Fragments From Floyd

BUNCOMBE (n)

Definition: A ludicrously false statement. Basically it means BS or nonsense.

Analysis: Actually, you probably already know this word by its more common spelling: bunkum.

The origin of this word is fascinating. In 1819, a North Carolina congressman, the Honorable Felix Walker, was giving a rambling speech with little relevance to the current debate. He refused to yield the floor, and claimed that he wasn’t speaking for Congress but instead “for Buncombe” (a county in North Carolina he represented). That’s all it took.

Over time, the spelling changed to “bunkum,” and the meaning strangely changed to be “excellent.” Then it changed back in 1870, when a San Francisco gambler introduced a new game “banco” played with dice that were later found out to be loaded. Sure enough, BUNCO became known to mean swindle or cheat, and bunkum reverted back to its original meaning. (Source)

The word DEBUNK came directly from this: it’s just bunk(um) with the prefix de- (meaning to remove). link thanks to NeatoRama

We lived in NC for seven years, and I heard of this county often, but never made the connection. Don’t you just love how language evolves!?

In 1974, a group of writers and activists gathered in the circular meeting space at Highlander Center near Knoxville to form what became the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Founding members of SAWC include Gurney Norman, Peggy Dotson Hall, Jim Webb and Ron Short.

During the 1970s, SAWC sponsored readings and published New Ground, an anthology of contemporary Appalachian literature. In the 1980s, Norman, along with poets George Ella Lyon and Bob Henry Baber facilitated the Appalachian Poetry Project, breathing new life into SAWC as poets and writers from throughout the Appalachian region gathered in their own and one another’s communities, and celebrated together at Highlander Center.

SAWC has met (almost) annually since this time. Through its annual October writers’ gathering, a SAWC Summer gathering at Wiley’s Last Resort on top of Pine Mountain in Whitesburg, KY, local readings and the literary magazine, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, SAWC continues its original mission to foster community among and encourage publication of Appalachia’s writers.

SAWC members from Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia will gather at Radford University the evening of Thursday April 24 at the Flossie Martin Art Gallery, Radford University to celebrate the posthumous publication of All There is To Keep, a book of poetry by the late Rita Riddle of the RU English Department and a long time and much loved SAWC member. Then, while in the area at the invitation of SAWC member Fred First, on Friday April 25, members of SAWC will meet and swap short readings with the Floyd Writers Circle at the Country Store from 3:30 to 5:00.

The time of good words and good fun at the Country Store is free and open to the public, and all are invited to attend and to welcome these writer-guests to Floyd.

The image is from yesterday, a day much less ominous for us than areas north and south that saw strong spring storms. Wish we’d gotten more rain!

A father-son story in four parts, this is part four. Hope you’ve enjoyed the journey. — Fred and Nathan First

“I wonder where I’ll sleep tonight and, Lordy, what Fiction lies ahead. By this time tomorrow I could be in anything from three feet of snow to a choir of angels, but I’ve got some real estate here in my bags.” That, from Nate’s journal, first night on the road.

And Lordy, how his mom and I tried to trust those angels – that they would keep up his pace and oh please, leave him down here on Earth to grow up beyond his Karouack-y idiot dreams.

Wide-eyed and awake in the wee hours of April 2000, his mother’s voice quivered in the dark. “I wonder where Nathan is right now”. I couldn’t tell her I wished that it was me out there with no obligations but to see what and who would be around each new bend. And yes, I was worried, too.

His unconditional trust is the thing that worried me most. He believed the best of everyone and if he jumped, he couldn’t image not landing on his feet. That the trip might leave him “disoriented” wasn’t so much a fear as a solemn wish:

“After all, we look around the most when we don’t know where we are. And the more we look around the stronger–and more helplessly, wonderfully lost than ever–we become. When a generation gets swallowed up in believing we’re not lost, it makes for a youth that’s too much like adulthood. Our generation, for instance, has been all too miserably found. Being found has made us sheltered. Being sheltered has made us dull.”

That spring I learned the minutiae of New England geography, sending Ann’s cookies and dry socks to post offices in tiny villages along the way. We tried to imagine each night that he would be taken in. He wasn’t always.

He learned to face rejection, and small wonder–a long-haired young stranger who appears in the cold rain on the doorstep. He stopped into a country church service one stormy late April evening where the sermon topic was on taking in the needy. How providential, he must have thought. Afterward, they closed up the church and sent him on his way, Lord bless you, son.

