremiah was rocking steadily now, as if he were relaxed and maybe resigning himself to whatever it was that was about to happen that would change the shape of the 67 acres he had inherited from his father back in 1910. “Seems a little strange to me, boy, you could forget about something as important as losing a quarter of our land.” No judgement in his voice. Just sayin’. Pa had calmed down from his earlier rant.
“I mean,” Jake looked up at his father again, smiling slightly. “I mean, I didn’t forget about it; I just forgot to tell you about it.”
“Uh huh.”
Jake’s expression morphed slowly  from concentration in his letter-reading, to a mild amusement. “Shootfire, Pa, there’s somethin’ else I forgot to tell you.
“Oh yeah?” His father allowed a mild chuckle. Mr. Roosevelt gonna bring us a hog or two as a consolation prize?
“Actually, it is kinda like that . . . maybe a peace offering. Uncle Skip told Roby he’d give me a job running one of them road graders.”
“On the new road?” Jeremiah’s voice acquired an even more amused tone.
“Yep.”
Jake’s father laughed. “Well, ain’t that a cat’s whisker! I seen it all now. The Parkway giveth and the Parkway taketh away,” he declared, playing upon some ancient proverb. Now he set the rocker into a steady pace. “And when’s that gonna start?”
“Coupla weeks, or something like that,” Jake replied. “They gotta finish that little bit of blasting over there near the highway. Then, Skip says, they’ll pretty much be ready to grade from Deep Gap all the way to Aho.”
“Well, I guess that’s good news for Uncle Sam, but it’ll blast the hell out of our peace and quiet around here with all that machinery and whatnot takin’ over this country.”
“Not takin’ over, Pa, just makin’ it easy for folks to come up here and spend money, after they lay the asphalt to it.”
“I reckon it will be easier for them rich folks down the mountain to come up here and ride around in their Cadillacs, like over in Blowin’ Rock.”

Yep. Coulda happened. . . maybe, maybe not. Long time ago . . . but we haven't  yet totally obliterated our consciousness of the past with our contemporary obsession in social media and and political side-show antics. Not yet.

Blue 

The Crossroads

The legend lives on from the blues men on down of the big choice they call the ole crossroads.

The crossroads, it is told, is where a man's mortal soul can be sold for a life of good fortune.

Somewhere out there in the delta, in the sweltering heat of Mississippi where the cotton grew high and the ancient blues twangers sang their mournful 12-bar tunes about how hard life is and how much much harder it could be when the love of a woman is tasted but then gets lost somewhere between trouble and tragedy, and the tragedy is turned into song. . . out there where Miss'ippi mud is blacker than New'Awlins coffee, and the blues pangs clangin' off them ole guitar strings is thicker and stronger than bad whisky. . .

that ole crossroads where they say the devil would hang around waitin' for the blues man to come walkin' along, desperate for some kind of simple twist of fate that would set his heartstrings and his sixstrings into a new direction, where he could catch a ride to Memphis or NewYawk and sing them blues into the big microphone and get satisfaction for his pain, get some monetary compensation for sharing his pain with the world, to the tune of . . .Crossroads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd60nI4sa9A

As I was a-growin' up down there in Miss'ippi, snotty-nosed clueless white kid in the suburbs of Jackson, late 1950's, my daddy might have driven right over them very crossroads, out there in the piney woods backwoods near where Robert Johnson and Pop Staples had cranked out their doleful blues tunes. My daddy might have clunked over them crossroads in the old Ford station wagon as he was driving the backroads doing forestry work, but if he did I never knew it.

Wasn't 'til later that I found out about them blues, encountered them blues for myself while tasting for my own young self the sorts of pain that this life can deal out.

Years later, when I was wandering in the college scene in the late '60s, I got a little turned around and confused and encountered the blues, found myself romanticizing some pain that was in my head and a little too caught up in the mary jane and the avoidance of the pain, but still managed somehow to gain a degree, for what its worth, in political science or English or some useless crossroads thereof.

I say useless, but not really.

