Augusta

...is only 37 miles west of St. Louis (as the crow flies)--about 43 actual miles
but if miles were measured in the decades that have passed, one would say Augusta is so very near the hub of things but so many decades removed from the hustle-bustle of the city
that in some ways it feels like it's thousands of miles away from anything. It's literally like walking back in time. The population of Augusta is 300. It has 12 or so B & B's, a few restaurants, a small grocery store, 3 wineries, and some gift/antique stores. It was so quiet and idyllic and healing.

To be truthful though, as soon as I exited 64 W and got on 94 (South, I think), I started hearing
Dueling Banjos in my head and thinking about James Dickey!

All that said, it was an absolutely amazing place to visit. The 16 miles of winding road
that took me to Augusta and the B & B I was to stay in for the next 2 nights filled me with
an excitement I had not felt in some time. The road rises and falls in synch with the rolling
Missouri wine country. I kept wanting to look to the right of me, past the drop-off, over the treeline and to the river running parallel (at that point) to 94. What a view!

My project: to interview the winemaker at Mt. Pleasant winery for a paper I am writing in my Psych class. He is a dynamic man who loves what he's doing. More about Mark later.

I gotta stop right here and right now and post James Dickey's Cherrylog Road. I thought about Dickey a great deal out there in the middle of nowhere and I thought of Dante "I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost." The last line of this Dickey poem just wrecks me every time I read this poem. "Wild to be wreckage forever."

Here's Dickey:

Cherrylog Road
by James L. Dickey


Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The ’34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
With a seat pulled out to run
Corn whiskey down from the hills,

And then from the other side
Crept into an Essex
With a rumble seat of red leather
And then out again, aboard
A blue Chevrolet, releasing
The rust from its other color,

Reared up on three building blocks.
None had the same body heat;
I changed with them inward, toward
The weedy heart of the junkyard,
For I knew that Doris Holbrook
Would escape from her father at noon

And would come from the farm
To seek parts owned by the sun
Among the abandoned chassis,
Sitting in each in turn
As I did, leaning forward
As in a wild stock-car race

In the parking lot of the dead.
Time after time, I climbed in
And out the other side, like
An envoy or movie star
Met at the station by crickets.
A radiator cap raised its head,

Become a real toad or a kingsnake
As I neared the hub of the yard,
Passing through many states,
Many lives, to reach
Some grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow
Sending platters of blindness forth

From its nickel hubcaps
And spilling its tender upholstery
On sleepy roaches,
The glass panel in between
Lady and colored driver
Not all the way broken out,

The back-seat phone
Still on its hook.
I got in as though to exclaim,
“Let us go to the orphan asylum,
John; I have some old toys
For children who say their prayers.”

I popped with sweat as I thought
I heard Doris Holbrook scrape
Like a mouse in the southern-state sun
That was eating the paint in blisters
From a hundred car tops and hoods.
She was tapping like code,

Loosening the screws,
Carrying off headlights,
Sparkplugs, bumpers,
Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs,
Getting ready, already,
To go back with something to show

Other than her lips’ new trembling
I would hold to me soon, soon,
Where I sat in the ripped back seat
Talking over the interphone,
Praying for Doris Holbrook
To come from her father’s farm

And to get back there
With no trace of me on her face
To be seen by her red-haired father
Who would change, in the squalling barn,
Her back’s pale skin with a strop,
Then lay for me

In a bootlegger’s roasting car
With a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun
To blast the breath from the air.
Not cut by the jagged windshields,
Through the acres of wrecks she came
With a wrench in her hand,

Through dust where the blacksnake dies
Of boredom, and the beetle knows
The compost has no more life.
Someone outside would have seen
The oldest car's door inexplicably
Close from within:

I held her and held her and held her,
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,
So the blacksnake, stiff
With inaction, curved back
Into life, and hunted the mouse

With deadly overexcitement,
The beetles reclaimed their field
As we clung, glued together,
With the hooks of the seat springs
Working through to catch us red-handed
Amidst the gray breathless batting

That burst from the seat at our backs.
We left by separate doors
Into the changed, other bodies
Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard

Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

James Dickey, “Cherrylog Road” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992. Copyright � 1992 by James Dickey. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.



I made so many notes, and I crossed so many rivers, and I counted so many dead animals (seems I have some fascination with that--yikes!), and I noticed so many roadside memorials, and I tasted so much great wine, and I dreamed so many crazy dreams.

One day, when I finish my classes and before I jump into grad school, I am going to write poems again. I miss writing. I miss the way writing helps you train your eyes to see things differently, to want to dig down into that place in yourself that knows the way all of us on this planet are so crazy connected to one another and so utterly distant from one another.

I miss writing. I am going to try to write some more later. Work to do.