At the six-month mark of the year, here are some favorites out of 21 books read.

Better fictions

Sipsworth (by Van Booy)

Diary of a Dead Man on Leave (Downing)

True Grit (Portis)

 Better non-fictions

The Wide Wide Sea (Sides)

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Allen)

The American Story (edit. Rubenstein)

The Demon Of Unrest (Larson)

 Crossovers

Good Night, Irene (Urrea)

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After the Flood

Most folks might have heard by now about Hurricane Helene that roared up from Georgia last fall and leveled much of the southern Appalachians as far north as Kentucky. The weather system made a long turn east of Asheville, N.C., then north along the western North Carolina border then northwest across western Virginia and eventually ran out of steam in northern Indiana and Illinois.

If you saw the news, the flooding was mostly in Tennessee and western North Carolina and the in the floodplains the Doe and Nolichucky rivers.

I live in Johnson City, Tennessee, Washington County, and we took a hit from the floods along our south county line when the Nolichucky, coming down from North Carolina flattened parts of the town of Erwin, scoured a 15-20 miles-long path along its former river bed.

The bulk of the damage in Tennessee was in Unicoi, Carter, and Johnson County all to our south and east. This is now being labeled a 1000-year flood. I am never be sure if we are at an end of a 1000-year time, at the beginning of one, or in the middle. Meaning, once in 1000 years is not much help. No one was living here 1000 years ago.

Homes, stores, churches, and the Unicoi Hospital in Erwin were damaged beyond repair. Places along the river in Washington County that had been home for several generations were now gone. In some places even the foundation or slab shifted. The torrent was not something buildings were made to withstand.

I have no idea how many well-built, modern bridges were washed away. The debris field is too large to imagine and the cleanup will take a long time. Eight months on temporary bridges and roads are in place. Homes are being rebuilt. The horror of it is still fresh.

I imagine a common conception is this brings new soil to the valley. The valley itself has been here for probably a couple of million years and has time time to clean the soil. The eons have allowed weeds and trees to grow and rot and insects and worms to dig through the soil. I read that agencies are now testing the mud layer for metals and not-nice stuff. Certainly a lot of dirt is transported from one place to another. More than likely what got transported was all that not-nice stuff in sheds and garages that we’d rather imagine did not get in our drinking water. In the soil is not better. The water picked up motor oil, fertilizers, antifreeze, manures, dead cats, and more junk than imaginable and all that is now in a field along the river banks. One flattened curve in the river reportedly collected cars with North Carolina license plates.

The heavy rain (30 inches) fell in North Carolina at the headwaters of the Nolichucky and Doe watershed. Towns a little further east were inundated with plenty of damage of their own. As the water deepened and headed down hill by the time it crossed into Tennessee the fate of many places downstream was sealed. A drive through the mountains always reminded me of past floods with makeshift bridges not even good for foot traffic crossed some creek a yard wide and a foot deep straddled now by a modern culvert bridge. Which worked for a short while until a mattress and a lawn chair and dead cow clogged up the culvert causing the water to over top the culvert and it’s access road. A washed out bridge was the end.

This was a serious problem in flooding last year in Franklin County, in Middle Tennessee. Too much junk in the ditches, yards, public dumps, provided plugs to the drainage creeks and culverts. It doesn’t take a lot of rain to make a disaster.

 For one day and one night it rained. At my house it rained and blew. Most of us woke up to the news of the flooding in Erwin and were advised to not travel that way nor even go down to sight see.

Relief had already mobilized the following morning before sunup. As the crest passed and the river leveled, work began. Remarkably Washington and Unicoi County emergency agencies were already at work. Choppers ferried patients and staff from the hospital roof. It was heroic.

The immensity of the debris field is staggering. This is just the leftovers. The rest is still traveling downstream. I suppose the light stuff eventually will end up strewn along the banks all the way to Douglas Lake.

Some of the aftermath will be with us longer than to rebuild homes. Soil samples being taken will determine whether farmers dare to plant crops or graze along the river. The change in the topography has changed which will determine where someone can build.

The personal tragedies will last forever.

If it is true that there appears to be a randomness in weather then we might want to ask what collection of weather positioning caused a weakened Helene to pass over western North Carolina instead of farther east or west. The results would have been so very different.

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Transcribing

This past year I have been lucky to spend some time transcribing letters for the Heritage Alliance in Jonesborough, Tenn. These came to us when a search in old furniture in a house destined for demolition turned up a huge bundle of letters and cards. I don’t have a number handy. They were written between 1850-1950 from Sonoma, California, Collins, Missouri, and several cities in Tennessee including Bristol, Chattanooga, and Decatur. A few extras came all the way from the Philippines. Most were sent to one family. 

What is interesting is how these people spread out but continued to write back home. We don’t have and don’t expect to have are the letters outbound. 

There are two major challenges: interpreting the hand writing, being faithful and accurate to the subject. Folks back then (before email) wrote about lot of things dear to them. I wonder how much of that is lost in the ease of email? The hand writing is from easy to brutal. I have to wonder how some of it ever was understood. Transcribing punctuation and spelling gets easier with each letter but also becomes habit forming. I have to switch between (dont) and (don’t) enough times my head aches.

 I am still interested in knowing more. There is little information in the letters about who belongs to who. We can see what’s going on in the writer’s place but never the reader’s place. For now, transcribing comes first. Someday we’ll post them to the website at www.heritageall.org. 

