(on the occasion of Mike and Kaylyn’s wedding, 26 September 2024 / Fraziers Bottom, WV)
Love is its own redemption (a homily)
For Mike and Kaylyn on their wedding day, 26 September 2024 / Fraziers Bottom, WV
In an unpredictable world, the only thing worth getting out of bed for is love.
I’m thinking now of something our mutual friend, George Eklund, once told me. He told me that there’s someone for everyone; but he also pointed out that “the actual chances of meeting that person is astronomical.”
By any standard or definition, such an occurrence could be called a miracle; which it is. The miracle of two people finding once another in a world that seems designed to isolate us is worth waking up for; it’s worth putting on your boots for; it’s worth trudging through the world for.
Love redeems not only us, but it redeems the world and returns to it some of its divine glory.
In order to understand where the Gator Horse comes from, it’s important to understand powerful impact the region has had on America. The earliest maps of the region date back to 1752 (Butler). French traders, trappers, and later, commerce and settlers came down river. Even after the Louisiana Purchase and the California Goldrush, the Ohio River was fundamental commerce and travel until the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. The Ohio was the primary route for chattel slave trade, with markets in Louisville and in Cairo, Illinois. People who only know the Ohio River as it is now – flood plains regulated by locks, widened for barge traffic, and as much as a river can be, civilized – don’t understand what the river was like. Journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) describe a river with dangerously rocky rapids, long stretches of riverbeds so shallow the crew had to carry their boats through, places so narrow that it was easier to carry the boats over a nearby horse path, and equally as wide.
Understanding the legend of Mike Fink is crucial to understanding what makes literature from the Ohio River Valley Regionally distinct. Before Jeff York’s Fink was given short shrift against Fess Parker in Davey Crockett and The River Pirates (1965) Mike Fink was a legend on par with Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Hickock. Stories of the keel boat captains who traversed the wilds of the Ohio River, moving French trappers up, moving goods from what was then the Wild West back east to be sold, and eventually passengers.
In Mike Fink’s heyday, the river was more than a way to travel and move goods. It was a myth, a mystery, an adventure. And the men who wrestled with it were more than just men. They were Gator Horses: men so strong and so fierce that they were as wild as river itself. And Mike Fink was King of River – the fiercest of the Gator Horses. Bernard DeVoto summarized him as “the marksman who could not miss, the bully-boy who could not be felled, unmatched in drink, invincible to wenches.” (Blair and Meine, 26). Fink stories fit into the stories of ancient heroes like Beowulf, Paul Bunyan, and Thor. DeVoto called Fink “a demigod of the rivers even before he dies – the boatman immortally violent, heroic, unconquerable.” (26) These traits – both heroic and ill-tempered – make Fink a blueprint for the writing that would come.
Prior to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Ohio River Valley – which includes parts of what we now consider Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois – was the stuff of literary and pop cultural imagination. This sense of the heroic, which Ohio River Valley writing inherited from literary traditions dating back to Gilgamesh, was infused with the anti-heroic and with rugged individualism created by the stories of Mike Fink, Daniel Boone, and the Lewis and Clark expedition. These things would eventually be passed on to the literature of the Wild West and to America’s collective cultural imagination.
According to her preface to Interior States, Meghan O’Gieblyn claims that economic recession and the resulting loss of what she calls telos – an object or aim – are what ties the Midwest together. (xiv). She claims an “abiding interest in this loss is what ties the essays in her book together. She goes on to tie this to the decline of the Christian narrative.
The thing that makes literature from the Ohio River Valley distinct from Midwestern literature – and indeed makes it geographically distinct from the Midwest – our telos is the ebb and tide of commerce and things that move. That the river is always in flux is what gives the Ohio River Valley it’s unique and complex history, culture, and art. At it’s core, there’s a stubbornness, a caution when it comes to change; but there’s also an inherent ability to embrace what the river brings. It’s as natural as the ebb and flow of the river. The South, the Midwest, and even Appalachia — culturally, they are built on a resistance to change, that can border on a dangerous nostalgia. The Ohio River Valley, with our deep-rooted tradition kept in the stories like those of Mike Fink and the Gator Horse Keel Boat Captains, takes whatever comes, keeps what is useful, and lets the river carry the rest away.
