Word: pick-up
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Which brings us back to the Marcus Garvey House, and across the street to a bus pick-up corner, on Friday morning. A small kid, maybe a fourth grader, who I had noticed earlier holding his mother's hand in their doorway, whispering and pointing, suddenly broke loose and hustled up to the corner to join two other children waiting for their bus. "Hey, maybe we missed it," he was telling them before long, beginning to strut and lecture like a little headmaster himself. "We missed that bus, I'm telling you. It's gone," he kept repeating. And after...
...uncle had the vehicle: a 1952 Chevy pick-up bought run-to-death for $180 in 1956 when Bell's uncle received his Korean bonus. The previous owner had been a rural mailman famed for his flying delivery service, driving his 85-mile route in under two hours over bad West Virginia roads, slinging packages and newspapers at rotting front steps in the nascent mountain morning, steering with his knee, one hand on the shift, one slinging, and two wheels off the ground. The radio, Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzell, turned all the way up: "Hunny jes LOW me nother...
...through his mind and Bell, who liked Hank Williams but liked Dylan more, bailed out the passenger side, into the lawn bordering the driveway. Just then his uncle, sighting down the Redfield 3x9 that made the truck look like he could sneeze on it, hit the gas tank. The pick-up just rumbled for a second, and there was a dripping sound as gas leaked on to the cement. Then the truck joined its brother the Merc, 20 years late, M-80s--July Fourth--Dealy Plaza--Day of the Locust craziness...
...pick-up chugged along, with the cab humping upward every third beat somewhat like a caterpillar crawl. It was the single dirtiest vehicle I had ever ridden in--when I retrieved my bright-red backpack out of the back at the end of my ride, it had turned brown, brown with black racing stripes. Come to find out the driver carried his organic fertilizer around back there, mostly cow manure, that is, with pig and chicken droppings thrown in as a kicker. But you couldn't ask for a more pleasant ride--Mt. Pisgah National Forest, hills and dales, glinting...
That morning I had found a note and a road map tacked to the door of a house in Black Mountain, N.C., where some friends of mine lived, a note which said "We've gone to Sliding Rock. Come!" with directions. Those directions had ended me up in this pick-up, and just around the corner was "my river," where Sliding Rock was. I had seen the gleam of contentment on the faces of those who knew about Sliding Rock before--to people who live in the mountains the Rock is what a mud slide is to otters...