Ty Bouldin, born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1947, has lived most of his life in the Mountain State pursuing his interests in natural history, fishing, and the arts. He has painted and drawn since childhood, is a largely self-taught musician and songwriter, a poet and novelist. Ty taught English Composition and Humanities at West Virginia State College and The University of Arizona until his retirement. In 2003, he and his wife, Susan, returned to their wooded 25-acre farm where he writes, paints, tends to dogs, mowing, gardening, and the demands of an old log house.
Montani Semper...
Snapshots From An Appalachian Family Album
by Ty Bouldin
Montani Semper...
Snapshots From An Appalachian Family Album
by Ty Bouldin
Published Oct 31, 2021
132 Pages
Genre: FICTION / Literary
Book Details
Montani Semper...Snapshots from an Appalachian Family Album draws on narratives, song-poems and drawings to evoke both the beauty and the tragedy of Appalachia and the betrayal of the region’s natural wealth. The novella relates the troubled family chronicle of Ramona and Woody Mann and the friend they know simply as ‘the Greek’. Woody’s and Ramona’s families have lived for generations in the same rural Appalachian farming and mining community, but their fortunes have declined with ill health and the shifting economics of the region. Only the aspirations of their two surviving children — Christine and Will — hold out any resilient hope for the future as they determine to face the demands of the outside world. However, it is the myth-like stories the Greek tells of Ramona’s and Woody’s third child — a boy stillborn after a fall late in her pregnancy — that suggest the encompassing tragedy in which their lives have moved. Montani Semper is a short but expansive exploration of America's attempt to grapple with the social decline resulting from our arrogant cultural divorce from the natural world. It provides a view of Appalachia which calls into question the portrait offered for so long by mainstream accounts of the region — from the condescending views of the natives' naïve simplicity offered by early colonial visitors like Timothy Dwight (an early President of Yale University), to the self-serving narratives of life in blighted poverty broadcast by politically-ambitious contemporaries like J.D. Vance. Conceived as an isolated pocket of inbred Scots-Irish cultural backwardness, Appalachia has always served America as a tragicomic host of Otherness, a blighted and perverse failure of a regional population to adapt to modern ideas and ideals, described by one internationally recognized historian as "the great cultural backwash of Western Civilization". This short novella, on the other hand, portrays an Appalachian world tragically betrayed not by mysterious cultural perversity or historical weakness but rather by familiar human failings, a world that can be taken as a moral warning to the entire nation. The region's decline in the grips of exploitative industrialization, the novella implies, has been enabled by a combination of misogyny, social ambition, and the materialistic worship of power — all widespread attitudes in American society, not the oddities of an isolated region.
Book Excerpt
And the Greek goes on, though Woody's feeling old now, you know, so old he can't care enough to hear. So old his torn, stained hands can't feel a thing now, his grey wrinkled-up brain can't take it in. So old he can't stand any more. No more of words, no more of fiery light.
All he knows is the Greek's still talking, running on and on. Some damn springcreek. Some babbling lot of nonsense about what never happened, what never could have happened, happened to the third child. The boychild that, you know, died. And the Greek is saying:
"The whole congregation is there, standing there behind the Healer — and your boy is standing there, on his strong bare little feet right up there in the pew, that spinning gyroscope of his held high there on his steady fingertip right before his eyes. All he can see is the light of it, the spinning light, the quick wheel wobbling and righting itself over and over, dancing on the fingernail of his right index finger. And all they can see I would guess is the Compton girl, naked and ashamed, her shy hands held up there before her shining breasts as she sits slumped on a rock at the side of the creek.
"And the Healer, now, bellowing like a bull, crying out to your boy, calling him a sinner, a child of Satan Himself. Calling on a child — on a child — to confess. But your boy, he stands his ground, looking deep into the weaving and the spinning of the light thrown by the wheel of his child's toy, and his voice is a kind of far off, you see, and he's talking like a boy in a dream of wheeling light, saying,
'When I woke up this morning, I was a fish, a sunnyfish swimming in a sunny little pool, and my Ma poured cold fresh water there, and the water she poured splashed me up on the mud.
'And up on the mud there, I was a springlizard with the purtiest black-and-yellow tail all the color of fire, and the sun from heaven was a'shinin' on me, and it dried up the mud and took the cool water all up in the air.
'And I went up in the air with it. And up in the air I was a bird, ya know, a bright redbird just a'singin', singin' songs to my mother. And singin' I flew, and I flew and I flew until my wings was so tired.
'And then I flew down onto the porch where all the dogs lay a'sleepin', and when they woke up, they saw a young deer. And I was the deer — and they chased me then, and I ran and I ran just as fast as I can, 'cause I knew they'd just jerk me to pieces. And by noon I'd run as far as I could and just laid me down in fear they'd catch me.
'But when I looked up for their mean old teeth, I seen Mary Ellen Compton, and she's just a'cryin' so — and I seen that I was a man.' "
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