THE FLOW OF SIGNIFICANCE To...

 

THE FLOW OF SIGNIFICANCE

To name, to signify, is to help the memory.  Naming makes significance, and significant events must be named.  These two are recursive, are also real and in time, and build the history, the intermingled egos.  They are words calling back places and events to the present as it moves on, evoking more evocations; naming and calling back; naming and calling back. We must be careful with names and not drop them into a sweet spring of ideas, stirring mud into the natural clarity of the linear movement of moments of naming.

I remember the yellow-green shine of the sun on Twelve Pole Creek, named for the twelve poles that George Washington measured it with, or so my mother told me.  She knew many such things: the names of plants and stones, and the histories of places and objects.  I recall the creek mainly because Dad took me and my two older brothers fishing, one at a time (we were 8 to 14 years old then).  He wore waterproof waders but we wore blue jeans and old tennis shoes.  And I recollect wading, the cold brown-green water flowing around and into my tennis shoes and soaking my jeans up to the rope, worn for a belt to avoid ruining my good leather one.  I felt my way on the bottom of the creek, careful not to step in a deep hole.  This I remember, but I think many of these memories come to me from color slides and movies that my parents made.  That yellow shine may be the sun on the lens of the camera.  But some things are not in the pictures and are snagged in my memory like leaves caught on a gnarled tree branch hanging in the stream.  The wading was like this, and it is like remembering, feeling for the bottom, the significance of the long-past experience.

This was at Cabwaylingo State Park in West Virginia.  The name includes the four closest counties.  C-a-b is for Cabell County, w-a-y is for Wayne County, named for Mad Anthony Wayne, the l-i-n-go is a combination for Lincoln County and Mingo County.  Our parents took us there for a week's vacation for several years during the late 1940s and early 1950s.  The cabins were made of creosote-soaked logs.  That odor still evokes thoughts of the vacations there.  I can't bring back to mind our everyday life in those cabins, what we ate and when, but I vaguely remember trying to sleep in that strange environment of insect sounds and water flowing.  Odors were thick in the air:  dust, mildew, the creosote, war surplus banana-oil insect repellent, smoke from coal oil lamps, and citronella.  The things I do remember, as I feel for the experience again, by definition must be the events and perceptions that are significant after fifty years.

Besides the wading and fishing I have other definite memories: baby eels pouring with the water from the mouth of a smaller creek into Twelve Pole Creek; pipsissewa, which my mother pointed out to us; a pet groundhog at the local store where we bought food and cases of Nesbitts Soda Pop; a tiny turtle, which I kept for a several years; and hikes in the flourishing green hollows and up Tick Ridge to an old deserted farm.

What we called baby eels were about two inches long and all black.  One end, as I remember, was all mouth and I seem to recall one tooth.  They would latch onto and suck on our skin.  The cold, clear water swept hundreds of them over the rocky bottom at the mouth of the little creek.  We filled paper cups with the slick black little worms, and had contests for who had the most. We soon tired of this and emptied the cups, letting them loose into the ever-moving stream.

 We learned about plants like the reclusive evergreen laurel relative, pipsissewa.  In Cree this means "to break it up," referring to its use as a diuretic and in the breaking up of bladder stones.  I have often, as I grew older, confused its fascinating name with the fascinating form of Indian pipes, which are saprophytes that live on dead leaves, mulch, and formerly live things, and grow under dead wood or low cliff edges.  They live on old residue like a memory that takes what it can from the past and uses it to make reality and flourish.  They grow as a single stem, bent over to form the flower at the top, giving the appearance of a smoking pipe.  The flower is made of the same waxy material as the stem, all white or all pink.  My mother showed us these and many other plants and named them; others were lady slippers and jack-in-the-pulpit, but the name pipsissewa and the form of the Indian pipes invoke these moments the most.

            We drove out from the state park to a local store for food and drinks.  The store was in a frame building, backed against a sandstone cliff, its white paint peeled off in flaps showing weathered wood underneath.  Chewing tobacco and soda-pop advertisements filled the window.  A general store, it sold junk food and modern "gee-gaws" for vacationers, and staples and produce for the locals.

A groundhog hung around the front door and would take offered food from the customers.  I extract a picture from my memory, or from the movie camera with the yellow shine, of a fat complacent grey-brown sort of beaver-like animal, but without the flat tail, sitting in a gravel parking-lot eating crackers.  As in many of my recollections, I am sure there is some idealization.

I don't long for the past to return to it, but what I remember seems better than my experience now; either my tastes have changed dramatically or the Nesbitts Soda Pop we bought there was better than anything that we can buy today.

