On a day in June I moved nine miles over a wagon road and two miles up a creek bed to a two-story log house in an area of the Cumberlands known in pioneer days as the Big Brush. Erected in 1837 by immigrants from the Black Forest of Germany, it is the birthplace of the noted dulcimer maker, Jethro Amburgey, whose instruments nowadays are sought by collectors. A mile above once lived Edward Thomas whose dulcimers are rarer yet. The dwelling faces east, fair to the sun, bounded on one side by Dead Mare Branch and on the other by Wolfpen Creek, facing toward Little Carr. Wooded mountains rise before and aft. Mine was to be a domain of thirty-one acres, most of it standing on end, once a farm, now long lain fallow. I had found a home.
I marked the day by an observation in a Notebook:
A hedge behind the house reached from Dead Mare to Wolfpen, a distance of some one hundred fifty yards. By count, thirty-seven varieties of shrubs and vines erected a wall dominated by sumac, blackberry, and sawbriar, crowned by wild cherry, hawthorn, and a crab apple. Anchoring the row an aged oak at whose foot during the first warm days of spring I was to gather an edible fungus (morels), locally known as dry-land fish. Along the creek banks flourished wild mint and bluing weed. The high ground before the house was to become my yard, garden, and farm. It gave onto a marsh where frogs bellowed in spring and red-winged blackbirds frequented in summer. Swamp violets reached up through the sedge on foot-long stems. Partridges nested along the dryer reaches and sometimes exploded from cover like a shotgun blast.
Save for three broken chairs and a small table the house was bereft of furniture. The back door was painted green to ward off witches. I slept on an army cot, cooked on a two-burner coal-oil stove until I could gather other furnishings. My worktable was two stacked steamer trunks supporting a portable typewriter. A neighbor when asked who had moved into the old log house had replied, "We don't know yet. A man person. We call him the 'Man in the Bushes.'" I was reported to be an ancient with a two-foot beard. A hermit shunning human contact.
It will take a little while to find him.
He may be in some unlikely place
Lying beneath a haw, lost in leafy sleep,
He is somewhere around.
Go and look.
It will take a little while to find him
For hunger drives no wild man home.
Dark bays no hasting to a will like his.
He may dine on berries, abide where he is.
He is somewhere around. Go and look.
I acquired two stands of bees. I never left home overnight without "telling the bees." Folk wisdom had it they would swarm and depart otherwise. Common superstitions often have psychological reasons. This one, I believe -- never leave home without checking the hives. I acquired a cat, sawed a hole in a door so it could come and go at will. Snakes don't linger where felines are. One day I rescued a ground squirrel despite having been told never to take anything away from a cat. If you do, they will bring you a snake. She brought me four snakes in due course. A dulcimer hanging from a nail began to play in the night, however faintly. A struck match revealed a granddaddy spider walking the strings.
Toward the end of March there came a warm spell. The meadow greened and buckeye buds swelled. A wren began a nest under an eave and frogs bellowed in the swamp. I heard a whippoorwill and mentioned the fact in print. Promptly came a letter inquiring into this unlikely event. Overnight frost nipped the buds and silenced the frogs.
I have a letter from Oklahoma ---
A professor of logic, part-time ornithologist
Doubts that Kentucky has had the chance to hear
A whippoorwill's song the third month of the year
When the Sooner State must wait till April at least.
I'd heard a whippoorwill's stout-hearted call
And printed the fact and thought it within reason
For bird or man to sing in or out of season
As any might err, might sound a note quite new,
Deny the systems and set the graphs askew.
I hold this state is not alone in being lucky
It has a whippoorwill uncommonly plucky;
I believe I'm not indulging in idle misnomer
By calling all fortunate, including Oklahoma,
When bird or thought makes lists and manuals vain.
O earliest whippoorwill, come again!
It was said of me that I had quit a good job and gone to the backside of Nowhere and sat down. I did sit down and finish River of Earth and compose in leisurely fashion an occasional poem and short story. If you are digging your living out of the ground, there is little time for sitting. Along with farming and gardening, I began experiments with the wild strawberry and the wild violet, an attempt by natural selection to discover superior plants. I began a study of the leaf miner, an insect needing a bit of magnification and living a varied and fascinating existence. There are some two thousand known varieties. My evenings were spent reading by lamplight and the library of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute supplied by mail any book I wished to borrow. After selling a short story to the Saturday Evening Post, I began to buy books: I commonly subscribe to periodicals I hope to appear in. There was the Sunday New York Times to cope with.
River of Earth was published February 5, 1940. Time called it "a work of art." I was standing by a potbelly stove in a railroad station in Jackson that frozen morning waiting for a train going north to connect with one heading south. The train was late. In walked a deputy sheriff, warmed his hands a moment, and responded to a call from the door, "They need you across the road." I followed out of curiosity. The sheriff entered a building where commodities were being distributed and was shot dead in my face.
The train came. I boarded and wrote a letter to Time to thank them for the kind words and briefly stated what I had witnessed on this long-awaited occasion. Two weeks later I entered a barber shop in Florida and was handed a copy of Time to peruse while I waited. Leading the "Letter" section was my message bearing the heading, "Bloody Breathitt." A touchy designation then as now. Breathitt County is the only one in the Commonwealth where nobody was drafted during World War I. Volunteers filled their quota. Stopping by Jackson on the way home to assess the damage, I learned citizens in high office were enraged and it would be wise to cool my heels elsewhere. My guilt was I had given a local matter national attention.