When Everything Becomes Clear
Standing on the shore where my book begins
In the first week of February, my school district—Oldham County, Kentucky—cancelled school for three days, all due to the flu outbreaks that were increasing absences among students and staff both. This action followed on several private schools in Louisville doing the same, and would be followed by Louisville’s public schools closing at the end of the week.
The days were NTI, non-traditional instruction, which means the students worked from home. Naturally, it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time; I was in the midst of readying students for seminars on the books we were reading: Fahrenheit 451 for the regular sophomore class, and Barry Lopez’s Crow and Weasel for my AP Prep course. I made up simple assignments to get through the week, looking forward to getting back into the classroom by Friday.
But by Thursday afternoon, the district outright cancelled school for that final Friday. No NTI at all: the day would be made up in May, after Memorial Day. I can’t say I didn’t welcome the news. I could use the day to go out and take photographs—the weather would be reasonably cool, mostly in the low-40’s and sunny—or I could write. In either case, I just wanted to be creative, to get out of the house or, at best, just start working on the manuscript I’d promised myself I’d get to all of 2024.
I preferred to do the latter; gas prices had jumped some 37 cents a gallon in a single day, making me grateful I’d filled up the evening before, and I was hesitant to waste gas traveling aimlessly, looking for a photograph or two. I had, at any rate, no clear idea what to do, what I wanted to picture, or even to say. I stayed home, drank coffee, and began to think on my great-grandmother.
Earlier, I’d been talking to one of my colleagues at the high school about my photograph of Mildred Tomb, my father’s grandmother, born in 1900. It turns out that my colleague had worked in the theatre with costume design, and was richly knowledgeable about clothing from the early twentieth century. I sent her the photograph, and she promised to do some research.
In early January, she sent this reply:
“Mildred, for her studio portrait, is wearing a linen blouse cut in the Belle Epoch era, to accentuate a protruding bosom. The elaborate hand-sewn cord embroidered pattern follows the organic, sinuous lines of the Art Nouveau style, which valued feminine, elegant embellishments. The delicacy of the ornate applique decoration on her bodice is complimented by crepe de chine sleeves, a fabric commonly used for dinner dresses.”
I was grateful for the response. I told her that I myself had researched Mildred’s hair, an Edwardian style called the Psyche knot, which, like the blouse, indicated she was a young woman. I’d emailed a woman I’d discovered online and gathered this information, as I recall, but I could find no archived email.
For more than four years, I’d been researching people like Mildred, and though I’d written some, I had no manuscript to show for my efforts. I felt behind, of course, and I was convinced I’d been wasting both my time and talent. I wanted to be resolute, to buckle down and get to work. On that Friday morning, school cancelled and my work computer closed, I took Mildred’s frame from the wall and studied it.
When I write, I’ll often go to other books for inspiration. With me, nearly always, it’s Barry Lopez. The night before, I read in bed, out loud, a few stories from Resistance, a book I’d bought more than twenty years before. I read from the preface and prologue to Arctic Dreams, looking, as it were, for a way in to my own geography, my own history.
It’s difficult to bring my ancestors to life, and the difficulty lies, I think, in the near absence of text I can draw on. For Mildred, I have virtually nothing, save an obituary that gives broad details about what she did in life. She was a parish aide. She married at age nineteen. She died in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elmira, where I used to go to get allergy shots monthly for nearly my entire adolescence. But I had no journals, no diary. Only a few photographs.
She died, only months after the 1972 Flood destroyed her home in Corning, New York, two weeks shy of my second birthday. Naturally, I don’t remember her at all. When she died, my parents were living in Kentucky, Bowling Green, where my father was earning his Bachelor’s at Western, and where my mother worked—if I recall correctly—as a secretary at a small law office.
In July, 2020, I made my first drive to Slate Run. Remember things then: we were in the COVID-19 pandemic. People were uneasy—not as frightened as they had been at first, in that late winter, but still uncertain. It was an election year, as contentious as ever, even, it seemed, in the Allegheny Mountains.
I ignored this fact. People, I found, would open to me simply by stint of my saying that the Tomb’s were my people. You could think of it as a privilege, I suppose. The same with social media: when I’d write the Pine Creek genealogy groups asking the whereabouts of, say, a small graveyard back in the hills, they’d send me intricate directions, even GPS coordinates. They’d have been happy to take me there themselves, I’m certain. Perhaps one day they will.
Mildred herself went back from time to time when she was young, still unmarried, and I’ve found old newspaper accounts of her visits to her grandmother’s house in Slate Run. Her grandfather, George Washington Tomb, had died in the winter of 1906, but her grandmother, Mary Ann, lived until the early autumn of 1921. She would have taken, of course, the train back into the mountains she was born in.
Over the weekend, I wrote. I finally drafted, and polished as well as I could, the prologue to my book. I made a PDF and emailed some family—the uncle who’d given me a lot of material, a few cousins who’d shown interest in what I was doing. On Sunday afternoon, I was glad to get a message from my cousin in Alaska, a retired firefighter.
He told me he’d been reading it, siting outside his camper as the sun rose. He’d camped along Tomb Run, he told me, in the area I was writing about. He said he’d walked blindly through that country, the Pine Creek Gorge where our ancestors came from, only seeing what lay on the surface, never the deeper history beneath—his history, as well as mine.
He pointed out a line I wrote, describing the country cemetery at the mouth of Pine Creek: “These stones stand rigid like frozen tongues, unable to say what it is they were meant to remember.” He said he’d seen the same thing, that image, but “I’ve just never finished it like you did.”
“You paint a very vivid picture,” he wrote, “and were able to transport me to a place and time I’ve both never been and at the same time I have.” I’m enormously pleased.
I reached out to one of my father’s cousins in North Dakota, another who has helped me by answering questions about these people before my time. I was glad for her reply, glad to see she was still well. I’ll send her a copy, as well.
I’d been reading Elizabeth Willis’s new book of poems, Liontaming in America, and I’d found a line I wanted to use as an epigraph: When the shore touches your hand, everything becomes clear. Precisely at the moment when you can no longer be understood.
I’m still wrestling with these lines. I’m wondering, today, now how many of us feel misunderstood. What we need to do to be understood.
I’m thinking of my cousin, reading my words in Alaska, the dew, he said, dripping on his feet, his coffee getting cold, transported to places he’d been but not yet been. I think of the shores of Pine Creek—this is why I admire Willis’s line—where my ancestors landed in 1791, where they built their farmhouses over the course of a century.
Writing about these people, even those I could never possibly know, everything comes clear.
“These stones stand rigid like frozen tongues, unable to say what it is they were meant to remember.” Perfection in words.