This is the story of Hanshew Hollow in West Virginia, written by Millard Lampell, of his memories of living there. I believe these to be some of my late husbands ancestors.Transcribed from a Reader's Digest magazine by Mary Runyon Hanshew.
A Hollow Place in My Heart
Condensed from MID-ATLANTIC COUTRY
MILLARD LAMPELL
I was born and raised in a bleak New Jersey city of silk mills and a dye-stained rive. I never felt it was home. As soon as I was old enough, I hit the road in search of America. My wife, Ramona, is different. Wherever we lived, when she said "home" she meant Hanshew Hollow in the West Virginia hills.
A hollow--pronounced "holler"---is a green fold in the mountains. Hidden away in these slopes and ridges, up the dirt roads, are houses, weathered barns, split-rail fences, neat vegetable gardens and stacks of split wood on the porches and in side yards. And there are the people---proud, wary of being patronized, stubborn as the tree that forces its way up through rock.
Hanshew Hollow traces back to gaunt, ragged long-rifle hunters who, before the Revolution, braved the wilderness mountains to escape the world of greedy planters, conniving politicians and bureaucrats spinning webs of regulations and rules. It took a fierce will to endure the harsh winter and the absence of civilized comforts, to stalk the Cherokee trails with a flintlock, an ax and a skillet. It took courage to claim a tangled hollow, chase off mountain lions, rattlesnakes and black bears and settle there.
When I met Ramona, I'd already been captured by the southern Appalachians. I'd gone to college in West Virginia and traveled its back roads. When Ramona first took me to Hanshew Hollow, I was returning to a part of the country I thought I knew.
Arriving a few days before Thanksgiving, I met Ramona's lanky, retired coal-miner daddy, Russell Estep, and was hugged by her bustling, determinedly independent mother, Mollie, who had helped her father plow the ridge. Mollie was a Gill, the family that for generations had shared the hollow with the Hanshews. I have never been able to fully untangle the weave of Hanshew Hollow's family tapestry. I gave up trying years ago.
I was introduced to an array of uncles and aunts, a slew of nieces and nephews, first cousins and second cousins once removed. Cousin Melvin was built like a backhoe. Cousin Delbert, short and slim as a jockey, could handle a chain saw with exquisite artistry, and made furniture in his spare time. Aunt Bernice, an avid gossip, was the high priestess of mountain lore. She gave the word when the moon was right for a crop to be planted. She knew which wild herbs could cure and made teas, tonics and poultices from bloodroot, goldenseal, mullein, slippery elm, witch hazel, ginseng and May apple, treating everything from a wasp sting to a child's infected leg.
Ramona's maternal Grandma Gill, a sassy 92 back then, was a small woman with a fine-boned face and cornflower- blue eyes. She was dressed in black, her plaited hair coiled on her head like a crown. She wore a black ribbon choker with a cameo pinned to it. Red sneakers added a raffish touch.
Grandma Gill had the imperious manner of a mountain matriarch, and a taste for playing the flirt. Shooing Ramona off, she patted the couch invitingly. I sat down. Pressing my hand between hers, she favored me with a disarming smile, asking softly in her back-hills drawl, "Is Ray-mona a jealous-hearted woman?"
My own family wasn't given to warmth. In the mountains, I entered a world where family was the spine of life, a world where you were defined by who your kinfolk were. That first visit, I had no way of knowing that.
I'd never sat at a table like the one we gathered at that Thanksgiving. the centerpiece was a wild turkey cousin Delbert had shot. There was venison, home-grown beef, Aunt Rheba's chicken and dumplings, mashed Irish potatoes, garden yams, beans and squash. There was Mollie's mouthwatering slaw, her relishes and sweet pickles, cousin Arlene's peach cobbler and apple pie, Aunt Bernice's stewed rhubarb, and Lord knows what else.
These were people who understood the land, nurtured it, worried over it. In return, the land gave up its bounty to them. It was my first experience with an easy intimacy between the generations, a ten-year-old seeking out a wizened great-grandmother, choosing to sit beside her, chattering away.
By the end of that Thanksgiving week, Ramona and I knew we wanted to live in Hanshew Hollow. Delbert agreed to let us have 13 acres of woods, down the ridge from Ramon's folks. Mountain-style, our deed read, "Beginning at a poplar, chestnut and hickor, thence N 35, West 136 feet to a sourwood on a south hillside ...."
Delbert wheeled out his tractor and grader, cut us a road up the mountain, and trucked in red dog, the terra-cotta slag from the mine , to surface it.
Ramona designed a house inspired by an 18-th century barn, and a flock of cousins helped build it. The house was tall, its back mostly glass, so there was the feeling of being enbraced by the woods.
By the following year, we were settled in. As I think back, the first image that leaps to mind is Russell. High-cheekbone handsome, with gnarled, work-worn hands, he showed his Cherokee strain in features that looked carved out of hickory.
Russell was to become my adopted father, my teacher and friend. An old-time mountain man, hew was one of a vanishing breed. I'm not certain how much schooling he had, probably not much beyond the eighth grade. But he had a hunger for learning and the native intelligence of those who live in harmony with the land.
He liked to say he was born "so far back in the hills we had to pump in daylight." I grinned at his dry wit, his characterization of a self-important local personage: "He ain't the man he used to be ...and he never was."
Russell had a fine baritone, and we shared a fondness for old hymns. Racketing into town in his battered green pickup, we's harmonize: "Farther along we'll know all about it/Farther along we'll understand why...." He had started work in the mines when he was 15, back in the days when digging coal could mean lying on your back in water under a 24-inch roof.
He taught me about the trees and the wild creatures that shared our woods. They were all his friends____squirrels, deer, chipmunks (called faradiddles), grouse, wild turkey and possums. He taught me to recognize red oak, white oak, wild cherry and walnut, maple, sweet gum, sourwood, dogwood, tulip poplar and 20 more.
Because of my work as a screen-writer, we had a second house in California. A second house, not a second home. Home was the hollow. I who had been restless in youth and rootless in the years that followed, I who for so long had been an outsider, finally found a place where I was at peace.
Among the Esteps, The Gills and the Hanshew, my name was strange, my upbringing as different from theirs as night from day. And yet, bit by bit, they drew me in.
The most amazing thing about living in the hollow was rediscovering the woman I married. It was as though seeds she'd carried inside her, when she left at 16 to become a model, now flowered. She was alive to a thousand small things, and made gifts of them to me: memories, childhood songs, the grapevines that once were her swings, and the secret patches of blackberries where bees worked, sounding like an orchestra of cellos.
Fifteen years passed, and the equation of our life changed. Keeping up two places became more and more of a strain. Life had to be simplified. We decided to live in only one place. We wanted to share the experience of our grandchildren's growing up, but they were in Texas. We were torn between there and the hollow. In the end , the grandchildren won out.
It's a year and a half now since we left. The ache of loss is still there. The yerning to climb the red-dog road to our ridge remains. Time will dull it, I know, but it will never vanish completely. Some part of my heart lies buried there.
Writers are always searching memory to describe an emotion. When I want to call up a feeling of aching loss, I think of never again exploring the woods with Russell, and I remember looking bck at our house on the ridge as we drove down the red-dog road that last time.
In my kaleidoscope of memory, images whirl, take shape: Mollie at 80, climbing a rocky slope, sure-footed as a mountain goat, myself listening to the sunset song of the brown thrush, the one we called the Mozart bird. Ramona triumphant, bringing the garden's first fruits as I sat under our maple, writing her a birthday poem:
You race down the path, past poplar and pine, Blackberry patch, tangled vine,
