Contentment

Poe, West Virginia isn’t the kind of place where everyone knows each other. Rather, most folks live deep in the woods, stay the hell out of each others’ business and like it that way. Most people have never heard of Poe, including quite a few folks in Kessler’s Crosslanes only 10 miles away. I’ve heard of Poe because my friend Tim the artist once lived the good life there.

Tim lived as artists should – deep in solitude and self-sufficiency in a place that nobody else gave a damn about. I always felt a strange sense of well-being at his farmhouse in Poe, but never quite understood why. The house was cluttered and filthy with no running water, and there was never anyplace to sit down. I don’t think there was any furniture in the house other than one dust-saturated couch with steel springs exposed in painfully vulnerable places, and a broken weight bench on the back porch that one could never quite figure out how to sit upon but would go on trying nonetheless. Tim’s girlfriend, Mary added to the clutter with pottery pieces which she sculpted at a prodigious pace.

The outhouse was Spartan. It had no door and Tim despotically stocked it with corncobs instead of toilet paper – an inside joke that few outside of Nicholas County, West Virginia seem to understand. Yet, late at night with a bucket of lime, black widow spiders and a single wretched candle to keep me company, I would gaze at Hale-Bopp Comet from that not-so-lofty perch and experience profound peace.

The “farm” was 500 acres of logged-out knobs and hollows owned by an absentee lawyer from Charleston named Kirby who visited the property about once every five years. As long as $200 rent made its way to his law office every month, the place could burn down as far as Kirby was concerned, and eventually it would.

Until 1992 and before Tim’s arrival, Poe was inhabited by real Sixties San Francisco hippies, including one who supposedly drove the Grateful Dead’s tour bus for awhile. That year, Kirby logged the farm at Poe. He didn’t clear-cut it or anything – there were still quite a few trees standing when he finished, but Kirby fouled up those woods pretty good. Rutted clay roads now snake through the hollows, a couple of the knobs are now bare brown thatch and the graceful ferns lining the trail to the spring have morphed into a tangled mess of thorns. To the hippies, this was completely unacceptable. Their primordial green paradise had been uprooted and industrialized, and they were thus scattered to deeper and darker reaches of fern laden, salamander-infested Appalachia. Certainly, the farm at Poe had been emasculated. Abandoned by the hippies and liquidated by Kirby, it was now “used up” and would be left fallow for another 80 years until the trees were once more the width of a healthy woman’s thigh and thus valuable again.

Yet, such forgotten, used up places are grist for the creative mind, and it was here that my friend Tim’s creative mind was unleashed. His art was everywhere – on the walls, covering the ceilings, and stuck to windows and old kitchen appliances. Some appliances were pieces of art. A 1940s refrigerator with its door missing was decorated with box-turtle shells and deer antlers and draped with fish bones. All this beastly mortality lent the refrigerator vague human features, causing me to at all costs avoid being left in the room alone with it. Tim’s paintings depicted maddening, psychedelic images of things I can’t even begin to explain. Massive, metallic stand-up basses plucked by women with hair like fire and basketball-sized breasts, serpentine prehistoric fish-lizards howling with laughter under river boulders and wise old men with long hair and metallic eyes staring at you all-knowing from every direction.

Sometimes all that visual stimulation was too much to bear, and on certain moonlit evenings we’d follow the dogs outside to the hill behind the house. There was the dominant female, black Amazon German Shepard named Athena, and a dumb white, hen-pecked, half-lab male named Woody. They enjoyed the best kind of life; never choked by a leash or hearing a “sit” command and being able to come and go as they pleased, they were truly the masters of their domain. They’d sprint off into the woods everyday at five a.m. and return with the grizzliest things – deer hooves and entrails left behind by sloppy hunters, mangled skunks and headless blacksnakes. Sometimes they’d return with a beard of porcupine quills or hind-end full of thorns. On rare evenings, they’d tree a black bear or two, but not even Athena ever tangled with one of those.

We’d all drink beer and pick guitars in the moonlight on the hill above the hay bales. Athena would chase Woody, and Woody, in short lived defiance would snap back at her and charge, only to be put onto his back in submission. Evil would chase good and good chase evil deep into the dawn. Under green-tinted Appalachian moonlight and above glowing hay bales, great horned owls shouted back and forth across the hollow. We’d just sit on an upturned kayak or the back gate of a pickup truck, strum and watch the night creep by in that useless, used up place. It was pure contentment.

Eventually, the dogs would decide it was time to go inside and we’d follow. We would creep into the house so as not to wake Mary and then turn on some Robert Earl Keen and break into the freezer, trying hard to ignore the dead roaches on the kitchen floor. Tim always had ample supplies of ground venison in the freezer from the previous November’s bow-season. We’d thaw it out and slop it onto Wonder Bread with sautéed onions and red peppers while the dogs pleaded for leftovers. Tim would sneak into bed with Mary while the others and I would move pottery, random trinkets and garbage out of the way before dusting off the couch for a precarious night’s sleep among lethal couch springs. It was filthy, no doubt, but we rested with clear conscience and slept deep, contented sleep.

The good life continued until Mary joined the Wiccans and kicked Tim out of the house. To the Wiccans, men emitted some kind of foul energy and had to be exorcised from the premises if the Wiccans were to get any serious work done. Thus, we were all banished from Poe that fall and strumming on moonlit hillsides in the gaze of old owls abruptly ceased. Evil still chased good and good chased evil, but the Wiccans were in control. The raging, white-haired, haunted wise men still beamed into the house from wooden frames but no one paid them much attention. Like the barefoot hippie purists, we were now scattered to other places of contented living.

Scattered – to places with Dodge Diplomats raised on cinder blocks with sugar maples growing up through their hoods, or to tar paper shacks at the end of dirt roads surrounded by glowing-eyed, bleating sheep. To places where porcupines, box turtles and salamanders still ran free and if good chased evil and evil chased good, no leash laws curtailed their frolicking. To places where furious owls still hunted deep woods, occasionally crossing open fields dotted with hay bales and a few wayward, guitar-strumming refugees perched upon upturned kayaks, broken gym equipment and rear gates of rusting pickup trucks.

Eventually, even the Wiccans were driven from the house at Poe when it finally did burn to the ground. A candle-burning, Earth-Mother ceremony coupled with combustible painted canvas was to blame. Kirby, having already reaped the rewards of the big timber sale didn’t have the patience to wait eighty more years for another “crop” to mature. Thus, he sold the farm to the timber company, Weyerhaeuser, whose executives seemed infinitely more patient than human beings.

I think of Poe sometimes when visiting friends of friends in big cities many light years away. I drink red wine and try my best not to spill, to make people laugh a little and to eat hors d'oeuvres without making a mess. At such gatherings, I often get restless and wander. I creep through immaculate, white-carpeted rooms adorned with expensive, non-offensive paintings of women with neatly kept hair and appropriate-sized breasts. No wise men stare through me from impossible angles and there’s nothing but impotent sales manuals on the bookshelves. I peek through cherry wood blinds and discover some pathetic lap dog shitting in a snowy backyard, never venturing beyond its fenced-in enclosure. It comes when it’s called, sleeps in a human bed and eats processed lamb nuggets for breakfast every morning at five a.m. It knows neither good nor evil – it just goes on living. I then realize that I feel uneasy, perhaps even a bit discontented.

I’d still like to go back to Poe on a full moon and sit on the hill with the owls, the hay bales and the haggard old men with beaming metallic eyes. Though the guitar players, the Wiccans, the half-lab and the dominatrix German Shepard are no longer, I’ll bet it’s still a place where I’d feel content.