Padgett’s need to be comfortable hits him just before we start walking the final half-mile to the abandoned quarry, so he changes clothes with the pickup’s door open between David’s sister, Betsy, and Padgett’s boxer shorts and bare legs. The blue rain jacket borrowed from me is the first to go, draped over the open passenger door. It’s finally stopped raining, and the May sun is out.

When Padgett emerges from behind the dark blue door he is dressed for Southern summer already, in the long khaki shorts he had worn on the flight the day before. He has on a khaki shirt and a wide, brown leather belt cinched up a notch more than seems necessary. I look down and he is also wearing what he calls his “coachwhip catching shoes,” a well-worn set of Docksiders with no socks.

Then Padgett takes off down the trail behind Ab, David, and Betsy. His mood seems reflective, even somber. Maybe he is expectant, as a visitor is often expectant in a new landscape. For me, these young Piedmont woods are home base, the furniture of a deep, psychic comfort. Something lined up in me thirty years earlier when I first visited this abandoned quarry. When I stepped out of the truck I felt like I was suddenly rooted as deeply as a white oak. I wrote my first poem, “Collecting Snakes at the Abandoned Granite Quarry,” after visiting this quarry. David and I caught a coachwhip on that visit, an elusive snake known for its bad temper. When I first saw the place, I passed like some insect through metamorphosis, from college student to poet, though that student poem did not make me famous, as Padgett’s first novel, Edisto, had made him.

In the decades that followed there were many more poems for me, but I also began writing essays—long and short—about places like this abandoned quarry. I am interested in speaking for places that have become sanctuary through neglect, abandonment, or abuse. In other words, I became interested in most of the old South—abandoned rice fields, old canals, Piedmont quarries, collapsed mountain house sites deep in recovering woods. What interests me is that I imagine and encounter creatures in these places that don’t seem affected by the world closing in around them. There are snakes, lizards, salamanders, frogs, and toads living their lives untroubled—or so it seems on the surface—by the sprawl and spread of urban comfort zones. Even though populations may be endangered, individuals of a particular species are carrying on. It is in these places I have always practiced a “catch and release” sort of amateur herpetology learned in college from true scientists David and Ab, and today I’m returning to it.

A poem by Pattiann Rogers

Poetry by Reg Saner

Poetry by Paul Guest

Poetry by Julie Larios

Poetry by Christien Gholson

My father likes to tell the story of visiting the long-abandoned homestead near Rainy Butte, North Dakota, with his sister. They wanted to keep some of the land their family had farmed for generations, so before the estate sale they drove west from Minnesota with a shovel and a couple of five-gallon buckets, which they filled with enough soil to grow a few chives. After what my father calls their act of preservation, they stood in the field and looked at the sky and listened to the wind in the grass. The Great Plains, which used to teem with buffalo, are empty now, my father says, of everything but grass and wind. He and his sister meant to go into the house and search for remnants of their mother, but when they stepped onto the porch, where no one had stood in years, snakes shot out from under it in all directions, hundreds of snakes, I imagine, though he doesn’t mention a number. Instead of going in, they waited until the snakes were out of sight and then ran back to their car.

We’re afraid of snakes in part because they take us by surprise, like broken vows, so before opening the door of the house I just bought, where nobody has lived for twenty years, I kick the sill and rattle the panes of glass and wait a minute to let anything that might surprise me hurry into hiding. Better not to know so soon. A few dead wasps in cobwebs near the ceiling drift backward when I open the door, and clumps of hair on the floor roll over in the draft. The air smells like dirt. There’s no sound except the constant stream of language in my head. I listen to that for a while, as I might listen to water rolling over rocks in an actual stream.

Better not to know so soon because I’m standing in a house that friends advised me not to buy, and I want to like it for a while before I realize they were right. Dozens of apartment complexes stand beside the Beltway, with swimming pools and exercise facilities and man-made ponds full of cattails, and some of them offer discounts with the first and last months’ rent free. Discounts and convenience were exactly what I needed, my friends advised, until the shock wore off—my marriage had exploded—but I’ve avoided those places, perhaps because while living in them as a child I came to believe that you could never know when everything would fall apart. “The shit has hit the fan again,” my father would explain, and while I wondered if there was a way to turn the fan off, we’d pack and move to another of those places.

Instead of renting a convenient apartment, I bought an abandoned log cabin on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, sixty miles from Washington, where I work and where my children live with their mother. I wanted to be part of a historic context, not one of convenience, and I had reason to believe the cabin had been built by a Confederate soldier named Robert Eaton, based on the plat map I was given after purchasing the property, which was in ruins: the sill log was rotten, the mortar was crumbling, and the window sashes had buckled long ago. But I wanted to believe it could be restored to its original condition, like the cabin down the road, and that I could be the agent of its restoration.

Photo: unidentified woman, circa 1865, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Wood is not enough and stone not enough. The house is trembling always, and everywhere John sees rotting, cracking, paint peeling, pipes leaking. If the decay is not apparent, it is because it is hidden and pernicious. He feels panicked, as if the house might fly apart at any moment—nails shoot from wood, the walls shudder with fatigue and collapse. The friction that holds the nails is a poor and pitiful force with gravity and entropy conspiring against it. John walks through the house touching the walls with his fingertips. Hold fast, he whispers, hold fast.

