A tale of two year-long western trips on no money, sixty years apart

 

As young men, both my grandfather and I took off on short notice to head out West, with no more than we could easily carry, seeking adventure, supporting ourselves with the manual labor we knew best: ranch & farmwork for my grandfather; millwork & logging for me —  and not returning for a full year.  My grandfather's trip is described in a blank verse narrative poem, "Al Appenheimer's Sight-seeing Tour of the Vanishing West," from my Stark County Poems, and opens thus:

In 1912, when he turned twenty-one,

because he had always wanted to see

the Old West of legend before it was gone,

Al Appenheimer packed a canvas bag

with a change of clothes, wished the folks so long,

and walked off into the sunset.  Apart

from his bag and hat, all he had was a pair

of five dollar bills in his shirt pocket. 

It was all he needed.  Whenever he

was down to a dollar, he just stopped off

at the nearest ranch and got taken on

as a seasoned hand for however long

       it took to replace the pair of fives,

       and then hit the road.  In this way he tramped

       all the way from Illinois to Texas

       and down into Mexico and then up

       the coast to Washington State just in time

       for the start of the harvest season where he

       was hired to drive a 30-mule-hitch

       combine across an ocean of wheat.  . . . 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My own Western trip is chronicled in my memoir:  Three Years on the Nowhere Road, and begins as follows:

 In November of 1972, at the age of 22, married less than a year, and having lost my job as a tree-trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, I made a drastic decision. I packed my uncle's WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from our rapidly-dwindling nest egg, and announced my intention to hitch-hike out to the coast of Washington state where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw.

            Two days later my wife Vickie drove me out to the west side of town shortly after sunrise and dropped me off beside the road. Before I closed the door, she leaned across to give me a warm kiss good-bye. Then she U-turned the car in the road and drove off back into town. It was the last time I would ever see her. Some sixteen or seventeen hours later, sometime after midnight, I found myself beside a deserted highway a few miles west of Omaha, in a cold wind, fantasizing about a warm bed and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into..

I lived rough for that entire year, camping in crude shelters above the Calawah and Hoh rivers on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, working in cedar shake mills and salvaging cedar logs for the mills on the steep, cut-over slopes of the Hoh valley and elsewhere.

When I returned to Illinois after my year in the woods, I drove down to Toulon in Stark County to visit my grandfather and we compared notes about our respective Western trips.

We each left with only a change of clothes and a blanket.  I was 22 and he was 21.  We both supported ourselves with heavy outdoor work and we were both gone for an entire year, 60 years apart.  He left in 1912;  I left in 1972.   He left with $10 and returned a year later, still with $10.  I left with $5 and returned a year later with nothing.

An in-depth interview with Jared Carter in New Verse Review

(Carter at work in his home in the late 1970s.  --

                                Photo by Chris Minnick.)

A wide-ranging interview with poet Jared Carter has just appeared in New Verse Review, covering Carter's early years in a small Indiana town, his education at Yale, his years in Fontainebleau, France with the Army, his many years in the publishing business and his long circuitous road to becoming one of the most respected of living American poets. 

Part One of the interview can be read here.  Part Two can be read here.  

And here is a brief excerpt:

New Verse Review:  [C]an you talk about how form corresponds with meaning in your narrative poems? Does form help you find what you want to say, or is it more that you go in with a clear vision or outline of what you want to accomplish with each poem—topically and structurally?

Jared Carter:   "With all due respect, none of that. I may sense notions, or clues, or whisperings, but I don’t begin with ideas. The truth is that I make poems the same way my father built houses and bridges, and the same way my mother made a few dollars by standing near the casket, or next to the bride and groom, and singing her heart out.

I just find a way to fit different words together, and when starting out, almost anything will do. I build poems out of bits and pieces, recollections, country tales, ghost stories, paving bricks, and old zinc canning-jar lids used for ashtrays.

On many occasions, as a youth, I watched my father and his workmen walk out into an empty field, and three months later, in that same field, there would be a small factory or a pumping station. I try to do something similar with each new poem. Not from the top down, but from the ground up."

Five new (old) titles suited to woodland walks

 The latest from Monongahela Books: five early American classics for woodland walking. At roughly 4x7, they slip snugly into the pocket of a heavy overshirt or over-the-shoulder satchel. Emerson’s essays “Nature” & "Self-Reliance," Thoreau’s “Wild Apples” & “Walking,” and the only known biographical sketch of “Johnny Appleseed” by one who knew him -- subjects steeped in the climate of an earlier America and suited to outdoor reverie and rumination.

These are lightweight, bare-bones editions, free of backcover blurbs or scholarly clutter. (Not that commentary and notes are without their uses, but such fatter editions belong on the shelf, available for consultation, and not weighing down a hiker’s pack).