Later that same frigid night, miles further down the road, an elderly lady also regretfully told him “no.” A half block later, she came running along behind him in her robe and slippers, convicted that it was the right thing to take the risk. A stranger, she took him in, and became his surrogate grandmother and friend for one night over cocoa and cake and conversation.

When he’d lost his way on the Massachusetts Mid-state Trail, four lady hikers gently let him know he was on the opposite side of the mountain from where he thought. They carried him to dinner in town, and late that night, re-deposited him on the trail with a good map, a full stomach, and his trust in trail magic intact.

Each new state line he crossed was a parental prayer answered, though in truth, still hundreds of miles away he might still as well be on the far side of the moon. Then finally, crossing the Potomac, our wayward son was in Virginia. A week or two later, he was at Afton Mountain. We breathed a premature sigh of relief.

He was in high spirits when he left his pack beside the Blue Ridge Parkway and ran off to call us from a nearby house. A half-hour later, his second call was not so cheerful. Clearly, he hadn’t hidden his pack well enough. When he went back for it, the pack was gone.

Everything he owned was in that old pack, including his entire journal of the walk. The next day, a Parkway road crew found the old Jansport tossed off in the weeds a mile or two away. Not a thing was missing.

On July 7, 2000, my wife and I joined Nate for the last two miles of his journey down our country lane. The stories poured out: most comforting, some unsettling, but all overflowing with the love of life and language and the heady blind curves of youth. There had been a book in every soul he’d met, in every town, every forest, every new day.

His thick journal that came from the trip is itself a fragmentary record of 1000 miles of abundant life. These four thumbnail distillations here in the Press do scant justice to the richness of the story. Even so, I’ve appreciated this excuse to collaborate with Nathan, to tell together a bit of our sometimes-harrowing, ultimately joyful, family adventure. Thank you for letting us share the tale.

Part One Part Two Part Three

The latter’d be me, and I’ll necessarily be looking at other options if I self-publish in the future. What’s a tiny minnow to do: Amazon eats whales for lunch.

Lightningsource (LSI) is a subsidiary of Ingrams, one of if not the largest book distributor in North America. I know because they print Slow Road Home as needed for drop shipments (got a couple of boxes going to Mabry Mill and such places soon) AND perhaps more importantly for the little guys like me, printing through LSI gains the independent author access to Amazon for purchase. So here’s the situation as of the end of March:

By now, you have probably read about the campaign launched against Lightning Source by Amazon and its print-on-demand company, BookSurge. Lightning customers are being threatened with Amazon no longer accepting direct orders of their POD books, leaving the books available only from outside sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace.

Since February, a number of author services companies (“self publishing companies”) and some larger POD publishers have been approached by BookSurge, telling them they can move their books to BookSurge to avoid having their “buy buttons” disappear. (Amazon Advantage and Amazon’s new Lulu competitor, CreateSpace, seem to be two other recourses for salvation.) One large author services company, PublishAmerica, has already refused BookSurge’s offer and seen its buttons vanish.

I’d be more upset if I had been making much money via Amazon sales. (I’m 90th in Books > Entertainment > Humor > Rural Life–the category for which Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Mneral is #1)

I sold 300 books that way last year and had about 50 returns (which eats huge holes in tiny profits) and netted a few hundred bucks. Amazon for me is just a way for me to hand my book to someone I never meet. I have generated far more income from the book through the direct sales (sign it, hand it to the reader) of the first thousand offset-printed books or the ones I order directly from LSI.

However…I’m on the verge of moving back toward the notion of self-publishing “Bridging the Nature Gap” and man, this makes it hard to know which team to root for and where to put my egg money. If you or someone you know is in the same boat, check out this significant developing story in the world of self-publication.

And am I the only one that gets a bad taste in my mouth from Amazon’s ham-fisted style of business? Makes me want to spit. But hey, they are top carnivore. We’re bait fish. What do they care?

by Nathan First, Special to the Press ~ a father-son story of a thousand-mile rite of passage

Part One Part Two

In the month it took to walk through New England, you might have thought I’d have gotten wiser for the wear.

In Connecticut, after a few hundred miles of back roads, I decided that I’d try out the Appalachian Trail. Nothing stupid there: New York and New Jersey loomed ahead, and taking the Trail was a good way of skirting the sprawl.

