Wayfarer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains (review)

Book Reviews Wayfarer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains. Text by James Dickey. Photography by William Bake. 192 Eages. Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor [ouse, 1988. $50.00. Wayfarer: A Voicefrom the Southern Mountains may weU be the most beautiful gift book in many seasons. Certainly , it is Bake's most beautiful to date in a collection that includes The Modern South: Four Seasons of the Land; The Modern South: Towns and Cities and Blue Ridge. The text is by the distinguished poet and novelist James •ickey. Bake's is a poet's lens. His images Unger. In combination with Dickey's lyric prose they render a story so compelUng that, luce the tale of Coleridge's Mariner, the reader/listener cannot choose but hear. Bake and Dickey take the reader on a journey into the terrain of the Southern mountains and into the heart and soul of me region. The journey is the central motif, metaphor, and recurrent image in die book, both in Dickey's prose and Bake's photographs of trails, paths, snow tracks, country roads, and at least one major highway. Dickey generally begins each book or poem with an image. "Wayfarer began with the image ofa country road," he says. "My way is to go deep, not wide, to look deeply into a subject and find meaning there." Journeys, both literal and metaphoric, have archetypal guides, and "meanings" are archetypal guests. An old mountain man, the "voice from the southern mountains," joins the wayfarer-and the reader-on a country road to guide both. Reading the text and looking at its photographs is a journey all its own. The use of die old man as guide and narrator is an experiment in point of view. The narrative is intended as dialogue , but only at the end does wayfarer speak directly. Until then we have only a reflection of what the wayfarer might have said to die old man. Dickey says, "It's kind of odd to have a dialogue and hear only one of the people, [but] it seemed luce an interesting idea. I try lots of ideas. Some work, some don't. ' The old man as narrator works well. He is a major contributor to a sense of time and place, one of the book's outstanding achievements. His is an authentic mountain voice: "I seen you . . . and I come down .... I seen you walking down here, goin' the wrong way .... I thought I'd make a turn on the switchback and meet up widi you . . . ." He invests narrative with a sense of place. He speaks of the mountains and the feeling he has for them. "These mountains are old, I mean real old .... You won't ever find in no other mountains all the things that grows around here .... You can strike in anywhere, and things're good .... I luce all that. I can't think about Uvin' no other way or in no other place. You just get out and move amongst it all, and you know it's right; everything you see is right" Certainly everything you see in Bake's poetic photographs is right. His camera catches the life in man and in nature from a single hand strumming a banjo to the frozen stillness of a mountain waiting for a poet's vision. In 1 17 full-color photographs Bake caputres a paradise preserved in the southern mountains. He documents the Eden of his quest in briUiant, memorable images throughout the book and in his dedication: "To die long green waves-/ their ancient myths and memories./ The mind of modern man forgets,/ AU else endures." 64 The old man enjoins wayfarer undèrUning the meaning of the journey and die object of the quest: "Remember everything you seen up here, and everything you hear, because we're losing it; we're gonna lose it all. Maybe a few places in your time, they'll still be here. A few places, a few songs, a few peo-ple. Old people. But if you wait too long, it'll all be gone. We're gonna lose it . . . ." In an interview Dickey went a bit further and said, "We've already lost it .... Most...