Ah, Booyz, that’s good
Kind Hearts, this hurricane has made me think about water, and I can say with certainty that water once had a role in my grandparents’ life that was near to a religion. Several years ago, a friend sent me a warning that confused me. “An organization named Nestlé is coming for your water.” What the hell? I struggled to understand how anyone could steal my water.
Well, I was pathetically ignorant of the modern world’s devious plans. They had come for our timber and our natural resources. Now they have come for our water. I still find it hard to believe that Nestlé that makes chocolate is going to control the commercial bartering of our water, but it is true. I also read that my favorite coffee, Starbucks, is “In cahoots” with Nestlé. Damn, I hate to stop buying Starbucks, but so be it.
In the world where I once lived, water was at the heart of everything. Every household had either a well or a spring, and I loved to open the little door on my grandfather’s spring house where spring lizards scurried across the bottom of the spring stirring up sand and, according to my grandfather, kept “the spring water pure.” When we visited the Plemmons family, I could let down the bucket in the well and listen to that awesome, magnified sound of water drops falling into the darkness. My grandfather had a water system that consisted of hollow pine logs fitted together and bringing cold spring water to our back porch where my grandmother’s butter and eggs and milk sat in a trough filled with continual running water (and where I once kept a trout). Each night, my grandfather stood with a gourd dipper and drank his fill.
Gone now. All of that magic was going, even then.
When my grandfather drove that oil truck up Glenville Mountain, or to the rock crusher in Little Canada, there were places where he would pull over and get his tin dipper out of the glove compartment and disappear into the undergrowth to where he and a multitude of others knew there was that rare thing, an unpolluted spring. Often the water was running from a pipe, driven into a rock bed, and the water sprang up from that pipe in a steady stream. Often times, there was a gourd, or a Garrett Sweet Snuff Glass jar atop of a stake. The water was crystal clear and ice cold because it had filtered through rock and tree roots and my grandfather would stand reverently drinking a kind of water that was becoming a rarity. Each time the roadbed was rebuilt and each time construction work uprooted a water system buried in the mountainside, another water system vanished.
Twenty years ago, the county agent told me there was no longer such a thing as an unpolluted well or spring. Trailer parks and housing construction had polluted them all. Eventually, tree roots did in my grandfather’s unique water system and finally, water tests indicated that even the old springs (guarded by spring lizards) were contaminated. I bowed to the god Progress and got “city water.”
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One of my recurring dreams is of my grandfather rising from his bed at 2 o’clock in the morning and walking barefoot through the house to get a drink of water. Sometimes I would peer from my bedroom at him, standing there in the Moonlight in his long johns, drinking from that long-handled gourd dipper, and halting now and again to whisper, “Ah, Booyz, that’s good.” I never knew what “booyz” meant, but both of my grandparents said it. It indicated they were experiencing a profound pleasure. When my grandmother died in the hospital, the nurse brought a wash cloth dipped in ice water to her room and washed her face. My grandmother smiled. “Does that feel good, Mrs. Carden?” My grandmother replied, “Ah, Booyz, it does.”
So, on we go, Kind Hearts. After we repair the damage created by the hurricane, progress is still coming to Rhodes Cove. On the mountain above me, I used to flush grouse and pheasants, which would rise like thunder and scare me badly. Now, there is only silent timber, abandoned springs and the distant sound of traffic. Pavement and street lights creep closer each day. Wish me well.
(Gary Carden is one of Southern Appalachia’s most revered literary figures and has won a number of significant awards for his books and plays over the years, including the Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers Association in 2001, the Brown Hudson Award for Folklore in 2006 and the North Carolina Arts Council Award for Literature in 2012. His most recent book, “Stories I lived to tell,” is available at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, or online through uncpress.org.)
