SLOW ROAD HOME* BY FRED FIRST AN APPRECIATION

The question is raised

in some quarters: all these bloggers scribbling, like all the monkeys in the zoo pounding typewriters, can anything ever come of it? Well, if the blogger is Fred First and the blog is Fragments from Floyd, the answer is yes, yes. Out of his blogging, which arises from his life and his place, Goose Hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Fred has created Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days.* A second edition is already in the works for this collection of short essays, many of them blog-post length, about 750 words, all gathered around a theme: this man finding his way in his place.

Slow Road Home was a series of blog- posts initially, yes, by a fellow intent on finding a path after resigning his job as a physical therapist at a local medical clinic. Fred was at loose ends, and his wife had given him her blessing "to work from home, learn this place, and write about it. This was a gift, and this book is a fruit of those morings alone that she gave me."

I suppose I could make a long list of the reasons I left my job that day. And there are good reasons that I could not have told you then. "The heart has reasons that reason does not know" and this time, at fifty-four, to my surprise, I chose to follow my heart.

Many of us might have pissed away such an opportunity like so many cups of coffee. Not Fred. He proceeded to establish his blog, Fragments from Floyd, proceeded to sort out who he was and what he was maybe going to do with the rest of his life, proceeded to learn the place he inhabited in all of its hidden intricacies, across all of its seasons.

It takes a lot of confidence to attempt finding yourself in such a public forum as a blog (and Fragments from Floyd did become and still remains a well-visited blog), and it takes even more confidence to learn the craft of writing in such a public space, a little bit like learning to walk a tight-rope, up there your very first time, with the whole crowd at the circus looking on.

By disposition and background, Fred was suited to the challenge. He is a little bit like a rat terrier in that way, I think, getting hold and refusing to let go. And he found he had a talent for writing, so he could pull it off. He wrote every day, "keeping a kind of field notebook."

It would become a guidebook to bring back the sound of wind in winter and the smell of pasture grass in moonlight; to remember the way it feels to watch the first fire of autumn in the stove or bring in the harvest from the garden; to lose a dog too soon, or gain the love of his successor at the edge of the creek.

Slow Road Home is divided into four parts. The first three are gathered under the heading "A Year at Home: June 2002 to July 2003." Do not worry of the specific dates here: like poetry, these little essays are news that stays new.

Fred calls Part One "Still, and Still Moving," and here he closely examines the meaning "in the fine details of everyday things." This would be the microscopic view. And it goes without saying that an exploration of a place that has seasons will have seasons, and "Still, and Still Moving" touches on "Summer Lightning," "Gossamer Days," "Fortress of Solitude: October Rain," "Edge of Winter," "Honor of Wood," "Breath of Spring," "Summer Symphony," and such. It takes paying attention to attend such a world, and Fred pays attention:

At last the days have been warm enough so that I am startled now and then by the smell of spring - not any particular and definable smell but rather a kind of teabag steeping of winter's gray dregs, the aroma of green things - mosses, new petals, and liverworts - and warm dark earth.

Part Two is called "Leaf, Feather and Fur." It is more the wide-angled view of "nature and the creatures and landforms that share this valley with me," Fred says. He looks at the honey bee and "The Season of Spiders;" he praises August and explains that "Every Drought Ends with a Good Rain;" he writes of the jewel weed, of the "Blueberry Hills," of the leaf knowing "when its time has come to fall." Of compost and turtles, of insects and the green tide rising. Of fireflies:

Last night late, we saw the first flashes in ones and twos - the earliest fireflies just practicing for the Hallelujah Chorus of Fireflies that will come in legions by late June. I close my eyes and see, in memory of summers past, a constellation of pulsing yellow-golden lights. They will come down to earth on a June night when we can smell the warm meadow in the dark, and we will see in the distance, at the edge of vision, silent flashes of summer lightning.

