Rivendell
Connemara
Thomas Rain CroweWhen will men know what birds know?
-Carl Sandburg
Returning again to these mountains three years ago, I immediately took up the literature that was created here and marks the place. Horace Kephart (Our Southern Highlanders), William Bartram (Travels), James Mooney (Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel). In reading Kephart, one passage in particular spoke to me and my new life here in the woods: “I came to dwell in the wilderness, not as one fleeing or hiding, but that I might realize, in a mature age, a dream of youth. Here, in the wild wood, I have found peace, cleanliness, health of body and mind. Here I can live the natural life, unfettered and unindebted. Here duty itself is pliant to any breath of fancy that may stir the buds and foliage of thought.” While these words have given me courage and something of a challenge, the words of Thomas Wolfe had a slightly different effect. While reading Wolfe’s sequel to Look Homeward Angel, and hearing his anguished cry of “you can’t go home again” from the novel of the same name, I found myself reacting instinctively and vocally (out here in the woods we are, remember, prone to talk to ourselves) “you MUST go home again!”
While this impulsive utterance reflects a bioregional ethic that can be traced back to my years in California and my work with “the Movement” there, and represents my own personal conviction, it presents a very tangible philosophical problem for those who are not living as I do—deep in place. Collectively, Americans these days are hunter-gatherers of sorts and are a mobile, migratory people. Only the “game” we hunt is different. Instead of moving with the seasons, with the herds, as did the original inhabitants of this continent, we now hunt for material goods, for jobs, for more comfortable and economically advanced lifestyles. In this sense, “home’ is a relative term used, often, to describe migration routes along which we have spent little time in any one place. But even the migrating animals come back, return, to familiar territory—to their “range” that defines the borders of their home and habitat. Since this story of migration has become our modern mythos, (with the exception of those rare souls who have remained in one place over the course of a lifetime) we are forced to identify with places where we have become transplants and where we try to live consciously and with empathy.
I’m thinking specifically of Carl Sandburg, who, had he lived but fifteen more years, would have been my neighbor. Not literally, of course, as his adopted Connemara home in Flat Rock is some ten miles from here, but close enough in proximity (considering my proclivity for exaggeration and the fantastic) for me to imagine time and distance to be only a relative impediment to such a notion. Sandburg’s relationship with the Connemara farm and the western North Carolina mountains was such that one might easily imagine him having lived there his whole life. His soulful embrassade of place was complete. It included the necessary surrender, the deep grounding, and the rest and serenity that is indicative of how one, ideally, evolves after “returning home.” From 1945, when he moved to the Flat Rock farm, until he died here in 1967, this was truly his home. The farm had everything he and his family needed. It had plenty of pasture for his wife’s goat breeding operation, and plenty of seclusion for Carl—including the four things that he said were all he needed in life: “to be out of jail, to eat regular, to get what I write printed, and a little love at home and a little outside.”
The two-hundred-and-forty acre Connemara farm (the name coming from County Connemara on the west coast of Ireland—a landscape which reminded Sandburg of the rolling, green hills of western North Carolina) was then and is now divided roughly in half by woodlands and cleared pasture. This balance between woodlands and open space couldn’t have been better for his poet’s soul, and here his soul took root while his farm and family flourished—giving rise to one of my favorite Sandburg poems “Instructions to Whatever Gardens”—a song in praise of beauty, nature, being, and staying in place.
In recent days, the Sandburg place and its former owner and I have become more than a little friendly, as my connection with the Connemara farm goes deep. At least as deep as the six inches of sawdust and goat-droppings that is the floor for the goat barns.
Once a month, I’ve been going over to the Sandburg place and cleaning out the barns and stalls and bringing the rich organic fertilizer home and dumping it in Zoro’s field. Through a barter arrangement with one of my neighbors, I’ve wrangled a deal to borrow his dump-truck so as to be able to haul off the goat-droppings and sawdust which will become compost in my own gardens. I got this job through a bit of serendipity and by making friends with one of the members of the National Parks Service staff there, who is in charge of the Sandburg goat herd. Although this person is officially working for the National Parks Service, their job is really that of being, primarily, a goat farmer. I met this member of the Sandburg farm staff during my first tour of Connemara, soon after my arrival from the west coast. Now, three years later, I’m working as something of a subcontractor for the Sandburg farm.
