Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The reason to write is to learn. The red streaks on rocks are iron. We are made of stardust, you, me, this newspaper, your thoughts, dreams, and hammers. Your diamond rings and number-two lead pencils. How blind we usually are. Not only to the real phenomena, which our five senses cannot see, but to the wonder that is here, beneath our feet, in Central Park, in every stone, the real history of the world, written in granite and marble and feldspar and dolomite and gypsum and opals and rubies and diamonds. Diamonds enter the earth’s surface at Mach 2. How’s that for a birth process?

  * John McPhee

  My Paris and My Rome, Part I

  I HAVE LOVED FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS, SINCE THE FIRST TIME I drove there from New Orleans and found it waiting for me in all its autumn splendor. I had driven late the night before and spent the night in the small town of Morrillton, a hundred miles down the road. At dawn I bought a large cup of coffee at McDonald’s and began the drive up into the Ozark Mountains. It was November, a clear, brilliant morning and the hills were covered with red and orange and violet and golden yellow leaves. Some mountains were covered with tall oak trees all turned a dark rich red. There were stretches of still-green bottomland, then hills of yellow and orange maples with red sumac climbing fences and abandoned barns and houses. I had not expected mountains or this spectacular autumn beauty.

  Above the hills were brilliant blue skies with white cirrus clouds drifting past a full moon that stayed in view until late in the morning. The nearer I got to Fayetteville the steeper and more treacherous the road became. BEWARE, signs said. THIRTEEN PEOPLE KILLED HERE IN 1975. DON’T YOU BE NEXT.

  It was exciting driving. You had to keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the narrow curving road. I was hungry but there was no place to stop after I left the town of Alma, only this wild mountain road with its beautiful vistas and occasional pickup truck.

  I was dressed in a designer suit with a ruffled white silk blouse. I was carrying a notebook containing one hundred and seventeen poems I had written the past summer and early fall. I had a CARTER FOR PRESIDENT button pinned to my suit jacket. I had picked it up the day before when I stopped in Jackson, Mississippi, to have lunch with Hodding Carter II and Patricia Derian, leading lights in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. They had insisted I stay the afternoon to hear Jimmy Carter speak at the Holiday Inn. I had never heard of Jimmy Carter and neither had anyone in Fayetteville when I got there. The poet Miller Williams, who later became a close friend of Carter’s and edited his first book of poems, used to introduce me to visiting writers as the woman who brought the first Jimmy Carter button to town.

  The reason I was making this 652-mile drive in my old Rambler station wagon was that I was “going to join the poets” in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas, where I now teach. My three wild, redheaded sons had joined the hippie rebellion of the 1970s. I had completely lost control of their lives. When they were born I had given up my ambitions to become a writer. I had transferred my energy and ambitions to my beautiful, tall sons. Now those sons had abandoned the paths I set for them and gone off to smoke marijuana with the hippies and do anything else they thought up to do.

  “If my sons won’t use the DNA, then I’ll use it,” I told my husband and my friends.

  I called the writing program at the University of Arkansas and told them I was coming up there to learn how to publish books. “Come on,” my old friend Jim Whitehead said. “I liked the poems you sent me. They are dangerous and powerful. You shouldn’t be alone writing things like that.”

  I left my youngest son in New Orleans with my mother and my husband and got into my Rambler and started driving. I had no idea where I was going. I didn’t look on a map until I crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas. I certainly never imagined I was going to love the place as much as I did.

  Fayetteville turned out to be much more beautiful and interesting and unique than I could have imagined, so free after the middle-class life I was living in New Orleans, so open and funny and welcoming, full of exciting men and women doing things like building kilns and designing houses and writing poetry and playing musical instruments and spending days floating down wild rivers in canoes, sleeping on blankets or in tents.

  There was music everywhere. I took off my shoes and remembered how to dance. I had stopped drinking years before and I was amazed to learn I could dance as well on Diet Coke as I had on gin and vodka.

