Shakesthegrounds Rumblings

[JCinNYC2006]

I downloaded it as part of my monthly audio book club.  I haven't played it all the way through, but I like Campbell Scott.  I'll check it out, thanks for the endorsement!

Juan

[Shakesthecoffecan]

"I'll tell you what", the Twist family ain't the only ones.

I have been involved with my family genealogy for many years, and am fortunate I live in the area where my fathers family comes from, in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Over the years several lists I am on have had posts from people looking for the grave of Grandpa Dickey and his four wives. Dickey and his first wife were my ancestors. He had died in 1859, and only one amazing detail about his life has come down to us. Having out lived all of his sequential wives, he arranged their graves so that he would have a place to be buried in the middle, with a wife on each side, one at his head and one at his feet. I had been to the grave yard before, in 1977. Situated waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down in the woods, out on a ridge about 2 miles off the Blue Ridge Parkway. The old feller who carried me and my mother out there in his pickup packed a pistol to shoot snakes he told us. The monument erected on his grave in 1939 had fallen into disrepair.

The property is no longer in the family. Rumors abounded that access had been blocked and others from out west had been baffeled as to how to even find it. Dickey and three of his wives had 17 children, and we know of 108 grandchildren- you do the math.

So in January, after seeing Brokeback Mountain for the very first time and wanting desperatly to get outside and do something meaningful in my life I posted to the lists that I would lead a pilgrimage to the cemetery on the 29th of April, a date I picked out for no reason except it was a Saturday. I received enthusiastic responces from several cousins. I had to find the place again myself. A month ago me and my partner went up the mountain and met with the son in law of the man who had originally carried me in his pick up. He carried us right to it. The monument had been repaired by the Boy Scouts in 1986.

This week it rained, and I was so fearful we would be rained out. People were coming from New Mexico, West Virginia, South Carolina and Maryland. I sent out an email telling them to dress warm. I received a letter in the mail from a couple in their 80's who were not on line but who had heard about the pilgrimage and wanted to know where to meet.

This morning the sun came up on the most incredibly beautiful spring day you could imagine. I drove up the mountain to the resturant we were all to meet at and ordered me a coffee and read the paper. I had never met any of the people who were coming, hadn't a clue what they even looked like. When I saw a likely suspect, I asked him "Are you here for the trip to the cemetary?" He was, he was the one from New Mexico. He said a crowd was gathering outside.

Sure enough, 23 souls ranging in age from 14 to 84 were conversing in the parking lot, all shapes and sizes and hairstyles. All so thankful for the opportunity to be there. Some of them had spent days in the hills looking for their roots. Some of them had known my father and grandfather.

I climbed on the back of a red Ford Pickup from the place we had stopped to cosolidate into 8 vehicles. I rode with two retirment age brothers and their nephew who was writing a story about the trip for a creative writing class. I called thru the open sliding windows into the cab to the cousin who drove us, down the asphalt, down the gravel, down the pig path that has not changed in 200 years, to a clearing where we would have to walk from.

An older cousin, ("Mrs. Spangler" is all I could remember) bought out a Tupperware container with a large, green ceramic vase and she told her story.

She was 5 years old when she attended the Grandpa Dickey Monument dedication in 1939. The attendees were all told to bring a handful of dirt from their homes, and at the ceremony they put it in the vase and mixed it, and sprinkled it on the graves of the ancestors. I almost cried right then and there. The vase belonged to her granddaddy, and riding home in the back seat with him, he gave it to her. 67 years later, it returned to where it had been used.

I lead the group down the trail, over the creek, by the old homeplace, and into the cemetery. Shutters snapped, file folders came out, stories were swapped, ideas were floated. A cousin who lived nearby who had never been there before thanked me for arranging the trip, and asked me what had inspired me to take this on. I wanted to so bad tell her to ease my sadness from watching Brokeback Mountain, but I am still not that honest a person. "The realization that life is short" I told her.

We got a family plot, and now we have some characters to go along with it.   

[Front-Ranger]

That was so moving. Thank you for sharing your story with us. You have really done a lot with your life after the movie, this is inspiring me to make some changes too.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Thank you all for reading, I am starting to enjoy this.

I think the heavens give humanity gifts sometimes, and I think the singer John Prine is one of them.

You will probably remember his from the early 70's country song: "Daddy won't you carry me back to Mulenburg County". He has a tremedous cult following, and recently won a Grammy for his last album, which features a song called "Some humans ain't human", which everyone needs to listen to.

I have been a fan for years and have been very fortunate to see him twice this year. He has recovered well from throat cancer, and sounds as good as ever. He sounds particularly well on one of my favorite songs he does, "Angel from Montgomery" which I think was written by Bonnie Raitt. It is a sad tale of an old woman thinking of lost love. When I heard him perform it the other week, I could not help but think of Alma, Jr. and Lureen in the years to come:

"I am an old woman, named after my mother
My old man is another child that's grown old
If dreams were lightning, thunder was desire
This old house would have burnt down a long time ago

Chorus:
Make me an angel that flies from Montgom'ry
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

When I was a young girl well, I had me a cowboy
He weren't much to look at, just free rambling man
But that was a long time and no matter how I try
The years just flow by like a broken down dam.

