Blue Highways: Spencer, West Virginia

Unfolding the Map

This post is a companion to my previous post, but at the same time it isn't.  While it deals with time and the past, it's a more personal reflection on how past and present intersect in my life.  When one pokes at the unseen on a trip, they may want the unseen to poke back.  Sometimes, however, you don't want to know about the unseen, especially that which you've tucked away for a reason.  That's why I have the symbolic picture of West Virginia's state reptile, the timber rattlesnake, to the right.  If you want to know where Spencer sits on the map...just go to it!

Book Quote

"I hunched over the steering wheel as if to peer under the clouds, to see beyond.  I couldn't shake the sense I was driving in another era.  Maybe it was the place or maybe a slow turning in the mind about how a man cannot entirely disconnect from the past.  To try to is the American impulse, but to look at the steady continuance of the past is to watch time get emptied of its bluster because time bears down less on the continuum than on the components.  To be only a nub in the eternal temporary is still to have a chance to see, a chance to pry at the mystery.  What is the blue road anyway but an opportunity to poke at the unseen and a hoping the unseen will poke back?

"At Spencer, I turned west onto U.S. 33.  The Appalachians flattened themselves to hills, and barnsides again gave the Midwest imperative: CHEW MAIL POUCH."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

View of Spencer, West Virginia. Photo by Richie Diesterheft and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Spencer, West Virginia

I suppose that this post will be an extension of the last post given LHM's quote, above, further reflects on the past and time.  And yet, I think the content will be different because the quote touches on something deeper.  As of late, my thoughts have also been enmeshed in that deeper reflection on past and present as well, and so that's where I will try to go also in this post.

As I write my thoughts are jumbling all over the place.  The week started with a realization that my job is going to expand, perhaps with greater compensation but perhaps not.  Then came news that a close family member may have a serious disease.  These pieces of the present pile on to the ongoing task of identifying and buying a house - a fun but also stressful time as we prepare to make a decision on whether to put up a bid for a house that we like but which we have some concerns about.  We are also trying to decide whether we should make a yearly trip to New Orleans and the Mardi Gras, which we haven't missed since we left in 2004 and which has become very important to us. 

All of these present events, however, get placed with the "continuum of the past," as LHM puts it.  The past year has been, for me, a long look at the context of my life, both the good and bad.  Everywhere I look upon the blue highway of my past, I can poke the "nub in the eternal temporary."  My perceived failures are there to see, like billboards on a dusty plain.  Stop here and have kids.  Choose your career wisely.  Do what YOU want sometimes, not what you think others want.  No outlet down this road.  Well, since you've done it anyway, you'll get burned but learn from it.

I notice these billboards because, like highway billboards, I've painted them in bright colors, outfitted them in lighting and put them, repeatedly, in the most conspicuous places.  My successes and the things I've done right are less gaudy, and set back farther from the highway.  They are little handwritten signs that stand back inconspicuously from the road and which don't draw attention unless I really look for them.  They are life's difficulties that I've overcome.  They are my marriage which I often and sadly take for granted when I shouldn't.  They are the friends that I've also taken for granted but who have been there for me.  They are the professional successes that maybe didn't measure up to the ideal image I had of my life but which have enabled me to live a comfortable life and have earned the respect of my peers.  They are the moments when I have been satisfied and happy.

If I look back over the continuum of my past, and I don't take time to look carefully, I only see the billboards, and those points could make my past seem overwhelmingly full of failure, regret, wrong turns and mistakes.  But once I truly drive into my past, and look for the things that I've pushed to the margins, once I look for the hand-lettered signs, my life's continuum looks different.  I want to stop and poke around, and relearn who I really am.

For "what is the blue road anyway but an opportunity to poke at the unseen and a hoping the unseen will poke back?"  In my life, I have been more than willing to take those chances in the real, physical world in the hopes of learning something I don't know, and of experiencing something that I've never experienced before.  In my early adulthood, on car trips, I made a determination well before ever reading Blue Highways that I would take what I called the scenic routes as much as possible and as time allowed.  I loved traveling through the small downtowns and stopping at the local markets or the diners.  My poking at the unseen gave me a better appreciation for America than the interstate ever could.  I've been enriched by those experiences.

But in my inner life, poking at the unseen has been much more scary.  Even though it is a road I've traveled, to retrace my route, or to stop in at places, both good and bad, that I've been before has seemed fraught with peril.  While I travel forward through my life in time, those experiences have built up the edifice of what I present to myself and to the rest of the world.  To go back and disturb the foundations might reveal something else, something more complex than the image I've constructed.  I would have to rearrange my understanding.  I would have to turn some billboards into hand-lettered signs and make some hand-lettered signs into billboards.  I might discover some billboards that have faded or decayed and fix them up, and write some new hand-lettered signs.

"A man cannot entirely disconnect from the past..." but "to try to is the American impulse."  I won't say that I've failed, but I've tried and it doesn't work.  Everything that happens now must be put in the context of what has gone before, the continuum of the past, just as the events of a journey add up into an overall impression of the whole endeavor.  As I move forward on my life's journey from this point in the present, my new goal is not to disconnect, but to assimilate and embrace, all of the points on my eternal temporary.

Musical Interlude

I have no rhyme or reason for this video, but it just feels right to go with this post.  enjoy Sugar Ray's Someday.

