Marideth is off on another research jaunt – Dauphin Island and several points in between. Last night she performed at the Third Annual Celtic Festival in West Plains along with a bevy of other marvelous acts.
photos by; Sarah Denton
Last evening found me at the Avenue Theater in West Plains with Marideth on the lineup for the Third Annual Celtic Festival.
Every time I visit the nation’s capitol, particularly when driving around in DC with somebody who knows their way around, I am struck by how spectacularly Small it is. I mean in area. For that many people to coexist with that many historic and/or holy edifices and monuments means they must crowd in upon one another. One pictures a solitary visit to the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. One doesn’t picture the clogged arteries of rush-hour traffic whizzing, and growling and fuming, by at arms length. The one visit we made, to the National Cathedral, set me gasping and stuttering when the magnificent, breathtaking structure rose up out of a modest neighborhood like Zeus among the tenements. What a study in contradictions. One might expect our nation’s elected officials to be more serious about their business when having to wade through such an architectural as well as human polyglot on their way to work. Another turn into a neighborhood took us through embassy row, where representatives of more than 100 countries reside in perfect harmony, if not outright boredom. There are places I ache to visit, not so much the big stuff as the phenomenal — Mary McLeod Bethune’s house, The Museum of the American Indian and, next time I head toward Charlottesville – Jefferson’s gardens at Monticello. Now, the New York leg has been postponed until later, and home beckons.
The first leg started out pleasant, an unhurried drive to Branson airport, a plane change in Atlanta that involved merely strolling across from Gate 7 to gate 4 in the same terminal and grabbing a sandwich along the way, and being met by friends Margaret Underwood and Linda Wolf in Raleigh, NC.
Dinner, a good visit and a leisurely sleep later we drove over to Wilson for my first interview with Civil Rights veteran Bob Zellner. I was put off immediately, despite warnings by Linda that North Carolina’s economy was in the pits, by my entry into Wilson by the back roads. Can you say agricultural and industrial blight? Miles of closed or run-down businesses, followed by a search for a recommended motel that,once I got a look at it, I wouldn’t have spent a night in under any circumstances. I’m sure it was affordable, but after the small swarthy and mustachio’d fellow who looked as if he’d just stepped off the set of the Maltese Falcon assured me ( through a barred window that hadn’t been washed since before Peter Lorre died) that all the rooms were smoking rooms, and by the way nothing was available, I gratefully accepted a further ride from Margaret and Linda over to a much cleaner side of town and got a room at a partially finished Quality Inn.
Later that evening, Bob showed up in a borrowed pickup truck and we retired to Cracker Barrel for a small feast and a large helping of information and contacts from Bob’s trove of experience. It was a lovely evening. Next morning I decamped and caught the Amtrak, and napped my way up the Carolina and Virginia countryside to Falls Church, Va. where I was met by longtime friend and fabled educator Judy Findlay who was just back from Pakistan. Whenever I get to thinking maybe I’m too old for my little adventures, a good dose of stories from Professor Judy’s life brings me back into focus right quick. Favorite line from this trip, talking about her experiences in international education: “Maybe I should start with the night I almost got arrested in Saudi Arabia.” Yeah. That would be a good start. It’s a good place to finish for now. More to come. This trip is just beginning.
This is Marideth Sisco for These Ozarks Hills. It’s March in the Ozarks and elsewhere, coming in this time quite lion-like and full of itself, telling us if we think winter is finished, we should think again. It’s all bluster, we say, trying to downplay the impact of wind and weather on aging bones and bodies, flinching whenever anyone coughs nearby, hoping we’re not in the line of fire of another dread beastie like what we hear is going round. Having just spent the day riding up the eastern seaboard on an Amtrak commuter train, admiring the distinctly different scenery from that in the Ozarks, while trying not to note that Everybody was coughing — passengers, conductors, food service folks, the lot. I’m about one flinch away from deciding I’m probably doomed. Ain’t no way all those beasties missed me.
On the other hand, it was an easy and uneventful trip, and I passed the time alternately napping and deciphering the landscape, one of cut-over, second-growth scrub pine and slim, straight deciduous trees of unknown species, interspersed by the occasional birch grove, alder thicket and houses looking like they came from two or three centuries removed from this one. Beautiful country, but different. A lot of those people from “Off” came from places like this.
The economy is hurting here, with factories along the tracks far more characterized by broken windows than by full parking lots. Still, people smile and say hello more often than not, and I get the sense that most have begun to believe we’re all in this together. And that’s a good sign.
