"Son of Fog" by Dean Young: Is Fog a Gas?

You science people, is fog a gas? Are you sure?  In Tipton, Indiana, you can refill your tank at the Sherrill place, a combination diner and filling station. But in both pit stops and poetry, watch out for double meanings.

In Dean Young's fine and perhaps startling poem about fog, you'll find, among other lines, these winners:

Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned   

nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle   

of mortality. A foglike baby god   

picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely   

then goes back to playing with her feet.

    Or this, toward the end: 

   What a mess. We stand at the edge
    of a drop that doesn't answer back,
   fog our only friend although it's hell  
    on shrimpboats. 

        But don't take my word for it; read it all.

Son of Fog by Dean Young : Poetry Magazine



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TIDBITS: ELKHORN CITY, KENTUCKY

From Wikipedia, about Elkhorn City, Kentucky, hometown of country singer, Patty Loveless: "On October 16, 1882, the post office was renamed Praise for 'Camp Praise-the-Lord', a tent colony that was established by evangelist George O. Barnes for a revival there in August 1881."

I find that fascinating, and for some time, I've been considering a periodic Tidbit post like this, apropos of nothing. It could be one way to offset any excess of attention to poetry. But is it interesting to anyone else?

I've driven around several times in those mountains traversed by Interstate 81, so I must have been close to Elkhorn City.

In Wytheville, Virginia, I just crossed I-81 on I-77 while driving to and from Florida. I find it easy to romanticize the Blue Ridge in spring, summer, and fall,, including bluegrass music and rural living. Winter is another matter. In southbound snow flurries and, a month later, a northbound threat of icing, I just wanted the damned mountains to end.



It was a comment by some female country singer, possibly Loretta Lynn, that first made me re-think my idealization of that area. She, or her song, said the days were shortened a lot in the hollers--you're that deep down; it's that skinny in there. If there's any sun, it's on a mountaintop, and who can live there? Maybe the owner of a coal mine, with his a private, heated road upward?

One time in south-central Kentucky, a little west of I-75, I asked a gas station guy about a two-lane route I'd planned to take into the mountains and on to the coal country of Hazard and Harlan in eastern Kentucky, Loretta Lynn country.

"Is that road just too full of curves? I don't want to spend a whole day going 50 miles."

"Oh," he said of my road marked narrow and grey on the map, "I wouldn't go that way. If you break down, you don't who's gonna stop. Or why."

It was the kind of advice I was used to hearing about pockets of danger in urban blight. So, as I processed the unexpected info over days and weeks, I decided to call it justice: there are vicious people everywhere and the inevitable fear of the Other. And how about the way we all groove on fear, the dirty little secret that makes local TV news stations happy.

Yes, yes, I already knew all that, but the gas station guy gave it new life, made it palpable. In one of the areas I'd nominated to myself for the title of Paradise, or at least a Praise tent camp of my own making, not everybody was Doc Watson or Earl Scruggs. A native of the place had said so. For all I know, Doc and Earl are mean too, and that guy would be the first to tell me so.

But I'll go back. In southwest Virginia, even in winter, there are sloped pastures among the mountains, and they're dotted with cattle, including a lot of Black Angus. A few years ago on that stretch, I hit a pothole and lost a hubcap. I need to go fetch it, and that could take a awhile.
















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SOUTHEASTERN OHIO, BACK ROADS, ROUTE NUMBERS

Here are some buildings I liked in my recent and epic wanderings in southeastern Ohio. Also, the Amish hill country north of here, around Wooster and Millersburg, is gorgeous in an agrarian way. To try to hang on to a theme, the campuses at College of Wooster and Kenyon College (in tiny Gambier) are extremely attractive, too, as are their towns.

“Maps are a way of organizing wonder.”
Peter Steinhart, “Names on a Map” (1986)

Color season has begun. Shake a leg. Here is the southeastern quadrant of Ohio. Could you name as many as five towns prior to this map? Can you picture the towns or the hill country? Click to enlarge (though only a little, I'm afraid).



I recommend these fine drives on southeastern Ohio’s back roads (there are more, but these will get you started):

from just north of the quadrant:

Rt. 800 Urichsville to Barnesville
Rt. 83 Millersburg to Coshocton to Reinersville to Beverly

Within the quadrant:

Rt. 339 Macksburg to Beverly
Rt. 36 Coshocton to Gnadenhutten (mostly 4-lane, but open, rural, pleasant)
Rt. 147 Batesville to Sarahsville.
Rt. 285 Winterset to Caldwell (averaging about 30 mph).
Rt. 513 Middlebourne to Batesville
Rt. 78 Woodsfield to Caldwell to McConnesville to Glouster
Rt. 564 Caldwell to Harrietsville

western part of the quadrant:

Rt. 60 Zanesville to Marietta
Rt. 550 Marietta to Athens
Rt. 13 Athens to New Lexington
Rt. 7 along the Ohio River is sometimes beautiful, sometimes pocked with industry.

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Back Roads, Campus, Waking, Roethke

The weekend’s not over yet. You can still hit the two-lanes for a few hours, or take a new back road home from Shangri-La.

Hit some small towns, wander by some farms. How much can you generalize about them? Or roam around a college campus, which can feel something like a gathering of cathedrals if you plan well—or just get lucky. What is life like for those kids and profs? If the devil's in the details, how much can you, should you generalize?

If this weekend is a flop, remember, a couple of autumn months have just begun, and they won’t last long. So hit the road and remember your Roethke:

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.


The Waking by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

MICHIGAN, LATE AUGUST

Year after year, I’m surprised at how early autumn begins.

If you can avoid the Labor Day mayhem on the roads, think about a two-lane trip soon. I'm recently back from a two-lane route of about 150 of the 200 miles from western Michigan to the Detroit suburbs,


and every leg of the 150 was a barge of relief from contemporary hustle, crowding, and obnoxious drivers. The patches of forest and the endless, rolling farm country were magnificent, though I worried about the dessicated corn crop in central Michigan, as if I knew what I was looking at.


Then came the last leg, into the suburbs--a re-immersion, a dunking, in suburban hellfire. Do people honestly think they’re so important that they need to, deserve to, rush like that--to crowd me like that? Who’s going to care if they take an extra five minutes or an hour? Maybe the boss, of course, but I wonder.

Are there any good songs about the joys of the freeway? Did the Wabash Cannonball need eight lanes? Is anybody crowding her? Here’s an oldie I used to worship, maybe still do. It’s about the journey. You can get the destinations on TV.

YouTube - Ian and Sylvia - Four Strong Winds (CBC TV 1986)

Well, if anybody wants some recommendations for routes in southern Indiana, central Ontario, or western Michigan, give me a buzz. I’ve lucked into some this summer. And yes, I planned well, if I say so myself.


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Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill." Ohio on Two-Lane Roads.

I’m just back from a two-lane road trip to central Ohio, and spring was making an Ireland of the buckeye state.

For fellow blue highway travelers, let me recommend north-south Routes 19 and 314 (connected by 224) from Magee Marsh to Sparta. It’s a stretch of two-lane, rural, understated beauty and mostly gentle curves—not a city to be seen or smelled, except for the short, harmless tacky-strip in Willard.

The parallel to that is Routes 61 and 4, which are also excellent, though construction on Rt. 4 could become a problem over the summer. Rt. 61 takes you through Galion, not a tiny town, but a pleasant one.

As for poetry, what I said about cummings yesterday is also true of Dylan Thomas, though I don’t think serious readers are quite as embarrassed to have found the Welshman important to them.

To be sure, Thomas is self-indulgent and redundant as he wallows in the wonders of nature, but I don’t think many would call him a philosophical simpleton, unless they’d say the same of Wordsworth. Also, who can fail to love the richness of the images in “Fern Hill,” even in its excesses?

Fern Hill - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

And who would dare to claim immunity to that conclusion? If you haven’t at least tried to sing in your chains, why are you still sitting here, bothering us, stealing our oxygen?

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