Recent events, most notably former President Trump’s Vice-Presidential pick, JD Vance, is catapulting regionalism back into the national spotlight. At this point, his politics have taken a backseat to what actually catapulted his name into the national conversation: Hillbilly Elegy, a book that has been (in my opinion, righteously) criticized by Silas House and bell hooks, to name a few, for its exploitation of Appalachian culture and Appalachian people.
My purpose here is not to add directly to this discussion; for one, I’m not Appalachian, though I spent better than a few years there, have friends there, and a connection in that my daughter was born there. I love the mountains and appreciate the culture, the music, and the complex history. But I am not OF the place, which is an important distinction that I make. Geography has played a major role in my writing for decades, whether I’ve been traveling or living in a single place. When I lived in Phoenix, the desert crept into my work; when I lived in Northwest Illinois, my Big Sky Country obsession was stamped in my language.
The Geography
But I grew up in the Ohio Valley. Bethel, Ohio, where I am from, is roughly 13 miles from the Ohio River. The house I grew up in was about 10 miles from the river, the closest point of connection being Moscow. I used to ride my bike there when I was a kid. As a young man I bounced around Cincinnati, Ripley, Aberdeen, New Richmond, Moscow, Maysville, Ironton, and Portsmouth. I spent a lot of time along the river. And while my current job along and on the Ohio is the first time I’ve made a living on the river, the entire geography of my childhood was shaped by it.
The Ohio River Valley takes up parts of 5 states. (researchgate.net)
The Ohio River Valley – defined geographically by the 981 mile long waterway that begins in Pittsburgh, PA and ending in Cairo, IL – is a unique region from the Midwest, the South, and the Appalachian regions, which has birthed unique artistic, musical, and literary styles. The richness of this aesthetic comes from the diverse populations that came to the region from rich and troubling history of commerce, diaspora, colonization, and the consequences of living around such a profound nature boundary.
Even though artistic regionalism has gained marketability… and as a result, respectability… the Ohio River Valley is overlooked. The river, in general, is overlooked, even though it’s still a major commercial artery and, in some places, a tourist destination.
Defining “Gothic”
In trying to describe the unique nature of the Ohio River Valley Aesthetic, I found myself pondering the word “Gothic”… not in the sense of vampires, but in the sense of the 1930 painting by Grant Wood. It’s been interpreted as both a defense of and a critique of rural life.
Wood’s painting spoke to me the first time I saw it in an art book. You don’t always notice the details in the first viewing. But it’s difficult to miss the fact that all the windows are covered, even the Carpenter’s Gothic style upstairs window, covered in a blanket of stars.
What does it mean, the covered windows? What does it mean, the blanket of stars? Let’s then consider what I mean by gothic. The term gothic was first coined by Italian writers in the later Renaissance period (late 15th to early 17th century). The word was used in a derogatory way as a synonym of ‘barbaric’. They denounced this type of art as unrefined and ugly and attributed it to the Gothic tribes which had destroyed the Roman Empire and its classical culture in the 5th century AD (www.vam.ac.uk) Over time it’s taken on the imagery of vampires and monsters. And when I apply the term gothic, as in the Ohio River Valley Gothic, I’m taking in not only the monsters, but whatever washes up in the river. The Ohio River continues to be a major transportation artery, though it’s mostly commercial traffic. It continues to be a driving economic force for the towns and cities that have sprouted up along her shores. All manner of things come down the river. Some part of all of it stays. The rest of it carries on down with the current.
There is art and music and writing in the Ohio River Valley that is distinct from the Midwest, Appalachian, and Southern geographies that surround it. Like the river, it has elements of them all. But there is a unique voice and vision that is, for lack of a better word, “gothic.” We have our ghosts. We have our stories and songs. But to understand them, and what makes them unique, you have to start with the river. And in order to understand the river, you have to start the the GatorHorse.