  The poets welcomed me. I met a brilliant young poet named Frank Stanford who asked if he could publish a book of my poems at Lost Roads press. Yes, I said, and yes and yes and yes. The book was called The Land Surveyor’s Daughter.

  A writer-professor named Bill Harrison talked me into trying my hand at short stories. The second story I wrote for him won publication in the yearly magazine of the Associated Writing Programs and gained me a lot of attention from publishers. So I wrote more stories and Miller Williams published a book of them at the new University of Arkansas Press. The book sold ten thousand copies in a few weeks. It has been reprinted many times by three publishers and also in seven languages.

  How could I not love Fayetteville after all it has given me? While I was making my name in literature my youngest son left the hippies and came to Fayetteville to get a degree in journalism and then a doctorate from the law school. My oldest son left the hippies and came here to get a degree in land surveying so he could support his wife and child. My middle son stops off frequently in between trips around the world as a ship’s captain. He loves the air in Fayetteville. He says it’s a good place to breathe.

  Over the years my oldest grandchildren have come here for weeks in the summers to go to basketball and tennis and drama camps at the university. An Olympic swimmer at the university taught them to swim one summer. They still have extraordinarily good strokes. When I see them swimming I remember the tall beautiful girl who charged me fifteen dollars an hour to teach them things they might never have learned anyplace else.

  This town is magic. It has a magical quality for those of us who love it.

  As much as I have always loved it I have never loved it more than I do right now in October 2008. In September I went to Duke University Hospital to have spinal surgery to correct a common ailment called stenosis. I had not been in a hospital as a patient since 1961.

  When I returned to Fayetteville the town closed around me like a band of angels. A new rug had been delivered to make my house warmer, the Orkin man had come to spray for spiders, John Tucker McCormick (starting quarterback for a Fayetteville junior high school football team) had mowed my yard and swept my porches and sidewalks for leaves and hickory nuts, the athletic club had put up the swimming pool bubble so I’d have a warm place to recuperate, and the university where I teach had allowed me to have a large black recliner moved into the classroom where I teach my classes. It looks hilarious in the room, like a scene from a Pinter play. All I need are some Fritos and a case of bottled water and maybe a television set.

  People I barely knew left notes in my mailbox asking to help or drive me places, wishing me luck. My students had written brilliant stories and nonfiction pieces and printed worksheets for our workshops.

  Not to mention the weather these past weeks has been perfect, cool and clear, seventies in the daytime and fifties at night. The trees turned gold and red and yellow and violet and there was a full moon to remind me of the one I followed thirty-two years ago to lead me to this refuge.

  My Paris and My Rome, Part II

  IT IS THE HOT, DARK HEART OF SUMMER IN THIS SMALL TOWN that I love. Fireworks have been going off sporadically for several nights, and the teenagers next door are playing water polo in the afternoons in the swimming pool their professor parents built for them this year.

  Down the street a four-year-old girl is riding her tricycle madly around the circular driveway of her parents’ home. It seems only yesterday that I walked by the house one morning and saw a pink ribbon on the mailbox. Now she is a tricycle racer, her
long curly hair hanging rakishly down over her eyes, her concentration and speed all you need to know about the power of our species.

  Last week the painting contractor who painted the exterior of my house gave me a discount for my patience while he had a stent put in an artery leading to his heart. (The attending nurse in the surgery is my weekend workout partner. She also attended the emergency surgery that saved the life of the game and fish genius who traps squirrels for me when they eat the trim on my house.) During the prolonged painting job, I took to spending the part of the afternoons when I would normally be taking a nap down at a nearby coffee shop reading newspapers and drinking herbal tea. I ran into the president of a local bank who has recently retired to devote himself to building a natural science museum and planetarium in Fayetteville. We already have plenty of dinosaurs. Some farseeing biologists at the University of Arkansas collected them years ago. They have been saved in a small, musty museum on the campus that was recently closed, to the ire of many of the professors. (There is always plenty of ire in a college town, accompanied by a plethora of long-winded letters to the editors of the local newspapers and magazines. Nuclear power, pollution, cruelty to animals, war and cutting down trees are contenders for space, but the closing or shutting down of anything at the university is a top contender.)

