FE Synopsis

SAMPLE from Hours			2
JamesMcCrone.com Writing, Editing, Cooking

	HOURS
		© 2001 JamesMcCrone
L A C U M B R E
In memory, I watch myself stand on the tarmac next to my DC-4 in Santiago, peering toward Los Andes, waiting for some sign that the pass will clear. It's just a memory, but I feel the same, quiet thrill this conjured self feels that morning as I watch him signal to the flight crew to prepare for take-off. The pass is not yet clear, but he's betting it will be by the time the plane gets to it. Memory shifts, and I am a seven-year-old boy, riding a plow horse bareback and barefoot through the West Virginia gloaming down from the hills into Talcott to meet my father, an engineer, at the train.
Memory is like that, associative, fluid, roiled by currents that carve specific paths, much as flowing water forges a river bed and is thereafter constrained by it. If I am to think of the pilot, I must also think of the boy. I must follow the course. The pilot peering toward the Andean mists between Acangagua and Los Leones thinks of the boy he was. The engines of the DC-4 sputter into life and then roar, settling quickly into their characteristic drone. The pilot knows that boy's dreams were wild, but they weren't this wild.
The boy on the horse is tired. The rhythmic, muffled clop-clop of each footfall on the dirt and gravel road, the gentle rocking of the horse's sway back entices him to sleep. His bare feet grow cold in the dry, chilly night air. The mud dries cold between his toes, becomes hard like the calluses on the bottoms of his feet. The night air, full of the heady, earthy smell of the horse is alive with the songs of cicadas and frogs. The horse regrets this trip more so than the boy, and she pauses from time to time to look wistfully back toward the house and her barn. She and the boy have already put in a long day. At least the horse has shoes.
The year is 1922. There is no roar to this decade in West Virginia. The coming Depression will look remarkably like the current boom, which for the people of Summers and Monroe counties looks a lot like every decade since 1860. There is little automated farm machinery, less education, and fewer shoes. There are no coal mines here in the Greenbrier Valley at the southern-most tip of the state. The coal seams that flow through the hills from Pennsylvania stop some fifty miles to the north. The future options for a boy growing up here are limited to two: farming, or leaving. The hills, so picturesque to visitors, are like shoulders wrapped in a stifling hug, a stern, protective father determined to keep his family together and safe even if it kills them.
Though I have earlier memories, the stream begins here seventy-nine years ago. As Jess plods down to Talcott, she carries with her both me and my news. The smoldering excitement of that news warms me like embers banked down in a wood stove. My retelling of what I saw will fan the embers into flame, and their intensity will threaten to consume the house. That heat will ultimately lift me high into the air, and a long way from Summers County.
That morning as I rested on my hoe, staring wearily at a long row of young corn, the steady clink and scrape of my brothers' work was split by the whine of an airplane engine as the plane erupted over the hill behind our property. I stared slack jawed and trembling as it flew low over the farm, its shadow undulating across the leaves of the new corn. I watched as it banked low toward another farm. I watched until it was out of sight.
The plane had been advertising rides at five dollars apiece. The pilot, I learned from my elder brothers, was a man named Ellis who kept the plane not far from Talcott in the town of Creamery. Their talk that afternoon focused on just how scared each claimed the other would be to go up in the plane as well as just how shamefully he would cry. I was lost in wonder--at the machine itself, a World War I biplane, with an enormous radiator and an engine that belched oily smoke; and wonder, too, that a man with an airplane at his disposal wasn't kiting off to distant, exotic places.
By the time the old horse and I arrived in Talcott about twenty minutes before the train, it was dark. Fortunately, the night was clear, and a quarter moon charged the air with a pale blue glow. Otherwise I would have been in utter darkness. There were no lights in Talcott other than the train signal lights, and it was getting late enough now that no lights shone from the few houses around. Electricity would not come to this part of the United States until after World War II. Talcott, West Virginia, was then (and remains) an unincorporated town, a wide spot around a depot. It nevertheless has a claim to fame, and that is the tunnel through [?] mountain just [N,S,E W?] of town, where John Henry died.
The moon light gleamed on the rails. I found that if I moved my head from side to side, I could make the moonlight appear to move up and down along them. To pass the time, I jumped down off Jess and started running back and forth across the tracks, seeing just how far I could get the light to move toward the John Henry tunnel. I tired of this after some minutes and went with my old stand-by: throwing rocks at things. Old Jess shuffled back and forth, a laconic soft shoe.
I heard the train whistle from inside the tunnel. A moment later the train erupted from the mountain side. The smoke it belched and spewed into the formerly still night air was darker than the darkness surrounding me. As I watched the train slow, I saw the delicate silhouette of my father lean out of the cab and climb down the ladder stairs, preparing to hop off, its engine spewing smoke into the night, its rumble and noise like the blustering of an old prize fighter who still needs to feel powerful. As I looked at it, its breaks screeching, its lone headlamp a glaucous eye, I no longer felt its impressiveness. Earthbound, its wings further clipped by being able only to go where the rails led, it struck me as sad. As my father hung from the side of the train and swung to the ground, I no longer found myself wishing for the time when it was I performing his neat trick.
The train would not stop but would slow to a fast jog to let my father off. I would wait by the signal light holding Jess about twenty feet from the tracks. My father, whose slender frame and delicate features belied his strength and agility, would hang off the train, and then drop beside it, hitting the ground at a nice run. He would slow to a jog and then three steps from the horse, he would quicken his pace again and vault heroically onto her back. Then he would lean down and scoop me up, set me behind him and away we'd go.
It had grown colder, and I snuggled into my father's back, the smell of coal and oil and smoke reminding me of many other rides home. It is odd now to remember fondly a smell that made my eyes water and occasionally gave me a headache. Reaching behind him to get me better settled on the horse he felt my feet. "Bless me, they're frozen," he exclaimed over the wheezing din of the train, still passing by. In turn, he took each foot and rubbed them roughly between his immense hands. Then he pulled my legs out straight, took each foot and put it in a pocket of his engineer's coat. We rode on this way for a few minutes before I blurted out: "I saw an airplane today." "Did you?"
I told him about Ellis, whose plane it was, and how much it cost. My father burst out laughing at the idea of spending five whole dollars on anything as frivolous as a plane ride. He derided the magician Ellis as a carnival hack.
"Son, do you know how short a ride you get for your five dollars? I'm told pilots of this type make it a point of honor--if they know the meaning of the word--that the wheels still be spinning from take-off when they land. That's how short."
As he went on and on about the expense, the way hillbillies were bilked out of hard-earned money for a carnival ride, I found myself resenting the smallness of my father's view. He did not realize that a ride in an airplane was not an end but a beginning.
Talcott was the beginning; Antofagasta was the end.



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