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Every day I walk to the edge of the world,
through the tended wildness of Golden Gate Park, across Ocean Highway’s car-thronged rush, up over the stone-littered dunes and down, until I turn south, my bare feet slapping again and again on damp sand, packed firm as cement, pounded by the Pacific’s cadence, low tide, high tide, low. My face stings turned into the wind. Damp with salt and grit, the coming storm brings the sky down, brined and bruised, to the ocean’s vast unrelenting grey. I know the earth out there, beyond the slate waves, turns. But here, washed up at my pale feet, lies the stalled detritus of the natural world. The bone-white scraps of driftwood, torn crustacean claws, muddy sand dollars, still brown and soft, and the deflated balloon of a dying jellyfish, its tentacles tender, folded like a ruffled skirt, laced edges marred with dust specks of blood. --Tami Carter, March 6, 2020
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The world was wild then: 52, a snake of a road,
the only artery into the heart of the coal fields. I knew then that beneath the earth's green top, the black world teamed--man and machine tunneling coal seams under our feet. Back then, they dug in--today, they take the mountain off. I don't know what any of this means, but 25 years later, out on the continent's edge, I'm dreaming of black water run-off, the day my father scorched the lawn with weed killer he'd brought home from the mines that the EPA had banned. I remember the goiter man at Warden's market, the hermit across the road who hung his winter coat in the trees come spring. My world was hollers and hills, sinkholes in the grove beyond the garden gate. My father dusty with coal dirt, worked the Long Wall despite the UMWA strike, the snipers perched high and dry on the ridge above. We sang Bluegrass each Sunday in the choir, and Tess, the Tupperware lady, testified. We ate dandelion greens from the yard; My Nana made Sassafras tea. And the only exotic place anyone had ever been was Vietnam. The pundits on TV say Appalachia's moved north, west. It isn't the south anymore. My brother says I've been gone too long, it's left me. He tells me West Virginia's walked out, but he's too young to remember the world before government cheese, the childhood threats of deportation to Prunytown, Uncle Billy's sermons on the true trinity of God, the union and the Democratic machine. Today, the mines are sealed with water, not coal, and men sit idle at the abandoned Exxon. They watch weeds grow and know the forested hills hide illegal crops. Their sons are in the army or the guard, working at Walmart or the local car lot. They remember, but their children don't. Once coal was king -- the imperfect world where men sunk each morning into earth and emerged each evening with the riches of black gold. Those days, the union saved, and the ridges sprouted houses , swimming pools. We lived like Hollywood then--materialism, God's gracious gift. --Tami Carter |
Tami Carter
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