  Fayetteville now has sixty-two thousand people, but it still seems like the much smaller place I found when I was forty years old and adopted as my home. I had driven up into the northwest Arkansas hills to spend a semester in the writing program at the University of Arkansas, where I now teach. The moment I left the flatlands and began to climb into the Ozark Mountains, I fell in love with the place. There is a welcoming naturalness to the land, and it is reflected in the people. I immediately felt at home in Fayetteville and I still feel that way. Even when I didn’t know everyone in town, I felt like I knew them. I lived in small towns in southern Indiana and southern Illinois when I was young, and Fayetteville has always reminded me of those places. There are many people here from the Deep South, but the heart of the place belongs to the Midwest. It is hill country, surrounded by farmland. There are never aristocracies in such places. There aren’t enough people to be divided into groups. In the schools of small midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess. I had been living in New Orleans, in a world of privilege, and I was never comfortable there. I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I’m in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.

  But I think it is the beauty of the hill country that really speaks to my heart. My ancestors are highland Scots, and my father’s home in north Alabama is so much like northwest Arkansas I have the same allergies in both places. Besides, I like to watch water run downhill. After years in the flatlands, I am still delighted at the sight of rain running down my hilly street after a storm. I also like to watch it run down steep steps, before you even get to the thrill of camping north of here and watching it run over real waterfalls near the Buffalo River.

  Most of all, this is where I write. Ever since the first night I spent in this town, I have been inspired to write by being here. When people in my family ask me why I live so far away from all of them, I always answer, because it’s where I write. The place closes around me and makes me safe and makes me want to sing.

  After thirty years of living here, I think I know everyone in town. I cannot walk down a street without seeing people I know or passing places where things occurred that mattered to me. Some of the people I loved have died, but it seems they have never left the place. Their children and grandchildren are here and their legacies: in buildings and businesses or in the town’s collective memory. Some are remembered in statues and plaques, and some for things they said or wrote, and others for the places where they walked and lived. People love each other here. It’s a habit and a solace in times of trouble.

  I live in a glass-and-stone-and-redwood house built by an architect who won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. I bought the house for a pittance several years before he won the award, and I spend my spare time keeping it in working order. It is on two acres of land. I have deer on the lot behind the house and enough squirrels and turtles and rabbits and foxes and coons and possums to supply several petting zoos. Not to mention crows and redbirds and mockingbirds and woodpeckers and bluebirds and robins and an occasional itinerant roadrunner.

  The first novel I wrote was set in Fayetteville, using many of the real people and places as background for the adventures of a poorly disguised autobiographical heroine named Amanda McCamey. (I disguised her by making her thinner, kinder, and braver than I was at the time.) The novel was really about Fayetteville. Here is how I described it in the novel.

  Fayetteville, Arkansas. Fateville, as the poets call it. Home of the Razorbacks. During certain seasons of the year the whole town seems to be festooned with demonic red hogs charging across bumper stickers, billboards, T-shirts, tie-clasps, bank envelopes, quilts, spiral notebooks, sweaters. Hogs. Hog country. Not a likely place for poets to gather, but more of them keep coming every year. Most of them never bother to leave. Even the ones that leave come back all the time to visit.

  Fateville, Home of the Hogs. Also, poets, potters, painters, musicians, woodcarvers, college professors, unwashed doctors, makers of musical instruments.

  Fayetteville, Arkansas. Beautiful little wooded mountain town. Lots of poets. No money. Clear air, clean rivers, wonderful skies. Nothing to do all day but go to school and make things and wait for the mail.

