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Here and There. Bill Conlogue
Читать онлайн.Название Here and There
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780271063225
Автор произведения Bill Conlogue
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
The last glacier, the Wisconsin ice sheet, erased the work of ancestral glaciers, leaving in its wake Wayne County: more than two hundred feet of clay and silt, sand and gravel. As the head of the Second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania observed in 1881, the county is “an unbroken sheet of Drift, with the usual aspect of Till, with loose boulders, striae on exposed outcrops, drift dams, buried valleys, reversed drainage, and innumerable drift inclosed ponds and lakes.” Beneath most of this drift stretches the county’s bedrock, the Catskill continental group, mainly red and brown sandstone and shale; another, younger bedrock, Pottsville and Post-Pottsville formations, underlies a sliver of the county, along the west edge, in the Lackawanna Syncline, part of the Ridge and Valley Province.14 Poor farmland, yes, but we could move the drift, which could also move us.
On a Sunday afternoon in the early seventies, not quite ten years old, Mike O’Neill and I unearthed Iapetus in the dirt behind his house in Pleasant Mount. On tableland two thousand feet up and a hundred miles from the Atlantic, an old sugar maple shading us, we sat in cool soil, surrounded by ragged grass that greened at a stream in the neighbor’s yard. We had little else to do but dig. Making a hole for no good reason, we turned up a stone. At first it looked like any half loaf, the kind of rock we’d seen often enough. But then we turned it over. A constellation of shells studded the flat side; each sharply etched, fine grained. Seashells? Astonished, we met each other’s eyes, realizing we had in our hands evidence of another time, an alien wonder. Only later, in school, did we find out that an ancient sea had covered the place, a warm and shallow sea that mountains and glaciers had replaced. Still later, the wonder drained, we learned about buried valleys, erratics, drift, debris.15
Devonian, Pennsylvanian, Carboniferous.
In April, we’d pick rock. Plowing and harrowing the Flat was never enough; to plant corn the ground had to be cleared. A kid, I was little help as my father and older brothers, sweating away two or three long afternoons, wore their hands raw tossing rock onto a stone boat, sheet metal with three-inch pipe welded to the sides, an upturned end serving as a prow. My father, a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth, guided the John Deere 3010 at a crawl, Bob and Jack behind, bent to the ground, hardly glancing with each throw. I kept ahead, loosening a stone here and there for one or the other, itching for shade and a sip of water. A half hour, the boat loaded, we’d climb aboard for the ride to the creek, the soil shearing off smooth behind us. Bankside, we’d toss the rock on a pile meant to keep floods from eating the field, but even after generations of stone picking and piling, the water found a way.
Swollen with snowmelt or storm rains, Johnson Creek ate at basher silt loam left from the Wisconsin ice sheet.16 After sweeping around, or over, the rock pile, the waters often enough swept soil into the woods or carried it on to alluvial fans on farms far downstream. There, in other fields, other stone boats ferried across similar flats the same glacial drift, stone buried when ice retreated from the land in the last cold spell, during the Pleistocene Epoch, about twelve thousand years ago.
To pick stone was to choose. You didn’t need to throw on every rock, just ones you judged capable of doing damage. Occasionally the plow would resurrect a stone large enough that it took two to handle, but more often than not we picked rock no bigger than a good book or a loaf of bread. Every once in a while, someone would discover an odd rock, black and crumbly, maybe, or one shaped like it had come fresh from a mason. As far as I know, we never came across a star, only pieces of mountains.
We stopped planting corn in the late seventies—too expensive—but I discovered picking rock again when in college I came across “A Star in a Stoneboat” (1923), a Robert Frost poem that offered me a new context for moving rock. In the poem, a laborer, clearing plowed ground of glacial drift, levers a meteorite into a stone boat. He doesn’t realize, however, that he’s come upon a “smooth coal,” a onetime fire in the sky that’s gone “stone-cold” (4, 10). Once an awe-inspiring sight, this star, come to earth, has died, but in dying has recharged the “very nature of the soil” (21). Now “burning to yield flowers instead of grain,” the star has been resurrected as a poet’s metaphor for art making (22). After the laborer removes the rock, a kind of waste where it is, he uses it to enclose space with a wall, a human-made artifact whose pattern across the land makes a place, the field. Although the laborer “noticed nothing in it to remark” (7), the speaker, a poet, marks the star so that he feels “Commanded” to “right the wrong” that the once-transcendent stone has been made marginal, ordinary (35, 36).
The heavens may fail, but wonder sings on in the mundane. The speaker cannot undo what’s been done by placing the “star back in its course”; telescopes long ago made such stars into stones (30). And if the meteorite is left “lying where it fell,” its former glory is known—and meaningful—to no one (30, 39). Reshaped for human use, the star still carries within it its “long Bird of Paradise’s tail,” and “promises the prize / Of the one world complete in any size” that the speaker is “like to compass, fool or wise” (16, 55–56, 57).
The promised “prize” is a reoriented, recharged relationship with this magnetic world. The meteorite, a smaller version of Mars or Earth, stars of “death and birth” and “death and sin,” possesses “poles, and only needs a spin / To show its worldly nature” (46, 49, 50–51). Held in the speaker’s “calloused palm” (i.e., the palm of the poet, the poem’s other laborer), the stone will “chafe and shuffle... / And run off in strange tangents with [his] arm” (52–53). No longer oriented by the stars, the poet/laborer holds a lodestone made erratic by the tension between the sublime and the ordinary, between the mystery of the universe and the earth’s magnetism. Following a new course in an old world, the poet looks not to “school and church” for answers but goes about “measuring stone walls, perch on perch” to find inspiration in the land, the “one thing palpable besides the soul / To penetrate the air in which we roll” (11–12, 43, 45). Despite his calluses, this singer is electric with feeling.
My homeland divides in two like no other place in Pennsylvania. The multifold map accompanying the 1881 geological survey of Susquehanna and Wayne counties sharply separates the geologies of the Lackawaxen and Lackawanna riversheds. The map’s pale grays and browns, depicting the Appalachian Plateau, contrast with the bright red line of Mauch Chunk shale that rings the Lackawanna Valley’s northern tip. Geologist I. C. White marvels at this, the map’s “most striking feature... the very curious curling up of the end of the Carbondale coal basin, northward; and the continuation of the axis of its trough (or synclinal) in a nearly due north direction along the mid-county line.” He describes the formation as a “remarkable violation of the general law of direction which governs the whole system of anticlinals and synclinals in Pennsylvania; virtually cutting off those of the Alleghany mountain region... on the west, from all connection with those of the Catskill mountain region of New York State.” The result: “No one of the Susquehanna river folds can be identified with any of the Delaware river folds—the two systems of folds flattening out as they approach each other and being kept apart by the north and south fold which cuts transversely across and between them.”17 Maybe because they are so sharply separated in their suturing, crossing and recrossing these folds has been, for me, an education in metaphor.
For example, commuting to high school, and then college, I passed a rock that gradually grew symbolic of the watersheds’ separation. I. C. White described the rock as a “massive grayish-white sandstone, with a few pebbles... still dipping northwestward... most probably the representation of the Cherry Ridge conglomerate.”18 Unlike any rock nearby, in color or size, this erratic rests in Griswold’s Gap, on the crest of the Moosic Mountains, between Curtis Valley and Browndale, and marks, in my mind, the exact divide between the Lackawanna and Lackawaxen watersheds.
These watersheds, however, are not really separate systems; as neighbors, they interlink, and each opens to other watersheds, on end. A rain shower near Belmont