Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Big Stone Gap

o ?J ~ z o :;: Cl UJ BETSY SHOLL Betsy Sholl (b. 1945) grew up on the New Jersey shore. She was educated at Bucknell University, the University ofRochester, where she was aWoodrow Wilson Fellow, and Vermont College. She lived in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, from 1976 to 1983, writing and working as a freelance teacher. While in Virginia she was associated with Christ Hill, a residential community that served people in need of housing and other forms of support. She has published five books of poetry: Changing Faces (1974), Appalachian Winter (1978), Rooms Overhead (1986), The Red Line (1992), selected in 1991 for the Associated Writing Programs Series, and Don't Explain (1997). Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and West Branch, among others, and in anthologies such as Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Maine State Writers' Grant. Sholl lives with her family in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University ofSouthern Maine and in the Vermont College M.F.A. program. For the last ten years she has served on the board of directors for the Wayside Evening Soup Kitchen. * * * Big Stone Gap In 1976 I moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, with my husband and two young children. We lived in Big Stone for seven years, most of them in a double-wide trailer on Clinch Haven Farm in Powell Valley, one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. Though I don't often write about those years directly, they remain germinal for me in many ways, having an almost elemental quality to them and having effected elemental changes in me. When I think of those years four things come to mind: the astonishing beauty of that valley, the cultural awareness I gained, my abiding sense ofexile, and the spiritual rebirth those elements combined to spark. Earth, air, water, fire-those primary substances embody my experience as a transplant with much to learn. Where I came from-first, the New Jersey coast of my childhood-was a prototypical landscape for me, with the exhilaration ofits salt smells, waves, rubble line, stark beaches and dunes, always a sense ofbeing on the world's edge. Then in my adult years, the city of Boston took over that role. In the crowds of people waiting for the subway, waves ofstrollers crossing the Common at dusk, the daily press ofothers, there was a vastness beyond myself, a largesse suggesting the mysteries of existence. Why not see humans as a form of magnificent wildlife, full of beauty and danger and otherness, I used to argue when people first urged me to appreciate the Appalachian countryside. At the time we moved, I had recently published my first book and was teaching creative writing at MIT. Leaving those connections, I was forlorn. I missed sunlight on brick, brake lights on rain-slick streets, the arc of bridges over the river, the sudden wind tunnels of certain narrow streets, and always the little human scenarios on the train. I missed people who sounded and looked like me, countercultural crossbreeds, semi-intellectual, artsy, social activist types. The new isolation frightened me, and my new cultural otherness infuriated me. At that same time my stepfather had retired from banking and moved to Florida, where he would sometimes stand in bank lobbies like a greeter, trying to strike up a conversation. It exasperated and humiliated my mother. But I understood how he felt. My identity, my ability to talk and be understood, to have my allusions tracked, my assumptions shared, to have work and an identity in the world-it was all dissolving. Eventually I would come to appreciate this small peacetime version of what losing a war must be like, discovering just how frail one's security really is. Big Stone Gap 255 It's the loss ofa kind ofinnocence that needs losing, an innocence that turns sour and myopic ifheld on to. And it hurts like hell, being stripped, shaken. But the land was beautiful. It was like entering a picture book-morning fogs, fields full of spiderwebs, paw-paws, grasshoppers, bluebirds, big old moon faces rising over the mountain. That land never lost its beauty, its own kind of otherness and mystery. Ifurban life is inherently self-conscious, in Big Stone there were whole...