The World Is on Fire
Page 25
For more about spiders, refer to Jean-Henri Fabre’s The Life of the Spider, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. (Fabre’s The Life of the Fly, The Mason-Bees, and Hunting Wasps also make for lively reading.)
One of my favorite sources was Amos J. Loveday Jr.’s The Rise and Decline of the American Cut Nail Industry: A Study of the Interrelationships of Technology, Business Organization, and Management Techniques. Pick up a nail and see the world reflected there.
“What will it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”: see Mark 8:36.
ACT ONE
Damn Cold in February: Thanks to Ander Monson, who chose this essay for DIAGRAM. The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, administered by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was invaluable to me for this piece. Words don’t do justice to the debt we owe to the atomic veterans and the historians who interviewed them. Thank you.
I relied on John Goldrosen and John Beecher’s excellent Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly (New York: Da Capo, 2001) for details and quotations. The Crickets appeared on The Arthur Murray Party on December 29, 1957.
Special thanks to Tess; our long walks at St. George helped me work out the connections. I miss you.
Beautiful Beyond Belief: Thanks to Tara Rae Miner, who ably edited this essay before it appeared in Orion. Her help was instrumental in making the piece what it became. Thanks to my parents, Earl and Margie Tevis, for taking me to Rock City the first time, and to Richard and Sue Bernardy for taking me back.
For a useful history of grottoes and other follies, see Hazelle Jackson’s Shell Houses and Grottoes (Buckinghamshire: Shire, 2001). I also relied on Naomi Miller’s Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: George Braziller, 1982).
My thanks to Karen Baker, of Lookout Mountain, for more information about the gardens and about Clark Byers, barn painter. Anita Armstrong Capps’s See Rock City Barns: A Tennessee Tradition (Lookout Mountain: See Rock City, 1996) provided particulars about individual barns.
A visit to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico, provided key historical context for this piece. I am indebted to Ferenc Morton Szasz’s The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984) for its clear explanation of the Trinity project. See also “New Mexico’s Atomic Bomb Crater,” Life, September 24, 1945. See also The Manhattan Project: A Secret Wartime Mission (Carlisle: Discovery Enterprises, 1995) edited by Kenneth M. Deitch—concise and helpful.
No need to watch a horror movie when you can read Survival Under Atomic Attack: The Official U.S. Government Booklet (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1950).
For more about the Battle Above the Clouds, refer to B. F. Taylor’s Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain with Pictures of Life in Camp and Field (New York: Appleton & Company, 1872). This book provides a real sense of Taylor’s time embedded with the Union army. Dedication page: “To The Boys in Blue this little package of letters is respectfully inscribed.”
To learn more about tobacco farming, visit the Duke Homestead in Durham, North Carolina.
“You will beg the mountains to cover you, and the rocks to hide you”: see Hosea 10:8, Luke 23:30, and Revelation 6:16.
Ten Years You Own It: Thanks to Adam Kullberg, who chose this essay for Terrain. Thanks to David and Diantha LaVine for taking me to the Salton Sea, and circling back to make sure I got the details exactly right, despite a massive tilapia die-off.
Backstage with John the Beloved Disciple: Thanks to Darren Lawson for taking the time to explain tableau vivant to me, and for allowing me to go backstage and see the work as it happened. Thanks to Alison Gray for demonstrating her wigmaking skills.
Something Like the Fire: Thank you to my students in Atomic Literature, Spring 2011. Your discoveries fueled my own. A trip to the National Atomic Testing Museum, in Las Vegas, Nevada, provided particulars and inspiration. I also referred to Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing: 1951-1993 (Washington, DC: US Department of Energy, 2006).
The Measure of My Days (Buddy Holly Reprise): Thank you to Jenny Willoughby and Kurt Gegenhuber, boon companions, adventurers, and wonderful writers, for driving me to Clear Lake and points beyond (Manly; Forest City). Thank you to Phyllis Willis, fairy godmother of Fertile, Iowa, for leading us to the crash site.
To learn more about pianomaking, see Steinway and sons “The Making of a Steinway.”
ACT TWO
Warp and Weft: Thank you to Steve Gailey and Rená Welzbacher for sharing their mill stories with me. Steve Richardson at the Furman University Library helped with sources and shared his encyclopedic knowledge about this part of our state’s history. Bill Ranson let me tag along on his tour of the Greenville Crescent. Thanks to Tom and Popie Whitted for taking the time to show me around the Easley Mill. Special thanks to Brad Raines, true friend and knower of every back road in the upstate.
