Talursis Tales

On a Rain-Washed Hill in Jenny’s Creek 30 January 2010

I was tired when we began the day with breakfast at a restaurant in Logan, West Virginia.  My cousin, Linda, and her husband Kenneth looked as though they had also struggled to get up that morning.  We were on an expedition of my dad’s choosing; an hour’s drive to the place where his father had been born and raised, Jenny’s Creek.  As birds fly, it is barely across the border from Kentucky on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork of the Sandy River.  But in 1905, with no roads to link it with anyplace else, it was a remote and isolated part of Appalachia.  I knew that now there was an asphalt road; but in my mind I dreaded the trip because I also knew how-off-the-main-paths of my life that it was.  Like so many places in those mountains that, even in my early childhood, had been harrowing journeys away along roads that sometimes vanished in mudslides during the rain, or that at other times were blocked by crashing piles of rock from above, the roads to Jenny’s Creek had been greatly improved and driving was now an ordinary (albeit a little rustic) task.  I rode in the lead vehicle of the two we were taking; with Ken and Linda, leaving Mom & Dad and Linda’s sister Nila Jean to follow.  Kenneth was ‘fairly sure’ of where we were going.  He had an approximate certainty that usually means you reach your destination in a timely manner; but sometimes means you will have ‘an adventure’ getting to where you are going.  I had a headache.  The rain that had been most of the weather there for about a week had returned.  At the restaurant, I think I had not been the only one who was secretly hopeful that the downpour outside the windows would provide sufficient discouragement to Dad to cancel the trip.  But, really, I knew better.  He had been obsessing on the idea since he mentioned it to us the day before at the Messer family reunion in Chief Logan State Park.  I have inherited that obsessive characteristic of personality from him.  There is no turning either of us away from a goal once we get like that.  Linda and Ken must also have known we were prisoners to Dad’s will.  I could see the look of resignation on their faces.  And, when the sun briefly tore through the clouds before we got into the cars again, we knew that our one good excuse was failing us and there would be no turning back until we reached the spot Dad had appointed for our visit.

I have always had an easy gift for car sickness – especially when the moist mountain weather conspires with this weakness in my body.  As we left the main road and made our way along the first two or three winding miles through a narrow valley, up and over the side of a mountain, and then back into another valley, I was suddenly seized by a memory from early childhood.  I had been no more than three years old at the time; and my parents and I were riding along old West Virginia Route 10 between Huntington and Logan.  I had a headache then, too.  And one curve too many had me clawing at the door to be let out to surrender the contents of my stomach to the side of the road.  Motion sickness afflicts a person’s entire being.  Sweat pours out of you, your stomach twists and convulses, and your whole body aches.  That roadside humiliation from long ago has become an iconic image for the frustration I feel at times when that queasiness draws near again.  It has never seemed fair to me that someone who has always loved mountains and travel should be so strongly afflicted with such sickness.  I didn’t mention it to Ken, as he accelerated into some of the sharper curves and dropped us over the rolling humps in the surface of the road.  I have found that a primitive defence against such feelings really is the best – denial.  Once the discomfort is mentioned aloud, it grows in power.  And no amount of slowing down is enough.  I focused instead, as best I could, on the forest and the beauty around me.  I love the deep, rich shades of green that the trees on those mountains wear during a rain storm – and as we drove on the pelting from above returned and provided a soaked pallet of beauty that made me wish I had with me some paint to record a portion of what I saw as a keepsake for another day.

