How to See an Old Town
This morning, I read something by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) and was moved by the brilliance of her ability to see into the heart of a place, hear the whispers of its inseparable sins and virtues, see its fleeting glories and enduring wounds, and feel its faint but steady heartbeat.
As I read for the first time the beloved Jackson, Miss., writer’s first four paragraphs of a 1944 essay titled “Some Notes on River Country,” the words seemed to have been written for me, and maybe you will feel the same way if you were raised in a small town or a rural community.
I am a lifelong river rat. Old, nearly forgotten riverboat landings, like the one at Clarksville, Mo., on the Mississippi, or down the Ohio at Shawneetown, Ill., where I was born, are among my favorite places to visit. I think about writing about them sometimes but what do you say about memories that are made of part fact, part illusion, part wishful thinking? How do you see and understand, well enough to explain it to others, something that is stirred up from the sediment of your subconscious, muddies your thoughts for a while, drifts downriver ahead of your understanding and then settles back to the deep before you can put it into words?
I long for the day, should it ever come, when I will be able to see the world more clearly. But, then I read something like this piece by Welty and I am dismayed. She has written it better than I ever will. Tennessee Williams does this to me in New Orleans and I resent him for it. He could have left something for the rest of us to say – some crumb of beauty for us to paint for the first time. Actually, I think plenty does remain to be written. Our seductive city reveals her spirit fully to no one, not even William Faulkner.
Welty is poetic in the following passages, not for the aim of nostalgia, but because when you understand and feel so well that which you see – what it is and what happened to it – you know mere surface observations do not tell the whole story. Most of us drive to the countryside and say a place looks dead. Almost everyone is gone, we say – nearly a ghost town. This laziness of seeing compels us to snap a few photos of poverty and decay and move on. We travel to the next “interesting little community,” and then to the next one, learning little of life, ambition, hope, struggle, victory, failure, birth or death. We do not even recognize the uncaring, temporary nature of commerce, and so we risk stumbling upon, toward the end of our trip, the weedy, decrepit landscapes of our own lives.
Taking in Welty’s written images, I suffered the death of my confidence as a writer – uplifted by her talents and destroyed by mine, and beautifully so.
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Opening paragraphs of Eudora Welty’s essay, “Some Notes on River Country”
“A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. It flares up, it smolders for a time, it is fanned and smothered by circumstance, but its being is intact, forever fluttering within it, the result of some original ignition. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen, small and tender as a candle flame, but as certain.
“I have never seen, in this small section of old Mississippi River country and its little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez, anything so mundane as ghosts, but I have felt many times there a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me.
“The clatter of hooves and the bellow of boats have gone, all old communications. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use; it is deep in leaves. The river has gone away and left the landings. Boats from Liverpool do not dock at these empty crags. The old deeds are done, old evil and old good have been made into stories, as plows turn up the river bottom, and the wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat decks once were strolling and talking of great expanding things, and of chance and money. Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the nights there are no mansions, no celebrations. Just as, when there were mansions and celebrations, there were no more festivals of an Indian tribe there; before the music, there were drums.
“But life does not forsake any place. People live still in Rodney’s Landing; flood drives them out and they return to it. Children are born there and find the day as inexhaustible and as abundant as they run and wander in their little hills as they, in innocence and rightness, would find it anywhere on Earth. The seasons come as truly, and give gratefulness, though they bring little fruit. There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.”
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.