The place where we lived was in the woods and at night
the wind would sing in the darkness through the trees.
The Appalachians are full of songs, songs of beauty, mystery, sweetness
and violence.
But while the songs of the Appalachians are universal, songs from
other parts of the land, of different cultures, have their own
unique coloration and Mendel knew – and I knew – that he had to move on.
So I followed him. My wife and I began driving. She was seeking
her perfect song and I was seeking mine. Mendel was insistent
in his freedom. He had no direction, no agenda. He simply followed
his instincts and wrote about what he experienced.
And I followed him. More on those travels later.
* * * *
But as I look back, the inception
took place long ago, when I was a child, growing up on a farm on
a mountain that overlooks all the other Appalachian foothills. On
summer nights, my dad and my brothers and I slept outside and the
night breeze caressed us, and down below, past the barnyard, the
pond with the croaking frogs, past the hayfield, and the stone walls
where three-foot milk snakes resided, was the dark and mysterious
swamp. An owl lived down there and his haunting “whooo” echoed
through the night, trailing off quietly into the valley below us.
The night was vast, unending.
It was the swamp where my black and white pony, Stormy, ventured,
and never came out. We found his body years later, or what was
left of it – bones covered by huge shreds of his black and white
fur. He had been sick and weak and gotten stuck in the bog, and slowly
starved to death. The swamp covered him from us until it was ready
to reveal his body to us.
This wasn’t the first time the swamp played tricks on us.
One night while lying out on the grass covered by a blanket and
staring up at the huge expanse of stars, a scream rose from
the swamp, filling the night, and scaring my brothers and me
nearly to death. It was the first time I ever remember my hair
at the back of my head standing up. It was the shrill scream
of a woman being brutally murdered. We all lay there in petrified
silence until Dad said quietly, “A bobcat.”
“They sound like that?”
I could feel him nod in the darkness. “Yeah.”
It was the most frightening sound I ever heard until years later
when I was a reporter on a murder scene and I heard the scream
of the mother as she watched her dead son being carried away.
The swamp was a good place in the daytime. But as daylight faded
and dusk faded into darkness, the swamp turned evil. I write
about it in another story.