I’ve come here in search of a story, or rather several stories that I hope will be woven into a larger piece. It’s what I do these days. In order to continue to tell stories, you see, one has to occasionally go out and get some. This time I’ve come to the home of a friend from high school that I’ve known for some 50-odd years. And in between the stories I’m in search of, we’ve begun to reminisce. In this process, I find I’ve come up on one of those parts of Ozarks culture with which I’ve always struggled, and have always resolved, in a sort of offhand way, by just not thinking about them. That’s gotten easier since I’ve retired from teaching, but it never goes away. It merely subsides.
Sound editors may insert here – the sound of me opening a can of worms. So be it, I guess.
For what I’ve come upon in my visit with my old friend is a bare fact that faces me every day that I live in the Ozarks, and is the fact that keeps my friend from coming home. It’s called by the experts cultural isolation. It forced the people who first came to the Ozarks to learn to live from the land and make do with what we had. It created an incredible toughness and resilience in the people who is unequalled except in places on the planet that are just as hard, just as unforgiving, albeit perhaps just as beautiful. It made us suspicious of outsiders, who sometimes operated under a very different set of rules, and were, for the most part, looking to sell us snake oil or take other advantages. It made us rely on a common set of principles — look out for your own, take no guff, expect the worst from the government. Don’t take charity. Use it up. Wear it out. All that. All fine precepts. But it works against us when we need the skills and savvy to live in the larger world. Especially when we equate knowing what we know to knowing all we may need to know.
When I was a teacher, the first thing I had to teach students coming from the deep Ozarks and entering college for the first time was that they did not live in the larger world. They only watched it on television. And they tended to interpret that world though a lens that did not always give them a picture that was clear and complete. It lacked context. It lacked essential information. It lacked the ability to be set aside so that the larger world could be taken at face value, its worth and its truths respected, its elements and ways not superior, but equal to what they had learned at home. They had to learn that difference is not always bad; that other is just other, not wrong. And that information that contradicts what you think you know is not a lie, just another point of view. Those of us that have moved away into the larger world and then come home cannot help but be aware of how our own culture and our ways, especially when evaluating things that come in from outside, can hurt us, cause us to misunderstand, cause us to turn away from change and the things that help us grow into better, wiser human beings. That awareness is often painful, for we love our homeland as much as we see its weaknesses. We want to see change, but we mourn the loss of an essential innocence. Whether we have come here from the land of Off, or we are those who have left and then returned, changed, to our beloved Ozarks, when we bring our notions of change and growth and a newer, broader knowledge of what it means to understand the larger world, are we the snake in the garden of Eden, or just a little, helpful can of worms.
A foray down out of the city and southwest across the Virginia countryside, past battlefields, monuments and headquarters sites from the Civil and Revolutionary wars set among a remarkably gentle and civilized backdrop that is on the move, cautiously, from late winter to early spring. Destination, after 3 hours, Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia. Leaves are tiny but showing. Early jonquils and the first phlox are up and blooming. The ample bed of spearlike fronds of rosemary on the campus of the University are a froth of blooms in wedgewood blue against the spruce blue of the leaves.
Judy’s physician son, Colin, observed to her recently that the founding of this splendid old university was possibly an even greater accomplishment by Thomas Jefferson than was the Declaration of Independence. Hard to argue from this view. I spent a comfortable and extremely enlightening couple of hours in the coffee shop at Alderman Library on the university campus, where at one point I was told that until the 1970s, an education at the institution was available only to white males. As I looked around, I counted, and found that at that moment, the proportion of scholars was 19 females to 5 males. I’m told the actual proportion is more like 6 to 4, with females prevailing. Along with the conversation I had with historian Holly Cowan Shulman, it made my day.
Just a few for now. Things are still way too busy!
The office Sarah and I share. I think she has been allotted more space than me…
The dining are. A larger table when all is said and done will make room for company at dinner.
-m
Off the road and holed up in fancy digs in Falls Church, VA, across the street from the apartment of my friend Judy Findlay. A good visit last night over dinner that left me lots to think about. Condolences today to Van Colbert and the Colbert family, who have lost their dear mother, who was a stalwart and fierce defender of her many children over the years. Van has told me more than once that he has no fear of not getting to heaven, because he knows his mother will stand up for him no matter what. And she raised her brood to be loyal, brave and stouthearted, and to love as fiercely as they fought. No mother could do more.
Listen to or read the narrative of the latest installment of the classic Ozarks commentary by beloved Ozarks singer and storyteller Marideth Sisco, host of the long-running series, These Ozarks Hills.
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Stories from my home town
5 years on the air
my life and times 