I relied on Easley Mill Memories: 1900-1991, edited by Tony Owens (Easley: Easley Mills Reunion Committee, 1991) for particulars about the mill I visited. Wilt Browning’s Linthead: Growing Up in a Carolina Cotton Mill Village (Asheboro: Down Home Press, 1990) focuses on life in Easley during the 1940s and 1950s. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) edited by Hall, Leloudis, Korstad, et al. was a foundational piece of scholarship for me. The oral histories and context collected there provide an overall picture of what life on the mill hill was like. The excellent Textile Town: Spartanburg County, South Carolina, edited by Betsy Wakefield Teter (Spartanburg: Hub City Writers Project, 2002) provided invaluable context for upstate textile mill communities.
For more about mill smokestacks, refer to the fascinating Alphons Custodis Chimney Construction Company’s Radial Brick Chimneys booklet (New York: 1924). I am in awe of what these masons created—and the integrity that many of these chimneys still display.
“The Lord can raise up these stones to give praise”: see Luke 19:40.
Coathook in an Empty Schoolhouse: Thanks to Furman University for supporting the research travel to fading railroad towns in North Dakota. Thanks to Lauren Cobb and Sean Hill for risking trespassing charges with us.
The Scissorman: Thanks to Ralph E. Lee, the Scissorman, who let me tag along on two separate occasions and graciously answered scores of questions about his job. Thanks to Mary Alice Kirkpatrick, research companion, who rode shotgun and helped me keep pace with the Scissorman’s van.
Hammer Price (Song of the Auctioneer): Thanks to Mike Hendrix for taking the time to explain the finer points of auctioneering to me. Our conversation was a real pleasure.
Reader, do yourself a favor and listen to Flatt & Scruggs play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
Pacing the Siege Floor: Thanks to Bev Hogue of Marietta College, Ohio, for making it possible for me to visit Fenton while it was still open. Thanks to Jolene Powell, artist at Marietta College, for visiting the Marble King factory with me, and sharing her amazing photographs of the cullet piles there. For more glass history see E. William Fairfield’s Fire and Sand: The History of the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company (Cleveland: Lezius-Hiles, 1960).
ACT THREE
What the Body Knows: Thanks to Furman University for supporting the research travel for this essay. Thanks to Terrell Dixon of Houston, Texas, for giving me the idea to visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the first place. Thanks to Amy Leland, gifted midwife. Thanks to Dirk Nickisch and Danielle Tirrell of Coyote Air, Coldfoot, Alaska. Thanks to Jennifer Sahn for her thoughtful editing of this piece before it appeared in Orion.
Special thanks to Carl Donohue of Expeditions Alaska, best damn guide in the land.
For more about the plants and mosses of Alaska, refer to Plants of the Western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland, by Derek Johnson, Linda Kershaw, Andy MacKinnon, and Jim Pojar (Edmonton, AB: Lone Pine Publishing, 1995). Trevor Go
ward, lichenologist, delighted me at every turn.
The World Is On Fire: The Cave of the Apocalypse:
Section 6: see Revelation 1:9, 10.
Section 7: Johnny Cash, “The Man Comes Around.”
Section 8: see Psalms 90:12.
Section 10: see Revelation 10:9. The Melville quote is from Chapter 132 of Moby-Dick, “The Symphony” (New York: Norton, 1999).
Section 11: see Revelation 21:4 and Revelation 1:11.
For more about the lives of the saints, refer to Voraigne’s The Golden Legend (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892).
Touch the Bones: For more about La Specola, refer to Encyclopaedia Anatomica: Museo La Specola Florence by Monika von Düring and Marta Poggesi (Cologne: Taschen, 2006).
I am also indebted to The Anatomical Waxes of La Specola, by Rumy Hilloowala, translated and edited by Joseph Renahan (Florence: Arnaud, 1995).
For more about the Capuchin Monastery in Rome, refer to The Cemetery Crypt, by Father Rinaldo Cordovani (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2012). My thanks to Bill Aarnes for bringing a copy back from Italy for me.
For more about hair jewelry, refer to Helen Sheumaker’s excellent Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Special thanks to Renée Zitkloff.