In Part Three, "Roads Remembered," Fred looks back at the people and places "that are fixed mountain peaks of my past," and that have guided him to this, his current incarnation and his current habitation. We cannot know who we are without knowing who we have been, and Fred recognizes that. This section is memoir, story-telling out of Fred's own story. "Finding Our Place" and "Chickens Come Home to Roost." "Labrador Tractor Abatement Policy" and "On Eagle Wings." "Good Life, Fertile Soil" and "Southern Snow." And other such "Kodachrome Reflections."

Found. Upstairs in the Very Back Room - a favorite photo of three violets. How well I remember: this was one of my very first flower images taken when I was a newly married graduate student. With my first month's teaching stipend, I bought a camera!

Part Four, "Rooted, Grounded, Found," is set off under the heading "Settled In Placed: July 2003 to October 2005." Again arranged in order of the months of the year, these pieces reflect the seasons of the place and the moods of the man over more than two years, "more personal, ranging from the sublimity of falling snow to the absurdities of married life."

"I think of them," Fred says, "as a celebration of the beautiful ordinary, in which I am finally at home."

This section is full of "The Plain and Simple Truth," such as this is:

I've been asked more than once what we plan to do with this land. Knowing the answer they expect from the owner of six fallow and fertile acres along a creek, I could tell my neighbors that someday we will fence it off to pasture a few head of cattle; or that we might plant Christmas trees like so many other landowners in the county who can't make their land pay for itself by farming alone. But I believe that from now on, when they ask me, I will tell them the truth: I plan to use this bottomland for taking spider-web pictures.

That should make for some raised eyebrows, don't you think?

Or this, "Savoring Autumn:"

Listen. Can you hear in the gentle susurrations before first light the papery sounds of leaves jostling, still clinging, barely, to twigs where already the watery sap is heading south for winter?

There is a little Henry David Thoreau in every one of us, and moreso in Fred First. There is a little Walden everywhere, and Fred has found his. He knows the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined place not worth inhabiting. If you're worth your salt, you know that. Fred does. This is "nature writing" in a way, in that it follows many of the conventions and traditions of nature writing. Yet it is more than niggling detail piled on wiggling detail. These particulars are more than particulars, but are local truths that are also universally true, as we like to say. Those of us who write to know the places we inhabit, and to know ourselves in those places, are often dismissed as merely "regional" writers; yet this kind of writing is essential if we are to know what life is and what it's worth. There are truths here in Fred's world that the more "cosmpolitan" among us may be blind to, to their loss. Anyone who dismisses such a fine examination as Slow Road Home as mere "regional" writing does not deserve the title "reader," but might be called instead "purveyor of ignorance." And there are a lot of such purveyors of ignorance who fail the examinations that matter. A fellow has come to a sad state if he thinks he cannot learn from such writing as is found in Fred First's little essays.

It is a slow road home. You know that, if you've ever tried to find your own way in this world. Getting to home requires careful attention to all the things around you; you have to watch your world, as Fred watches his world. What one dismisses as unworthy of attention may be exactly what he needs to learn. Fred knows that. I wish the mass of humanity realized it as well; this would be a far better and more interesting planet if they did.

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*Fred First, Slow Road Home: A Blueridge Book of Days. Goose Creek Press, Floyd, Virginia. $15.95. For more information: www.goosecreekpress.com .

Comments

[Lorianne]

Thanks for this "appreciation," Tom. I'm still slooooowly picking my way through Fred's book, savoring like a box of fine chocolates saved for special occasions versus cheap M&Ms that you inhale in one sitting. (Okay, that analogy is flawed since I've been known to inhale fine chocolates in an intemperate manner, but I think you get my gist!)

I've been reading snippets of Thoreau's 1851 journal with my first-year writing students, and it keeps striking me how blogger-like Thoreau's composition habits were, with his lectures and published essays being gleaned from the stockpile of his journal. Since blogs are one kind journal, it seems natural that we'd have Thoreauvian writers who would cultivate and then harvest them thusly.

[colleen]

Wonderful well-rounded review, Tom!

Fred's is the first blog I read and it's what gave me the inspiration to start my own. I wonder how many varieties of fruit have fallen from the Fragments family tree?