Connemara

November 9, 2020

We drove across the state line Thursday to Flat Rock, N.C., and walked the high and rolling grounds of Connemara, the home of Carl Sandburg, the “people’s poet.” Sandburg, a poet, journalist, historian, songwriter, and political activist, never graduated from college, but won three Pulitzer Prizes. He started life in Galesburg, Ill., then lived in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Chicago before settling in Flat Rock in 1945.

On Thursday morning, with political nastiness in America nearing its peak, a stroll around Connemara was just the thing. Flat Rock is a few minutes north of the North-South Carolina border, surrounded by the rugged peaks of the southern end of the Blue Ridge. The famous Blue Ridge Parkway passes just 30-plus miles north on its 469-mile way through Asheville on its way to its terminus near Cherokee.

Sandburg was the anti-Trump. He worked as a milkwagon driver, dishwasher, hotel porter, bricklayer, farm laborer, coal miner. He served in the Army during the Spanish-American War. He dropped out of college. He bounced around, mostly in the upper, colder Midwest. Then he started writing and never stopped: news stories for the Chicago Daily News, poems, children’s stories, folk songs, movie reviews, and fiction, before embarking on his magisterial biography of Lincoln, for which he won the 1940 Pulitzer. Sandburg was the first white man awarded the NAACP’s Silver Plaque award, the citation praising him as a “major prophet of civil rights in our time.”

 His wife, Lillian, pushed for the move to Connemara to have the pastures to raise her goats. Goats still graze part of the property.

“Anti-Trump” means anti-fakery. Sandburg didn’t try to pass for the “common” man. He was the common man. Common in that his entire life represented the qualities we all say we admire, but often struggle with: pure honesty, respect for hard work and people who do the hard work, acknowledgement of virtues that define goodness: steadiness, optimism, kindness, patience, civility. In his 1917 poem, Caboose Thoughts, he opens and closes with:

It’s going to come out all right–do you know? The sun, the birds, the grass–they know, They get along–and we’ll get along

What you read is an unvarnished sense of life lived with humility. The poems of Sandburg don’t give you the brooding, erudite nuances of T.S. Eliot. They give you the elegance of the mind of a man at peace with himself and with the world.  

Tramping the Connemara trails, you escape the malevolent nightmare of election news. A few folks, all wearing or holding masks, passed by with a smile and a nod. The place was largely quiet. Is it the election coverage? I shook my head at the thought. People who come to a peaceful mountainside gem like this don’t sit around watching TV.   

We are working to acclimate ourselves to such places, which seem to whisper that life is richer closer to forests and mountains and farther from crowded places, even if only for short stretches, a day, a couple of days. We still are separating ourselves from the Washington suburbs. That doesn’t mean that we’re going full country. As we drove up on U.S. 25, the thinly traveled fast road from Greenville, I pointed out to Sandy some homes perched on mountaintops. “Great views,” I said, half-seriously. She frowned. An eagle’s nest-type place with a scary, twisting access road isn’t in our future.

It would be nice if we all could visit places like Connemara every so often. I miss already the sharp rocks of the Shenandoahs, which after all are the northern end of the Blue Ridge we’re looking at right now. But what we’re all seeking is a vista on our own lives that Carl Sandburg’s life and work offer. Maybe all we need is the idea of a quiet mountainside.

What his life taught, or teaches, is that we’re called to seek, always, the diamond-hard virtues of human nature: generosity, tolerance, charity. Sandburg got a rocky start in life, working backbreaking jobs at age 13. His father was a railroad laborer. How does that shape a man? We know life was different then. Priorities and values were different. Poor people didn’t expect much. But today it would be easy to see him, or anyone in the same fix, slouch into resentment, envy, selfishness, or worse. We wonder how did he get along? Let alone win three Pulitzers.

Sandburg listened to the pulse of America. He looked at the lives of Americans who didn’t go to college, didn’t have money or health insurance or pensions, yet put their shoulders to the wheel at work that created America’s prosperity and power. They were the people who finished their shifts exhausted, dirty, often ill or injured, but showed up for work the next day. He wrote in Smoke and Steel:

So the fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,  And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,   A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;  And always dark in the heart and through it, Smoke and the blood of a man.   Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.

For sure, the quiet woodland beauty of Connemara is a long way from Gary. It became a place of solace for Sandburg, where he sat in a hard wooden chair and produced much of his work. He kept writing about simple, straightforward things, because after living through hardship and need he saw life as a path to be guided by the simple things: integrity, perseverance, equanimity, charity.

We come away from the place with these lessons, a little late in life, maybe. Some challenges lie ahead. But by a nice coincidence, as we trekked up the driveway to Sandburg’s house, I got a call from the doctor’s office and made an appointment. Complicated things are becoming simpler. That’s the way it looks right now. We’ll get along.