Falling Through Space Read online

  You don’t know how you have civilized me. You will never know how much you’ve taught me and how deep the lessons go. I think you know I love you. I know that you love me.

  Don’t die. Love, Ellen

  (Note to young writers. I woke up dreaming this essay. If I stay alone long enough, I will always begin to write. It is the imaginary playmate syndrome. I don’t know who I was writing this essay about my father to. Probably my next door neighbor, whose father died last week. He was also a Scotch Presbyterian and a man who lived a long time because he hated and feared to die. What a great honesty was in my daddy. He was a fierce and brave man. Of course he didn’t want to die. Who does?)

  My father’s father was a famous hunter and horseman in North Alabama, who loved to take his silver and his servants and go out and live in the woods. Because of this everyone in our family was taught to live in the woods, to make fires and leave trails and know where to camp and what to do if they were lost. I carried a compass with me at all times from the age of six to twelve although I was never sure I really knew how to use it.

  My brother probably really knew how to use the compass. Anyway, at some point he and my father began to go off camping without me. They had tired of my constant complaining and wanted to go deeper into the woods and stay longer. At about age eight, they stopped inviting me on their expeditions, and my camping education was turned over to the wonderful summer camps my father found for me to go to. The first great camp was in Ohio. Columbus Girl’s Camp. Months before I was to go there, Daddy brought a small black trunk into my room, and we began to pack it. There was a list the camp had sent of things I was to bring and we followed it exactly. Two small sheets, a pillow, a wool blanket, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underpants, three pairs of shorts, a pair of long pants. Every morning when I would awake, I would see the trunk sitting at the foot of my bed, a promise of great things to come.

  My father died three years ago this week. It was two years after his death before I could bear to have a photograph of him in my house. I had his Auburn tie hanging in a back closet with the black gown I wore to receive an honorary doctorate from Millsaps College, one of the few important events of my life that he attended. He was not a public man. He was a man to take a little girl off alone and teach her to make a fire. He was a man to load five children into a pickup truck after the first long freeze and take them off to spend Saturday clearing a pond for ice skating. He was a man to buy enough ice skates for every child in the neighborhood who could not afford a pair. He was a man who could create huge excitement out of nothing.

  He would come home from a hard week’s work carrying a box full of long underwear and ice skates, and by Saturday morning at nine we would be in the truck going to find a pond. We were living in Mound City, Illinois, but we were from the deep south. None of us knew how to ice skate, including my father, but he was a great athlete and he had been asking questions of the people he worked with. Also, he had found a farmer who would lend us his pond. It would be my father, my seven year old brother, me, aged five, and three other children in the neighborhood. There were never any other girls along on these expeditions but that was a way of life for me, as all of my cousins were boys. The only time there were girls was when we were horseback riding. My father’s grandmother had been a famous horsewoman in North Alabama, and he approved of women riding horses.

  When we had found the pond, we collected firewood and built huge fires on both ends of the pond. Then we took two by fours out of the truck and began to push them across the ice, smoothing it down for skating. Nothing was ever simple with my father. Everything he thought up to do included hard work. The ideal was Sonya Henie and the little Dutch boy who skated miles to save his city from disaster in a story book we had. The reality was pushing the two by fours across the pond and hauling brush to keep the fires going.

  Finally we put on the skates. Then we stood up and began to learn to use them. To this day I can still go to an ice rink and put on skates and skate on them. The body does not forget skills it learned to save itself from falling. I am sixty-four years old now. When I was sixty-two, I was stuck in Tulsa, Oklahoma for twelve hours because of flight delays, and I took a taxi out to the indoor ice rink and rented skates to see if I could still skate on them. I wasn’t Sonya Henie but I sure made it around the rink a few times.

  I woke this morning thinking about my daddy and all the things he taught me to do. He was the most exciting person I have ever been around and the most exacting. I miss him greatly and I am glad my mind has decided to let my memories of him return. I have to go to New York City to talk to business people next week. I think I’ll get out the Auburn tie and wear it to make me strong.

  THE REASON to write is to learn. The more I write, the more I am forced to learn. This winter I am having to study geology so that a teenage detective named Ingersol Manning can discover a map to a kimberlite pipe in Berkeley, California. A kimberlite pipe is the source of diamonds in the world. “… a relatively small hole bored through the crust of the earth by an expanding combination of carbon dioxide and water which rises from within the earth’s mantle and moves so fast driving magma to the surface that it breaks into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. Such events have occurred at random through the history of the earth, and a kimberlite pipe could explode under Moscow next year. Rising so rapidly and from so deep a source, a kimberlite pipe brings up exotic materials the likes of which could never appear in the shallow slow explosion of a Mt. St. Helens or the flows of Mauna Loa. Among the materials are diamonds.”*

  A kimberlite pipe is about a half a mile wide. If there is one underneath Ingersol’s neighborhood, he and his friend, Tammili, and their mentor, the pianist, Mrs. Coleman, will have to decide whether it’s worth telling anyone and having their neighborhood destroyed in the process.