  Fayetteville, sitting on its hills and valleys in the extreme northwest corner of the state of Arkansas. The Ozarks, high ground. Where weather from four directions meets … Hard to scrape a living from these hills. Hard to leave once you learn to love its skies and seasons. Seasons appearing right on time like seasons in a children’s book. Fall, a riot of red and yellow maples, winter, with enough snow for sleds, spring, coming over the hills like a field of dancers, bringing jonquils, dandelions, violets, pussywillow, celandine, sedge, and trout lily, turning the creeks into rivers.

  Stars, clouds, storms, rain, snow eagles. Wild weather and people who work for a living and women who wash their own underwear.

  Amanda has fallen in love with a world where the postman makes stained glass windows, the Orkin man makes dueling swords, the bartender writes murder mysteries, the waitress at the Smokehouse reads Nietzsche on her lunch break.

  “Where in the name of God are you going?” Everyone in New Orleans kept asking Amanda.

  “To Fayetteville, Arkansas,” she replied. “My Paris and my Rome.”

  OCTOBER 19, 2008

  Living with Light

  I AM A LIGHT HEARTED PERSON WHO LOVES EARLY MORNING AND late afternoon. I love having the moon peek in a window where I have never noticed it shining before. I love the beauty of sunrise and sunset, the reds and golds and mauves as light enters and leaves the world.

  So I keep on living year after year in the wonderful, light-filled, Japanese-influenced house that Fay Jones built when he was a young architect. It has concrete floors and is freezing cold in the winter. The entrances are so short that my tall grandchildren have to bend over to get in the front door. It requires constant attention and is expensive to maintain.

  But it is my home and I cannot imagine living in any other house. There are windows everywhere, long banks of windows and skylights and a stone and concrete entrance with a pond that is covered by slanting windows that were set in stone with lead. If one of them breaks, the company that puts them in comes out and men stand around with their hands on their hips telling younger men how impossible it is going to be to replace the huge broken panes and how long it is going to take to do the job. I make them coffee and cheer them up and tell them it has been done before and can be done again.

  I hope someday a wealthy person will own this house and make the repairs it still requires and have the redwood sealed and refinished so the house will look as Fay meant for it to l
ook. For now I take care of it as well as I can and love its workmanship and design as much as anyone can love the place where they live.

  Before I owned one of his houses I met Fay Jones at a small dinner party at Roy Reed’s house. Fay and I formed an instant simpatico. I am a working artist, a successful, published writer. At the time I met Fay I was at the top of my form and had just won the National Book Award. Fay and I talked long and hard about our work and the joys of work and the problems of work. We were two charismatic people giving each other everything we had to give, understanding, respect, offering friendship.

  We were in the dining room of the house Fay had just built for Roy and Norma Reed. It is far out in the country on a gravel road and was designed to look like a barn, a whimsical idea of Roy’s perhaps. I liked the house but I didn’t understand how anyone could live there. I later learned that the only way to understand one of Fay’s houses is to live in it. It won’t give up its secrets on a few visits. You have to live in it season after season and year after year to appreciate and understand the workmanship and genius. The genius for me is the way light makes its way around my house as the days and seasons go by, visions in rain and panoramas in snow and ice.

  I have known several young architects as they began their careers and built their first houses. One of them was a true genius and was my close friend until his death. I know the problems architects have trying to stay true to their visions while pleasing their customers. Someone has to pay for all that concrete and mortar and lumber and stone and brick and roofing. Writers have problems also but we can make mistakes without costing thousands of dollars. Meeting Fay Jones meant a lot to me and I cherish that first meeting and the knowledge that we really liked each other.

  A year after that first meeting I flew to Fayetteville on a spring day to buy a new house. I had been living in Jackson, Mississippi, near my family for a year and had sold my small Fayetteville house on Mt. Sequoyah. I wanted something larger so my growing number of grandchildren could come and visit.