05/13/2024
My sister was a wonderful writer. Friends of hers and I publish her (most-days) journal 28 years to the day from which she wrote it. I am formatting the June, 1996 entries now. We invite you to subscribe. It's free (although you can pay something if you would like). Here is part of one of the June entries upcoming (and a photograph of turtle MG75).
Join us. https://elizabethhunter.substack.com/
--------------------------------
June 16
Religious experiences occur where the sacred and profane worlds intersect, said an Episcopalian priest I interviewed not long ago. Perhaps that is why my garden now, in early morning, seems the holiest of holy.
It is appalling to be granted even a glimpse of the depth of your love for something — someone or something. The glimpse accorded me a week or two ago is the depth of my love for this place, this ridgetop and bit of hillside upon which I had expected to celebrate, in September, my 20th year of calling home. That anniversary will still be observed. I know I will give thanks for all the pain it has healed in me, for its beauty, its companionship, the joy it has bestowed upon me. But something has been injected into it that has given it a different cast. As though a dye had been dropped in a clear pool of water.
Two men stood in my yard on a morning like this one: a man from the railroad and a man who cuts roads for the railroad, and I suppose for others. The road builder, a young man, sharp featured, with a buzz cut, brown eyes, well-built, said little. Though a look came into his eyes like that of a hungry man who smells dinner about to be put on the table when I told the railroad man how hard it would be to reconstruct a road in the ravine below my house. The rudimentary road that existed when I moved here in the fall of 1976 disappears just beyond the bend at the northeast corner of my property. That’s the kind of road building project he liked, the hungry young man said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
It’s the railroad man I remember, older than the other, perhaps about my age, effusive, clad in a white T-shirt that showed that his belly was undergoing the same middle-aged swelling I detect in my own, perhaps with a dental plate, with a radio on his belt. We stood in the green stillness that makes up my mornings, not far from the birdhouse the chickadees had just vacated, and he looked around. “What a beautiful place you have, back in here away from everything,” he said. And proceeded, with no ear for incongruence or obscene transposition, to tell me about his need, more or less, to put me back on the map. He needed to build a road along two sides of my property, down to the river, to move heavy equipment into place, to fix a spot where the river has been eating away at the hillside that supports the track, near the curve it terrifies me to walk around. At the horseshoe curve, you can’t see in either direction for more than perhaps 100 feet; nor — because of the rapids below — can you hear a train until it is almost upon you. Not far from that place, I watched a dog get cut in half by a train a few years ago. Of course, the railroad man said, when they were finished with the road, they would restore everything to meet the landowner’s wishes.
Perhaps he was God in a T-shirt with a yammering plectron on his belt. He would restore the wood thrush to the woods from which he banished it? He would build a cardinal nest and lay cardinal eggs in the bush the bulldozer pushed into the creek? He would reassemble trees he cut down, reattach the delicate needles to the broken branches of hemlock? He did not know a hemlock from any other evergreen when he came into my yard, He wanted to buy one for, I believe he said, his daughter’s yard in Jacksonville, Fla. (lucky tree to be wrested from these mountains for a long interstate ride, to be planted in a suburban yard a few feet above sea level and many hundreds of miles south!). I confess that by that point in the conversation I wasn’t attending fully. More of me was thinking about the leg he had severed from my body, from my life. More of me was wondering whether I would bleed to death.
I know I will be accused of over-reacting. I will be viewed as an hysterical middle-aged woman, nearing menopause, lacking seemly balance. I will be categorized, grouped with the wives who take their battering husbands back, who mourn the loss of philandering mates, who realize their powerlessness, their un-wholeness and cast themselves abjectly before the strong, begging mercy. I belong in that category. In the days since that man walked out of my yard I have considered how far I would go not to have a road built down two sides of my property. I know it would be very far indeed, if I had any hope of it doing any good.
I have called my neighbor G–, whom I have long and much admired. G– severed my other leg the night the railroad man came, when he called to tell me that he and his nephew — who oversee, in his case, or own, in the case of the nephew, all the land that surrounds my little acre — felt it would be “an advantage to us” to have a good access road to the lower part of the property. That us, I saw, did not include me. He said they had given the railroad men the go-ahead. That the road would make it easier to log the land around me, which they would eventually do, because it is the only way anyone who buys land — as the nephew had recently done, from G–’s brother — can “come out” on it. A few days after the railroad man left, a week ago today, I called G– again to plead my case. I could hear my voice shake as I tried to explain to a man who has pulled the lifeless body of more than one calf from its mother, who has watched prized cattle die, who has seen hail and early frost lay waste to acres of about-to-be harvested to***co, the devastating loss it would be to me to have a road to the river built — and remain — a few feet from my front door.
I knew it would not do any good to mention to him a big part of what I cannot bear — the destruction of wood thrush habitat and the loss to other birds, the loss of part of what appeals to my aesthete’s eye, when I look down into the woods toward the ravine where twenty years ago my angry neighbor broke the morning stillness dragging the battered body of his pickup over rocks on his way to work. The woods got quiet again after they jailed him for shooting and killing my neighbor just down the highway. He used to leave threatening notes on my car, when I parked it under the big oak tree, which he considered his place. He left other notes, threatening to kill my dog if it went down to his place and killed his chickens. While he was in jail, his beautiful but terrified looking wife moved out of the house down at the bottom of the hill; when he got out, they didn’t come back. The house was vandalized, and the road, what was left of it, washed off into the gully to be replaced by an impenetrable thicket of multiflora rose and blackberry cane. For a few years after they left, I used to walk down that way to reach the river, but I haven’t for years. That period of my life, the fear I felt of him and his huge unquenchable anger, silted over in the years between then and the railroad man’s visit.
