New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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Letter from the Raleigh Station
June 10, 2004
I’ve escaped the mountains. I took a Greyhound bus yesterday from Waynesville to Raleigh. The Smoky Mountains are lush and beautiful this time of year. The forests where I have spent the last 6 months are like a jungle now. A high cool jungle in Appalachia. Plenty of bugs like any jungle, but at that altitude (around 4500 ft above sea level) very few bugs are bothersome. Giant Luna moths and Carpenter bees fly freely through the unscreened open doors and windows of Rabbit Rock lodge. A few mosquitoes only here and there. No fire ants. I have had to pick off an occasional deer tick. The snakes are out but they are hidden in the rocky landscape, thick now with underbrush and poison ivy. We’ve seen one rattlesnake here in five years. We named him Raul, and coxed him away from our gate with a long stick. The antidote for poison ivy, if you get into it is the watery jewelweed that abounds here. You rub it on the affected areas.
I’ve been working on the spring at Rabbit Rock, clearing it out, clearing the trail up the side of Sugar Top, installing a new spring box and a new reservoir. Our water system is gathering about a gallon a minute of pure spring water unadulterated by anything but the tiny salamanders whose presence generally assures the water’s purity. There is something ritualistic and meditative about piping a natural spring down a mountainside into your cabin. Working on a spring can be like good sex, at times physically demanding, but always physically and emotionally gratifying. The rudimentary stone age engineering required makes me feel almost as much a part of nature as the salamanders who make the spring their home and the birds and mammals who drink here. My last day at Rabbit Rock was one of the best days of my life.
The bus trip to Raleigh was un-crowded and uneventful, thank God. I met no one and had no conversations, unlike many cross-country trips I have made on the bus before, this 8 ½ hour trip was a smooth and relaxing ride down out of the mountains: Asheville, Statesville, Greensboro, Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh. I discretely drank vodka disguised as Evian water and began reading Celine’s Journey to the End of Night. I bought it two years ago in Santa Fe and hadn’t read it yet. Bukowski loved Celine. Phillip Roth called Celine his Proust.
We arrived on time in Raleigh and I spent the night in a Days Inn 2 blocks from the bus station. The Amtrak Station is 10 blocks from the motel. I’m sitting in the station now waiting for the train to New York. The train is ½ hour late. It is a pleasant day in Raleigh. The sun is shining. I had a good room and a good night’s sleep. I walked here to the station with my convertible soft-side suitcase/internal frame backpack. It was very heavy and I was sweating and breathing hard when I arrived one hour before departure. It is cool and pleasant inside the station. About 20 other people are waiting here with me. A wall of glass looks out over the tracks.
Raleigh is the capital of North Carolina. Without intending disrespect, I have to say that that compared to the capitol buildings in, say, Austin or Salt Lake City, The capitol in Raleigh is very small. It looks like a faded grey Monticello. It looks like a civil war movie set designed by Tim Burton. When I was here a few months ago, I read an article in a local paper complaining about the city's plans to build a convention center. The writer was bemoaning the lack of nightlife in this city of ½ dozen colleges and universities. Without the nightlife, he argued, why would anyone want to come here? But I like Raleigh. I went out last night to buy some beer. I found a little grocery store near the corner of Glenwood Ave and Peace Street. There were open air cafes and Irish bars for blocks up and down Glenwood. If the man wants New York or Austin he’ll have to go there. Me, I like the pace in Raleigh. The downtown remains alive but sleepy and on a human scale, with little of the monolithic government architecture you find in Austin. The departments of community college education and Indian affairs, for example are in small, early 20th century red brick buildings, a bit seedy but with a quaint historical gravity like the capitol building itself. The only modern concourse eminating out from the capitol is made up mostly of the state museums of science and history. The science museum is particularly fine, with excellent displays of the ecology, flora, fauna and geology of North Carolina. I could live in Raleigh. I could die here. I know I would be comfortable. It’s nice to know of someplace you could hide out if you had to. But not likely. Not at all likely. I’m still 400 miles and 10 hours away from New York City. And here’s the train. We’ll be in Richmond at 4pm and Washington at 6. Ronald Reagan’s body lies in state at the Capitol. He will be buried tomorrow at Arlington. We will be in New York before midnight.
On board a gaggle of children dominates the front half of the car. But the acoustics muffle all sounds. The train jerks and rolls out on its way. The ride is smooth and hypnotic. Like the spring at Rabbit Rock. Like good sex. The pine trees and cornfields rush by. The whistle of the locomotive as it approaches the crossings is long and musical like Phillip Glass or the high lonesome whine of Ralph Stanley. The conductor is tall , black, proud and jovial. Elegant in his starched uniform. Like one of the marines I saw guarding Reagan’s casket on TV last night. The porter is a young black woman with dreadlocks pulled back in a pony tail. She cleans the carpet with an old fashioned carpet sweeper and jokes with the conductor. These two are happy today. The gaggle of children got off at Wilson. There are still more babies in the car. But no crying. We pass through a vast freight yard. Thousands of cars, dozens of tracks, and roll into Rocky mount. Raleigh is far behind us. We head out now across the muddy river border into Virginia. No map to know what that river is. The pines jut out of the deep red clay banks. If you could open the window you could reach out and touch them. Then newly sprouted fields whiz by. Is it cotton, or soybeans? From this distance the small plants even look like they could be potatoes.
A black man gets on at Rocky Mount and settles in across the isle from me. The conductor looks at his ticket and informs him that he has taken a later train than the one he paid for. He will have to pay a $30 penalty. They barter back and forth. The man claims he is in the military and should be able to ride free. The conductor looks at his military ID and says, “This is not even an active duty ID.” The man is caught and will have to pay. The affable conductor might have given him a pass but the train was over booked as it was and he may even have to get off at Richmond. When the conductor leaves, the man takes out a black and white school composition book just like the one I’m writing in. He writes for a while and then falls asleep to his head-phoned Walkman. He is a man of imagination and risk. Maybe he is a writer. Maybe he has read Celine. “Travel is useful,” Celine says. “It exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue…anyone can do it. You just have to close your eyes.” The train hurls itself into the dark night. 3 hours now to New York City. I pull out the Vodka and drink and then close my eyes and listen to the click ..click.. click of the wheels on the tracks. I could be anywhere now. Anywhere.
--Larry L. Dill
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