The afternoon sun sets, bright and orange through the old stand of yellow pine. The summer breeze is heavy, heavy in only the way a dusk breeze in the South can be, heavy with Gulf dampness, soaked from that great, billowing, promising ocean of the Americas. The sky is now red in its forever death, the pine branches only black silhouettes. In the soft pine needles, an old diamondback stirs, master of the deep piney woods. Those pine needles, soft and brown and thick blanketing the low, loamy earth, cover all, all the way to the waters' edge where the tannic acid turns river water a luminous brown. Here water is shallow but deceptive. Not far off sounds the last steamy, hollow, off-key whistle of a steamboat, one of those great oak-and-pine barns of the river, all filagree and seething strength, all fragile pastels and muscular sweat. The boat has cast off, now bound down river for New Orleans.
This is my summer place, the place I once saw and felt and breathed in, in my childhood, a place that never was and I was never there but nonetheless is forever, timelessly, eternally real, more real to me than most of my day-to-day reality. Born in the wrong time and place? Perhaps. Such questions are beyond my cosmic pay grade. But when, as a child, I was carried through — of all places — Walt Disney World, what memories followed my two-year old self unbidden? Besides a certain blue balloon with bulging, hopeful rubber ears, there was the smell of the pines in a hot Florida summer dusk, and the sight of a grand old riverboat, brightly lit, silhouetted in that setting eternal sun, the same sun sinking beyond the sands and the swamps and the lapping warm Gulf waves not far west.
I was a born a cornfield Yankee boy, of course. But none of that made a difference, that siren call of the South. I was meant for the South, or my far past was, and that does not have to make any sense whatsoever. Somewhere along the great wheel of cosmic time and place, some impossible-to-ignore connection was made, even as the nighttime stars spiral overhead. "Oh, my goodness, the summers are just so hot down there!" "I prefer the 'real' mountains, the Rockies." I've stood on those high impossible edges of Montana's Absaroka Range in August, denim-wrapped against a snow chill that all of summer could not melt. The beauty there is unmistakable, far-removed from warmth, far-removed in lonely bleakness. Were I there, I would shiver, missing the Gulf, missing the embracing atmosphere, missing these mountains. The Ozarks are in the South, no matter what tourists think. Here, the "sky is closer," as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote once, here in the wild, ragged, far western mountains of the true Deep South. Time to drive to the Arkansas State Line, to Wild Bill's, and raise a glass of cheap Tennessee whiskey to the lost memories of conflict, Yankee versus Johnny Reb.
The unseen but still-heard steamboat is picking up speed, the thick brown and luminous water makes a repetitive hushing sound, calming, like a sunset lullaby, like heavy straw broom strokes swept over clean pine plank floor, planks worn smooth by a generation of wear. A hound puppy wiggles on the floor, belly fat with milk. Black nose is wet and cool and soft, eyes full of love. It is a sin dogs only live some 15 years. The generations of puppies and old dogs that have crossed this path are unthinkable, impossible so many lives and so much love have been compressed into the past, then forgotten. History chooses not to remember the dogs. The puppy's eyes light up and I pick him up, holding him close, feeling his heartbeat, willing him to live forever, even beyond me. Light is energy, and light is love and both are eternal, at least to me.
The steamboat whistle sounds again and I'm standing in a crowd near the end of day, a grown man, and it is summer 2021, and I have spent some $100 to relive something resembling childhood memories. My shirt is almost dry from the afternoon downpour so characteristic of a Florida summer, and the queue line to Peter Pan's Flight is characteristically interminable. I would walk to Space Mountain but my feet hurt too much from a day in the Magic Kingdom, again, one last time. I haven't been here since I was 13 and the weight of memory is palpable. Another moment in time, impossible to forget, but no less real than any of my other memories, some less tangible than others.
The puppy, black and white and fat and loving, wriggles in my arms. The steamboat whistles again. I hold this puppy against the dark and the fear of rattlesnake, and do my best to protect him forever against cruel passage of time and pitiless darkness of death. There's an old rocking chair on the front porch and I will find solace there, perhaps to the smell of bread cooling on the old cookstove, and there in the chair and the dark I will rock against time, and feel my way through memories, past and future. There, in the darkness and the warmth and the night with a million southern stars overhead and the smell of pine heavy in the air, I will find and build a bulwark against the frantic passage of time and, at least for a moment, meaning will again be found in this insane world, a world far too often transient and heartless, before I too pass on into oblivion.
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