Somebody to Love: Thanks to Kendall Driscoll for explaining the music theory behind the song. Her help was invaluable.
Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” appeared in Birds of America (New York: Picador, 1999).
For the full text of Jonh Ingham’s delicious profile on Queen, see “A Riot at the Opera: Queen Triumphant,” Sounds, November 29, 1975. I referred to Phil Sutcliffe’s compendium, Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2009) for details about Brian May’s “Red Special” guitar, as well as the band’s early years.
Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1952): “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?”
FINALE
Some Memory of Daylight: Thanks to Stephen Quinn, former curator at the American Museum of Natural History, for showing me around backstage and answering my many questions. His excellent Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Abrams, 2006) gave me the idea for this essay. I also referred to Karen Wonders’s fine Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993). Thanks to Mai Qaraman for her help in the museum archives.
Thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, via Furman University’s Shi Center for Sustainability, for the funding that allowed this research travel to take place. Thanks to Julie Goolsby for leading us around town like a boss. Thanks to Diantha LaVine for helping me find the sites in the Smokies. Thanks to Annette Hartigan, formerly of the National Park Service, for answering so many of my questions about the Walker sisters.
For more about the Walker sisters, see John Maloney’s “Time Stood Still in the Smokies,” Saturday Evening Post, April 27, 1946. See also Rose Houk’s The Walker Sisters of Little Greenbrier (Gatlingburg: Great Smoky Mountains Association, 2005). I also referred to Robert R. Madden and T. Russell Jones’s Mountain Home: The Walker Family Farmstead (Washington, DC: National Park Service, US Department of Interior, 1977).
Some of these essays have appeared previously in the following magazines:
“Beautiful Beyond Belief: Rock City and Other Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age” and “What the Body Knows” appeared in Orion.
“Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb” appeared in DIAGRAM.
“Brain Sweat and Blueprints,” “The Scissorman,” and “Girl Power: Ode to the Demolition Derby” appeared in Oxford American.
“Ten Years You Own It” appeared in Terrain.
“What Looks Like Mad Disorder: The Sarah Winchester House” appeared in Ecotone.
Thanks to everyone who sustained, encouraged, read, and wandered with me during the writing of this book. Gilbert Allen, keen of eye and generous of heart. Hannah Auringer. Charles Baxter. Jim Cihlar. Lisa Colby. Valerie Jean Conner and Stan Makielski. All my Furman compatriots. Caroline Goforth. Julie Goolsby. Laura Flynn. Renata Golden. Braden Kerwin. Sarah Lageman. Amy Leach. Kim Meyer. Rachel Moritz. Juliet Patterson. Steve Gailey, Durham Hunt, and Rulinda Price, research librarians at the South Carolina Room, Greenville County Library. Mike Rollin. Lynne Shackelford.
Special thanks to Earl Tevis, automotive consultant and guru, for identifying all of the cars in this book—of which there are a fair number. Special thanks to Margie Tevis, founder of Camp Grandma Margie, which allowed me extra time to write.
Particular thanks to everyone at Milkweed Editions, especially Daniel Slager and Patrick Thomas. Your love for books heartens me and gives me hope. Thanks to Casey O’Neil and Connor Lane for tirelessly spreading the good word.
Thank you, Caroline. You are a true road warrior with the spirit of adventure and a thousand-yard stare. Research travel—and, come to think of it, pretty much everything else—is so much better with you along for the ride.
Thank you, David, for reading everything first and often, for shouldering the load at home so I could finish, for being ready for anything, for staying strong. From Apalach to Brownlow Point, Bombay Beach to Weeki Wachee, from Florence to Rome and all the way home, this is for you most of all.
Formerly a park ranger, factory worker, and seller of cemetery plots, JONI TEVIS is author of the acclaimed book of essays, The Wet Collection. Her nonfiction has been published in Oxford American, the Bellingham Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, and Orion. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at Furman University in Greenville, SC, where she also lives.
Interior design by Mary Austin Speaker
Typeset in Baskerville
English type founder, stonecutter, and letter designer John Baskerville (1706–1775) began his career as a headstone engraver, snuff-box japanner and writing master before starting his printing business. The first book Baskerville printed took seven years to produce, during which time he was responsible for major innovations in press construction, ink, papermaking and letter design. His work was admired by Fournier, Bodoni and Benjamin Franklin, among others, and revived in the 1920s by Bruce Rogers.