Two are currently available for purchase, and three are in the works. Each fits easily in the hand, while taking one’s repose beneath a spreading oak.

      

"From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War" ~~ a cycle of unrhymed sonnets

 

From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War

A book of unrhymed sonnets based closely on the letters of a young, newly-married woman to her husband in the training camp at Quantico, Virginia in 1917, shortly before he was shipped overseas.  Written mostly among the isolated hills of her childhood home in Wolfe County, Kentucky, the letters are tender and touching with some lyrical passages, but also unsparing in their naturalistic descriptions of hardship and dysfunction.

~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 8, 1917

Apart from Aunt Nora who's just as kind

as she can be, all the old women here

are spiteful and mean and even make fun

of the way I talk, but I don’t much care.

They say I am foolish to promise myself

to a soldier who’s going straight to war,

but I said I would marry no one else

for if a man doesn’t have life enough

to fight for his country he isn’t likely

to fight for me. — Another old lady

said what a disgrace it was that I

should get myself into trouble like that.

What trouble? I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

I no longer listen to them at all.

But my little cousins all like me fine.

They snuggle up close and sleep with me too

and follow me everywhere that I go,

but the older women just criticize.

They say my dresses are much too short

and more becoming to a girl of twelve

than a woman of twenty.  The young girls here

go around all day on Sunday with

their sun-bonnets on, but I refuse

to wear them at all.  And in one house

where I visited there was one little girl

so drunk she could hardly stand up straight.

She was only three years old.  That hurt me

worse than anything I have seen.

 

And Al, the chickens just strutted around

on the table, scratching and pecking for crumbs

like they owned the place— and then I met

a young husband and pretty wife so poor

they had to make do in a chicken coop.  

— I would have given most anything

if you could have been with me yesterday

and seen the old cabin where I was born.

I couldn’t find it at first, so hidden

in nettles and horseweeds as it was. 

I thought I would step inside for a bit

and say hello to an old ghost or two,

but it was so dark and smelled of old dirt 

and the sadness was more than I could bear.

 

~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 11, 1917

 

How I wish you’d been with me yesterday

when we went for apples and had to climb

a hill so steep that our wagon and mules

nearly spilled over backwards.  The little road

was so narrow there wasn't any room

to walk alongside to drive and the banks

so high the mules couldn’t possibly

turn out on either side — so we simply

let go of the reins and followed behind.

Never seen such a road in all my life

but, Al, the apples were just wonderful

and I’m going to send you some.  I got

a bushel for 50 cents and fourteen

more for a dime, so I did pretty well.

~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 12, 1917

 

I got a letter from you today which 

was written on Tuesday in which you said

you would ship out soon.  I'm going to send

a box anyway and I still don't know

if even one of my letters has reached you.

You said you were only about as well

as could be expected and just holding on.

--Oh, Al, I also hated to leave you

beside the train in the dark that night.

It was the hardest thing I have ever done,

but no more than thousands of other girls

are asked to do, and I am no better

than any of them, but still . . . it is more

on certain nights than I think I can stand.

 ~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 18, 1917

I am glad you liked all the things I sent.

One of papa's brothers sent the yellow

apple and one of his sisters the jell.

I sent all the rest myself.  I'm sorry

the cake didn't look so good, being burned.

I climbed the tree, picked the apples and payed

a dime for them.  And I made the candy.

I am glad you got them before you left.

I sure had some time getting everything

collected all in one place together

and I had to carry that box a mile.

I'm afraid for you sailing so far away.

Even if my heart could speak I wouldn't

know how to write it, so good-bye for now.

"Closing Inventory" from Stark County Poems appears in Small Farmer's Journal

The poem "Closing Inventory," about the death of an aging farmer living alone along the Spoon River in the mid-1930s, and which first appeared in the online journal The Milk House, has been reprinted in Small Farmer's Journal.  The poem is from the collection Stark County Poems (Monongahela Books, 2019), by BJ Omanson. 

Mr. Omanson informs us that he is always pleased when his work appears in a traditional agrarian magazine as it means he is reaching a wider general audience beyond the small specialized audience of academic literary journals.

He also appreciates the unapologetically old-school  layout of farming magazines with their generous use of space and illustrations and mingling of literary pieces with practical articles on agricultural subjects.

Omanson's work has appeared several times in Small Farmer's Journal and has also appeared in Farming Magazine, an Amish publication, which has published such poets as Wendell Berry and Ted Kooser. 

"He made himself the first authentic voice of America..."

 Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy by Cleveland Rodgers.  Illustrated. (Monongahela Books, 2025).  $8.50. 