On a hike up one of the lush hollows where the pipsissewa grew, as I rested from hiking on a large moss-covered rock overlooking the creek, a movement near my right leg startled me.  At first, thoughts of snakes and insects flooded my mind, but within a few moments I was holding a turtle about two inches across.  It was a pond slider or red-eared turtle, a type they used to sell in the pet shops.  I'm sure it was against the law, even then, to take anything from a state park but I smuggled it home and kept it for several years.  Eventually it escaped and I never found it again.  I gave it a name but it must not have been significant; I can't remember it.

Memory is like the sandstone rock cliffs in the eastern forests; rough, weathered and usually hidden by foliage.  We would come upon them suddenly, and from several yards they looked like old stone ruins.  I learned they were sedimentary rocks, grit of long ago dropped to the bottom of a body of water where the current slowed.  Fossil memories of older times were deposited and a stable stream bed, firm enough to find footing on, solidified.  I know now this strata is designated by the time period in which it is laid and the area in which it was first named, Pennsylvanian, Pottsville; and the dark black fragments of formerly living things in it are called Matewan or War Eagle coal strata.  Again, I know this from my mother.  Before she died in 1996 she sent me a book on the geology of West Virginia.  Odd, that she would once more, through a rivulet of time, help me signify an ancient silt.  That older stream, though dried, still has significance in the larger, longer stream of time.  My imagination coupled with a natural affinity for large stone formations gave the hikes in the hollows there a special excitement.

The hike up Tick Ridge was a long one and I remember very little of the trip except that we complained of it being tiring and too hot, and Mom had to keep encouraging us to continue.  There are no home movies or slides of this, but as before I remember the light; on a day with no clouds it seemed special, bright, but filtered and striated as through moving water.

At the top of the ridge we found a deserted farm which had been a large self-sustaining enterprise.  A machine to make wooden roofing shingles stood under a tree.  It seemed an odd bit of the past and my father, who was raised on a hill top near New Haven, West Virginia with eight brothers and sisters, had to tell us what it was.  Except for the weathering of the wood and the rust on the metal it could have been used only the day before.  Some buildings were still standing, others reduced to foundations, but all were being slowly washed away by long duration:  a stone cellar, some wooden out buildings, a fenced in rock overhang, and a sort of chimney rock with a ladder to the top.  I was not able, or maybe not allowed to climb the ladder to the top and was left at the bottom with my little brother in some blackberry bushes in the hot sun.

When we were running on the trail back to the farm from the rocks we almost stepped on a copperhead.  I have a striking memory of a sleek coppery length, like a self-contained bit of fluid, moving swiftly away through the profuse jungle of the eastern forest.

A muddy forest trail led off of Tick Ridge in another direction.  We followed it back down to the blacktop county road.  Along the way were several old foundations of houses lost and worn like a memory in the flow of time; one is particularly unforgettable because of the rose bushes growing around it and the large shade tree in what was formerly the yard.  I wondered who remembered those places as home.

Since the 50s I have been back to Cabwaylingo sporadically.  I taught high school and elementary school music and English in the area and ended up there several times on outings.  It never appears again as dramatic as it seemed in my childhood or as I see it in the pictures from those vacations.  One of the last times there, I slept all night on Tick Ridge in a tent.  A large group of old friends and relatives sang and ate around a campfire near the fire observation tower that sits on the ridge.  The high tower above the memoried eastern forest allowed a far view across great green space, with clouds scudding as though caught in a tide of blue water.  The next day we hiked to a deserted farm on up the ridge where the grandfather of one of my friends had lived. It evoked memories, but it had been a long time and I wasn't sure whether it was the same farm I hiked to as a child.  There were only foundations, nothing left standing, and it was very overgrown, very worn, like my memories from thirty years before.

That I think I remember is meaningful; details from so long ago are hard to recall.  I've come this far into the creek fishing for significance; wading, with my nostrils full of the odor of sweat, branch-water, dark loam, and moss; finding memory coalesced as in a still pool on the far inner side of a curve in the creek.  I'm not sure the significance is there, anymore than value and relevance is anywhere in our long story of remembrance, our ego history, the story of this entity on this planet during this century.  The question of significance is really, "who am I, wading in this water now, and from where does the light shine?"  The only answer is that I am the past, the light is remembered, whether from a picture or from an actual memory (if there is ever actual memory).  I am the one who played with little wriggling black snake-like creatures at the mouth of a fresh clean stream on a steamy day sometime in the mid-twentieth century, sometime in eternity.  I am the one who was then, and the one who now thinks he remembers all of that and yellow light.  We can only define ourselves or anything with descriptions from the past, and we can only feel for those memories, as for footing and stability while wading in this stream that is all around us, flowing.

Comments

[PappawJack]

I love this Nate, because I have the same memories.  I think I might even have some video from Mom and Dad's old movies of Tick Ridge.  If I can find the video, I will send it to you.  You are so good at description, I almost believe I am back there when I read it.

Thank You, Dave