But after a week alone in the woods, I started feeling rugged and self-sufficient. With grim excitement, I mailed home my sleeping bag, hat, gloves, and sweater. I needed nothing! I was Nate of the Wild.

And then came the cold front. For the next several days, the sky turned gray, temperatures plummeted, and a cold rain made relentless, baneful raids on my underwear.

Dumber for the wear. By the time I crossed the New Jersey border, the weather had taken its toll. I was hypothermic. My lips and fingertips were blue; my hands were losing their coordination. My shaking was sometimes more akin to convulsion, and sometimes stopped altogether. By then, instinct had finally kicked in. I was even ready to break my “no hotels” rule. Trouble was, the closest hotel was still a day’s walk away.

That night I shared a shelter with “Pops,” a 60-year-old who had planned to hike northbound into Massachusetts. His plans, though, had changed. Tomorrow, he promised, he’d be homebound, to all things warm and dry.

Pops was far from cheery. “You ready to freeze your butt off tonight?”

I just nodded grimly. At times Pops and I tried to talk ourselves into distraction. Other times one of us would say goodnight and plunge in, hoping that we were ready for sleep and the morning would come quickly.

Finally, well after dark, a crashing down the trail startled us from our chattering little worlds. Flashlights flung out across wet trees along the ridge. “Who in the heck could that be?” said Pops in disbelief. “What time is it, anyway?” I looked at my watch. “Eight thirty.”

Pops moaned. “I’ve been in this shelter since noon today. Been in my sleeping bag since five . . .” He mumbled off. ” . . . damn thought it was at least one o’clock.” We whistled to the oncoming hikers to let them know they’d found the place. They whooped back.

One was singing. Pops quietly growled.

Rich and Ed unpacked their things and we all got acquainted. They were leaders of a Boy Scout troop back in town, they said. They’d planned this trip as a reward for their troop, but none of their scouts had been fool enough to come.

“More for us, I guess,” said Ed.

Trail Magic: tr al-ma-jik. n. A term used commonly by hikers of the Appalachian Trail to signify a moment of overwhelming fortune at the time of greatest need.

Rich lugged a ten-pound propane grill from his pack and set it up in the light drizzle.

“Itellya, Ed, I am starving.” Rich looked at the two of us. “What about you boys? Up for a coupla ribeyes?”

Plump, juicy, rib-eye steaks. Sautéed mushrooms and onions. Various hills of scalloped potatoes. Warmth. In a delectable cheesy white sauce with pepper. Trail Magic.

______________________

For the time being, let me end with a confession. When I started walking home to Floyd, I thought the trip would be less warmth, less Magic. More me. Alone with the road. Nobody else.

So before I lead you to believe that I “walked off to look for America,” a star in some Simon and Garfunkel song, I’ll admit that my goals were not really so noble. I didn’t entirely expect to meet a whole bunch of Rich’s and Eds. And without them, frankly, I had little desire to “find America.”

If you’ll forgive the clichéd way of saying it, though, I think America found me. In countless feats of “Road Magic,” America walked off its front porches, stopped me in its front yards, invited me into its homes and offered stories, suppers, hot showers and warm beds.

America of all kinds, all shapes and sizes: monks and cowgirls and dying tycoons; college kids and brave old ladies; pastors, professors, doctors and farmers. And if that wasn’t enough, Ma mailed me cookies, and Dad even came out to join me for a while, and we shared some Trail Magic together. But that’s a story I’ll let him tell.

Birds were calling outside my window this morning in  the dark long before I was aware of their sounds. We  hear what we expect to hear, and for so long through  the winter, there has  been the wind, the creek, the  hum of the computer, the yawning dog stretching in his  sleep in the next room, the ticking of the woodstove and no birds.

When bird voices finally broke through winter’s oblivion, I could not name them. That kind of familiarity with the particulars of life outdoors will return soon  enough as I comprehend it: I am no longer alone in a gray-numb world of winter.  First light lures me with my coffee out onto the front  porch.

A comfortable flannel shirt is just enough. Beneath  the raucous sound of the creek, spring hums underground. I feel it through my slippers, through the soles  of my feet.

March wind carries a trace of sweet loam, moves faint red buds gently at the first hint of dawn. March is to June  as early morning is to noon: there is not much color yet in the day, or the year. But the sun will rise. And it will come sooner tomorrow and stay later, every day adding  more tint to the faint dilutions of February.

