Big Walker Mountain Lament
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Big Walker Mountain Tunnel Lament, a new song.
Sometimes I’d like to write a happy song, but the thing that’s on my mind isn’t happy. I need to write a song for someone who didn’t have the luck, wasn’t covered in glory, and who lived in the shadows.
I was hesitant to share this new song because when global circumstances feel dire and the news is horrific, why write a lament? But it’s human to do so. The balladeers who told the stories of Little Margaret or Barbara Allen and their ill-fated loves and my musical mentors like Jean Ritchie and Hazel Dickens who sang for the miners knew that a lament has its place. We cry our hard stories as well as sing our joys. I hope you will understand this.
This is one man’s lament though his story is a shared one. He was family. I loved him. He was proud of me and was tickled to pieces that I sang country music. I hadn’t seen him for years and he passed away some time ago. He didn’t know anyone for the last several years because he had Alzheimer’s.
I always thought he’d deserved a better outcome and a kinder journey, but that’s not what happened.
I won’t call him by his name here. I’ll call him Carl after Carl Perkins because he loved country music.
When he was a young man, Carl got married to his even younger teenage wife. They had a son right away. A job came along. I was always told that it was when the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel was built on Interstate-77 to get folks from North Carolina up through Virginia and beyond and back down the other way. The road couldn’t go overland because as soon as the government started digging a road, they came across Native American burial grounds, civil war battlefields, ghosts that shouldn’t be disturbed.
So, the powers set about tunneling into the mountain. When I was a kid, we always blew our horn in the tunnel. Were we waking up the ghosts?
Men died building that tunnel.
When the men got killed, other men had to go in to retrieve the bodies or what was left of other men. The pay was good. It was a job. Carl went in there one man and came out another. What he saw in that tunnel changed him forever. He was no longer a young man with a young family looking to the future, making plans, and building a life. He lived day by day with little sense of how long each lasted and what was in them.
He was never “right” again. He was nervous and he was angry. I saw the rage come up in him and fly out of his hands onto the bodies of his sons.
I was afraid. But Carl never hurt me. The boys, like their dad, carried those ghosts. What I saw, not just at Carl’s, but in a lot of families, made me realize that love and family can be a complicated thing.
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Carl took one medication then another. He never said much anyway, but the drugs were so powerful they took away his tongue.
Whatever he saw, Carl was always somewhere underground with dead men. Except every once in a while, he’d surface. I would run up to him in all of my heedless love and his face would fill with joy. He was a giant of a man. Hugging him was like hugging a tree. I wish that hug could have lasted forever. Because as soon as I let go, things had to go back to being how they were.
I’m really really sad that he died. I miss him. I miss him from when I was little and drinking kool-aid and eating baloney sandwiches at his kitchen table with a George Jones record playing.
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What can we do when someone has seen something that they can’t unsee and it changes them forever? What do we do when that place they go is dark and angry?
I remember my Dad playing guitar and singing to me when I was a little kid. One of the songs I learned by heart and always requested was “Sam Stone” by John Prine – a song about a returning war veteran where:
the gold rolled through his veins Like a thousand railroad trains And eased his mind in the hours that he chose While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes
Dad didn’t seem to think that song was too sad or too real for his own kids. We walked around Harvard Square asking him why there were men sleeping on subway grates. “Sam Stone” told us in a song who some of these men might have been and what they might have seen.
“Sam Stone” also helped me when I would think about Carl outside in the yard with his head in his hands.
Carl just got along. His family were in his way sometimes, as he walked that lonesome valley, and he let them feel it. Other times, they made him laugh, they called him Dad, they celebrated this or that. Without their endurance and care, he surely never would have lived all this long. But at what price did they bide with him? What was the cost of loving him? It can’t be measured.
I don’t have the answers to these puzzles about love and family. If everyone was well and happy and there was no rage and no dark tunnels, then the answer would be plain.
What I do have is a childhood love for someone who I wanted to make better with hugs and being my silly self, but who needed a different kind of medicine. What I can offer is a lament and a sung prayer in the music that Carl loved. Especially for you, Carl, and for everyone who has walked into that tunnel and come out changed.
Your Jeni
Thank you for being here with me for the music, for the stories, and for the adventures.
This song is “We’ll Meet That Day” from my album A Body is a Delicate House. The films and photos are ones I took on my walk only a couple of miles from our house in Carnforth, Lancashire, along the shore road by the River Keer and the Kent Estuary at Morecambe Bay. You can see a full version of this video and hear the whole song on YouTube.
This is a song for all who grieve and miss someone. Especially when I walk in the country and see the wind in the grass, I feel the love of my family and friends where they are everywhere around me. I cannot call them on the phone anymore or hug them, but they come to me in beautiful and gentle ways.
Thank you for biding with me,
Jeni
Big Walker Mountain Tunnel Lament for G.L.L. When you see a thing that you can’t unsee, you’ll spend your life looking to get free. You can fight the ghosts, but you can’t win ‘cause the thing you fight, it sleeps within. When the job came down, you took it on for your young wife and your baby son. Men blown to hell – you the living one. You walked out, but your mind was gone. Maybe you dreamed one day you’d stand on the mountain top like any man, but you always lived in the tunnel dark with your broken dreams and your own broken heart. When the anger comes, running ‘round your brain, there he stands calling out your name. You knock him down just to realize he was your own son who has paid the price. All of the scars, all of the scars. Take the broken up to the stars where we pray, “Savior, wash us clean. Forgive what we said that we didn’t mean.” © Jeni Hankins 2024, BMI Jeni Hankins, guitar and vocal. The Englishman, harmonica.
Lee Smith (author of Fair and Tender Ladies) says, "Jeni's stunningly original music is as old as those hills, yet brand new at the same time. The spare, simple arrangements not only showcase her musical talents but also highlight the brilliant writing; for Jeni is a true poet and a born storyteller, through and through – many of these songs contain whole novels."
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