RAMBLING IN NORTH CAROLINA

Last summer I wrote a lot of poetry about the forests of kudzu shaped like huge human forms blanketing the roadsides near Pickens, South Carolina. This summer, we haven't seen see so much kudzu in the mountains around Cashiers, North Carolina, but the roadsides everywhere are inundated with lavender blossoms of Jo-Pye weed.

"Every state has its weed," I told my botanist friend, Vickie, who is one of the experts on Eupatorium plants in the U.S. She disapproves of my derogative remarks about "weeds," especially when I question the uses of them. If Joe Pye weed had some widespread useful purpose, residents of Sapphire Valley could make a fortune from harvesting the gracious plenty along the road from Sapphire Valley to Lake Toxaway, North Carolina.

Wildlife also abounds here (including a backyard chipmunk), and at Whiteside Mountain, you can glimpse peregrine falcons nesting on the granite cliffs. If you're the hearty type, you can climb a two-mile trail above a 750 ft. high cliff, which is no hill for a stepper, but neither my mind nor body feels inclined to become that kind of stepper. The landscape is forested with yellow pine, and spring-fed streams meander through the deep woods.

Meanwhile, on the drive to Toxaway Lake, we discovered one of the ubiquitous Farmer's Markets in the area. This one advertised South Carolina peaches, homegrown tomatoes, and their specialty: tomato pie. "You know you're in the tourist South, when you find the New York Times in the news rack at a fruit market in the boonies," Vickie quipped. There it was--the current issue of The Times, and I had to buy a copy--just to keep abreast of all the bad news about the country going to the dogs. Only the day before, I had read an account online about the Dominionists who think that Christians should rule the world and all its institutions. It was a scary article. I'm a Christian, yes, but I don't belong to any exclusive group that denounces all the world's major religions except for Christianity. Shudder, shudder, my Jewish great-grandmother on the Marquart side must be turning in her grave.

Cashiers and Highlands, North Carolina offer artists and writers a haven for their work -- writers' groups and art galleries flourish in both towns. Highlands has a Performing Arts Center that stages performances to benefit the Literacy Council of Highlands, a program that provides after school tutoring, adult literacy English as a second language and Spanish classes. Currently, the Council is sponsoring a play called "Sirens," based on the ancient Greek myths of sirens who sang and lured sailors to shipwreck on rocky coasts.

If you want to shop up here, you need to bring a large satchel of money because the high-end shops in Highlands (from interior enhancements to antique jewelry) are only for the idle rich, and aren't for starving artists and writers. Highlands has become the home of Bil Dwyer, a nationally-syndicated comic strip artist whose comic strips, "Dumb Dora" and "Sandy Hill" ran in the newspapers during the 20's - 50's. He has become noteworthy for his study of southern euphemisms that resulted in Southern Sayins for Yankees and Other Immigrants and Cooking Yankees Ain't Et. Excerpts from The Dictionary for Yankees and Other Uneducated People include: "Rum--Enclosed area within a building," "Tar--What you change when you have a flat," and "Lust--What you are when you don't know whar you are."

Well, this is what comes of going to the Mountains to woodshed; i.e., work on a new book that has nothing to do with mountain culture!

MORNINGS IN MEXICO, AFTERNOONS IN OAXACA

Re-reading Mornings in Mexico by D.H. Lawrence is, for me, always a treat to magnificent descriptive writing about Mexico, a place that was one of my favorite summer destinations before drug lords destroyed the tourist trade. During the 20’s when Lawrence lived in Mexico, he recorded his impressions of two places that I visited and for which I feel nostalgia when I re-read Mornings in Mexico for the fourth time.

Lawrence’s essay about “Market Day” (published in the New Criterion with the title “Mornings in Mexico: Saturday,” 1926) takes first place in my reading as it describes a typical market day in Oaxaca City. When we sojourned in Oaxaca City in 1997, seventy years following Lawrence’s third stay in Mexico, we rented a two-bedroom suite facing the zocala and from our window on the square, three of us watched daily marketing that included the wooden animals created by the Zapotecans. I loved the bargaining and exchange that took place when I searched for and found an alebrijes monster, a “bug-eyed, dagger in its sides/snake-tongued Zapotec fiend/pantheistic dream in cobalt blue,/yellow, red, lurid colors…” I later wrote in a poem.

LAWRENCE DESCRIBES MARKETPLACES
Lawrence describes marketing exchanges in one of the most eloquent passages in Mornings in Mexico: “To buy and to sell, but above all, to commingle. In the old world, men make themselves two great excuses for coming together to a centre, and commingling freely in a mixed, unsuspicious host. Market and religion. These alone bring men, unarmed, together since time began. A little load of firewood, a woven blanket, a few eggs and tomatoes are excuse enough for men, women, and children to cross the foot-weary miles of valley and mountain. To buy, to sell, to barter, to exchange. To exchange, above all things, human contact. That is why they like you to bargain, even if it’s only the difference of a centavo…”

ALL BEGGARS

My experiences of the marketplace were reflected in a few poems that appeared in Afternoons in Oaxaca, my book of poetry with a title that was a play on Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico. One poem centered on a morning trip to the post office:

WE ARE ALL BEGGARS
Sending postcards every day,
we keep track or boast impressions?

In the post office, and everywhere,
they use adding machine tapes,

tallying the price
while we drop pesos into small baskets,

feeling the bright-eyed children’s cost,
how they mirror the poverty

though their smiles are happy flashes,
how they seek to,

but do not have to,
buy us;

we scatter the silver
like rain from a rooftop

into unfolding hands.

