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Shakesthegrounds Rumblings

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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. 

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