  Anyway, I had to study geology for many nights. Two things happened because of that, and both of them may prove to be irreversible. First, I have begun to view the world from an entirely different perspective. I live in the Ozark Mountains, soft, old hills left by glaciers ten million years ago and since then eroded and worn down by rain and snow and forests. I have always thought they were beautiful and always been fascinated by the huge rocks that seem to spring up from the earth. Everywhere there are boulders of many sizes still working their way to the surface. My house is built of that rock, much of it broken up from larger stones.

  Now I can no longer look around me and see the spring trees and the soft, new grasses and wildflowers. Now all I see is geomorphic time, the long processes that brought that rock down here from Canada.

  The basins, ridges, shelves, gullies, erosions, roadcuts, all have taken on huge, exciting lives. I am outside five hours a day exploring this and wondering and thinking. This is exciting work. This is an exciting life.

  When I am through for the day I go to the bookstore and buy all the books on geology I can carry home. I have started giving them to children.

  The reason I have become so excited about this subject is that I have found a use for it. I am a Scot. Most of the blood that runs in my veins came from County Cantyre, Scotland, and I don’t like to waste things. If I can’t see a practical use for something, sooner or later I get rid of it or give it away. I am using this geomorphic information to write a book that someday I might be able to sell, and that someday young people might read and be amused by, or learn something from. With that in mind, I began my study of geology with enthusiasm. It has developed into a passion. I have not yet bought a rock hammer and a set of cold chisels but that will be next. I did almost have a wreck on a mountain road last Wednesday. I came to a roadcut with a great fall of granite. I must have passed that place hundreds of times as it is on the main road south from my home. “Granite,” I screamed. “Granite, granite, granite.” I threw on the brakes and was almost rearended by a Highway Patrol car. Fortunately, the officer had been maintaining a proper distance and was able to swerve around me. I was preparing a defense in my mind,
but he drove on and did not bother me.

  The second thing this new passion has done for me is to bring me back to consciousness after a long winter’s sleep. Three weeks ago I was so bored I was watching television. While watching The Learning Channel I became convinced that there had been an Atlantis and that it was now Anarctica. I talked of nothing else for days, boring all my friends to death. While buying the geology books I picked up Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, and was brought back to consciousness about pseudo-science, even when it’s on The Learning Channel. There may have been a city in the Aegean that toppled into the sea, or was covered by an earthquake, but that is a far cry from “the destruction of a continent on which had sprung forth a preternaturally advanced technical and mystical civilization.”

  The reason to write is to learn. The red streaks on rocks are iron. We are made of srardust, you, me, this paper, your thoughts, dreams, and hammers. Your diamond rings and number two lead pencils. How blind we usually are. Not only to the real phenomena, which our five senses cannot see, but to the wonder that is here, beneath our feet, in Central Park, in every stone, the real history of the world, written in granite and marble and Feldspar and Dolomire and Gypsum and opals and rubies and diamonds. Diamonds enter the earth’s surface at Mach 2. How’s that for a birth process?

  __________________

  *John McPhae

  FOR YEARS people have asked me why so many writers come from the south and for some reason that question has always annoyed me. It seemed obvious to me why writers come from the south, and yet, when I tried to articulate an answer, the answer was always lacking. No matter how many ideas I advanced, no matter how many theories I created, it wasn’t enough.

  “Why do so many writers come from the south?” the person would say, and I would see in my mind’s eye the south I knew, the wonderful, mystical place from which my parents came and to which I was driven every summer so that I would not become a yankee even though we had to live in Indiana and Illinois until the United States won the Second World War and my father became rich enough to “go home.”

  The south I was driven to was a land of flat, delta fields and rooms full of people talking, talking, talking. Porches at night with people drinking whiskey and talking. Porches in the afternoon with women drinking tea and talking. Porches in the early morning with my grandmothers and great grandmothers and great aunts and great great aunts drinking coffee and talking. Kitchens full of people making mayonnaise and stirring batter for cakes and cornbread and talking. The cooks and I out in the garden picking vegetables for lunch and talking. People wearing srarched shirts and dresses waiting around for church to start and talking. The minister preaching, the choir singing, us singing “A Mighty Fortress is Our Lord” and “The Church’s One Foundation” and “I Sing a Song of the Saints of the Lord.” Our voices everywhere, filling the earth with exclamations, excitations, questions, answers, pining, crooning, laments and praises.

  Even if I were alone on the lawn inspecting bugs and collecting things the world was full of sound, crickets and birds and frogs and the wind, the sound of the bayou running past, voices rising from fishing boats, oars touching water, laughter from the store and the bridge, people teasing and upbraiding, stories being told, excitement passed along.

  Of course we had to begin to write some of that down. If I think of the late afternoons when the houses were quieter I see in my mind’s eye people reading and writing. The minute they stopped talking they began to read and write.