If you want to know more about Spencer

City of Spencer
Wikipedia: Spencer

Next up: Gallipolis, Ohio

Blue Highways: Stanardsville, Virginia

Unfolding the Map

At the close of 2012, I will use this post to reflect on the past year.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), toward the end of his trip and as he traveled through Stanardsville, reflected on what his trip had accomplished.  Usually we accomplish quite a lot that we don't give ourselves credit for, and overemphasize our failures and shortcomings.  Not this time, Littourati.  Not this time.  To the right is the Virginia State Seal, found on Wikimedia Commons.  To see where Stanardsville awaits the New Year, go to the map.

Book Quote

"I went up U.S. 33 until the rumple of hills became a long, bluish wall across the western sky.  On the other side of Stanardsville in the the Blue Ridge Mountains, I stopped in a glen and hiked along Swift Run, a fine rill of whirligigs and shiners, until I found a cool place for lunch.  Summer was a few days away, but the heat wasn't....

"....In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished?  I hadn't sailed the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn.  In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared.  I had stood as witness."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 2

Greene County Courthouse in Stanardsville, Virginia. Photo by Calvin Beale and posted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Stanardsville, Virginia

As I write this post, it is New Year's Eve 2012.  The time of year often entails a look forward at the coming year, and even resolutions for what one hopes to accomplish.  However, on New Year's Eve media often spends time looking back at the year's accomplishments, failures, events, and the people that have passed on.  We can see from the quote above that as LHM is the end of his own journey, he also takes a look behind him to tally up his own accomplishments on his travels.

It is curious that he begins with a list of those things that he didn't accomplish, and one could read this as his admission that his trip wasn't important.  After all, instead of crossing "the Gobi by goat cart," he went out.  Instead of bicycling "to Cape Horn," he met.  Rather than sailing "the Atlantic in a washtub," he shared.  Above all, he had "stood as witness."  To what?  To his country certainly, but also to himself.

As I look back at my own journey in this past year, not necessarily through space but definitely through time in the form of days that make up a year, I can ask myself the same questions.  What did I do?  And my list isn't that exciting.  I worked.  I made a trip or two.  I hung out with friends sometimes, and I spent a lot of time alone.  The three major accomplishments that I can list are the following: With a colleague, I got a paper published in a major political science journal; I wrote roughly 118 posts in Littourati for a word count of around 120,000 words; I made great strides in my own personal development through a combination of therapy and self-reflection.  I watched all the episodes of the old Star Trek.

I am currently reading a memoir of Istanbul by the great Turkish writer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.  He identifies a melancholy, which he labels with the Turkish word huzun, that Turks collectively have when they consider Istanbul.  All around them are the reminders of the glories of the Ottoman Empire, in particular the crumbling houses and palaces of Ottoman princes.  Turks, after the last political remnants of the Ottoman Empire had been swept away under the Westernizing zeal of Ataturk, could not simply forget that they had once been a great civilization.  The reminders were there to see.  Sure, they could look forward to the accomplishments of a modern, Western and dynamic society.  Indeed, Turkey has positioned itself as an economic and political player in the 21st century.  But Pamuk points out that the melancholy weight of the past still hangs on the coattails of Turkish society.

As I look back on my last year, I could look at it with the same melancholic air, and in keeping with Pamuk's concept of huzun, I'm most likely not the only person who does this.  There were so many things I could have done.  What about those things that I might have accomplished.  I wanted, for example, to take up some sort of hobby, to learn how to bead necklaces and earrings for example, as a reflective and creative enterprise.  That didn't happen.  I had hoped to begin running again and didn't even begin.  I wished to even do some mundane activity, but very necessary, like organizing and cleaning our house.  I couldn't get a handle on it, and didn't even know where to begin.  I wanted to write more in my field of political science.  The list could go on and on if I let it.  And like Pamuk's Turkey, the weight of my past accomplishments as well as the expectations I had for myself weigh down my thoughts and create a thin veil that blurs the good that I did accomplish this past year.

It's very easy to get caught up in the "would haves," "should haves," and "could haves."  Doing so tempers the thoughts about the new year.  I have ceased making New Year's resolutions because I find that I just disappoint myself if I do so because I never complete them or give up on them.

As I close 2012, and get very close to finishing Blue Highways, it's easy to reflect back on the year and see the things that I didn't do that I wished I had.  It's easy to look back on my life and regret some things I've done, other things that I didn't do, and certainly all of those things that I could have done better.  At the same time, we often give short shrift to that which we accomplished, and those things we accomplished well.  I suppose that's human nature.  We often regret choices and actions taken, and pile up the dead weight of past glories and should-have-beens behind us.

It's true that I didn't achieve a lot of the goals that I set for myself.  But it's also true that I achieved other goals.  As I look back upon my 2012 journey, I realize that the most important thing is that I participated in the process of living.  I lived, not in the sense that I stayed alive but in the sense that I actively participated in life.  That participated included both the joys and the disappointments, the achievements and the failures.  Given the alternatives, I think my year went pretty well.

On this New Year's Eve, 2012, my wish for you, dear Littourati readers, is that you also truly lived in 2012, and will continue to do so in 2013 and beyond.  A very happy New Year to all of you!

Musical Interlude

Even though it's from 1988, and references that year, this song by Abba, Happy New Year, has lyrics that fit the post.  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about Stanardsville

Wikipedia: Stanardsville

Next up: Franklin, West Virginia