The Hills of Home

by Jory Sherman

  For a long moment, just before this corner of the world is drenched in darkness, there is a timelessness about everything the senses can grasp. There are no people, no sounds. There is no sign of civilization. There is only a deep hush, the dust of day hanging in the pale afterglow sky.

  The sky turns dark, a lone star winks on.

  It is very quiet now, very beautiful.

  The transition is complete. Perfect.

  And somehow, eternal.

  Bull Shoals Camp

  OUTSIDE, IN the dark, the fishing boats are gliding in to shore, their hulls whispering, hissing. The travel trailer is very close to the water, windows fogged up from our breath, the heat inside. Rain has misted the lake and this camp all day. The mist has smeared everything with a dull pewter glaze.

  The windows in the little trailer make the things outside appear as if they were protected by a scrim. The picnic tables and barbecue grills are out of focus. They are that way in the dark, were that way under the gray clouds of afternoon.

  The chug of outboard motors are muffled by the same damp shroud that envelops us. The mist hangs in veils like sound baffles on a recording stage of yesteryear. Sheets of mist from a point of light between two hills end, as far as we know, just beyond this inlet here at Tucker Hollow on Bull Shoals Lake.

  My young son is asleep on the cushioned seat on the other side of the table. Lights shimmer like luminous ghosts outside our steamed windows. The radio, a lonely sentinel of FM, blares out music snatched out of the air. The music, too, is blurred, distorted.

  We have had a good day out in the wind and the rain. There was not much rain. More a drizzle than anything else. A wetness that stalked across the lake under slowly moving dark clouds. We could see the moisture coming and when it hit us, it was refreshing--a spray against the face, cool and soft as silk. The light drench was brief, no more than a brush of lips in a fleeting kiss.

  Marc, my son, has played on the damp swings, slid slowly down the slide. The metal's wetness clung to his small trousers, holding him back. He thought that was quite an odd experience, and so did I. He has been concerned with speed lately, now that he's almost seven years old at the time I write this. The lake, with its immense face, takes away much of that urgency. Everything seems to move in slow motion here.

  There were a couple of small, light planes that flew over today, just under the clouds. They were gnats in slow motion, stuck against the gray sky, lights blinking like lightning bugs, for the longest time. Then they, too, were gone, like the fine mist that strolled across the lake and disappeared in the smoky trees beyond the shore.

  The trailer is warm, cozy. It glows with a friendly orange light. It is easy to think that we are the only people in the world out here. Yet, there are other campers here. Their lights burn like copper halos through our own steamy windows. Fishermen load and unload their boat trailers. Some men fish only at night. They seem beckoned by some ancient call, some primal tugging of the veins that makes them go out after the sun is down and fish the dark waters.

  They, too, must sense the darkness as friend. We do. Marc has no ingrained dread of the dark. His only complaint is that this phenomenon, when we are home, signals the arrival of his bedtime. That's why he likes to camp. We do not look at clocks or watches. The night, then, is a time of blazing campfires, roasting marshmallows, delight in running through the shadowy camp with other children who do not have to go to bed.

  His face is so peacefully composed right now, I want to reach under the table to his bunk and touch him. I want to tell him that I understand the rebellions that spring up in his mind like sudden squalls.

  He is asleep now because there is school tomorrow. He cannot understand Daylight Savings Time. At 8:30 p.m. it is still light. Still light enough to play. Yet, he must go to bed. The lingering light, and our parental policies, are torture for a young man bursting with life.

  It would be better if he could know that we care about his feelings and don't want him to lose a minute of waking life. But, we are hamstrung by tradition. In the morning, if he doesn't go to sleep early, his eyes will be puffy. He will be cranky and pugnacious when he has to be awakened so that I can drive him back home to get ready for school.

  Somewhere, somewhere along the way, we lost sight of some things. Maybe, of everything important. We created jobs and built empires. We worked and acquired land. We began to possess things that we manufactured. We made watches and time clocks. We made charts and graphs. We stockpiled arms and wasted food. We dug and mined and kept building. Higher and higher, longer and farther. We raced the universe, knowing we would lose. The universe is a slow, inexorable entity that expands and contracts like a breathing lung. We thought we could beat it to the end of time, to the end of death. Instead, we found that the universe is curved and just keeps going on and on, endlessly. It is in no hurry.

  So, Marc sleeps here under a fogged window, unaware of these movements within the vast universe beyond our night. He has a faint inkling of space travel when he swings high in the playground. He has an intimation of speed when he hurtles down the slick steel slide. He knows the motion of planets and stars and galaxies when he spins on the merry-go-round. These playthings serve, perhaps, as little reminders of our past, our future, our certain hitch to the universe. We spin and slide and glide through space and our blood churns like the sea, rises and falls in a tide surge with the pulling force of our own close moon. Something inside us knows where we came from. We do not know where we are going.

  The glass of our future is smeared, fogged over. We can see little glimmers of light. Orange halos, yellow pinpoints in the fabric of dark. Far off glows of other worlds.

  Perhaps that is enough for us now. We are cozy inside our trailer. We can travel a bit. We can see new places, explore unknown vistas of the mind. We can drift a bit on our mortal tether.

  And, every time we think we know the answers to all the eternal questions, there will be a sheet of fine mist stalking across space to blur our eyes, to splash us with simple rays of truth.

  The lake seems huge and endless now. In the dark, it is barely navigable. We sit in the trailer and that becomes our universe. For now. We are not chained here, however. We can move. We can go on and on.

  There is a beauty to the travel of mind and body. For every mystery that is bared, exposed, another presents itself.

  The mystery is in the glass, in the fog-breath on the windows, in the magical peach-glow of lamps that throw stripes across the shore, bleeding ribbons on the water. The men in boats are out there, too, peering into the light-smeared lake, looking for something alive and shining that they cannot see.

  Tomorrow we will hitch up the trailer and go back home.

  There is irony there, of course. The trailer is our home. Or has been for a couple of days.

  It is temporary, but in the ways of the universe, it is as temporary as the earth itself, although some say it will last forever.

  The wonder is that every so often, for the fisherman, there is a dynamic tug on the line, a mighty, brief struggle, just before something marvelous and silver breaks free of the lake, dances above the masked depths trying to shake the hook that jarred it loose from its hidden world.

  Outside, in the dark, there is movement. I peer through the damp fog on the window glass. I see a ripple of the water, the shape of a man moving along the shore. There is a sudden flash of lightning. For a second, I see everything outside clearly. A moment later, it is pitch dark again. The thunder rattles the windows of the trailer.

  Marc, asleep, has seen none of this.

  But someday he will. He will be awake when such things happen. I hope that he will begin to wonder, as I do, and to take comfort in existence. Not existence as ideal or perfection, but existence as a gift, as wonderment.

  Again, thunder. As it rolls across the lake, reverberates on the waters and rockets into a muffled roar over the hills, it sounds something like human speech, magnified billions of times.

  Someday, when Ma
rc is a man, I hope that speech becomes conversation.

  Someday, I hope he will be one of those fishermen out there in the dark.

  Things of Beauty

  MEMORY.

  As long as memory lasts, there is no aging, no death.

  There may even be something to pass on to those who come after, to our children, our grandchildren, to people who will be born when our generations have been forgotten. If we put down the things we remember, we may even leave something of ourselves to other minds, other generations.

  We may leave a collection of ideas and ideals, distinctions of character, morals. Or heritage.

  We may just leave scraps of memory.

  Memories of beautiful things we saw in passing.

  The Ozarks have given much to me, to my family. I cannot speak for them, except that my wife, my sons and daughters, as well as those I've met here, are part of those memories. My memories.

  Memories of beautiful things that are so fleeting, so ephemeral, they almost didn't stick in my mind. Almost.

  Sometimes those brief glimpses into a peoples' character, scenes of incredible beauty, leave a more lasting impression on the mind's memory than those things we see so often they dull our senses.

  But we must remember these things and, perhaps, we must record them lest they fade from what someone will someday call our heritage as a people, as humans who lived here for a brief time in these gentle hills.

  Here are some of the impressions I've had that made no sense at the time, but only left me dumbstruck, somewhat awed. They are all simple things, everyday things, but they must mean something because they move out of my mind now and onto paper with an urgency, a compelling urgency, to record them for now and for whatever future is left to us.

  I don't know what they mean. Perhaps nothing. But they may mean something to someone, or they may trigger the memories of others who will add to them, realize their place in time, in history.

  They mean something to me, only because I feel fortunate to have glimpsed them, to have seen beyond myself, into lives not my own.

  Beautiful things.

  Things that float on the memory like ghost images, blurred and wavery photographs in an album.

  Things like these:

  A woman with flowing tresses that shawl her shoulders as she plucks a dulcimer. She is young, mature, her fingers delicate as a mother's tending to a newborn babe. Her face reflects an inner light. I see that the music comes from within her. The dulcimer is only a sounding board, an amplifier. There is a strange, haunting composition here. The woman, the instrument, are one piece, a painting with sound, a single entity, composed of separate elements that appear incongruous at first: wood, flesh, hair, smile, fingers, sound waves. I do not know the woman's name. I will love her always.

  There are many of her here in these hills and hollows.

  I saw her at folk festivals, on a downtown street in Branson, in a hardscrabble farm during the 30s. I saw her at the Globe Theatre in London, back in Shakespeare's time, in Yorkshire and Wales and Ireland. I saw her in Fayetteville and in the rugged hills of Newton County, Arkansas, somewhere in the smoke of Elkhorn Tavern and in the twilight along Osage Creek when the setting sun painted the water with all the colors reflected in her soft eyes.

  The veins in Edna York's hands.

  Michelangelo might have sculpted them. In her hands, I saw the road maps of pioneers who came from Compton County, Tennessee, settled in the Osage Valley in 1839. I saw the road from Bellefonte, through Capps, down to Fairview, the old name that has been wiped from the records.

  Frank Stamps' face, another history of those hills, solid as the rock that housed his store in Osage, Arkansas. He was a man who offered friendship to strangers. He was a poem not yet written, a man of earth and commerce, whose general store was better than any chain store ever built. To him, a stranger was just someone he hadn't shaken hands with yet. He was the first Ozarker I ever met, and I credit him with making me want to stay when I didn't know where I wanted to go.

  The following are just a composite of images that have left lasting impressions in my mind. They are gestating, floating through my consciousness until they become transformed, indelible. Memories, after all, are shapeless until fitted into context, made orderly, filed. But I want to mention these only to spur me on to recall the wholeness of them at some later time. Put them more firmly into my mind's data bank.

  Here they are, in collage:

  Nameless people in campgrounds where I go, who brought me gifts they never realized I would cherish all my days. Their smiles, their interest, their love of the country. They told me of the best fishing spots, gave me directions to places off the tourist maps. They gave me their light, let me see into their good hearts.

  A girl in a bank; another in a newspaper office in Branson; a man in an auto parts store in Harrison; a teacher in Alpena; a chicken rancher down past Osage, near Huntsville; some reporters, newscasters; a fisherman who designs and makes lures, and retrieves them from the trees along Turkey Creek, near Hollister, Missouri; a stranger from Iowa I met on Lake Taneycomo; some of the York family who live near Alpena, Arkansas. Some women of talent who write novels that we will someday read and feel good about. A child swimming at the Blue Hole; a sunset that hung on forever one night over Table Rock Lake; a day at Silver Dollar City that took me back a hundred years in time, left me awestruck at what we have lost, proud of what we have preserved.

  Charlotte, my wife, who planted our garden, worked long hours as a pioneer woman because the earth got under her fingernails and into her blood long after she was young and strong. Who followed me everywhere and who lived primitive beside me during the years of coming into these hills, becoming part of them in the only way you can: living with the earth, rather than just on it.

  Of course there are more of these memories. These are but a few that rose up in my mind, generating still other images of past and present times. I wander these Ozarks roads like a blind man, full of wonder at every turn of the road. This is being written in one of the campgrounds where I often go, some distance from my home. But the Ozarkers have given me lodging wherever I have gone, letting me hook up to their electricity, fish their ponds, hunt their woods, eat their simple food.

  There has never been a place like this on earth.

  These feeble words are only a smattering of the heritage of these hills as seen by a grateful immigrant, a newcomer, an outlander.

  This is but a glance at some of the beautiful things to be encountered along these endless Ozarks roads.

  Look deep, see deep.

  Foxfire Mist

  ONLY THE morning was alive.

  The dawn boiled up in a swirl of light without sun or source, a turbulent alchemy of cool stream swallowing rocks and trees and earth as if King Arthur's mad Merlin himself had uttered a cloaking spell over the land.

  I walk lorn along the Ozarks road next to the wounded woods.

  The first snows of this winter have fallen, the previous day, cloaked the earth with a majestic ermine dust, thick as heapings of refined sugar. During the night, a faint thaw breathed away some of the snow, warmed rocks and tree trunks so that patches of bare earth blotch the albino landscape.

  The temperature quivers below freezing, still, but it is oddly warm, as if that hot thaw southern breath is still puffing out of a gulf furnace, razing the crystalline banks of snows with invisible currents that knife the vagrant chill which prowls the winter morning.

  The mist enfolds like a warming cloak and the brave cedars have deadened the wind with their evergreen gloves. The deer tracks have left wide circles in the snow, muddy clefts that are frozen into cuneiform tablets a man might read and understand.

  It is quiet and the earth itself seems empty at this vacuous hour. My heartbeat thrums as loud as fear itself. There is no one here. I am alone and the mist is suffocating.

  The fine quality of the morning out here is its vacancy, its utter indifference. It does not matter if I am here or not.
The trees don't care; the earth is like a mighty Sphinx underfoot, sleeping for eternities regardless of intrusions.

  The light, though, begins to take a shape of its own. It assumes the motion of arabesquing mists, assimilates the forms of these earthclouds that smother the land with a kind of primordial reminder of the legendary Void.

  The light--it takes my breath away, gives it back. Foxfire, they call it. A mystical radiance that slinks out of the lowlands and sniffs under bridges, hugs the mossy feet of trees and searches through empty fields at dusk and early of a morning. A faery light spoken of in whispers by old-timers who recall the bogs and moors of the old country and see the mirrored reflections of those ancient Anglican nations in these Ozark hills.

  When I think about these things and realize that the earth, this mist, doesn't care, isn't malevolent or dangerous, I am no longer afraid. Rather, I feel as if I were back in San Francisco, under a streetlamp bathed in brume. It's like being up on Russian Hill or down along the Embarcadero, near the mindless sea, the Jack London-haunted bay.

  This mist seems to come from such a sea. The comforting, ever-changing, restless sea. The time beach where we floated to shore so long ago when we could not see land or tree or rock. It's as if the good Gulf air had come to the Ozarks for a brief visit, bringing us a reminder of eternity and infinity, of the Void that once was.

  When I was a small boy, I used to think of that void, that awesome nothingness. I must have heard of it in Sunday school class or read about it in a book. Or dreamed it. I pictured it in my mind. The universe was an egg and the egg was empty. It was a very frightening image. It is frightening now, in a cosmic sense. To think of a place, a whole vast place, that was absolutely nothing at all, that was, according to Genesis, "without form, and void; the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."