The road we were on had been a railroad bed in the early decades of the 20^th century.  The one-lane bridges were really just train trestles onto which an asphalt layer had been applied for automobile traffic.  The paving of these bridges was a major improvement upon the roads of my childhood days, however.  I can remember when similar roads had no paving on the trestles.  You drove on the railroad ties (hoping they would hold) – all the while praying you would not go too much to the left or right and land yourself in the river or creek below (as there were no guard rails).  Sometimes the roadway made use of active train trestles – with tracks and all! – and one experienced the added thrill of wondering if you would get across the bridge before a loaded coal train crashed into you along the way.  This was not a mere paranoid fear of an overly safety-conscious child (me).  I grew up hearing stories of people who ‘didn’t get out of the way in time.’  That day, on my first trip to Jenny’s Creek, I counted it a luxury that we had a paved road and didn’t have to share our bridges with trains.  Even when we had trestles minus guard rails, I felt as relaxed as one could be.  Roads in West Virginia have gotten a lot safer over the course of my first forty-two years.

The one thing that did frighten me (although I kept this fact to myself until now) was the train tunnel we drove through.  The trains and the tracks had long since been removed.  But the tunnel itself was one that was hand-hewn out of the rock.  I looked up and saw the uneven arch of the passageway and wondered how many times it had dropped some portion of the mountain down onto the road we were now traversing.  There were no beams or supports.  It was just the soft rock of the mountain that looked as though it had been scooped out with a giant’s spoon.  I thought of scooped out melons and my concern for the soft, often fractured rock, increased.  Thankfully, we did not die on our journey through that underworld.  But I would not have been the least bit surprised if we had.

I was still contemplating our narrow escape from the clutches of death when we drove on and then made a sharp, banking turn to the left.  The narrow road we had been on was a wide thoroughfare compared to the path we now traced; although, to the credit of my birth-state, the pavement was smooth and relatively new.  We climbed up and up and up the side of the mountain.  ‘Kenneth, do you know where you’re going?’  Linda asked this question just as we crested the hill.  ‘I think so.  We’ll know soon enough.  If we have to we’ll turn around and go back.’  ‘Where will we turn around, Kenneth?  All we’ve got on the side of the road is a cliff.’  I did not join in the conversation.  My stomach was again threatening an all-out rebellion and my head was spinning.

We plunged down into a narrow hollow (‘hollar,’ as it is said there).  The next thing I noticed (remember that I was focused upon not becoming violently ill) was the sudden appearance of houses lining the road.  Then, on our left was a sign proclaiming a cemetery (one of at least three I counted along the quarter mile stretch of road that made up the place).  One of the names on the sign was ‘Messer.’  We had to be in Jenny’s Creek.  My surname is not common even in my native southern West Virginia.  In fact, I was struck by the novelty of seeing it on a sign.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sign with my name on it before.

We stopped and Kenneth asked where the Hodge Cemetery is of a woman loading herself into her car in the rain (oddly enough, many of my Messer ancestors are buried in a cemetery named after the Hodge family – who occupy very few of the actual graves there).  She paused and gave us a minute’s worth of directions, which soaked her with a gallon’s worth of rain.  I wondered if she was a relative.  But I am shy with people I do not know; so I smiled, thanked her for her kindness, and we drove on.

The rain was a perfect special effect to add to the atmosphere of that first visit to the place of origin for my father’s family line in West Virginia.  I felt like we were travelling back in time.  The German word ‘Urzeit’ (primeval time) kept running through my head; also the word ‘Ursprung’ (source).  These words alternated in my thoughts every couple of minutes the whole while I was there.  Perhaps this is simply because I have been exerting huge amounts of effort (to limited success) to learn the language.  But it also seemed that these words conveyed nuances of meaning for me that their English equivalents do not.

Arriving there, I had stepped on the stage and into one of the scenes of my personal and family mythologies.  I know nothing of my grandfather’s family before Jenny’s Creek.  I suddenly felt as though I had stepped onto the first page of that volume of my own history.  In an instant my heart grasped what my mind had already known – that one of the reasons why my dad was so determined to visit there (his first visit in nearly fifty years) was because it was a pilgrimage.  The thought had occurred to me along the way that not even high water was going to divert us from Dad’s goal, as I watched the creeks and rivers swell and rush with earth-rich brown run-off from the rain.  My first sight of the community of Jenny’s Creek transmitted more understanding of the why of this determination than any words could have.  We had returned home – for me, it was for the very first time.