The latest 'small booklet' from Monongahela Books is an obscure, little-known essay-- originally published in 1920-- on Whitman as a poet of democracy by one of his earlier biographers, Cleveland Rodgers, who also served as editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Eagle, a post held for a time by Whitman himself.

        "Whitman was a great pivot and force in our national evolution. He came upon the scene in time to gather up the torch that had been kindled in Revolutionary days, and he made a heroic effort to pass it on to the new generations of Americans.  He stands with Lincoln as the exponent and prophet of the greater democracy. 

       Whitman, looking back, saw how far the Republic had come.  He looked around and ahead and saw where the nation could go if it went along.  He wove his dreams into a moving and magnificent pageant of words.  He made himself the first authentic voice of America and democracy's great prophet. "

Carter's "The Land Itself" reviewed in New Verse Review

The Land Itself, by Jared Carter.  Introductory essay by BJ Omanson.  Photographs by the author.  72 pp.  (Monongahela Books, 2019). 

Jared Carter's The Land Itself was recently reviewed by David Lee Garrison in New Verse Review. 

Here is an excerpt:

"The black and white photographs within the book and on its cover, taken by the poet himself, have no human figures in them. They have the lonely look of Andrew Wyeth paintings—abandoned houses, a closed-up church, cemetery figurines, an old mill, spirea flowing over a wall and casting shadows. And yet, the poems are about people and their struggles, people and their wanderings across Midwestern landscapes. Jared Carter tells us their stories.

       The poems are as stark, uncluttered, and unassuming as the photographs. The poet does not moralize or generalize or draw abstract conclusions. He lets the people and the land and the structures that remain on it speak for themselves. He draws back a curtain on the past and shows us birds in the rafters of a covered bridge, gas streetlamps it was thought would never go out, and a coffin filled with rock salt. Then he offers us a glimpse of the human context of such things.

       What we hear in these poems are primordial echoes of the land and reverberations from little Midwestern towns. What we see and experience are defining moments in lives now mostly forgotten. In the words of essayist R. P. Burnham, Carter 'knows that a lived human life is made up of moments, that in the lives of even the most commonplace farmer or druggist or carpenter some of those moments are magical and the very stuff the human spirit is made of.' "

The entire review can read in New Verse Review here.

"Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade" now available

 Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade

Volume 1: 

From Before the War to the Eve of Belleau Wood.

 264 photographs, 26 maps, 15 drawings, 379 pages.  8.5 x 11. 

$40.

 

From the Introduction:

       ". . . This book is as much a social and cultural, as a military history.  There is, for instance, far more about the French villagers among whom the Marines were billeted than you will find in other books about the Marine Brigade.  There is more about the rear areas, and movements from one area to the next, with all the complex preparations such movements entailed, than can easily be found elsewhere.  And there is of course a good deal of information on the care of mules and wagons, and the duties of teamsters, as well as anecdotes about teamsters and mules. 

       This book, in other words, is about those aspects of the Marine Brigade’s history which—because they do not bear directly on the fighting—have been largely passed over. But a soldier’s experience of war involves a great deal besides combat, and such “peripheral” experiences are consequential in their own right. They matter.  They are an integral part of the full story.

       It will never be possible to recover the greater part of my grandfather’s experience of the war—for the most part that experience went with him to the grave.  But there are, nevertheless, many aspects of his experience—and of the wider context of that experience—which can be recovered, and this book is the result of a fifty-year quest to seek them out and organize them into an open-ended but still coherent narrative. "

  

 

" . . . the melancholy decline of the year . . . "

In the Hour before Dusk, by BJ Omanson.  (Monongahela Books, 2024).  Illustrated.  75 pp.  

After half a century of work in the naturalistic narrative mode of Hardy, Robinson and Frost, Omanson returns to his aesthetic origins-- to that long period in English poetry from late-18th century Gothic to the late Victorians-- to contemplate once more the mesmerizing vistas of his youth from the more philosophical vantage of old age.

from "Old Locksley among the Ruins":

.                             It was later that year,
after weeks when the heat of midsummer
had driven Old Locksley to seek the shade,
had driven him, like a disgruntled bear,
to take sanctuary deep in his house,
deep in the cavernous gloom of his house,
with bats in the attic and dripping eaves
and high steepled windows where mystics, monks
and martyrs shone softly in sunlit glass—
it was later that year, after summer’s heat
had driven Old Locksley into the hushed
recesses and curtained-off rooms of his house—
a house that was more a cavern than house,
with ivy-encumbered and blackened stone
and deeply-set doorways encased in vine—
or more like a mausoleum, perhaps,
with its bordering arbor vitae and yew—
with crumbling foundation and groaning pipes
and crickets in corners, its redolent rooms
provisioned with humidors of tobacco
and crystal decanters of peaty scotch,
its snug little hideaways fitted out
with old leather sofas and mica lamps
enveloped in amber light—  it was later,
much later that year that Locksley, at last,
emerged amid whirlings of leaves released
from willow and maple to clutter the air
all about his head and skitter across
the garden to lodge in the lower boughs
of the conifers—  it was later that year
that Locksley returned to his garden seat,
returned to consider and contemplate
the melancholy decline of the year,
the shedding of gold and of crimson leaves,
the dropping of berries and migrating flocks
of sparrows in spruces, and all the subtle
foreshadowings of the coming cold . . .

