Dead Letters: The Afflicted Areas

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

In the fall of 1968 I set out to interview Wilma Dykeman, and the animals of the mountains would not let me arrive.

She was the reason for the trip and I should say who she was, because she has never been as famous as the country she wrote about deserved. Thirteen years before, she had published The French Broad, a book that took a river and its whole watershed and the people strung along it and set them down as one living thing, the water and the mills and the mountain families and what they had done to each other. She wrote about the river the way you write about a person you have known your entire life and do not entirely forgive. She lived over in Newport, Tennessee, on the far side of the high mountains from Asheville, and I had a commission to go and get her talking about her books, and I drove west out of Asheville on a bright cold morning with a list of questions about literature on the seat beside me.

I did not use the questions.

The squirrels began before I was out of Buncombe County. One, then a scatter, then a thing I had no frame for. Gray squirrels were crossing the road in numbers that made the road itself seem to move, going one direction, west and north, the way I was going, as though the whole animal population of the Blue Ridge had been given the same instruction on the same morning and was carrying it out without hurry and without stopping. The dead ones lined the shoulder for as far as I could see in the mirror, not the occasional casualty you pass in ordinary country but a continuous thing, a hem of them along both sides of the pavement, and more coming down out of the trees to take the places of the ones the cars had taken.

Where the road ran along a reservoir I stopped and got out. They were in the water. Not at the edge, drinking. Out in it, dozens of them, small dark heads pushed north across a mile of open lake toward the far shore, swimming with the terrible steadiness of things that will not consider turning around, and some of them were not going to make the far shore, and they swam anyway. I stood on the bank and watched one go under without any fuss, the small wake closing over the place, and I got back in the car.

The towns were worse, because the towns had decided to help. Somebody had gotten it into the county that the squirrels were starving, and the county had responded with the particular energy of people who have finally been handed a disaster they can love. There were signs in the grocery windows asking shoppers to buy an extra sack of nuts for the poor creatures. At a filling station a man told me, proud, that folks up his hollow were mailing boxes of acorns and hickory nuts down to the hardest-hit places, that his own wife had packed and sent two, and that it was a comfort to be doing something. I did not tell him what I had watched go under in the reservoir. I bought my gas and drove on with the boxes of acorns riding somewhere in the mail all around me, kindness in brown paper, addressed to the afflicted areas, coming to feed animals that were at that hour drowning by the thousand in water no acorn could reach.

I got to Newport in the middle of the afternoon and found her on her own ground, unhurried, in a sweater against the cold, looking at the same thing I had been driving through all day as though it were a page she had read before. I told her what I had seen. I told her about the man mailing acorns.

She was quiet a moment. The trees made too much the year before, she said. A hard mast year, acorns past counting, and every squirrel born to it living through a soft winter into a fat spring, until there were more of them than an ordinary woods could hold. Then the ordinary year came and the trees rested and the table was cleared, and here was the multitude.

I said something about the man and his boxes of acorns.

She looked at me. He'll mail nuts to a squirrel, she said, and vote down the thing that would keep the river alive, and go to bed easy on both.

I had come with questions about her novels. I never asked them. We stood in her yard while the light went, and she did not perform for me and did not offer me a quotable thing, and I understood that the book I had driven over the mountains to discuss was the country I had just driven through, and that she had written it down years before it climbed into the trees and came out gray and started for the water.

I drove back east in the dark. The dead were still along both shoulders where the headlights found them, and out on the black reservoir I could not see but knew were the swimmers, still going north, still not turning. Behind me in the post offices of those hills the boxes were stacking up for the morning trucks, brown paper, correctly addressed, fully paid, bound for the afflicted areas, where nothing left alive would be able to open them.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.