Returning to these mountains many years ago, I immediately took up the literature that was created here and marks the place: Horace Kephart (Our Southern Highlanders), William Bartram (Travels), James Mooney (Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again). In Kephart, one passage in particular spoke to me and my new life here in the woods:
I came to dwell in the wilderness, not as one fleeing or hiding, but that I might realize, in a mature age, a dream of youth. Here, in the wild wood, I have found peace, cleanliness, health of body and mind. Here I can live the natural life, unfettered and unindebted. Here duty itself is pliant to any breath of fancy that may stir the buds and foliage of thought.
While these words have given me courage and something of a challenge, the words of Thomas Wolfe have had a slightly different effect. Reading Wolfe’s sequel to Look Homeward, Angel and hearing his anguished cry that “you can’t go home again,” I found myself reacting instinctively and vocally: “you must go home again!”
This impulsive utterance reflects a bioregional ethic that I can trace back to my years in California and my work with what was referred to as the “Bioregional Movement” there, and it represents my personal conviction. It also presents a tangible philosophical problem for those who are not living, as I do, deep in place. Collectively Americans these days are hunter-gatherers of sorts and are a mobile, migratory people. Only the game we hunt is different. Instead of moving with the seasons, with the herds, as did the original inhabitants of this continent, we now hunt for material goods, for jobs, for more comfortable and economically advanced lifestyles. In this sense “home” is a relative term used to describe migration routes along which we have spent little time in any one place. But even migrating animals come back to familiar territory—to the range that defines the borders of their home and habitat. Since this story of migration has become our modern mythos (except for those rare souls who have remained in one place over the course of a lifetime), we are forced to identify with places where we have become transplants and where we try to live consciously and with empathy.
I’m thinking specifically of Carl Sandburg, who, had I come here 15 years earlier, would have been my neighbor. Not literally, as his adopted home in Flat Rock is some ten miles from me, but close enough for me to imagine time and distance to be only a minor impediment to such a notion. Sandburg’s relationship with Connemara, as his farm is named, and the Western North Carolina mountains was such that one might easily imagine him having lived there his whole life. His soulful embrassade of place was complete. It included the necessary surrender, the deep grounding, and the rest and serenity that is indicative of how one, ideally, evolves after “returning home.” From 1945, when he moved to Flat Rock, until he died in 1967, this was truly Sandburg’s home. The farm had everything he and his family needed—plenty of pasture for his wife’s goat breeding operation and plenty of seclusion for Carl, including the four things that he said were all he needed in life: “to be out of jail, to eat regular, to get what I write printed, and a little love at home and a little outside.”
The 240-acre Connemara (named by Sandburg for County Connemara on the west coast of Ireland, a landscape reminiscent of the rolling green hills of Western North Carolina) was then and is now divided roughly into half woodlands and half cleared pasture. The balance between woodlands and open space couldn’t have been better for Sandburg’s poetic soul, and here his soul took root while his farm and family flourished, giving rise to one of my favorite of his poems, “Instructions to Whatever Gardens”—a song in praise of beauty, nature, being, and staying in place.
In recent days the Sandburg place and its former owner and I have become more than a little friendly, as my connection with Connemara goes deep. At least as deep as the six inches of sawdust and goat droppings that form the floor of the goat barns. Once a month I’ve been going over to clean out the stalls and bring the rich organic fertilizer home to dump in Zoro’s field. Through a barter with one of my neighbors, I arranged to use his dump truck to haul off the goat droppings and sawdust, which will become compost in my own gardens. I got this job through a bit of serendipity and by making friends with the National Park Service employee who is in charge of the goat herd. I met the goatherd during my first tour of Connemara soon after my arrival from the West Coast. Now, three years later, I’m working as something of a subcontractor for the Sandburg farm.