Dad navigated our journey from memories that had not been refreshed since he was a teenager.  The cemetery is up the side of the mountain on the right, he told us . . . across a creek that he remembered having to ford on foot.  I was doubtful if we could wade safely through what was quickly becoming flood water.  I told Ken and Linda that I feared we would get in sight of the place and we would have to look up the hill and then turn back, prohibited from reaching the graveyard by the rain-swollen creek.

Dad recognized the cemetery through most of a half-century’s worth of memory.  It was as he said and where he said it would be.  The only detail that was – thankfully! – different, was that now there was a makeshift bridge of a couple of steel beams and somewhat less-than-confidence-inspiring wood laid across.  We were able to walk over top of the creek.  There would be no wading through muddy water in the rain that day.

Of course, the cemetery was on a steep stretch of the mountainside (land too sharply angled to be farmed), so the next concern to occupy my mind was whether one or more of us was about to fall and break our neck and prematurely join the others of the family who had been laid to rest there.  Carefully placed bits of shale had been assembled into steps to get us to the first level of the graveyard.  But shale is a soft and treacherous rock.  It breaks and heaves without warning.  And in the rain, the soft mud of the mountainside worked a mutual mischief for the unwary.

Dad remembered that Fanny Messer was buried in a mausoleum at the left of the entrance to the graveyard.  I have no idea what he meant by ‘mausoleum.’  Stacked rocks?  An actual building?  Whatever the case, it wasn’t there anymore.  But there was an odd structure resembling a miniature pole-barn (two sides and a roof made of steel and wood) that looked like a temporary shelter while construction was under way.  The gravestone did indeed say Fanny Messer.  And I was struck that a woman who had died most of a century before then still had someone labouring to keep her grave out of the weather.  Someone still cared for her memory all these years later.

My dad was looking for his grandparents (his grandmother, grandfather, and step-grandfather).  We all spread out and wandered off, intermittently calling out names in the rain.  Do you know this person or that?  Look for so-and-so.  The raindrops turned back to a steady downpour again.  There were only two umbrellas for six of us.  I was the youngest; and so I took the steepest portions of the graveyard and settled for the meager cover of a plastic shopping bag pulled over the top of my head.  I looked ridiculous.  But it seemed to me that this added to the moment in a memorable way.

Nora Messer.  I was standing beside her grave and called out her name to Dad.

‘That’s your great grandmother, Glen.’

1887-1944.  She was eighteen when she gave birth to my father’s father, L.B. Messer (he hated his given name and always went by his initials – somehow I think he’d be angry with me if I wrote it all out for you; so if you don’t know it already, you won’t know it from the telling of this story).

I looked at the wet, grey stone.  Great grandmother’s name was stencil-painted there, along with her dates.  The grave was marked with flowers and mountain vegetation was drawn over her for a blanket.  One of the things that was striking about that cemetery was how ‘alive’ it was.  It was obviously actively cared for by relatives who still lived nearby.  It was simultaneously one of the most rustic – and one of the most tended – graveyards I have ever seen.  I looked at the name, looked at the flowers, and saw my feet partially sunk into the soil beside where she lay.  Quite unexpectedly, I found myself unable to speak or make a sound.  My throat tightened.

Seven years ago, when I officiated my first funeral (for my dad’s younger brother, Bobby), I had been stunned to realize just how close to the surface the dead actually lie in their graves.  For some reason, I had always thought ‘six feet under’ meant six feet of dirt between you and the body that was buried.  But it is six feet to the floor of the grave.  Nora’s grave was slightly sunken.  She had been buried at a time before the mortuary lobby convinced legislatures that burial vaults should be mandatory.  Her coffin had given way, and her flesh had melted into the earth.  It had melted into the soil at my feet.

