A Right Smart Piece to Go

If Cactus Hill south from Richmond proves out as pre-Clovis, First Americans certainly crossed the Alleghenies into the Shenandoah well before sixteen thousand years ago

The Spanish never made it up into Virginia

De Soto came north from Florida for El Dorado through what became Georgia and the Carolinas, but south of the Smokies his 1540s opportunistic curiosity took him meandering on westward

In the eighteenth century the Shenandoah was already heavy with Europeans off their transatlantic crossings walking southwest via Pennsylvania down long and graceful mountain-valley Virginia for the Cumberland Gap 

My brother and I probably came into the Shenandoah over Swift Run Gap

Crossing the Blue Ridge that way, via Culpeper in our aunt’s 1942 Chevy

Fall 1943 Home Front gas rationing, but she was the Yancey Mission lady with the only car in the parish and so with a B or even a C sticker she was able to drive up out of the Shenandoah to Washington and back

The first night was spent with her in Trenton at the Stacy Trent and then she took us away on a Washington train in the morning

Riding in a parlor car

She was obligated but brave to take us on, me seven, my brother four

Intensely confused little kids 

Either she picked us up in a taxi from the Robinson farm or Elizabeth Robinson, who had saved us from state care months before, delivered us to the hotel 

It’s blurred and there is no one else alive to ask

As the deadened past tense of every event soon turns

And too, “what you see is nothing compared to the roots”  (Tomas Tranströmer)

Of a father’s suicide leaving a deranged mother with young ones 

Hemingway flogged Ballantine Ale, probably why my father drank it

“…nothing exists which does not understand its past or its future”  (Ezra Pound)

“Hem always believed that you should get yours inside the system”  (Pound in St Lz on Hemingway’s magazine ads endorsing beer and a pen)

Writers think through how to do it

How to stay at it, make it work

Understanding that they are individual, and then some are trying to be original

Doing the best they can at that

“Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another”  (Julia Kristeva)

As if most lives were the same

“Theory, that capitalized catch-all term which is meant to cover all the various ways of studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist.”  (Clive James on Walter Benjamin)

In the dead upper trunk punk of a boxelder, the dray of flying squirrels or a pair of gray squirrels keeping cavey with their late winter progeny

The nest destroyed overnight, noticed in the dawn from dead leaf litter on the snow below, odds are a great horned owl

“I’m just not a fixer or an influence peddler”  (Alan Dershowitz)

Being the sort of sleazy ego we’ve had during Trump’s four years

Now as it is with some raptors’ unsettling ability to keep on vanishing after they’re gone, eager for the same rapid disappearance of Trump, Stephen Miller, all the ethically odious shlumps in the Trumpismo directorate

As we earnestly try to push past covid and slide beyond following a catastrophic year of dishonest federal mismanagement  

And wind down or leave it after almost twenty years in Afghanistan

Two trillion dollars and twenty-four thousand military casualties

Orthodox corruption and deceit, boundlessly vicious treatment of women, bachi bazi, Hesco barriers and pitiful hopelessness

Done in black, white and red

“Westerners have a history of undervaluing all things blue. During the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, reds, blacks and browns reigned supreme; the ancient Greeks and Romans admired the simple triumvirate of black, white and red.”  (Kassia St. Clair)

Fall 1940 or 1941, a shrimp left to my own devices along a quiet street on one side of the Princeton campus on my elbows down on the flagstone sidewalk looking at ants, then shoes were present, not bedroom slippers, and when I looked up he was smiling down

Soft accented words from him that I’ve never remembered, apologies from me as I scrambled out of his way

He with it all in his head

More than two billion galaxies, billions of stars in each, most stars orbited by exoplanets

As though reaching, reaching, reaching, Shostakovich’s eerie piano Prelude No 14 in E-Flat Minor

In the same universe as a superb supper now of Veneto risi e bisi with Puglia Primitivo

Alive in the exact particular

A dot in time                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Eighteen centuries after La Maison Carrée in Nîmes came Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol, both of course slave labor built

In front the Capitol state workers in good weather sit and read at lunch in spring sun on its dramatic steeply sloped lawn

And his Charlottesville Rotunda designed with close reference to Palladio’s drawings of the Pantheon, slave labor built as surely as was the Pantheon itself

That incredible Roman concrete dome, more than six meters thick at its base and weighing over four thousand tons

Those vividly Classical designs alive on down the line to our present, as with our huge stadiums’ peel back ETFE pneumatic cable net system cushion roofing

The serial modifications of everything pointedly linked

Or allowed to go derelict and ignored, or destroyed 

As with the new A303 highway tunnel under Stonehenge, to break ground in 2023 after “archaeological mitigation work”

As twenty-seven years after his death Mr. Jefferson’s Charlottesville went about treating his genius like so much Aeolian debris

When in 1853 the University of Virginia with slave labor attached an annex to Jefferson’s Rotunda that in 1895 burned and destroyed the Rotunda itself

Eventually re-rebuilt en toto in 1976 faithful to his design

Our aunt drove her Chevy from St. Stephen’s Mission to Charlottesville forty miles over the mountain now and then to visit her Bishop and deliver her church’s deep Depression collection plate proceeds

Nickels and dimes

From those steadfast Yancey people to whom she’d give emergency rides

“Much obliged, Miss Steward, how much I owe you?”

She was the mission lady, there to help and sympathize, to offer sound often teacherly Episcopalian counsel

Their skinny supple feed-sack dress bib overall bodies

With quiet Appalachian dignity

Their fast pace barefoot manner walking the Rocky Bar Road to church

We ring-worm “Yes Mam” kids running wild there in Yancey’s hollows, on the dirt roads and wagon tracks

Those families living up against the Blue Ridge having no economy no jobs no cash at all in the early 1940s

Trade this, trade that, fatwood, chickens, heifers, hogs, honey, berries, whittled handicrafts, smokehouse ham, bacon and game   

Don’t make me no never mind, have time, happy to help 

He called his nonchalance “specifically Appalachian in origin”

Chuck Yeager (1923-2020), “I was always afraid of dying. Always.”

Flying as he did through the sound barrier with the finesse of racing a ball joint stock car

That’s the breed those people are

Living in the Shenandoah

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About the author
D. E. Steward has many hundreds of literary magazine credits. His five volumes of Chroma are published by Avante-Garde Classics/Amazon (2018). Chroma is a month-to-month calendar book, the months are continuing past the books of them published, of which the piece published here is one.