Living On the Road Less Traveled
River Road by Wayne Caldwell. Blair, 2024, 85 pages.
For years now, Wayne Caldwell has been writing a creative fictional history for Western North Carolina. His new book River Road is something of a sequel to his earlier collection of poems, Woodsmoke (Blair, 2021), which was told from the perspective of an older man, Posey Green, who is a multi-generational native to these mountains and who speaks with a strong Appalachian dialect.
In Caldwell’s new collection of poems, we are treated to the feminine narrative voice of Susan McFalls, whom we were introduced to in Woodsmoke and who is neighbor to and a good friend of Posey. Early in the book in the poem “Be Careful,” when Posey dies, Susan, who is looking for a more naturally-secluded kind of life, moves into a ramshackle old house previously owned by a notorious bootlegger, located near the French Broad River just outside of Marshall in Madison County.
“I miss him,/ like an amputee misses her missing limb./ It’s why I ditched Pole Creek for River Road, Nothing here /to remind me of Posey except the disease of memory,” she says. She then speaks of her new homeplace: “I decided I really wanted to be near living water.”
She soon meets another elder mountain man known by the nickname of Old Gabe, who helps her to renovate and remodel her new homeplace that she has named Eagle Bluff and where she can live in at least quasi-normal conditions.
In an ongoing conversational style narrative that reads like a memoir of place and person, Susan gives us a tour of her new home, her quiet surrounds, and her new life as a poet.
She converts her small dining area into a writing study with her “green glass owl-shaped mug/ full of what Posey called ‘writing sticks’. It’s hard to write/ with pen in one hand, fly swatter in the other,” which gives the reader some idea of her spartan living conditions. And she writes with a fountain pen, not a computer. We know we are with her in the present day and we are off and running to experience her new life in all its current manifestations.
“I don’t own a tv,/ it’s too much fun to porch-sit!” she exclaims. The land around her new home includes snakes, birds, beavers, bears, fleas, ticks, and geese. “I call them ‘Jesus geese’./ But there’s nothing holy about goose poop,” she writes with a sullen sense of humor.
What follows in the poems in River Road are tales of regional history including the flood of 1916, the history of the town of Hot Springs, Cherokee tales, the story of Paint Rock, and the growing overpopulation of Asheville.
More to the present point she shares her experiences of things like tadpoles in ditch-water and other observations and knowledge in something of a literary ecological history of these mountains in present tense. But what stands out in River Road, more than anything, is the time and detail devoted to Susan’s new-found love for poetry and the writing thereof.
Throughout the book are examples of her own poems in the form of the poetic style of Haiku. In a poem titled “Dandelion” Susan writes “No weed but golden/Wine-giving sudden flower/Harbinger of Spring.” And, then, there are poems in homage to her teacher, the well-known poet to North Carolinians, Randall Jarrell, and reference to many other writers familiar to academics and avid readers alike.
In this sense we get the feeling that much of what we are reading is maybe more autobiographical of Caldwell than of Susan McFalls (who are, in reality, one and the same). In the poem “Soup” she/Caldwell writes: “Words won’t often obey the laws of /thermodynamics, but when they do, the poem /smells good, tastes great, and fills the soul.” But then in the poem “About the Best I Can Do” we get a perspective of what Caldwell sees as the current declining culture and politics here in our region that also includes the subjects of climate change and litter along the roads.
In River Road, there is not as much interaction and local speech shared between named people as there was in Woodsmoke, but more interior musing by Susan McFalls about her experiences and her surrounds. So, all the way to the end and as she ages, Susan is enjoying her solitude and her semi-hermetic life. “My woodstove is miracle enough for me,” she says, quoting her lost friend Posey. In poems toward the end of the book with Christian references and titles, she writes: “My true church is the river and its choir.” She also quotes Mother Julian who speaks of God in the feminine. Finally, McFalls/Caldwell’s denouement for the book comes on a positive personal and poetic note with the quotable lines: “I’ll read another book. Take another walk./ Enjoy the flowers. And listen/ to the magic music of a river full of fish./ I have plenty adventure on the porch, pen in hand.”
About the author: Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author, editor and translator of more than thirty books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods (2005). He lives in the rural enclave of Tuckasegee in Jackson County.