When I was a child, this thought would have repulsed me.  But it had the opposite effect upon me in middle age.  Never before in my life had I been to a single place where so many – perhaps dozens – of my relatives and direct ancestors were buried.  For the first time I felt a rudimentary and very physical (as well as spiritual) connection to those whose blood now runs in my veins.  For the first time, I felt an ancestral connection to a piece of land . . . as though its soil was an extension of my very flesh – or perhaps the opposite.  Looking at my feet in the mud of that mountainside graveyard, I felt ‘grounded’ to a part of who I am that I never knew I had failed to notice.  I wondered to myself if my departed relatives knew that we had come to see where they lay.  I wondered if they could see me and hear me in that place.  My sense of spirit became as primal as it had been when I was a small child.  I was not grasping for meanings or understanding – I knew there was an unseen world and I wondered if those in it could see me as I drew near.

All my life, I have been a person of more than one home, more than one people, and more than one history.  I left West Virginia for Michigan in 1969, when I was twelve day’s short of my fifth birthday.  Since then, I have never felt that there was a place to which I fully belonged.  Not until then, that is.  There on that mountainside in Jenny’s Creek, West Virginia, where so many of my ancestors’ remains were laid to rest, I felt I belonged to them – not to the dead; but to the living part of them that I intuit still is.  I hoped they would think well of me.  But I did worry whether or not they would claim me for their own.  It was my birthright; their flesh is my flesh; their spirit is my spirit.

Whether I will ever feel that feeling again I do not know. I have always lived my life ‘in between’ – belonging in more than one place and belonging to no place – and I imagine that is a defining part of my character I would not give up were I given the choice.  But that moment was a multifaceted revelation to me concerning the depth and the power of the myths and identity of the self and the groups to which we belong.

Along with my primitive self that did not belong to the world of words, as such, and the part of myself that is simply tribal (in the best of ways, I think), there was also present in that moment on the side of that mountain the man that had just finished his doctoral studies for a vocation as a historian.  All of these collided in me, like children suddenly stirred into revel in the waves by the breakers that heralded a storm far out to sea.  It was as though these facets of who I am became tangibly aware of one another in a way that had been only theoretical most of the time before.  Each pointed to the other and spoke in language that was not clearly intelligible; but whose meaning was nevertheless clear.  Ursprung.  Source.  And with that realization came a sense of the power of just how ‘created’ each of us is . . . how much a cast of characters we all are in a story we shape and edit again and again into the stories that make up the realities we know, intuit, and share with one another.

I looked at my great grandmother’s gravestone and saw the name stenciled there in black paint.  Who was this woman whose flesh and blood now lives in my own?  Or, perhaps, an equally valid question is, ‘Who is this woman?’  Standing with my feet planted in the mud of her ‘what-was,’ I thought of how foolishly incomplete the facts that presented themselves to me are – Nora . . . 1887-1944.  Mother of L.B.  Grandmother and great grandmother of . . . lived and died on Jenny’s Creek.  Coal country in an isolated pocket of Appalachia.

As a historian, I spend my life chasing after footprints in the dust.  I collect shadows.  I sometimes catch a whiff of long-ago flowers whose essence lies hidden in the folds of a letter not opened in a century and a half or more.  Small, isolated facts.  . . . But not so much a story.

The story is in imagining how the pieces fit together.  More than this, even, the story is in imagining how those lives and events relate to our ‘now.’

History is like bread.  It is made to be fresh for a day.  It is meant to nourish for a day.  And thereafter it becomes an ‘artifact’ in itself.  It is a trace record of how a people of one place, time, and situation interacted with those who stood off in the mist of another place, time, and situation; their reflections and projections of what they thought once was and what they believed to have been their own ‘is.’

In truth, it is all myth.  It is the story-telling of people and peoples.  It is observation and commentary poured out in the narrow light of the moment’s campfire, with all the shadows of what was and what will be bending over the tale like flicker-lit trees craning down to hear what is said.  History, like true myth, must speak truth in the essence of the story.  But truth is painted in all the colours of that day’s imagination.

