Letters to the Editor

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

The Resurrection Letterpress

Part One . . . as told by Dale Michels

Some stories cannot be told in one sitting, this is in three parts. Some cannot be told without changing a few names, though everyone (save one) has passed on. Out of respect for the community it took place in and to emphasize a theme, I’ve changed its name. This story is lifted from the larger story of my life, which has yet to be published called Gringo Grande, because I keep adding to it. I hope you find something worth pondering here-in.

Part One

Zedic came close, but no one was old enough to remember how the Story actually got its name. . . however, tales abound. Some say it’s due to all the jaw’n done around the general store and post office. Others say it goes back to stories told around campfires about wild things and blood sacrifice up on cradle rock. It’s a fact, Story’s long history was hard to know. Artifacts dug up in Story’s gardens spawned stories themselves when handled and turned over in the minds of sensitive elders. And there were family stories told and retold to each new generation.

Once some professor types came down from Morgantown and convinced folks to loan them some of their artifacts. You know, they never returned a single one of them. . . but Zedic had a letter in a cubby of his roll top. He’d take it out to settle a bet or argument by reading it aloud. He’d always start out, “This here liar says…” What the professor said, was that Story had been continuously settled for over 10,000 years… making London, England and Paris, France Story’s juniors.

One thing was certain, anything and everything that transpired could become a story. Might be about that large snapping turtle the size of a Volkswagen spotted crossing the road at Diggers Run or flirtatious eye play observed between two young’uns. Stories were as fluid as the river, constantly changing as new information was picked up and stirred in by members of the community.

When tragedy befell the community, those stories weren’t circulated for entertainment. They were painful and the sacrifice of telling them was only made when there was a reason. Not that more entertaining storis couldn’t contain important information or significant gems learned from life, they often did contain useful knowledge and wisdom wrapped up in a smile. In an oral story telling culture like this, everyone in the community becomes ‘famous’ or known… and known for who they truly are.  To be sure there are vendettas, lies, and unfounded gossip, but after a story has been through the community a number of times the wheat generally gets separated from the chaff. When I first arrived in Story, people didn’t know me and only had speculation to rely on. He must be a drug dealer, was the predominant story about me until someone got a hold of one of our catalogs. More accurate information flowed one we hired Dennis, who’s father was full blooded Indian, one of the family lines that went back to the beginning.

I had to rely on speculation too before I knew much about Story. To my urban eyes, Story seemed like a ghost town, only inhabited. Everything was old and no one was in a hurry about anything. I spend some time exploring the village when I first got there. There were a number of od houses, two general stores, one with a lean-to Post Office, two haunted hotels, a Grange Hall, a closed 1920s gas station, an old, abandoned school and a hilltop church. I was inspecting some of the old headstones in the graveyard behind the church when I came across a curious marker. It was a broken piece of an iron wheel arching out of the ground; a fresh bouquet of wildflowers lay before it. It was a mystery with few clues, but I guessed, someone must have died in an industrial accident and a piece of the machinery used as a headstone. But it puzzled me, why use a piece of machinery to memorialize a life?