Anhak and Heavyhead
I wandered through cow pastures along a broken down fence up into the wooded hills of Appalachia. Had found an abandoned farmhouse and was living there. That was in 1954 and I must have been thirteen. Halfway along in a field a fox was eating on a live groundhog. Down in the burrow I could hear the other groundhog crying. Strange, scary mine holes near a logging trail. Hawks and white-tailed deer everywhere. Mystical, curved waterfalls,
August moon so pale
raccoons deep in the hollow
tumble little creek
Then again and shortly thereafter Anhak stopped by to check on the dog, Heavyhead. The old civil war barn was home to many animals in those days–a horse, chickens, possums, and even a wildcat. Anhak slept in the hayloft. She was seventy then, my age now. Had crossed through the Wabash on a wagon train. Oxen took her into the prairie where she helped break through the sod for the first time ever. That was in the 1880s.
Annie (that’s what we called her) wanted to travel with me to Cartagena and Bogota and, if possible, into the Amazon. We put our bags on the gelding, Dusty and slowly walked out of the hollow to the dirt road. Made it to Idlewild and onto a prop plane bound for Cartagena.
Forty years later I made it into the Putumayo y Cacueta. Narrowly missed getting shot in the head. The boy next to me in the cart took a bullet in the left eye. They probably thought he was my son. Several times knives were held at my stomach and throat. But I’ll get to that soon enough– sleeping in the streets of Calcutta; hitchhiking from Paris to Baghdad and back; Norway to Portugal; North Africa, Senegal, Mali, Gambia; hitching from New York to Costa Rica; the man-eating leopard on a hill near Kathmandu; six years in Guatemala; five years in Japan; Hong Kong, Thailand, and Pakistan.
Still above ground and still on the trail . Now wandering about a magical, mountain kingdom, a medieval, oriental entity. A place of beauty, a place of weeping. Of revolution and betrayal. A land between Mexico and Guatemala. Chinantec, Mazatec, Zapotec, and Mixe. Will be leaving tomorrow for caves discovered near Teotitlan del Valle.
So then, from where the moon now shimmers, by the 16th century cathedral, at a sidewalk cafe sits the irregular pilgrim. And the town swings about. The people swirl around. The uncouth one assumes a quietness amidst the lower levels. Thus the low becomes the elegant. It’s all in the slope of the letters. Let it unfold. We miss you Annie. Maybe I’ll be seeing you soon,
Oblong
Tags: Mali, Pennsylvania
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