By late April, the color will be almost more than the eye  can stand, and I will sit down on the front steps all hours  of the day enveloped in a full palette of artist’s colors.  The east sky is pinking up already.

The pasture grass is smooth as a putting green painted  butterscotch, pressed down flat as pancake batter, snow  after snow. Five black crows move erratically back and forth across the field like ice skaters, leaning forward,  arms tight against their sides, gliding in the twin choreography of hunger and curiosity.

…from Slow Road Home ~ a Blue Ridge Book of Days 

I am trolling for an agent for my book, operating under the impression that, unless I can find a representative, I won’t get my foot in the door with a “real” publisher, most of whom say in Writers’ Market that they find their prospects through the recommendations of agents or other contacts.

An agent, the logic goes, would make an end-run around my shot-in-the-dark unsolicited broadcasting of my manuscript to slush piles around the country. An agent would know the best matches between my work and receptive publishers and have networking contacts with those publishers. He or she would stand behind my work (since they operate on commission–15% domestic and 20% foreign seems to be the normal range.) If I succeed, they succeed.

Some agents listed in Writers’ Market even offer to look at queries via email. The response time and expense is a sure improvement over mass mailings of SASEs and response in months. The rejections come back almost immediately, I found out.

And the tree image? It has nothing whatsoever to do with this topic BUT is the first imported from the Nikon just now by way of the card reader I had to buy to replace the one that WOULD NOT work with the Mac. Still some glitches in how Adobe Bridge handles the image files, but MAN does it import a RAW file in a jiffy vs the old reader on the PC!

The tree here does happen to be one of the wife’s favorites, a Fraser Magnolia along the edge of the pasture that has graceful lines in every season.

This is the second part of a four part run in which father (me) and son (Nathan, author of Parts 2 and 3) describe our variant perspectives of his long back-roads walk home in 2000–from Bar Harbor, Maine to Goose Creek in Floyd County, Virginia. Part one is here. This time, Nate tells his side of this little hike.

_____________________________

In his last installment of “A Road Less Traveled,” my dad reflected back on the origins of some of his more treasured gray hairs. In particular, he was thinking of a dumb stunt I pulled–a road that I traveled–eight years ago when I’d just turned 21.

I had recently developed an obsession with all things Northern. North for me, was no mere cardinal direction. It was, instead, a fabled place where adventure thrived. Somewhere up north, and soon, I’d move into some blustery hut and write bad poetry and eat snow till spring. Then, plump on whale-blubber and weeks of cheap wine, my real adventure would begin. I would wander to the roadside, put out my thumb, and like a poem scrawled on the back of a napkin, I’d blow away.

With Mom and Dad waving handkerchiefs behind me in Floyd that January of 2000, I drove a thousand miles northbound to Bar Harbor, Maine. For the next three blizzard-ridden months, I holed up in an attic and did a lot of the safe, sane things I promised Mom and Dad I would do. I brushed my teeth; I slept indoors (and sometimes in my car). I worked at a deli a couple doors down. And on the wilder fringes of things, I hiked Mount Desert Island for hours a day. And back in my room, I wrote hundreds of pages of excited babble that all boiled down to three words: Youth! Life! Possibility!

Dad seems to think that all along I was secretly scheming to walk back home to Floyd. But here he gives me too much credit. In fact, at that point, the idea had never yet crossed my mind. What I conceived early on was less a “plan” than a recipe: no money, no agenda, just an open road and a willingness for … well, whatever.

But on April Fool’s Day (fittingly enough) I put all these other ideas on hold. Late that night, wandering alone on a pitch-black road a few miles outside of of Bar Harbor, I stopped with exhaustion and laid down, looking up at a frigid, starry sky. And there, feeling my body heat leech into the asphalt, I knew that my plans had changed. I would have no more visions of hitched rides and freight trains: these only made the roadsides a blur. I wanted to see everything – the good, bad and sprawl alike – and that meant moving slowly, taking it in with every step. I had driven from Virginia to Maine in two days, and since had forgotten nearly all of it. I knew I wouldn’t forget a walk back home.

Ten days later, I hefted my dad’s creaky old Jansport on my back and headed out of Bar Harbor. I could still hear Mom’s voice ringing in my ears–recounting on the phone, the day before, how much she’d cried, how little she and Dad had slept in the last week, how sure they both were that I’d “learn the hard way” the fallen state and dangers of a modern world.

