I’ve knocked about a good bit over the years, starting back when I was a boy and we left my personal Eden, the Redlands of south Florida, and rode a vista cruiser Greyhound bus through the darkness to Tennessee.
There we lived in a place called Mud Flats, rows of houses thrown together cheaply for enlisted navy families, with a sea of mud for communal backyards. In the winter of that year the mud froze into a rippling sea of dirt that turned the snow black when it fell. I had never seen snow, or ever been so cold.
The same year we moved again, this time to southern Texas, and I started second grade in a new school and a new state for the third time. Here the teachers believed in corporal punishment, and I, a polite and anxious child, was paddled often for infractions I could hardly comprehend. On the schoolyard, grown men with thick forearms whipped the schoolboys on their bare legs with whistle lanyards for running too slowly or talking in line.
We moved often across the South in those first school years, and I saw the rural poor from the back of a station wagon, as I lay propped up on pillows while my older brother and sister sat and read in the back seat. We crossed through Arkansas and into the Ozark Mountains, still an indelible memory of ridges, shotgun cabins with bare dirt yards, the road rising and dipping, and all the trees burning with colors. Later we saw Alabama near Gulfport, white mansions along the road and the flat, blue arc of the Gulf on the right as we drove toward Florida; the Overseas Highway, Key West and the bridges down to the Florida Keys, the small islands with their strange names – Matecumbe, Islamorada, Bahia Honda, No Name Key. My father knew each one from the inside out and called out their names as we passed.
Walt Whitman, visionary American poet, wrote that he heard America singing, and I caught the tune first as a child. Sometimes it’s a song of loss – lost hopes, trailer park dreams, shotgun shacks and shotgun weddings, the sad, crumbling fate of American cities. But it is also the sound of the cicada on a southern summer night, the splash of the frogs jumping the lillypads on the Tamiami Trail, the ice cracking on a swollen spring creek in Minnesota, a saxophone echoing on a San Francisco street corner Friday evening, 1989.
Sometimes, these days, the melody seems lost in the cacophony of competing groups, trying to divide up the American pie with a steam shovel. But I think I heard the original tune once in a country churchyard in Smithfield, Virginia just before dawn.
It was a work morning and I had crossed through the Portsmouth tunnel on my way to deliver sodas to a grocery store in Smithfield. I was on the road before the school buses were out, with the houses still dark along the country lanes. I was running a half hour ahead of schedule, so I pulled into the little churchyard far out in the country, cut off from the lights of the town by a thickly wooded rise. The rain began falling slow as I walked among the tombstones that had been there since the earliest Colonial days when the little church was founded by settlers from the Jamestown colony. Beside me, I felt the ghosts of the early settlers, saw them moving in and out of the little church, dressed in their rough, plain clothes, their faces pale in the dark, moving in slow lines. I watched them while the rain dripped down from the high trees, and I thought I could hear their deep, speechless tune.
It sounded like this – solemn, fearful, determined, full of faith in God, homesick for a world of paved streets and lighted houses, feeling like insignificant specks in a vast and frightful wilderness, risking everything, toiling ceaselessly, dying young- America singing its first, bittersweet song.
Heckuva song, too, isn’t it?
Sadly, I’m not hearing much singing these days,
Walt. I find that more fearful than striking out
for new territory.
I’m a product of the Second World War days,
and growing up with the Ameican people all
pulling together.
I keep hoping that we’ll see some of those
days again.
Always enjoy what you write. Thank you
for sharing it with us.
Julia in Boca Raton, FL
Love that you are doing this. Mom and I read them all.
I’m glad to hear Mom read them also. We look forward to visiting.
Walt