The Birthplace

On the other side of the town from where I grew up, on top of the southern mountain that closed our valley in like a wall, there was a settlement in the 1890’s, with houses, a small post office, and, of course, a coal mine. That was, after all, the reason why men went up there in the first place. That whole side of town was honeycombed with mines. But before the miners got there, the local Indians used to meet at a certain field they had cleared for the purpose. They cut down the birches, maples, and oaks, and used the stumps for seats. Hence it was called Stump Field. I haven’t been there. It was only recently that I even found out about it. Some memory of it, maybe, lingers among a couple of old timers, not that they would have seen the houses and the post office, because they were torn down a long time before, but they might have seen the remains of a couple of stone foundations, or a dug-out cellar, or they might have heard tell of it from their own grandparents.

In the woods on our side of town, too, there were the remains of human activity that had long ceased to be. There was a row of telephone poles beside a long disused trail, and not a single wire on them. There were cavities in the ground, forty or fifty feet deep, where miners had taken coal near the surface. In those days, the people in my town would sometimes drive into the woods along one of the trails, to leave big items of garbage in one of the pits. Imagine a forty-foot hole in the ground, about eighty feet wide, filling up with green water from below — perhaps from copper? And imagine a boy, and a refrigerator at the edge of the hole. Yes, you know exactly what he’s going to do! But to tell the truth, I was always pleased to discover such things, in a wistful kind of way: a paved road beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, for example. Our Word of the Week is heir, but what do you call it when there’s a sort of heritage that nobody wants?

“People have to move on,” you’ll say, and that’s true, but sometimes I imagine time and change as a policeman, coming up to someone lingering in the vicinity of a house where nobody lives anymore, and saying, “That’s enough. Move on, fellow,” laying a firm hand on his shoulder. That’s as much as to say, “You have nothing here. Keep going.” Back in 2011, Debra and I went back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where we had met each other and fallen in love and gotten married, 25 years before. We wanted to visit the church, a beautiful stone building, but when we got there, all we saw was the broad front yard of a house far off the road. Somebody came out of the house to ask what we were looking for. “Saint Thomas More Church,” we said, and that’s when we found out that they had taken the church apart because the congregation got too big. They built another one a mile away, preserving some of the stone and a couple of the stained glass windows. But of course it was a big sprawling modern thing — not the same. I guess every American has had experiences like that.

But in our Poem of the Week, Robert Frost takes an uncharacteristically sunny view of such a change. The speaker’s father built a home far up a mountainside; too far, actually. But through hard work and stubbornness, we suppose, he managed to scrape by, and the mountain “seemed to like the stir.” And a stir it must have been, because he and his wife managed to have a dozen girls and boys. What a mountain could give to those children, the speaker doesn’t say. He leaves it to us to guess at. Imagine a mountain, children, a farm too high uphill, no doubt on the sunny side if they were going to get anything to grow at all, and the years it would take to get them all out of childhood — twenty or thirty years at least. And what’s left?

The speaker doesn’t say that, either. He doesn’t mull over a stone wall that doesn’t any longer keep anything in or out. He doesn’t point out to us any hitching post with an iron loop turned to rust. All he does is to express, without actually putting it in words, his gratitude for the mountain. For the mountain didn’t just nurture them. She — the mountain is like a mother — pushed them off her knees. That is, she gave birth to them, and then said, “Now you must go and live your lives.” And the last line is simple and brilliant: “And now her lap is full of trees.”

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“Mountain House,” Albert Bierstadt. Public Domain.

Here further up the mountain slope
Than there was ever any hope,
My father built, enclosed a spring,
Strung chains of wall round everything,
Subdued the growth of earth to grass,
And brought our various lives to pass.
A dozen girls and boys we were.
The mountain seemed to like the stir.
And made of us a little while —
With always something in her smile.
Today she wouldn’t know our name.
(No girl’s, of course, has stayed the same.)
The mountain pushed us off her knees.
And now her lap is full of trees.