That night of the first day on the road, with some twenty miles now behind me, I was hiking yet again on a pitch-black road. The occasional headlights of logging trucks flashed through sleet and freezing rain. Each time a truck roared past, I stumbled to the roadside, often into puddles, my eyes forced down by the light’s blinding glare in the blackness.

This time, I had no attic to return to, and a warm bed in Virginia was still some thousand miles away. What on earth had I done? At one point, a passing pair of headlights silhouetted a roadside picnic table just ahead. Ready for any relief, I fished out my flashlight and hurried to the table. “No Camping” read the sign nearby.

At this point, I didn’t care. Gathering a small heap of fallen branches, I put a small pile between myself and the road, and covered my pack with the rest. Under the table, I climbed clumsily into my sleeping bag, and prayed for sleep.

For the next two weeks, as I walked my first two hundred miles toward New Hampshire, many of Mom and Dad’s lesser fears were realized. The temperature seldom rose above 35 degrees, and ten days of rain sought to kill me before I ever left Maine. There was also plenty of the foretold bad traffic, sprawl, and even some butt-nipping dogs, sure enough.

But what none of us expected–myself included–was the outpouring of kindness from the roadsides. In the first twelve days on the road, nine different strangers took me in. And suddenly I realized that my long walk home would be far less about the days walking and more about the late evenings talking with monks, cowgirls, and dying old tycoons.

…more in two weeks.

Well pffftttt. Bubble potentially re-inflatable but temporarily burst. I had my mojo working there for a while thinking I’d get this thing off to my top choice publisher and hear in 8-10 weeks. That’s what it says on their webpage submission guidelines. Send 20 pages and a cover letter.

Yesterday I bought a 2008 copy of Writers Market. Conflict.

For my chosen publisher, it says “send query first.” Nothing about unsolicited manuscripts.

Which is right? All-day meeting today, so I can’t send this thing off today as planned. And that’s a good thing: don’t want this much work to end up in the dead-manuscript pile at the PO.

Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking about how to turn this material I already have (images and text) into a presentation for future audiences, an alternative choice to Slow Road Home and the visual essay, Our Place in the World.

The Mac opens up new options for blending images and music/narration (vs Powerpoint before.) Wonder if iMovie does stills and transitions. Haven’t checked it out yet. If I have to purchase for this multimedia project, what? Ideas?

Writers Market. Depressing. Overwhelming. Typical: “Publishes 24 books a year, receives 3500 submissions. Six months to reply, then one year to publish. Author gets 7% royalty.”

Versus Self-publication (again): House devotes 100% attention to your book, publishes one book a year, no turn around time to reply. Publishes three weeks after book and cover files are submitted. Author makes minimum 2o% through Amazon or 70% direct sales.

More perhaps soon about the Amazon experience through Lightningsource. Mixed feelings here.

Oh joy–to reach a goal and have it behind you is such a fine feeling. And often, a cruel joke when you read the fine print. Or in this case, find it missing entirely.

I took excerpt pages of the book by Kinkos in Christiansburg yesterday–located flat in the middle of Malfunction Junction and I had never noticed it before. A friendly and efficient young lady took my thumb drive and three minutes later came back with some very acceptable color pages. I got three sets for about $12 per set of 25 pages. I was set to go! Ah, the heft of those pages, those hours, those words, those lived moments turned to text. How gratifying.

This morning I relished the final steps of signing the cover letter, putting pages in the desired sequence and in triumph addressing the folder to the publisher. One reader of the sample suggested “Better Without Batteries” as a good lead piece, so I pulled it out to look at it. And for reasons I cannot comprehend, in the very first paragraph, a half dozen words were missing. White space where words should have been. Aacckk!

Stop the presses. I’m crestfallen. But in the grander scheme of things, it is a small defeat that I’ll have to make a 50 mile round trip to get this one page repaired. Couldn’t I wait? I dunno. Just heard the weather forecast on NOAA radio and we have freezing rain in the mix for the next few days. I think I’ll just do it.

This setback is no stranger. This month two years ago, I was discovering the same kind of horrible surprises in the files that would finally become Slow Road Home. I lived through it. I have the scars, they only itch now. The book happened. And I largely forgot those petty aggravations for the greater satisfaction of holding that slice of my life in my hands.

Still, it is to be nibbled to death by mice. Pesky wrodents of the writing life.