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Welcome back, to me. It's been a bit too long to not "blog." We've been through COVID and one massive death of my reliable Mac system here at the house. That has been an incredible disruption. But, I'm back. Topics about: water supply, food, AI, and reading. I recently submitted my annual list of favorite reads to the local paper. They have been quite generous to publish the article. I am learnin a whole new way to master my computer (HP Laptop) after 15-17 years on the iMac. My fingers aren't all that cooperative but they are learning. Sort of like playing guitar. Parts of the brain stay on vacation, too, and the re-learing and new habits and comforts can be a little slow in coming back to work. Happy New Year. -0-

On Reading New Writing

Finished reading Rivers Solomon’s “An Unkindness of Ghosts.” This is a different read from most if not all of my previous books. Its style might be called “gender vague.” The story is not new but takes a different twist because without sometimes having gender identities as a given the characters surprise the reader. It’s not easy to do well and Solomon is to be commended. Most the time it seems to me such attempts are done badly and I think it might be that an author tries to control the character too much from the start. We should also understand “gender vague” is not “gender neutral.” The author uses gender as part of the character’s attributes but attempts to steer those attributes into the corner. There is always the possibility that such style backfires. From a writing perspective we usually need to crawl before we can walk. To be novel in a novel world takes some practice. We must remember that the “new” is usually an extension of the old via experimentation. And sometimes very disappointingly, the novel becomes so common it soon is labelled and tagged like some animal skin and no longer very exciting. But the experimentation can go wrong another way, too. Solomon uses a bit of “misspelled dialect.” Once the author starts using street spellings where does it end and how am I supposed to read something that my brain sees as a foreign language. (James McBride goes in deep with local dialects and seems to pull it off.) The rationale is this is how people speak. I agree. And I’ll be the first to admit when people speak in a very localized accent I have to work at paying attention to what they say. And interpret what I am hearing which interrupts my listening. Every region has its own accent but your reader base is national. Something has go to give. In this text, I would stumble across a misspelled word that I thought was a thought by the protagonist stopped me for a long moment and forced me to figure out what I’d just read. This is a pit into which readers fall (not the writer) and affords an opportunity to quit reading the novel (which almost happened). Beware, then once the reader stops, it takes a compelling pull from the work to start up again. And any reason will do to help derail the reader (gotta mow the yard, gotta eat, bathroom break, Internet message). It’s tough. ###

A thought or two on writing

Finished reading Rivers Solomon’s “An Unkindness of Ghosts.” This is a different read from most if not all of my previous books. Its style might be called “gender vague.” The story is not new but takes a different twist because without sometimes having gender identities as a given the characters surprise the reader. It’s not easy to do well and Solomon is to be commended. Most the time it seems to me such attempts are done badly and I think it might be that an author tries to control the character too much from the start. We should also understand “gender vague” is not “gender neutral.” The author uses gender as part of the character’s attributes but attempts to steer those attributes into the corner. There is always the possibility that such style backfires. From a writing perspective we usually need to crawl before we can walk. To be novel in a novel world takes some practice. We must remember that the “new” is usually an extension of the old via experimentation. And sometimes very disappointingly, the novel becomes so common it soon is labelled and tagged like some animal skin and no longer very exciting. But the experimentation can go wrong another way, too. Solomon uses a bit of “misspelled dialect.” Once the author starts using street spellings where does it end and how am I supposed to read something that my brain sees as a foreign language. (James McBride goes in deep with local dialects and seems to pull it off.) The rationale is this is how people speak. I agree. And I’ll be the first to admit when people speak in a very localized accent I have to work at paying attention to what they say. And interpret what I am hearing which interrupts my listening. Every region has its own accent but your reader base is national. Something has go to give. In this text, I would stumble across a misspelled word that I thought was a thought by the protagonist stopped me for a long moment and forced me to figure out what I’d just read. This is a pit into which readers fall (not the writer) and affords an opportunity to quit reading the novel (which almost happened). Beware, then once the reader stops, it takes a compelling pull from the work to start up again. And any reason will do to help derail the reader (gotta mow the yard, gotta eat, bathroom break, Internet message). It’s tough. But done well, and Solomon does it well, then that is a good read. ###

Works of Art

I’ve been enjoying a recent spate of sunshine and warmth to stroll downtown Johnson City to photograph the “wildabout walkabout” statues. There are 15 statues and I guess it took me four afternoons to finally find them all. I think my Dan’l Boone Frontier Training days are over. The statues were made by a group of art students at ETSU. They seem like a pretty talented bunch. Bronze is poured in a mold and it would seem to me to be a lot of work. But the finished product is quite nice! I would always worry that my mold would crumble and I’d have a lump of pop-art that was supposed to resemble a fish. My few attempts at working in clay ended pretty much junk. I’d hate to think how much patience it would take for me to work in bronze. At least with writing and photography you can easily delete something incredibly beyond help and start over. But there was a lesson, once upon a time, in pottery class. Some of us had finished a simple vase. The instructor then asked us if we felt we were good or lucky. If we felt lucky, then destroy the piece and make another. Sadly, the second attempt never did see the heat of the oven. I’m glad someone has stuck with it and produced some nice pieces of art. Johnson City has, I think, tended towards the right idea of making attempts to inject life into the downtown. Now that we might see the end of the shutdown, of course, things will liven up. A bit. But don’t get in a hurry. There have been great attempts at treasure hunts for kids (and parents) but I have no idea of their success. But I think this is a step in the right direction. There are some interesting little corners to the downtown and if you are one to take pictures with your cell phone I think the wildabout is “just-about” right. ###