Laurel Day
A Whimsical Current
For Delph’s Dad and Uncle Bear
By Orman Day, As Published in Weave Magazine, Issue 7, December 2011
Although I had paged through magazine pictorials of Appalachian plight (bare feet, chipped teeth, lopsided cabins, muddied streams, snuffling pigs), I daydreamed of the Appalachian grandeur of geography books and full-color calendars when I sat cross-legged on the floor of my fort, which opened onto a yard of anthill and dirt clod.
I wished my refuge could rise from my backyard, alight on the other side of the country somewhere in the Great Smokies, the Shenandoah, the Cumberland, and I could clamber over lichened rocks, drop a leaf into a crystalline stream swirling with smallmouth bass.
When I was a young man in the winter of ‘69-‘70, I thumbed around the country with a California friend, earning our way with folk songs and fire-eating, exulting in a serendipitous freedom that finally led me through Appalachia on sinuous two-lane roads. We stood beside our bags on a West Virginia shoulder, brightened when a yellow school bus rumbled by, full of scowling high school boys thrusting raised fingers at us and girls blowing long kisses, flashing the peace sign. In a Carolina store, we sang in a musical circle (our guitar and drum, their dulcimer, autoharp and fiddle), me swigging bootleg offered in a Mountain Dew bottle.
We turned east toward D.C. before reaching Big Rock, Virginia, where a boy named Delph gigged frogs, fried their legs, spread honey from his aunt’s apiary across warm cornbread, traipsed through a forest of willow, oak, water birch, filling sacks with black walnuts to dry, hull and eat in a square of Mom’s fudge, a slice of Mamaw’s cake. If we had hitched to that hamlet, we would’ve asked Mamaw, Delph’s widowed grandma, if we could sing for two of the bologna sandwiches she sold to truck drivers, and I might’ve met the boy destined to marry my niece.
Delph grew up in the kind of rough-hewn terrain I like to conjure listening to Dock Boggs’s banjo, Maybelle Carter’s guitar, Jean Ritchie’s dulcimer, the anguished voices of Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline. At a family gathering I asked him a morning of questions, which he often answered like a bewhiskered old-timer. Did he accept the altar call of an itinerant preacher, have sins washed away with a frigid dunking in the river? "Baptized so many times…the crawdads know my Social Security number." Did his family have much money after bills were paid? "Things were tighter than bark on a birch tree." I contrasted his childhood with my own in a place where palm fronds swished in a hot wind, smog hazed the sky so you couldn’t see the San Gabriels.
To cool ourselves on summer days, my sisters and I splattered each other with pans filled at the hose, darted into the spray of our rusted sprinkler, and if Mom wasn’t selling patterns at a yardage shop and she found an extra dollar in her purse, we rode in our sputtering car to Verdugo Pool, where we waded into a youthful pandemonium, watched belly-floppers plummet from the high dive, felt the sting of chlorine so thick it reddened our eyes, turned the blonde hair of some girls a ghoulish green.
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