I’d always thought every good American took his garbage to a landfill every week, but it turns out if you live in town, like the McCobbs did, there are people that come and take it for you. I was amazed. An entire truck existing for the sole purpose of garbage. Men working their way down the street, emptying people’s cans. A town thing.
This excerpt is from the novel I am reading this month, DEMON COPPERHEAD. It can be found on page 151 of the author’s, ( Barbara Kingsolver), novel. I am not finished reading her book as my days are still filled with trying to help family members who are and have been courageously healing. I am blessed to have a large family and be part of an even larger family that extends a hand, a prayer, a meal, a piece of their time to help others in need. Ironically Demon Copperhead is about a boy born into a family that at first consists of just him and his single mother. They live in a single wide trailer in southern Appalachia.
This story is written in the first person account. Demon tells the story. His story. Life growing up in poverty peppered with abuse, loss, anger that opens the door to foster care and more abuse. Barbara Kingsolver’s talented empathetic ability to write/walk in a young male pre teen’s shoes and inspire the vision of Demon’s days and nights from his point of view is remarkable. What’s more this isn’t the Appalachia so often depicted in stories during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Demon’s Appalachia also had Walmarts, pawnshops and truck stops, all places for moving things one way or the other along that road. ( page 151). Damon, nicknamed Demon, red-hair copper like, and living with snakes in their hilly back yards, last name moniker, Copperhead. The author, Barbara Kingsolver, introduced me to many characters who run through their daily dramas wearing their own nicknames. You quickly meet Maggot, Tommy Waddles, Fast Forward, Swap-Out, U-haul, Angus, a girl, along with other characters.
The novel is rich with detail of southern Appalachia life. The rural touching the city. Demon Copperhead lays out a tapestry of a world as seen through a young boy’s eyes as he finds his place in an order of poverty, broken families and broken adults wearing shattered dreams.
I love to read. Obvious I know. Over sixty five years ago, I read about boys not much younger than I who led lives of adventure, exploration and growing self awareness; Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Jody in Rawlings’ The Yearling to mention a few. In high school and college, I immersed myself with Dicken’s David Copperfield and his myriad of other young characters especially Tiny Tim. Those characters introduced themselves to me as I was pretending to be an adult. (You know, fake it until you make it!) Over the past few years I have met young characters in the Nickel Boys and today I am meeting Demon. My old man eyes see Elwood in Whitehead’s novel and Demon in Kingsolver’s novel from a point of view that makes me think and remember snapshots of my earlier life. I look forward to finishing Demon Copperhead.
As I sit this month leaning against my metaphorical lighthouse, my gaze is upon the sea that is riled by a hurricane that is passing New England by, out at sea. Another has just bit Florida’s northern Gulf coast hard. My thoughts of course are with everyone in the path of Mother Nature’s wrath. I also have memories brought to my old brains surface by the tug of scenes painted by the talented author of this novel I am reading. My trips to the town dump in a Berkshire town with my Grandfather Pa. He taught me that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. He also taught me how to hit a moving target with an old 22 rifle. I had not reached my tenth year. Later I would continue dump adventures with Pa’s son, my father. I had to become more civilized when I married so my adventures morphed into flea markets, rummage sales and the occasional garage sale. Also as an adult I found my self part of a herd of baby boomers that invented transfer stations, recycling centers, paper straws, covering our old treasure troves with layers of bulldozed dirt vented to allow the escaping methane gas to commingle in our atmosphere along with our farting cows. So you might say, “Mark get over it!” Wait a minute, what is that mass coming over the ocean’s horizon? What you say? An island of trash floating in our ocean? An Island of trash as big as Texas? Oh we have come so far in our steward ship of our planet! Give me a b…., Mark stay positive!
Thank you for reading!
Be in peace and joy.
Mark