Repeat Chorus:

There's flies in the kitchen I can hear 'em there buzzing
And I ain't done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.

Repeat Chorus:"
 
It goes hand in hand with the recurring theme of life that Brokeback Mountain embodies so well. All life is suffering, we are born in pain and we die in pain, we live with pain, but amidst the suffering we have have a few instances of pure joy. We connect with someone else and are taken somewhere else. For Jack and Ennis it was each other, for the rest of us, it was their story. For the singer of the song, be it Bonnie Raitt or John Prine, it was the promise of a rodeo cowboy.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

"In May of 1983 they spent a few cold days at a series of little ice bound, no-name, high lakes, then worked across into the Hail Strew River drainage."

I love this story partly because of its historical context. I am growing into the age now I can pinpoint where I was when something happened, marry it to my own story. I was born in August of 1963, I would have been 10 days old when that snow fell on the mountain and Heath Ledger's Ennis did that Chicken Dance in it. I was becoming a 4 year old uncle the month Ennis got Jack's general delivery post card.

And May of 1983....where were you? I was in full blow young adult angst, that stage AFTER you realize you don't have the answer to everything, or anything for that matter. I started the month as a sophmore in a small Baptist College in Bristol, Virginia. Mindful that year I was the May was the month of change, when I would leave my friends behind and go home and endure summer with my parents.

Somewhere between the 8th and the 9th, eithe late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, I was initiated into the the Gay World by a dawg-ugly guy driving a white 1967 Inperial. The part we drove to out to a park in the country is now a golf course. I reeled over the experence for long afterward. Feelings of shame and disgust mixed with accomplishment, the hope that now I could move on to women, maybe. It would be January of the following year before I attempted a hook-up again.

By mid-month I was home, working 12 hours a day, 7 days one week, in the lumber yard of a prefab housing factory. My co-workers a bunch of drop-out redneck heteros I had nothing in common with. I was amused by them, they were interesting, but I knew I did not fit in there. After a couple of weeks I volunteered to move a trailer, in an attempt to fit in. Having never drove a tractor trailer before I tore the door off the trail, and that was all she wrote.

I was a wreck. I'd never been fired before. I went off into the woods and cried.

A week later I got a job mowing grass at a state park nearby. It was deliverance. My first day on the job I was greeted by a big hunk of a professional tree surgeon, swinging from branch to branch with a running chain saw. "Lemuel" was his name. He somehow got to fanagle a cabin out of the rangers to live in for the summer in exchange for tree work. He could have had anything he wanted just for the asking. He never did of course, everything that came to his had came thru hard work. May gave way to June, and so on.

My father, an alcoholic, was not drinking that summer. It was the only time in our 21 years together that we had any kind of a relationship. We got along well. I had a flirtation with a charming young lady I took to see the Little River Band. We would leave each other notes in the ticket takers house at the park entrance. I made friendships with people I never crossed paths with again, but have never forgotten. I hated that summer had to end finally.

One of the "what if" memories of that summer a lifetime ago involved a late night visit to Lemuel's cabin, drinking to the wee hours of the morning and crashing on his couch. The next morning I grabbed on of his newly laundered shirts that looked like my park service uniform and groggily went off to work. He came by later and told me the shirt looked good on me and to keep it. (Nice of him) I know I kept it for years, I wonder if I still have it, back in the closet someplace.

Lemuel, he never married, has a tree business and I run into him ocassionally, never often enough. 

[Shakesthecoffecan]

I am actually going to Wyoming, for the second time this year.

The idea was first floated on the Yahoo Bulletin Board for Brokeback Mountain a few months ago, and from that genesis it has come. One of the organizers commented to me that on the Dave Cullen's Ultimate Brokeback Board there are numerous gatherings all over being planned.

It is amazing to me how many boards are out there for this story and movie. Amazing the need so many people driven to participate in the discussion, and the thought that for ever one there are more, lurking, silent, or out there on their own. Somewhere there must be a line betwixt a force of nature, and a life of its own.

I think back to last, what was it, October, when I first heard on NPR that at the Toronto Film Festival a gay cowboy movie was getting a lot of attention. I thought I was going to have to listen closely for that name again because I sure wanted to get the DVD and see it at some point. Had no idea I would get to see it in a theater, six times. Had no idea....but the closer it got I was paying attention.

A friend of mine in D.C. saw it opening night. This guy IS Mr. Film. He knows the medium backward and forward, can explain the original idea behind cinemascope vs. the commercially sucessful version of the format, has see thousands of films. He is gay, and his excitement over this movie was palpable, but when he called me the next day, there had been a shift. He told me, very soberly, "it was the best movie I have ever seen." Jezus. That is saying something.

I bought a newspaper to see if it were playing at an art house theater where I imagined it could be found. At the top of their ad: "Brokeback Mountain Next Week". I could hardly wait. That next friday came, and me and my partner drove 50 miles to Roanoke, Virginia, to the Grandin Theater, met a friend there and managed to get tix for the next showing. The place was packed. The car drove down the River Road Logo, and those words came up: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. I thought "I can't believe I am finally going to see it."

