Adirondack Serenade

I guess it was maybe ‘78 or ‘79, I knew a woman a handful of years older than me with a child’s smile and laughter that lived deep in her soul.  Her name was Virginia. She spoke with a heavy twang and had a reputation as one of the best coon dog handlers and raccoon hunters in any of those parts. Those parts being an isolated section of New York State, deep in the thick pines and mossy brooks of the Adirondacks.

She’d migrated here with her husband and kids from West Virginia, but she said she was named after her grandma, not any state, and she was born in Louisiana, not a city girl from New Orleans, she was oddly and fiercely proud of that. She was a girl from the swamps and bayous.

I asked once why she hunted raccoons and what she did with them when her dogs treed one. She told me it was about the hunt, never the kill, and she lived her life modeled around that same philosophy. She was forever looking for a debate. Philosophical hunts were her bent and fascination. A fiercely bright woman, she’d argue with me until I, like the racoons, was trapped, with nowhere else to hide, and surrendered. Satisfied her hunt was a success we’d retire to her front porch. I learned a lot seeing the world through this country girl’s eyes.   

She wore her long brown hair in braids that ran past her shoulders and cradled her breasts. She was pretty in a Willie Nelson kind of way. Work boots and jeans and flannel shirts, some with the elbows work-worn through, even on the hottest summer day. Her husband left her and the kids for a woman who was prettier in tune with more common American tastes, I suppose. Virginia was never stroke book pretty, she had no desire or need to be, but she was pretty enough in her own way.

An independent feminist, vehemently anti-racist, and smart as anyone I’ve ever met, yet she could kill, clean and cook a wild turkey and lay out a dinner spread on Sunday that would put any 1950s TV mom to shame. She’d even place a skinny vase filled with wildflowers from her meadow to set perfect the scene.

Her son left the mountain when he was seventeen and that broke a part of her heart. He ended up working for the government in Washington DC, and she told me once in a phone call, long after the last time we’d been together she thought she raised him to be better than that.

Her daughter, also named Virginia, but everyone called the girl Ginger, was as smart as her mom, she had a couple of PhDs of her own. The two of them were intimidating for someone like me, who barely survived high school. When I met them both, I actually had to look up what PhD meant.

Ginger was pretty but not in any Willy Nelson kind of way. Her mom made it abundantly clear to me, or any coon hunter who straggled to her house coming down off the mountain she’d cut off the dick of any of us who even looked sideways at young Ginger. I took her at her word, as I’d never known her to lie. I half believed and half didn’t want to believe that in some corner of her old ratty woodshed there might be evidence that this wasn’t just an idle threat. I never ventured inside to find out.

Virginia smoked a corncob pipe almost all the time and grew her own weed and other vegetables and herbs in a small plot on the big pine and mountain facing side of her homestead. She spoke a lot about God as nature, and I believe she stood in awe and humility before all of life that surrounded her.

Sometimes in the summer on a sweltering and buggy evening and sometimes in the cool autumn air and sometimes in the frozen dead of winter I’d sit on that front porch of her cabin and we’d smoke weed and look at and listen to the night. The winter nights were dead silent, but for the wind or the muffled crackle of the fire in the pit just off the front steps.

Summer nights were the best when spent on that porch. Virginia would play the banjo and sing Gershwin’s Summertime, in a shaky drawl that made me believe she truly missed catfish jumpin’ and fields of high cotton. As she sang the Treeing Walker coon hounds would sing in a mournful disjointed harmony. It was always this time of year, when August was queued up and on the horizon and in her words, “July was fixin’ to leave her again.” And the days, while no cooler were growing slightly shorter and she told me her August never made her sad, but September did and she died a little in the winter and she hoped I’d stop by the next time I passed through, winter or summer. Like me, she desperately needed her summertime, and each year dreaded its passing.

As the late sun set, and the porch was enveloped in the fast-coming night, Virginia sat in silhouette picking her banjo, she was prettier than Willy Nelson on his best and prettiest day.

Every year, about this time, when July is fixin’ to leave me too I think of her and that shack. She must be very old by now, or dead. I heard her estranged husband died a few years back. I kept in touch with Ginger for a time, until that became a pointless burden for both of us.

I think often of the characters that have painted my life. Many to most have left me now.  Sometimes I wonder if they were real or just remnants of some past time’s hallucinations. I remember the most fondly those who taught me and challenged me, or even fought me. Virginia was a little of all that, and as real as any, I suppose.