It's good to learn to read and write, and to research etc blahblahblah. Now I'm working on a fourth novel, like a thousand and one other boomer fools.

But As I was sayin', One thing led to another and then after college I was in Florida for awhile, selling insurance and then advertising with many a night misspent in topless bars and what not, followed by a few nights in Pasco county jail and the night I got out of jail I saw a movie that had been made in the mountains of North Carolina and so I, still running from my troubles, went up there, landed in Asheville, been there ever since, not in Asheville but in the great green state of North Carolina.

North Carolina Is My Home

After a few more false starts and dead ends I finally found, by the grace of God, salvation and the love of my life, from whose womb birth was given that brought forth our three children and this wonderful life, which is, as it turned out, so richly lived, even without all the money that I coulda shoulda woulda made had I made better choices.

Now after 35 years of building houses and other structures I suddenly found myself turning a corner toward the big 65 when I found myself not yet ready to throw in the towel and just settle into the social security dole which supposedly I have contributed to all these years and therefore earned, so I went and got myself a job at Lowe's home center, which is at the crossroads between two great industries of this country--retail and construction--not a bad place to be in America.

Now at this late stage, looking back on it all, it seems I've been, like many boomers, and like many so-called millennials will be by the time they get to be my age, underemployed. Hey, I've been underemployed all my life, but that has turned out to be no big deal.

It's been a good ride, thanks be to God.

And the big 65, which I'll turn here in about three weeks, is really nothing special--no magic number, so I'll keep paying my dues--which is to say, working-- for a few more years because this life is, as the Beatles said on Abbey Road. . . the bread you make is equal to the bread . . . you take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVYjQScC1DY

Or something like that.

And so my advice to all you millennials and gen-Xers out there who are over-educated, underpaid and underemployed is this:

Find a job, any job, and just stay busy working, learning, progressing toward your destiny. Don't wait for .gov or Bernie or anybody else to bail you out because this world really does not work that way.

Get busy, stay busy, work every day you can, and your destiny will find you by the time you're my age and you will find that . . .

Life is good. Make the best of it. Don't wait for a handout and don't blame anyone else for your troubles.

But you can sing the blues if it helps you to deal with the pain. And you may find yourselves, along the way, at a crossroads or two, but don't sell your soul.



Glass half-Full

The Great American Divide

Although I have lived in the cool Blue Ridge mountans for thirty-five years now, I was raised in a place that is hot, humid and flat--Louisiana. Perhaps I ended up living here on the eastern continental divide because of an intensely wonderful travel experience I had at the tender age of nine years. In 1960, my parents had taken me and my sister on a cross-country road trip from our Miss'sipi-River delta home all the way across the Rockies to Washington state. What a string of vivid memories that westward trip has proven to be.

At the time of that journey, my father was bound for an international convention of foresters in Seattle. We took four days to drive a light blue Ford station wagon across Texas, the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, California, and up the west coast, then four days back again. This impressionable boy from Baton Rouge emerged from the long road trip with a vivid memory file that included seeing the morning snow-capped pinkness of Mt. Rainier, and an elk-horn hut in Wyoming, as well as a ride with a cowboy on his horse through a herd of cows that had blocked our mountain road.

Funny how the mind wanders sometimes. Somewhere in Colorado or Wyoming near that cowboy memory stands a wide wooden road sign that reads: Continental Divide.
And this is what I thought about yesterday while reading Paul Krugman's "A Tale of Two Moralities," in the New York Times.

It prompted me to share some personal experience with you. Everybody has a story to tell, and I'm going to tell you part of mine, as a roundabout way to get to a point about our Great American Divide.

In the first half of the last century, my dad's folks had come out of the Mississippi woods, but had settled down in Baton Rouge in the thick of the petrochemical industry. Many of my young years were spent growing up in the shadow of a gargantuan Esso (now Exxon) refinery, which was said by locals to be the third largest oil refinery in the world at the time; it was three blocks from our house. I'll never forget that acrid smell in the air, although some said it was from the Kaiser aluminum plant further up the River. Probably both.

