The Wormlips Scrapbook

At last — in case anyone cares — here is documentation of my trip to West Virginia: eight days of hiking hiking hiking condensed into a six-minute slideshow featuring an appropriately bluegrassy soundtrack. All the photos were taken on Dad’s farm, except when I accidentally wandered off by following the wrong ridge. On my connection the slideshow takes a couple minutes to load, unfortunately. Once it’s ready for you, a little “play” triangle will appear in the lower left corner of the movie screen.

Next, below is a little time-lapse photo thing I put together, also with a lovely little soundtrack. If you try to load this at the same time you load the thing above, your system will choke. I took the photos from the deck of our house. Dad built that thar snake fence years ago:

And here are a few stills. This is my still-beautiful, nearly-80-year-old mother who gave birth to three odd-looking children:

Here is a picture Molly took of me visiting my father in Lewisburg:

And here is a picture Lulu took of me as I snoozed on the flight home. I found it by accident on her photo blog. I should sue her:

Before I upload my pictures from my recent visit to West Virginia, I’ll tell you about one day in particular: our field trip to Talcott: “The home of the John Henry Legend.” I’d spent a lot of time tromping around there while producing Steel Drivin’ Man. You can read more about the documentary or visit the old Web site I did about it years ago, or read an article I wrote about producing the program, or download a PDF of the program transcript.

Not only that, you can listen to the half-hour documentary (which aired on Weekend All Things Considered, among other places) right smack here:

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So anyway… Anna, Molly and Bates accompanied me on my pilgrimage to Talcott, about an hour from Dad’s farm. My real goal for the day was to see Mamma Ginna, now in a nursing home, but I also wanted to show my guests the Great Bend Tunnel and some of the other landmarks that are close to my little old heart. I hadn’t been in town for five seconds before I started running into people I’d interviewed over ten years ago. Here’s how Anna describes it:

We’d go a few blocks and there’d be someone you’d know and they’d greet you with open arms and it was so exciting. Like, you hadn’t even gotten your foot in the door of the corner store when that woman screamed Ginna! And then the next thing you knew we’d be in their homes and they’d be offering us soft drinks and candy. They were so happy to see you and so open with their stories.

That was fun. A lot of the people I interviewed are dead, but some of the ones who were instrumental to my work are still around: Donna and Kenni and Bill.

We stopped to see Mamma Ginna’s daughter-in-law, B, whom I’d met only once in person but have been talking to on the phone a lot since Mamma Ginna had her last big stroke. B was a total delight: smart and funny and full of character. She’s also quite exceptional in Talcott: a white woman long-married to a black man in this traditionally southern small town. Her hubby, Buck, had sudden gutter work to do when I asked to take his picture, but B obliged. Here she is with Lulu and me:

Then it was off to the nursing home where, we’d been warned, Mamma Ginna might not recognize me any more. But after a split second of confusion, she lit up and we had the most wonderful visit. She looks beautiful and her eyes still sparkle and you’d never guess she’s 94. Here’s Anna again:

Mamma Ginna was full of wonderful stories. She remembered you two. It took her a moment. And then she got all comfy and you held her hands and she went on and on with her childhood stories over and over which made her feel really good. When she spoke it seemed that maybe she didn’t have this long for this life and that you and Molly meant a lot to her.

She was still able to recite from memory parts of her 1930s poem about when the state knocked down her grandparents’ homeplace to make room for the highway. Here are the last two verses:

I go there every summer,
Just to fish and swim.
There’s no one there to greet me,
No home to enter in.

I often sit and wonder
Just why it had to be.
But the old home place we loved so well,
Was more than a heaven to me.

After an hour, as I reluctantly took my leave, she did something she’d never done before: cried. It was like the time I said goodbye to Dad when we both knew it was the last time. Here are some pictures of when we were still laughing:

Here’s part of the statue on the hill above the tunnel. You can see the railroad tracks in the background:

Here’s the tunnel, which has finally collapsed somewhere in the middle; you can no longer see a pinpoint of light at the other end:

And here’s me hugging my tunnel:

In 1993 I wrote a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce a half-hour documentary about the John Henry legend and the small West Virginia town where it took root.

Dad was the one who told me about Talcott, reputed to be the site of the legendary race with the steel drill. He and I visited a couple times, climbing down to the railroad tracks and hacking our way through dense and prickly undergrowth to find the entrance to the abandoned Great Bend Tunnel.

The radio production turned out to be a gargantuan project, another of those five-cent-an-hour labors of love, and the last big documentary I did. Also probably my favorite. Steel Drivin’ Man aired in a couple of places, including All Things Considered, in ‘95.

I was asked to write articles for the NEA Web site and for a South African print publication about the process of producing the program. Here’s one version: Looking for John Henry.

Right afterwards — my first all-by-myself Web project — I decided to build a site about it. There was a lot less stuff on the Web back then — a much cozier place — so a lot of people found my site and contacted me for John Henry info. Among those were representatives from Disney, who’d decided to produce an animated short about the legend. One person who didn’t contact me but who apparently found my information useful in writing his bestseller [oops: did that smack of bitterness? sorry] was Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days. According to his essay on the Random House Web site:

I knew vaguely I wanted to do a modern update of the John Henry story. But I didn’t know much about him except for half-remembered details from the legend. So one day … I plugged the man’s name into a search engine.

Well, there are a lot of John Henrys, a lot of Johns, and a lot of Henrys. So I added various keywords such as hammer, steel-driving, etc., and narrowed it down. I didn’t find that much. Put such a search into Google these days, and you’ll get almost six thousand hits. But these were the early days of the web…

Anywho, the next thing I found was a web page for Ginna Allison’s radio documentary “Steel Drivin’ Man,” broadcast on NPR in 1995. Well, this was news. Until then I had no idea that there was an historical basis to the story. I had thought it was just a legend. Ambiguity! Conflicting stories! Now I was cooking with gas, or at least getting my grocery list together. I’m glad this page is still on the web, and hasn’t gone on to that Big Link in The Sky.

Now that I had a name of a town, Talcott, West Virginia, I started noodling around with that…

I would’ve loved a mention in his book’s credits, but oh well.

So… for posterity, here is that old John Henry site. There was actually an earlier (funkier but more interesting) version that I don’t have any more.

If I can ever figure out how to do audio for the Web, I’ll put the program up here too.

Editor’s Note September 17, 2008: Hey, check it out! I figured it out. Here’s the program…

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