NPS photo
The Carl Sandburg home in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
Besides the fact that I get paid a small fee (enough to cover my expenses for using my neighbor’s truck) for hauling off the potent fertilizer—which goes into my gardens, enhancing their productivity—other bonuses have come with this job. Since the goats need to be fed and tended, even on days when the rest of the staff is taking a day off, I’ve worked it out to come with my borrowed truck to clean out the barns on those closed-to-the-public days. After I’ve finished cleaning the barns, and if it’s not too late, I’m often allowed into Sandburg’s study in the attic of the house, where I carefully and respectfully look through his files, papers, and books, which are as he left them in 1967. I have spent many hours up in that attic room snooping—wearing Sandburg’s print-shop visor, hoping some of his unused poetic lines will filter into my mind—and reading everything within reach. The ambience of his words and work as well as the memorabilia (such as a notepad that lies open on the nightstand beside the little bed he used for catnapping, and a well-used pencil with the inscription “half the pressure, twice the speed”—a kind of koan, if not a magical spell, that I imagine fortified and fed Sandburg’s late night revelations and poems) includes, on occasion, what I perceive as his ghostly presence, a presence that appears as an abstract specter in the sunlight coming through the attic window and filtering through swirling dust.
From working over on the Connemara farm this past year and from my time up in Sandburg’s roost, I’ve come to appreciate him as a poet of place as well as a poet of the people. Although he adopted Western North Carolina as his home late in life, he quickly became both a homeboy and homebody at Connemara, where he was protective of both place and privacy. A good story provides some manner of proof for these claims I’ve made for him—one I heard recently from talking to an older Black woman who was Sandburg’s housekeeper and unofficial bodyguard during the Connemara years.
In the spring of 1964, a 23-year-old poet named Bob Dylan arrived on the Connemara property unannounced. Standing on the front porch, Dylan introduced himself to the housekeeper: “I am a poet, my name is Robert Dylan, and I would like to see Mr. Sandburg. I’m a great admirer of his.” After a lengthy wait Sandburg appeared, somewhat disheveled in his plaid shirt and baggy trousers, which were his normal writing attire. He took one look at Dylan and said: “You certainly look like a very intense young man. You look like you are ready for anything!” According to the housekeeper’s eyewitness report, Sandburg and Dylan visited for about 20 minutes on the front porch and talked about poetry and folk music, which Sandburg said he regarded as kindred arts. Dylan at some point handed Sandburg a copy of his newest album “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and reiterated that he too was a poet—which, according to Sandburg’s housekeeper, got the elder poet’s attention, and he promised to listen to the record Dylan had brought him as a gift and literary offering.
Despite their age difference Sandburg and Dylan had much in common. Both were born of immigrants in the Midwest, and both were admirers of Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie and were collectors of folk songs. However, Sandburg cut the visit short by saying that he was in the midst of working when Dylan arrived and that he had to return to his study to finish his day’s writing, giving the young celebrity what amounted to little more than a nod and a handshake in order to preserve the sanctity of his cherished seclusion and his regimen.
So when I go up to the Sandburg farm these days, I’m in good company—my goatkeeper friend, the goats, Sandburg’s ghost, and the ghosts of the famous friends and admirers who visited him there. What rubs off on me mostly, however, is the sense of calm and stability the old place exudes. “The goats, the gardens, and the peace,” as Sandburg referred to it. Of all the places Sandburg lived during his life- time, I think in the end it was Connemara that he thought of as home.
And the place is beginning to feel that way to me, too. As beneficiary of my monthly visits to purge the barns of their pungency, I’ve come to think of it almost as an upscale extension of my little shack in the woods.
Thinking of Sandburg’s ordered and balanced life at Connemara and at the same time seeing how out of plumb (as the older generation here in the mountains might refer to it) the world has become these days, it seems all the more clear to me that we must go home again! Take the knowledge, the experience, and the strength gained from all the years of wandering, searching, working, and plant this in the soil of our adopted or native homes—whether the west coast of Ireland or the mountains of Western North Carolina—wherever they may be.