Beside the fact that I get paid a small fee (which basically covers my expenses for using my neighbor’s truck) for hauling off all this brilliant organic fertilizer which goes into my gardens—enhancing their production capacity—there are other bonuses that have come with this “job.” Since the goats need to be fed and checked, even on days when the rest of the staff is taking their day off, I’ve worked it out to come with my borrowed truck to clean out the barns on those closed-to-the-public days. After I’ve finished cleaning the barns, and if it’s not too late, I’m often allowed into the Sandburg house, where I get to spend time up in Sandburg’s study in the attic—carefully and respectfully going through his files, papers and library that are still as he left them in 1967. I have spent many hours up in that attic room, snooping—wearing Sandburg’s print-shop visor, hoping some of his unused, poetic lines will filter into my mind by osmosis—and reading everything within reach. Taking in the ambience of his words and work, as well as the memorabilia (such as the notepad which lays open on the nightstand beside the little bed he used for cat-napping, and the well-used pencil with the inscription “half the pressure, twice the speed”—a truism and kind of koan, if not magical chant I imagine Sandburg imagined fortified and fed his late-night revelations and epiphanies) which includes, on occasion, what I perceive as his ghostly presence. A presence that appears as an abstract specter in the sunlight coming through the attic window and filtered through swirling dust.
From working over on the Connemara Farm this past year and from my time up in Sandburg’s roost, I’ve come to appreciate him as being as much a “poet of place” as a “poet of the people.”
As someone who adopted western North Carolina as his home rather late in his life, he very quickly became both a “home boy” and “homebody” at Connemara, where he was very protective of both place and privacy. There’s a good story, in fact, that provides some manner of “proof” for these claims I’ve made for him—one I heard recently from talking to an older black woman, whom I had sought out and who was Sandburg’s housekeeper and unofficial “bodyguard” during the Connemara years.
In the spring of 1964, a twenty-three-year-old poet named Bob Dylan arrived on the Connemara property unannounced. Standing on the front porch, Dylan introduced himself to the housekeeper: “I am a poet, my name is Robert Dylan, and I would like to see Mr. Sandburg. I’m a great admirer of his.” After a lengthy wait, Sandburg appeared, somewhat disheveled and in his plaid shirt and baggy trousers, which were his normal writing attire. He took one look at Dylan and said: “You certainly look like a very intense young man. You look like you are ready for anything!” According to the housekeeper’s eye-witness report, Sandburg and Dylan visited for about twenty minutes on the front porch and talked about poetry and folk music, which Sandburg said he regarded as kindred arts. Dylan, at some point, handed Sandburg a copy of his recently released album The Times They Are A’Changin’ and reiterated that he, too, was a poet—which according to Sandburg’s housekeeper, got the elder poet’s attention, and he promised to listen to the album Dylan had brought him as a gift and literary offertory.
Despite their age difference, Sandburg and Dylan had much in common. Both were born of immigrants in the Midwest and both were admirers of Whitman and Woody Guthrie and were collectors of folk songs. However, Sandburg cut the visit short by saying that he was in the midst of working when Dylan arrived and that he had to return to his study to finish his day’s writing, only giving the young celebrity what amounted to little more than a nod and a handshake in order to preserve the sanctity of his cherished seclusion and his regimen.
So, when I go up to the Sandburg farm these days, I’m in good company—my goatkeeper friend, the goats, Sandburg’s ghost and the ghosts of the famous friends and admirers that visited him there during the years of his North Carolina residency. What rubs off onto me mostly, however, during these visits, is the sense of calm and stability the old place exudes. “The goats, the gardens, and the peace,” as Sandburg referred to it. Of all the places Sandburg had lived during his lifetime, I think, in the end, it was Connemara which he thought of as “home.” And the place is beginning to feel that way to me, too. As beneficiary of my monthly visits to purge the barns of their pungency, I’ve come to think of it almost as an upscale extension of my little shack in the woods. My own American “dasha.”
Thinking of Sandburg’s ordered and balanced life at Connemara, and, at the same time, seeing how “out of plumb,” (as the older generation here in the mountains might refer to it—a colloquialism meaning “out of shape or balance”) the world has become these days, it seems all the more clear to me that we MUST go home again! Take the knowledge, the experience and the strength gained from all the years of wandering, searching, working, and plant this in the soil of our adopted or native homes—whether the west coast of Ireland or the mountains of western North Carolina—wherever they may be.
After Reading Han-Shan
How much alike are the wise man and the drunk! The wise man sees the light in the cloud, the one who drinks: the cloud in the light. Each seeing the same thing. How I love the way Han-Shan laughs when he speaks! And in laughing, the way he cries— His dreams are like mine: full of maidens in cloaks of crimson silk. Wondering today the direction in which my life will go, the I Ching says: “Where disorder develops, words are the first steps.” No word this time of crossing the great water. But a message of keeping still. So tonight I have made myself a cup of tea and sit with my friends: all the words I know. Having taken the first step toward tomorrow, I make a bold stroke with my pen that in this dim light looks like one of those court maidens Han-Shan and I know so well. I sit for a moment in the trance of another world. Far away from here. But like this small shack in the woods, still home.« Back to Excerpts