In me, there has always been a tension between ‘cold, hard facts’ and warm, vibrant imagination.  In some ways, this is a marker between the primeval me and the modern me.  The primeval me always resides in the firelight of a campfire tale.  And the modern me always feels that fancy must be roped off and the doings of life examined with the clinical detachment of an autopsy.  In some ways, this tension is spoken of in a novel I am just now finishing, a short book entitled Of Two Minds.  In that story, fact and fictive stories of ‘is’ and ‘was’ and ‘will be’ battle within the souls of some of the main characters.  In some senses the story resolves this conflict by looking upon it with an amused eye – amused that human beings, so self-constructed to begin with, cannot find peace in the fact that myth is real and that, like it or not, they spin it anew every day.  Of course, the book was a projection of my own inner struggles.  But I face them on different terms when I don my hat as a historian.

I looked down at Nora’s grave (funny, as I think of it, one of the main female characters in my novel is named Nora . . . that wasn’t a conscious echo) and I realized in an instant how important she was and is and will be to the fabric of my life’s story.  But I also realized in that same instant just how much the story of Jenny’s Creek had already changed in its telling during the years of my life up to now.  Its significance has shifted and its importance for the now and the future has been refocused and reshaped.  Nora and L.B. were and are living characters in my life.  But inside me they sometimes appear in the first act of the play, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end.  Each telling of the story has them speak in different ways.  And each telling of the story reshapes how they are integral to it all.

Never tell the story the same way twice.  This was a lesson I learned as a child.  Sitting in the kitchen of my grandparent’s house, we told and retold, again and again, the ‘same’ stories.  Still an oral culture, but one whose campfires were quickly being overpowered by the lights that shine over strip-malls, we told our tales.  My Dad and other relatives explained to me that the power of it all was in the telling.  And to tell it well, it had to be told for the first time again.  The essence must not change.  The details that do not matter should.  And somehow, the stories of days gone by should be brought into living interaction with the stories of today.  And both should inspire the stories about tomorrow.  Never tell the same story twice – but always tell the truth.

I encountered this principle again when I had my first classes in university on the subject of the Hebrew Scriptures.  With each significant shift in the biblical history of the Jews, the stories were retold, reinterpreted, and reappropriated . . . not to change the essence, but to make it fresh for another day and another circumstance.  What was the truth of God in the time of Abraham?  What was the truth of God during the Egyptian captivity?  What of the Babylonian exile?  The essence remained the same – but the story was told again anew.

The rain was pouring down and I was back to stumbling among the graves of my ancestors.  Unseen in my lifetime on this earth, they had nonetheless been players in the stories of my life.  Now, as the earth, mixed with their melted mortal flesh, caked onto my shoes, I knew they would be given new lines in the telling of my personal myths – and in what is the history of my family and of the peoples to whom I belong.

My favourite text in the Bible is Revelation 21 (a reworking of another text from Isaiah, by the way).  One of the lines in this text is, ‘Behold!  I am making all things new.’  Walking in the mud and pouring rain, I was struck again that it says ‘I am making all things new.’  Some interpret this to mean God is making a new thing – that the old is discarded.  But I think a better sense of it is that the old things that are passing away are themselves being transformed and given new life.

One of the ways in which we give new life is in the telling of our stories.  And the truth of the matter is: a historian is simply a storyteller who goes to great lengths not to misrepresent the facts or make the characters in the story say lines that they would never choose to say.

I did almost break my neck coming down off that mountainside in the sliding mud.  It would have been easy to take a fall from such a steep hillside and move from my place by the campfire and back into the shadows of the witnessing forest.  I thought of the potential irony of it; dying in a graveyard filled with my ancestors.  But I made it off that hill.  And now I live to write the stories that no one else can tell.  Nora is here with me . . . and L.B. . . . and perhaps even some people whose lives have not yet intersected with my own.

Copyright 2007/2010 by Glen Alton Messer, II – All Rights Reserved.