PicoBlog

Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Before I taught creative writing, I taught regular English classes. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was on the syllabus for both ENG III and AP Language. We read the work for our novel unit.

One of our many discussions of this book centered around the possible reasons for the collapse of society in the novel. McCarthy never reveals the cause of the scorched, ash-covered landscape. We floated some ideas: a civil war, a cataclysmic meteorite strike,  and the most popular one, nuclear war. 

We talked about different nuclear war scenarios, either retaliatory, preemptive, or aggressive. We discussed the possibility of an accidental nuclear strike, and we read the hair-raising events surrounding Stanislav Petrov, who saved the world in 1983. We studied survival and went on a scavenger hunt throughout the school to find items that we would need to survive a nuclear blast. (Incidentally, my rural kids beat the city kids hands down in this challenge. Almost all of them knew how to hunt and fish, so apparently Hank Williams Jr. was correct: country folks will survive. )

One day as we ended class with a particularly depressing discussion about mutually assured deterrence and mutual assured destruction, a boy in the front row looked up at me and said, “When are they going to do this?” 

I’ll never forget Stevie.  

With his skinny neck and cheap t-shirt, dirty shoes and grease under his fingernails, he was a kid who lived in the mountainous part of our county, a kid who felt more comfortable in the woods or in auto tech than in English class, a kid whose life, up to that point, had not convinced him of a future that would include anything other than disenfranchisement. 

He had internalized a certain cultural powerlessness, that his life was determined by others more powerful than he and that he was impotent to change it. Perhaps this was some vestige of an Appalachian fatalism or an echo of some granny who told him that “a night was coming when no man would work.” 

Whatever the cause, there he was, asking me to tell him when the end of the world was scheduled to occur. It was a sobering moment. I weakly explained The Road was just a novel and no one was planning on ending the world for real, but I’m not sure I was convincing. Even to myself. 

When my class collectively came to the end of The Road, having traveled through pages and pages of gray ash with the boy and the man, I read the last paragraph out loud to them. And cried. 

This time… and every time after that…I read the last paragraph thinking about that kid. A kid more familiar with brook trout than I was, a kid whose DNA told him more about the things which could not be put back than I or McCarthy ever could. And a kid who had tacitly accepted the end of the world as we know it. 

When McCarthy died last week, I thought about Stevie and the hundreds of students I’ve stood in front of over my career. And I was reminded again of Wendell Berry’s weighty requirement of teachers, that we give students tools against loneliness in order to allow them freedom in this world.

ncG1vNJzZmivop7BqrrGrZyam5iav2%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xop2ismJp6sa3Rmp6rmaCdeqLAjK2fnmWVo7Fuu8Vmq6GdXae8orA%3D