  “Read to me,” I was always demanding. I didn’t want them to stop and read a children’s book. I wanred to hear the essays in the Progressive Farmer or the letters to the editor in the Deer Creek Journal or the short stories in The Reader’s Digest or Good Housekeeping, or, if it were my Great Grandmother Biggs or my Grandmother Gilchrist, some paragraphs from the latest Book of the Month Club book. I could go all over the house at Hopedale Plantation being read to. Eli Naylor might be in the kitchen reading Exodus or Leviticus, my brother, Dooley, would be reading The Hardy Boys. My cousin, Bunky, would be reading a National Geographic, my cousin, Laura, would be reading a musical score she was memorizing for the piano.

  All we did was talk and read and write and sing. Of course we became writers. All my cousins believe they could write anything I write if they would agree to go live all alone in the Ozark Mountains and be too selfish to stay married. I believe it too but I never encourage any of them to do it.

  If you are a child and you have an ambition to do something in the world, it is helpful if you know a real, live person who has already done it. Because there is a tradition of writing in the south and many writers live here, it is possible to have these “role models” without anyone noticing it or calling them that.

  In my case I knew writers and I knew someone who knew a poet. My grandmother had gone to school with a poet named Mildred Plew Meigs and had an autographed copy of her book of poems to prove it. I was allowed not only to read this book of poems but to carry it around in my hand and take it to my room and dog ear the pages and finally, when I was older, to own it. No wonder I became a writer. I didn’t think it was some mystical thing no human being could achieve. My grandmother had walked and talked with a real, live poet. This proved becoming a writer was within the grasp of mortal men.

  Also, and equally important, my aunt was married to a newspaper editor. I would show off for him unmercifully whenever he came into a room. I wanted him to know we belonged to the same subspecies, that I was a writer too, although it hadn’t been made manifest yet.

  All of these answers seemed sufficient for my life and work, but they did not tell me why Richard Wright became a writer or Eudora Welty, whose parents were from the midwest.

  A piece of the puzzle fell into my lap a few weeks ago and that piece is the inspirarion for this essay. I was watching a documentary on Irish immigration and the announcer said the English settled the northeast but mostly Irishmen and Scots settled the south. Eureka! I screamed. It’s a Celtic thing. Then I began to figure. I am half English, a quarter Irish and Welsh and a quarter Scots. The way I figure that is, the Scots blood makes me love to workohn McPhae, the English genes make me anal retentive about finishing what I start and the Irish and Welsh are the magic that turns words to music. I would bet there are very few southern writers without some Celtic genes but please don’t get mad at me for believing that or challenge me to prove it. Many other racial groups have great musical and verbal skills. Perhaps it is the blend of all of that which has made us writers.

  All of that is, of course, conjecture. What I know for sure is that southerners are writers because they love language and they love to live in worlds of their own making. Shakespeare loved the worlds he created. Harold Bloom says of Shakespeare he saved his creativity for the plays. He wasn’t a wastral or a crazy man or mean to people. Everyone who wrote of him says he was a pleasant person who was fun to know.

  William Shakespeare is my favorite writer. My second favorite writer is William Faulkner. I think he also loved the worlds he was creating. That’s why he kept on writing about them until he died. He had to keep on finding out what was happening in Yoknapatawpha County.

  When I was younger, I hated being called a southern writer. I wanted to be a universal writer. Now I know there never was a universal writer, just an occasional man or woman who was so true to the place they knew that it was made meaningful to people in any culture.

  I was reading The God of Small Things last summer and I kept thinking, this is just like the Delta. A writer has hit pay dirt when the reader thinks the other side of the world is just like the place they lived.

  It is all metaphor. Everything is a metaphor for everything else. Everything stands for everything else.

  Wherever there are men and women and love and death and courage and kindness and betrayal there will be writers. Maybe there are so many southern writers because we have been living so hot and heavy down here for so many years. It took hot, passionate, powerful men
and women to carve a civilization out of the wilderness of forest and swamp and plains that was the south. From the very beginning, from the time Cortez came from Florida to Arkansas, there were epidemics carried by mosquitos and many people dying along the way. There were floods and plagues and forests to cut down and rivers to tame.

  Later, by the time I got here, there were screened-in porches to keep out the mosquitos and time in the late afternoon to drink whiskey and tell the stories. I was lucky to live when that was going on and curious enough to listen. My mother was telling a story the other day about a friend of hers who married beneath herself and had “rough children.”

  Maybe that’s why we are writers. Maybe we are a lot of rough children. Most of the southern writers I know would fit into that category, except, of course, Eudora, who is the exception that disproves everything I say.

  Provenance

  ORIGINS

  In the Beginning

  The Road to the Store

  Things Like the Truth

  Going to the Coast, Southern Living, March 1984

  National Public Radio Journal Entries

  March 26, 1985, Mississippi Writers,

  Reflections of Childhood and Youth, Volume II

  April 25, 1985

  February 26, 1985, Mississippi Writers,

  Reflections of Childhood and Youth, Volume II

  January 1, 1985, Mississippi Writers,

  Reflections of Childhood and Youth, Volume II

  October 10, 1985

  August 5, 1985

  January 13, 1985

  April 2, 1985

  June, 1985

  January 7, 1986

  July 14, 1986

  October 1, 1985

  November 24, 1986

  Knowing Gaia

  INFLUENCES

  National Public Radio Journal Entries