LAKE CHAPALA
Even earlier than the Oaxaca visit was the trip we made to Lake Chapala, another of Lawrence’s haunts, not 45 km south of the bustling city of Guadalajara. It is here that Lawrence wrote The Plumed Serpent while staying at a beautiful villa called Quinta Quetzalcoatl, but we spent three nights at the Lake Chapala Inn which overlooked the lake. During breakfast in the inn restaurant, we watched fishermen throw huge nets and sweep the lake for white fish. In the evenings, we drank Black Russians at a table near the window and watched them row toward shoreiwith their plentiful catches.

We had traveled to Mexico that summer in an electric blue van carrying three teen-agers and my grandson Martin, then two years old, and the entire group seemed to like the lakeside inn better than most places we stopped, even Acapulco. However, one of the girls, thirteen, developed a strange rash on her hands and arms that looked suspiciously like poison ivy, and we treated the case with a compound created by a local pharmacist. After examining the rash, our resident Floridian and botanist, Vickie, who also drove the cumbersome van, declared that the rash resembled mango poisoning, and the teen-agers began giggling and shushing each other. Fifteen years or so later, one of the girls confessed that the rash was indeed mango poisoning because after the adults and two-year old had retired for the night, the teenagers picked mangos from a tree near the inn, climbed up on the rooftops and threw the fruit down at Mexican boys who had chased them. That entire trip with three teenagers was an experience we never felt like repeating…and, later, we discovered that the girls felt the same way.

OAXACA CITY, MEXICO
When we returned to Mexico fifteen years later, we made the trip, sans children, and were able to savor the sights of the colonial city of Oaxaca and enjoy the culture, especially the music scenes that included the Guelaguetza, a festival of music and dancing which honors maize and wind gods. We tasted the mole negro (chocolate tinged sauce) made with chilhuacle negro chili (Oaxaca is called the “Land of Seven Moles”) and sampled the harsh liquor, mescal, made from the maguey plant, which we drank from tiny green shot glasses.

I chronicled the visit to Oaxaca City in poetry, writing in a bright yellow copy book used by children that I bought in the marketplace. It had wonderful wide spaces between lines, and on the first page I penned the lines: “The mask of the mother goddesses, the ancient Aztecs, is yellow. I didn’t know this when I chose a yellow-covered exercise book. (June, 1997).” The friend who accompanied me and Vickie on this odyssey to Oaxaca City in ’97 was so enchanted with our sojourn there that when she experiences any happy occasion now, she cries out, “Oaxaca, Oaxaca!” Yes!

BADGERED BY A SKUNK?

Last evening, as I was reading a line from Joseph Campbell, “Sri Ramakrisna says ‘Do not seek illumination/unless you seek it as a person whose hair is on fire seeks a pond,’” I was called to the kitchen window to see the illumination of something that set my hair on end – a huge skunk standing in the light of the yard lamp. Light shone into its expressionless eyes, but it went back to rooting for grubs like a pig after truffles, even when we beamed a flashlight on its body. From the direction of the hemlock in my backyard, a deer came out and observed this nocturnal beast for a few moments, and all three of us froze in a frame of territorialism, watchful against intruders.

The deer ambled past the fence, and I went out on the porch to get a closer look at the critter. Because we didn’t move around, it must have felt safe, and  it slowly undulated toward the hemlock, then disappeared under its drooping branches. To me, the animal seemed both beautiful and terrifying; the latter because years ago a skunk sprayed into a floor furnace beneath our home in Texas and also because the size of the animal in the yard was unlike that of a “regular” skunk. I thought perhaps it was a badger. However, “Pepe le Pew” presented a fluffy white tail, and, after researching the two animals, I discovered that badgers have stubby tails. At one point in this nocturnal drama, the skunk seemed to be dancing around in a frenzy.

This morning after Eucharist at St. Mary’s I asked Sister Lucy (who knows the wildlife around Sewanee) if she thought it was a badger, but she said “no” and that skunks in these parts are often as large as I described and have broad white markings on their bodies and, sometimes, a fluffy white tail.

I don’t know if I’d really like to have badgers around as they often burrow in yards and do a lot of damage. Still, when I looked at Beatrix Potter’s illustrations of a badger this morning, I really wanted to catch a glimpse of this nocturnal animal. Potter wrote a book about a badger and a fox entitled The Tale of Mr. Tod in which Tommy Brock, a badger who captures two bunnies (could my critter have been searching for the brown bunnies that brazenly graze on my lawn daily?) and puts his catch in an oven in the home of Mr. Tod, the fox who is temporarily away from his residence. When the fox returns home, he and the badger end up in a fight and roll down a hill fighting like the bad guys Potter wanted to portray.

Frederick Warne didn’t like Potter’s opening paragraph of The Tale of Mr. Tod in which she relates that she was “tired of making goody goody books about nice people” and that she’d make a book about two disagreeable people called Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod. Warne changed her opening lines to read: “I have made many books about well-behaved people.” I almost expected Potter to step out of the mountain mists during the short time my nocturnal visitor roamed the yard – the scene was surreal, with the critter waving that white tail like I’d imagine a stripper waves a big white fan, then disappearing into the overhang of the hemlock.

I guess we’re luckier than one of our friends who lives in a home perched on the bluff near Monteagle, Tennessee where a buzzard frequently visits. She says she awakened one morning and found a large black buzzard eying her through the window of her bedroom, which overlooks a wraparound deck. We told her that the big bird was probably after smaller birds that often crash against the glass panes and die on her deck, and she registered some relief that the vulture wasn’t eying her for a meal.

Although we live on the campus of the University of the South, Sewanee is a village intermingled with deep woods, and I’ve written about some of the critters that roam around campus at night in my recent book of poetry entitled Alchemy. Alchemy should be available at amazon.com within a few weeks.