Been thinking about…The bones of the earth

From the cool cab of the truck, I look south. Thick forest briefly falls away, hardwood oak and hickory cleared for the power lines loping over the ridges. Beyond the deep gully, the long, knife ridge cuts through the clearing to reveal ancient limestone, a backbone of the Ozarks, the easily overlooked bones of the earth even now covered in scrubby grass.

More curves ahead and at the old and raggedy junction, I turn south. Cicadas call loudly. The forest is thick, nearly hiding a rundown cabin, cat briar taking the front porch and decaying lattice slats. Broken windows are dark and beyond the cabin, the ridge already begins to fall away. Ahead, cows graze on open pasture, a rare flat spot in such hilly country, wide shoulders of the earth.

“The Ozarks are resting on a huge bed of crystal,” a strange, elderly, shawl-clad woman from Massachusetts — or was it Maine? — told me once, before flapping away. “That’s why the energy here is so powerful.” Yeah, sure, whatever. The summer heat and a grinding daily schedule can wear down any magic, especially as tourist traffic snarls and the full moon pulsing overhead drives us just a little mad. “That’s all just crazy talk. What do you believe in the moon?” Words like “magic” are dirty words, reserved for wacky people. Polite society doesn’t talk about such things for fear of being labeled weird, or worse. And stigmas die hard deaths. But even the most stalwart and objective in society — if they work with the public during a full moon — know something happens.

Emergency services, healthcare workers, teachers, customer service, retail, we learn pretty fast that folks go kind of crazy at certain consistent times — and paying attention to the moon will at least give us a little bit of heads up. Besides, if the moon can move oceans, it can probably move us too, especially seeing how we are essentially just big Ziploc bags full of salt water anyway.

A long time ago, the Ozarks tourism campaigns leaned into the whole “Ozarks as magic” thing, crafting a unique, hillbilly “other” with wild, folkloric ways and granny women and healing waters. It’s easy enough to dismiss those stories now in the face of modern ideas. But there is a materialism in the modern life that never quite sits as easily as it should, all money and plastic and carefully crafted spreadsheets and returns-on-investment. Sometimes those plans even work, but there is empty fulfillment in the end, just more tallies in one column and fewer in another. Humans were not meant for sterile ideas, or a world bereft of magic.

I slow the truck, preparing for another turn. Against expectation, there is magic on these old ridges and in these deep hollers and deep in my bones I feel the call to stop the truck, get out, and wander deep into the woods. This was once a place for running the ridges, once a place to delve deeply in shadowed coves, looking for magic plants, plants with names like ginseng, witch hazel, elderberry, goldenseal. The sun is hot, intensely hot, but the moon’s magic remains strong this week. Goofy cartoons and bad werewolf movies taught us the moon only affects us when it is seen at night. The wolf man doesn’t transform until the clouds part and he looks the moon. But that’s not how any of this works. Just the same, I won’t go wandering into the woods this afternoon. I have a schedule to keep, trespassing laws to not break, and the dark woods come with danger of their own. As the sun drops, the copperheads and pygmy rattlers will emerge from their rock dens and leafy, shadowed cover to hunt.

If expectation holds, the weather will continue to be summertime hot for another two months. The tomatoes will keep ripening, the lake water will keep heating up, and we will keep griping about the weather. And after all that, autumn will arrive, but not a cool, crisp, New England autumn with bonfires and hot cider but instead a Southern autumn that heats up to a thick 90 degrees in the afternoon, causing even the most steadfast to melt beneath hopeful checked flannels by midday. “Isn’t it supposed to be fall,” we will say, exasperated. But the truth is, the weather did the same thing last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Real autumn arrives on Halloween and often not a minute before.

Through all the seasons, all the cycles, all the moments, our petty resentments, our busyness, our collective outrage and hope and fear and distrust and anger, this old world really hasn’t changed that much and the deep energies and magic and lessons remain the same. The things that really matter are often the things most easily overlooked — chickens pecking at an old fruit rind, brown sugar in the coffee, the touch of an old friend’s hand. We still breathe in, still breathe out, our blood still courses through our veins, all red, all the same beneath the arguments and heat.

And outside, beyond, in another last day of another last deep summer, silently pulsing in their own strange way, the bones of the earth wait, calling us to other parts of ourselves, most often the kinder, better, deeper, most painful parts that we wish to ignore the most.