Maybe five or so miles away, near downtown Baton Rouge stood the state Capitol, tallest bayou-state building not located in New Orleans. Huey Long had built the 34-story monolith back in the 30s. If you ever go up to the top of it, you'll see, dominating the northward view, the huge, smoke-belching Exxon refinery, kingpin of Louisana industry.

My grandfather on mama's side had occupied an office in the Capitol; he was a math-brain, and served as assistant Secretary of State under four Louisana governors, including the infamous Huey Long. The other grandfather demonstrated a more visceral, mechanical expertise. Hard-working Scots-Irish Miss'sippi man that he was-- he had become a foreman down at the Esso refinery. My dad used to tell me that grampa had worked himself into a job where "wasn't a valve or wheel in the whole damn plant that didn't turn without Louis Rowland's order."

As far as I had been told, the unions had nothing to do with my grampa Rowland's rise to productive authority in that super-size oil refinery. And that pertains somewhat to this Great Divide thing that I'm a gettin' to. But hold your horses. Go watch a video somewhere if'n you don't have time to do some personal-type historical reading.

My daddy, you see, had tried to start a forestry-supplies business back in the 60s. But it didn't work out, and so he wound up his working life as a civil servant, in industrial development and recruitment for the State of Louisiana. (Hint about the Great Divide: Entrpreneur of State employee?) His office was in the complex of state guv'ment buildings that mushroomed 'neath the shadow of Huey's skyscraping Capitol.

At the time of my father's job there, Huey was, of course, long-since dead, having been shot at the Capitol building one September night in 1935. But Huey had been a horse of different color. Some folks down there say that if he hadn't been assasinated, he would have challenged Mr. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in '36. Of course, we'll never know. Huey's politics was raw and agrarian, and near as I can tell, even more "liberal" than President Roosevelt's New Deal, which would have placed him on the leftward fringe of Democratic politics then or now. One of Huey's slogans had been, "every man a king," which might seem to have landed him in the self-reliant camp about which we hear so much today from the so-called libertarian wing of the Republicans. But since Huey's other major plank was "sharing the wealth," that would throw our categorization of his politics into the income-redistribution, quasi-socialist wing of the Democrats. Like I said, he was a horse of different color; there are a few of them buckin' around in every generation.

He was, after all, you know, a Democrat. And that brings me closer to this oncoming perspective on the Great American Divide.
I was raised in a (at that time) Democratic state, in that state's politics-obsessed capital city. That heritage had cast the prevailing political machinery largely into the mold of Huey Long, the firebrand orator who had come out of the piney woods of north Louisiana. Part of Huey's share-the-wealth, every-man-a-king legacy is, these days, a state guarantee that students who prove to be diligent enough can get free tuition in state colleges and universities.

It was after I graduated from the state's flagship University, in 1973, that I left Louisiana never to return, except for visits. It's a great, proud state, but too hot and flat for me, so I ended up, after a brief Florida period, in the mountains of North Carolina. Back to the earth and all that. Ha!

Thirty-five years ago my quest for cool mountain livin'-- a la that trip to the Rockies when I was nine--found its resting point here in the Appalachians. And now, after all this time, my view from the eastern Continental Divide--only a few geographical miles from our house--reveals that I landed, unbeknownst to me at the time, in the middle of a stubborn, self-sufficiency-touting, fundamentalist mountaineer culture, decidedly libertarian and mostly Republican (except for the thriving academic, typically humanistic community at nearby Appalachian State University.) So it seems that my life's journey has taken me from one side of the Divide to the Other.

I'm just now figuring out what happened. I started out fifty-nine years ago on the left side of the Great Divide, and am now winding down on the right side.
From this perspective, I can see, as Mr. Krugman has so adroitly identified, that the two poles (polls?) of American philosophy gravitate down to this definitive question:

Am I a contributing part of a great Nation-State that is taking care of every citizen, with every citizen taking care of it?

Or,
Am a self-reliant individualist who prefers to swat the government nuisance out of my way?

Which way do you lean on the Great Divide?

Glass Chimera