I had not read the story, had only a vague impression of it from the previews. Was not prepared for what I saw and have spent months trying to make it make sense to me. Well, all the boards are full of that tale, so I won't go into that again. I wonder though as I write this, what is it about these tears, the ones that always come when I get to THAT point, that place within me that remains as raw as it was four months ago. Will it ever heal? Am I making this trip to heal it? 

What has welled up in me is a big ole black hole of sadness. It is a pain I feel daily, sometimes its prompted by thoughts of Ennis and Jack, sometimes not. It is an acknowledgement of generations of men and women cut off from one of lifes greatest joys. As a gay man I feel the duty to greive this pain for them. I also have a duty to myself to live my life and grow. How to find balance when your world has been rattled.....

Now, this force of nature is carrying me practically to the source, not very far from where Annie Proulx herself lives. There to meet people I have talked to on line, come to know somewhat, who have been effected like me. Gay, straight, bisexual, trangender, I wonder what it will be like. To hear their stories, not just with the BBM experence, but how they got to where they are in life now, and what they see ahead of them. It may well be a one shot deal, but there is a certain magic about a group of people being drawn together, around a campfire, on the greiving plain, who would be there for no other reason.

Plans call for trips to Riverton and Lightning Flat. Riverton I have read a bit about, a fair sized place, I was even able to chat with a gay guy from there who had heard his town was a part of the story, but had not seen the movie because it didn't play there. But Lightning Flat, that's another story. I wasn't even sure it existed until recently I spied it on a road atlas, the tiniest of dots at the end of miles and miles of unimproved road north of the Devil's Tower. Right on the Montana line.

Google it: you will find basically three things. It is where Jack Twist came from in the story. It had its own newspaper from 1920 to 1927, and its geographic coordinates. The huge county it is in has a population of about 5,200. I am not sure if anyone lives there. There are no maps of the place, it is not a mapquest has no details. I did find a satilite image that seems to show a human mark on the landscape. What must Lightning Flat be like? The most desolate destination in modern America?

I feel drawn to it some how, this is my preconceived notion of the trip that Lightning Flat will somehow be the highlight for me.  It will be interesting to see how that turns out, how I look back on it. I know there will be no mailbox with John C. Twist on it, I know there will be no ranch hands as I am used to seeing them depicted, but what is there? What is the truth about Lightning Flat? What is the truth about anyone or anything? What will I learn about myself if I make that long drive out that dirt road.....perhaps only a greiving plain where I can speak to the lost souls Jack Twist has come to represent. Perhaps there greif can be let go of.   

[Shakesthecoffecan]

So I checked out Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories from the library, it is the book that Brokeback Mountain appears in as the last story. I am throughly enjoying it, reading one or two stories an evening. Oddly wonderful stories, full of despiration and violence and longing. I highly recomend it.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

So it is about mid day on Saturday, the 27th day of May, A. D. 2006. Me and the partner were heard to a campground south of Siler City, North Carolina. We are on Highway 49, approaching the town I know is the final resting place of the actress Frances Bavier, known to the world as "Aent Bea" on the 1960's CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show", which to this day remains in reruns in the area.

On the left hand side of the road is a building with a hand lettered sign that say: "Live Bait and Game Room". Directly across from it came a cemetary.

I says to him: "I wonder if that is where Aent Bea is buried?" I look almost over my right shoulder and recognize her huge granite monument from from the pictures on www.findagrave.com. I told him this would only take a minute, and appropriatly enough I turned around in the highway patrol parking lot and went back.

Frances Bavier I have not been able to learn much about, She was an actress on stange in New York way back, back in the 20's and 30's. She appeared in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and my world came to know her as Miss Beatice Taylor, maiden aunt of Mayberry, North Carolina's Sherriff Andy Taylor. Once it and its sequals left the air she retired to of all places, Siler City, North Carolina. She became a fixture I understand, and there is a vague recollection of a story involving a damaged green DeSoto. She died in 1989, unmarried and without issue.

Her headstone towers above her neighbors. It is also visited frequently. We placed a small buttercup and a small hawkweed we found growing there, but there was a pot of fresh flowers, and a gallon jar of kosher dill pickes that had been cooking in the sun for a while. We seemed to recall an episode with the plot calling for some drama betwixt the characters Aent Bea and Clara, over a pickle recipy or contest. See attached photos.

One wonders at times like these, this woman with no known family, in an adopted home, still inspiring devotion in people stong enough to make them u-turn. There were no such gags as the pickles on the other graves, with their Twist Family Plot plastic arrangements. One has to wonder at a person who played a character people loved. Who loved this woman? What was her joy? Who was her joy? No, gaydar is not ground penetrating, but I point out the epithapt: "To Live In The Hearts Of Those Left Behind Is Not To Die".

I sang "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye!" and we took off down 421.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

The Pix are too big, will have to figger out how to resize them and then I'll post them.

[YaadPyar]

OMG!  I can still hear her say in that unmistakeable soprano voice..."Andy!"