Mary will be returning from the library board meeting soon. He checks that the boys are both asleep. Roger is six and Oliver will be turning eight in a few weeks. Mary has been planning a party for him—knights, costumes, dragons. She has asked John to clear a bower in the woods, a request he has neglected. He and Mary are both scattered in their energies, as if they could mount one half-decent love between them. He hopes they both avoid the children enough to keep this unevenness hidden from them.

Mary has been put in charge of the library’s evening lecture series; the previous month’s was a bit of a disaster. The speaker was a poet, widely known by name but little read. He arrived drunk and read without humor a series of poems about jizz and farting. He breathed ponderously through his nostrils. He offered no reflections when he finished, just snapped his book shut, shouldered his coat, and left.

For her the lectures are a vital leavening agent to life so far from the city. They add a civilizing texture without which she would feel that time was moving backward. The women of the board are more focused than Mary on self-betterment. They have traveled little and believe firmly in the idea of progress. They have appointed Mary to find the next speaker with the goal of avoiding the seamy flatness of the jizz poet, and, at the same time, drawing more of the men in town to the lecture. The women present it as a matter of broadening the appeal of the series, but each feels silently that they would like their betterment validated by the interest of men.

When Mary comes in, John pours her a glass of wine.

“They want more men to come,” she says. “Do you know any speakers men would be interested in hearing?” John is the editor of a magazine attached to a small art museum; he thinks of his work there as an ongoing attempt to cast light into the darkness, but his job, like everyone else’s there, is defined in terms of raising money. The women at the museum all dress in colorful accents and their hair is erratic. They speak urgently about everything, everything is so wonderful, so vital and exhilarating, so breathtakingly unique. Men, generally speaking, hate them all.

“What about Hugh MacPhearson?”

“He’s a bore,” says Mary. “And he always makes me feel like he’s doing us all such a favor.” MacPhearson writes a mystery series set in town. He had three or four mildly successful books, but has since written an additional twenty that clog the shelves in the bookstore.

You have been waiting forever—beached, scorched, weary—white handkerchief in your pocket ready to wave. But the lawyers won’t let you quit. They save you from yourself even though you want to plead guilty—unhappy in the first degree. When you enlisted and they asked Do you take?

A poem by Deborah Bogen

October again. The days go down heavily and soon. The morning comes later, cold and dark. Geese mark the gray sky. As much as I try, I will never like the fall.

When I was a child living in the woods with my parents, October meant darkness. October meant time inside. October signaled the coming of the spiders. I remember the linked geese passing overhead full of direction. I remember the melancholy hoots of distant trains in the morning as I waited for the school bus on Grover Hill. I studied my vaporous breath and made it mirror the trains’ exhalations. When one puff had fully disappeared, I blew out another impish breath to keep me company. The trains’ voices trailed south. October. Everything seemed to say, so long.

Death hung in the air. I heard the crackle of dry umber leaves underfoot and of gunshot echoes over the mountain. The frost-soft apples fell under bare trees, waited for deer. Mornings smelled cold and sterile, like certain snow.

October was a reaper stealing sunlight and abundance, leaving me to worry. I worried about the woodland animals. I worried about my family. Would we have enough wood, enough food? Would we all survive another long winter, each of us folded into our corners, dreaming?

Living off the land in the woods of Maine, my family spent many summer days intently thinking of winter—cutting wood, replacing chinking between logs, tending the garden, and canning its crop. However, nothing solidified winter’s certain arrival like the first frost. Stepping out of bed onto pine floors in the melon hues of dawn, my bones felt like icicles inside my skin. Outside, the field was an old giant’s beard, white and wiry. There was no more bounding out the front door in my nightshirt before my parents rose. No more barefoot, dew-soaked visits to the bullfrogs in the pond before breakfast. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. First thoughts questioned how to make it through the day. First thoughts were thoughts of night coming again so soon. Even the golden fields ablaze with morning sun couldn’t dispel images of the darkness to come inside our cabin.

Photo: Krysten Newby

A poem by Derek Sheffield

PALEY

William Paley, who lived from 1743 to 1805, was one of the most influential English authors of his time. He argued forcefully in his Natural Theology (1802) that the complex and precise design of organisms and their parts could be accounted for only as the deed of an Intelligent and Omnipotent “Designer.” The design of organisms, he argued, was incontrovertible evidence of the existence of the Creator.

Paley was an English clergyman intensely committed to the abolition of the slave trade and, by the 1780s, had become a much sought-after public speaker against slavery. He was also an influential writer of works on Christian philosophy, ethics, and theology. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) earned him prestige and the kind of ecclesiastical benefices that allowed him a comfortable life.

In 1800, Paley gave up his public speaking career for health reasons, providing him ample time to study science, particularly biology, and to write Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, the book by which he has become best known to posterity and which would greatly influence Darwin. With Natural Theology, Paley sought to update the work of another English clergyman, John Ray, author of Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation(1691). But Paley could now progress beyond Ray by taking advantage of a century of additional biological knowledge. Natural Theology is a sustained argument for the existence of God based on the obvious design of humans and their organs, as well as the design of all sorts of other organisms, considered by themselves and in their relations both to one another and to their environments. The argument is twofold: First, organisms give evidence of having been designed; second, only an omnipotent God could account for the perfection, multitude, and diversity of the designs.

Poetry by Dan Albergotti

Poetry by Bruce Smith