New Hope Journal

     Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979

   June, 2005

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It is he, anew, in a freshened youth and it is he in the substance of his region, wood of his forests and stone out of his fields or from under his mountains.—Wallace Stevens

Dear Bob,

Tuesday night May 31. Back in town again just for the night. Dr.'s appt. tomorrow, then back out to Rabbit Rock. You're right about being wrong about 4 cabins. Just 3: Original cabin (called variously the little cabin and the tin cabin), the Main Cabin (Rabbit Rock Lodge) and my new one (Rock Ledge). I've been running copper lines for the new hot water system in the main cabin. The water heater still hasn't come in. I'm hoping against hope to have it all up and running before Elaine and the girls arrive. Deborah is looking forward to being able to spend more time out there in the summer when she can have a hot shower before going to work.

Thanks for the comments on the ending of "What did you do in the war, Daddy." As usual your sensibilities are right on target. I came to realize in the writing of that last chapter that I was angry and still am angry about the stupidity that would allow an established social institution like the military to label someone as psychologically defective because they wanted out. But I have been reading U. S. Grant's memoirs these past few weeks and he is a text book case of the military mind. Grant's memoir is generally considered the best of all Presidential Memoirs. He was broke and ailing when he wrote his two volume masterpiece. But his publisher was no less than Mark Twain and I am convinced that Twain ghost wrote the book using Grant's notes.

Grant hated the politics of war. He started out in the Mexican War which he thought was a stupid greedy land grab and wound up of course winning the civil war which he thought was ignorance and immorality on the part of the rebels and an egocentric power trip for northern politicians. Still he just fell in line and performed like a soldier as if that were the only option available to him. He read a lot but I don't think he had read Thoreau.

Anyway my next book will be called "The New Hope Journey," which begins when I got out of the Army and met Elaine a few months later and I think will run up until my father's death just before I met Deborah. It will include the childhood of the girls, the original back-to-the-land experiment at New Hope Farm in East Texas, my mother's death, the Rhonda years, the New York years, ending back in Texas. The working title of the final book in the trilogy if I live long enough will be "Requiem at Rabbit Rock" which will include my love affair with New Mexico, my teaching at the county jail in Austin, My life with Deborah, the birth and fruition of Rabbit Rock North Carolina, and of course the tragedy of the Lizzie experience.

I like to go down to the site of my new cabin around dusk these days and look at the rock ledge I've built and the rough log frame work for the unfinished cabin. It may well be my last. It already feels like the place I wouldn't mind dying. I have an antique metal glider parked out beside the cabin site and Deborah and I sit out there sometimes until almost dark, watching the sun set on Dream Mountain across the Gap, listening to birds, the towhees, the giant woodpeckers, the brown thrushes and scarlet tanagers, and the thumping of our resident grouse in his bower just beyond my new cabin. Sometimes we are surprised by the turkeys passing through giving themselves a wide suspicious birth around us. Deborah's Dingo lies quietly at our feet.
I'm looking forward to seeing Elaine and my children in a couple of weeks. It has been a good 60th year. I'm hoping for maybe 60 more. Why not.

Stay in touch,

Larry L. Dill

photo by Deborah Gaddy