. . . . . . 

For Autumn to Locksley was no mere bridge
of transient days linking summer's close
to the snows of winter— in Locksley's mind,
Old Autumn was less a condition of time
than of place—  it was less a recurrent phase
embracing the earth for a day, than a place
of endless ending through which the Earth moved
as a ship through a shifting sea, a region
unalterable in its alteration,
immutable as the mutable moon.

~~~~~

Note: the poem "Old Locksley among the Ruins" was originally issued as a separate book (Old Locksley among the Ruins, Monongahela Books, 2021), which has since gone out of print and can no longer be ordered.  However, "Old Locksley . . ." is currently the final poem in the collection In the Hour before Dusk  (Monongahela Books, 2021), pp. 59-73.

Now available as an illustrated book: Dana Gioia's "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism"

Dana Gioia's seminal essay, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism" has just been published as a pocket-sized book liberally illustrated with period engravings.

Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism.  By Dana Gioia. (Monongahela Books, 2023).  Illustrated, 107 pp.  $15.

Excerpt: 

"Modern literary criticism on Longfellow hardly exists in the sense that it does for more overtly difficult poets like Dickinson, Stevens, or Pound. There is no substantial body of commentary on specific poems, no vital tradition of critical discourse that collectively sharpens our reading and challenges our preconceptions. The unspoken assumption, even among his advocates, has been that Longfellow's poetry requires no gloss. Consequently, many central aspects of his work have never been examined in any detail (the linguistic stylization and rhetoric of Hiawatha, for example) and misconceptions about his work abound. The best Longfellow scholarship often has a decidedly old-fashioned feel; it traces historical sources, clarifies textual problems, and connects biographical data to the poems. Such criticism addresses a small group of nineteenth-century specialists rather than the general readership for American poetry; it implicitly ducks the issue of Longfellow's relevance to contemporary letters. On the rare occasions Longfellow criticism has spoken eloquently to a broader audiences as in essays by Horace Gregory, Howard Nemerov, and Leslie Fiedler, his champions have usually been more concerned with the general mission of keeping him, however marginally, in the canon than with examining specific features of his work. Since Longfellow's work now largely exists in a critical vacuum, one must begin any serious examination of his work with a few basic observations about the unusual nature of his poetic development and the strange combination of circumstances that brought this multi-talented literary man into poetry."  

Harshman reads from "Dark Hills of Home" on Mountain Stage

 

(this Mountain Stage concert aired on April 4, 2023).

KATHY MATEA:  Hello again and welcome to the second hour of Mountain Stage.  I'm Kathy Mattea and I'm so glad you joined us.  We're back here in Charleston, West Virginia and we're celebrating our 39th Anniversary today. .. . . .  Still to come, a very special extended set from Bela Fleck, 'My Bluegrass Home.'    But we're going to open this second hour with a writer and poet .  In fact, he's celebrating his 10th Anniversary as West Virginia's Poet Laureate.  He's written 14 nationally acclaimed children's books and 7 books of poetry .  .  .  (long list of titles and prizes), and his newest book for this, his anniversary year, called Dark Hills of Home, published by Monongahela Books.  He says, "It's hard to explain, but I'm the kind of writer who needs to know where the woods are, and that there are good friends and neighbors nearby."  Please welcome back to the Mountain Stage, Marc Harshman.

MARC HARSHMAN:  Thank you Kathy . . .  I'm so happy to return to be part of another anniversary celebration.  This first poem is from my new book, Dark Hills of Home, and is one that plants us squarely in West Virginia, particularly the southeastern mountains, "Not All that Much."  (reads it, followed by "Cleaning the Cistern.").

Omanson's memoir of a winter alone in the wilderness serialized online at The Milk House

Selections from the first volume of BJ Omanson's memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road is currently being serialized online at The Milk House, a collective of rural writing based in Ireland.

Part 1 is introduced by the following paragraph: 

 

What follows is a selection from the opening chapters of BJ Omanson’s memoir Three Years on the Nowhere Road in which he recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry— a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and— as he was a high-school dropout— nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia. 

 In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle’s WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw. We pick up his story several days later, on a deserted two-lane road in an Oregon forest, sometime after midnight:

 Continue reading at The Milk House: