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| Photo Credit: Andrew Feight, Ph.D. |
The passenger pigeon flocks that once darkened this valley's skies have long since disappeared and while the great American bison, the deer, bear, and panther no longer seek out the saline waters of the Scioto Salt Licks, migrating human populations who first came to this valley because of its abundant game have definitely settled in and left their mark. As with the birds, there are old human migratory flows that drew and, to a certain degree, continue to draw people into this valley. There are little eddies here and there that swirl about and over the years they have managed to overpower many a rambling bone.
Though I am relatively a newcommer here, I followed the path of many of the first white and black American immigrants who came to this region from the southeastern side of the Appalachian Mountains. From the foothills of Georgia and South Carolina, through the Cumberland Gap and into the Kentucky Bluegrass, I eventually made my way to the mouth of the Scioto River in Southern Ohio.
Over the millenia a number of different civilizations have inhabited this region - migrants all. They have come and gone and returned. Whether the prehistoric Native Americans or their European, African, and Mexican American successors, many decided to stay here and sow their seeds and reap their life's joys and sorrows. Yet, like the migratory birds of this spring, there is no doubt that more have simply passed by and through our valley than have made this their home and laid their bones in our soil.
If one stays in this valley long enough to know it, the layers of its history, reaching back to the earliest days of contact between Native Americans and European explorers, reveal themselves to be as rich as the valley's primeval forest, when the passenger pigeon turned day into night and the doe and the buck were so thick that the Shawnee spoke of a river of deer.
The river is for drowning girls
ReplyDeleteevery song says it's true
hair blooms in the cold current
the little fish rise like angels to meet them
they go down into the dark
in the good black mud
they roll, white-eyed
through brown water
arms out in benediction
fish-pale bellies and breasts
like
a basement full of mushrooms
roots and blind things
they say
there are catfish big as Volkswagens
near the dam, the divers come back up
and never go down again
they say
when the drought drops the water
low enough the old carved stones
break the surface
and only say
that you'll be mine
and in no other's arms entwine
down beside
where the waters flow
down by the banks of the Ohio
here, once
they humped the earth like new dug graves
in the shape of serpents, eggs, moons
wheels and bears
buried bones,
copper axes, obsidian hands
but the river is for drowning girls
every song says it's true
Train trestles cut across
flat stones and mud, ring top beer cans
tangles of fishing line
the river swells with rain and swallows fields
making mirrors of the mud
leaving fish to die for the corn
leaving the old stone blades of knives
arrowheads, bone beads and broken pots
the river is for drowning girls
hungry for their white flesh
it beats against the city walls,
glutted with chicken coops, detergent bottles
syringes, empty jugs, tampon applicators
slick black logs and fishing floats
dark as a rotted oak leaf, as a cold night
as the smoke of a fall fire on the bank
dark as a barge filled with west Virginia coal
electric light of a lone house
and a song ringing out
go down go down you Knoxville girl
with the dark and roving eye
go down go down you Knoxville girl
you'll never be my bride
the river is for drowning girls,
girls drunk and dancing
girls fucking
boys fresh from jail
in cars
girls with hair too high,
with painted faces, and slit up shirts
girls in towns with cold smokestacks
who run blue lines up their noses
smoking beside a bonfire
swapping speckled eggs for candy bars
the river is for drowning girls
they go down to the last line of land
and wait to be taken away
Jacob Rakovan
JR: Thanks for the poem. These rivers -- the Ohio and the Scioto -- make fertile creative bottom lands, where the detritus decomposes, at least the non-plastic flotsam, that is. Perhaps some creative/tormented souls have to leave this confluence of waters to make sense and poetry out of that "good black mud." Thanks for reading.
ReplyDeletewell, i don't know about "having" to leave, but it certainly made it easier to see clearly. I think you will have a different historical perspective on the region being a naturalized citizen of appalachia ( as i am, also) as opposed to a native one. I think an interest in that history at all, at least history in the traditional sense is atypical of the region. History in the river valley is viewed by it's residents as an outgrowth of geneology, primarily, as a repository of familial myths and as a touchstone of values important to the clan ( for example, the curious way in which the labor struggles, union shootings of the depression and the race riots of the 60's are viewed by portsmouth residents. they are almost entirely divorced from any kind of relation to the history of the country as a whole, and instead serve as cautionary tales, as tribal myths used to explain the poverty, the racial divisions. There is no more fact in most southern ohio history than in a mythopoetic story of origin for some tribal sun-king. Most interestingly is the romanticized view of the original inhabitants, i think, and the way in which local historians paint an edenic, arcadian picture of the moundbuilders, the scioto, etc. They serve as mythic ancestors, an age of gold in contrast to our post-industrial malaise. I don't think this romantic picture of the past is unique to southern ohio, but i do think it plays out in a particularly interesting way there.
ReplyDeletelocal "blue eyed cherokees" running gas mowers over a simulated mound that they insisted be fenced for it's preservation seems to me particularly telling, an almost deliberate inactment of the resident's relation to the simalcra of the past.
Very good Andrew and very interesting. I'm looking forward to more postings on the history of the area. Maybe you could enlighten some of us on the settlement of the "white man" in this area.
ReplyDeleteI have lived at the confluence of these two rivers from time to time and it is quite an interesting place, as I'm sure it's history is.
JR: I didn't mean to suggest that one HAS to leave, but I do think distance and time away from a place can help the creative process. I, for one, have a slow (deliberative) mind that far too often takes its time. Somethings perhaps are meant to lay in the mud until they surface in their own time and place - like your poem, or is that an old piece written down here?
ReplyDeleteCF: Thanks for reading. I've been contemplating my next post and it turns out that it may very well be about first contact at the confluence.
it is an older piece, i just realized i had not sent any of the newer things home, and thought you might get a kick out of it. working on a manuscript, 50-ish pages a the moment of fairly edited stuff, just need to work on order, and then start sending it out i think. keep posting
ReplyDeletehttp://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2007/06/taste-of-lucifer.html
ReplyDeletethought you might enjoy these
your river sucks it could at least catch fire once !
ReplyDeleteI take this most recent comment to mean that we should judge our rivers by the number of man-made fires they have experienced. I suppose, next to the Cuyahoga in northeastern Ohio, the Scioto does pale in comparison. But, seriously, the Scioto also has its own pollution problems. I wouldn't knowingly eat fish from its waters.
ReplyDeleteThe Cuyahoga is burning HOTT!!
ReplyDeletethe Scioto is not
You have stirred up the wrath of Leatherlips-he hates your deer eyed river!
ReplyDelete