not a desk?” he was asked.
Carl shrugged.
“Surely you can afford a desk.”
Carl Sandburg smiled. “If General Grant could command his troops from an old crate,” he said, “I can certainly write about it from one.”
So he did. Carl Sandburg championed the lost cause of “the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient in the darkness of the night.”
He celebrated the universal toil, blood, and dreams among lovers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, cowboys, factory workers, and gamblers. As he said at the end of his days, “If God had let me live five years longer, I should have been a writer.”
It could have turned out far different.
If, after his sojourn in the Spanish American War, Carl Sandburg’s nomination to West Point had been accepted, he might well have settled down to a military career as an officer and a gentleman.
His landscape would have been fogged by the gunpowder of two World War battlefields instead of defined by his poems.
Instead, Carl Sandburg became a poet. He had no other choice. West Point glanced over his application and rejected him.
On his entrance exam, Carl Sandburg failed grammar.
In Connemara, his Flat Rock, North Carolina Home, Carl Sandburg wrote his poetry in the late hours of the night with his typewriter perched on an orange crate.
For Whom The Bells Ring
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Ocracoke Island, North Carolina
Pop: 784
The Scene: The Outer Banks, its restless sands battered by the unrelenting Atlantic, are linked to the mainland by either bridge or ferry and curve southward from Whalebone Junction on Bodie Island to Ocracoke Inlet. Clinging to the beaches of Cape Hatteras National Seashore are the fishing villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Hatteras, Frisco, and Ocracoke. All were once remote and isolated on that narrow splinter of sand, but now they lie scattered within the shadows of million-dollar homes on stilts.
The Sights: Down on Ocracoke, a ferry ride away from Hatteras, wild ponies ran without fear or fence on the beaches. Perhaps they were descendents of horses that swam ashore from the wrecked ships of Sir Walter Raleigh. No one knows for sure. But only a few are left, and they have been penned for their protection. Just beyond the shoreline, the notorious pirate Blackbeard ruled the waters of the Outer Banks and died there, killed in a gun battle in 1718. Some say Blackbeard left a treasure buried within the dunes. Only the wind and the sand know for sure, and they keep their secret to themselves. Fishing boats head out each day during the season in search of channel bass, cobia, mackerel, and the big blues. As one boat captain, Thurston Gaskill, said, “If you know how to fish these waters, you don’t ever go hungry.” He looked around at the quiet, simple, peaceful world at the ocean’s edge, then told me: “I often have nightmares of doing something so bad and terrible that the judge sentences me to ten years in a city.”
The Setting: Beyond the captain’s gaze, only a distant patch upon the water, is Portsmouth, a ghost town on a ghost island. Travel by boat, or you don’t go at all. Once, five hundred people lived among its dunes. Now there are none. As a generation died away, no one came to replace it, and gradually the isle held more graves than people. Portsmouth island and village continue to be protected as an integral part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore. It still showcases twenty empty and abandoned structures, but most of them are in ruin, the way a good ghost town is supposed to be.
For so many years, the Life Saving Station on the Outer Banks kept a watch for ships and men encountering trouble at sea.
(Photo: J Gerald Crawford)
The Story: Henry Piggott stood, straightened his cap, and glanced at the calendar on the bare and weathered wall of his pink Portsmouth home. The house should have been yellow. He had ordered yellow. Lord, how he did love yellow. But when the paint arrived by boat, it was pink. He could have sent it back, he guessed. He probably should have shipped it back. But Henry Piggott was in the mood to paint, so he pried off the lid, grabbed an old brush, and when he finished, he found himself living inside the pink walls and pink facing of a pink house.
The color didn’t look particularly bad, he thought. It kind of matched the innards of the sea shells scattered and broken down on beaches. Besides, it wouldn’t take long before the rains and winds – the salt spray and sea squalls – would sand the wood down to an ashen gray again. Always did. Between now and then, whenever then might be, pink would work just fine.
He always checked the calendar in case he might forget, and Henry Piggot could not afford to forget, not with all of Portsmouth depending on him. Sunday was a special day. He waited all week for Sunday, and it seemed to come around a lot sooner than it did when he was a kid running barefoot in the sands, waiting for the ferry and fishing boats to reach shore, and wondering why they even bothered when few strangers ever stepped on the island and nobody else had any interest in leaving. This was where they were born. This was where they died. Not a lot happened in between.
Henry Piggott shuffled out the front door of his home and walked down past the sea oats to the little wooden Methodist Church. The clock on his wall said it was five minutes to ten. He should have little trouble making it on time. A five minute walk, and he would ring the bells, just as he had done for as long as he could remember.
Always at ten o’clock. Precisely at ten o’clock. Never early. Never late. Didn’t want to wake the Good Lord too early, he said. The bells chimed loud and clear, the only sound on the island, not counting the frantic rush of the surf as it tumbled recklessly toward the dunes.
He rang the bells again. They sounded like a prayer. Prayers aren’t words, Henry Piggott said. Prayers are feelings. The bells were filled with feeling. Their echo didn’t fade away until Henry Piggott was halfway back up the pathway toward his home. The pink had turned a pale shade of pale. Another rain or two, and he would have to paint again. Maybe yellow this time. By now, however, he had grown accustomed to the pink and hated to see the storms rip it away. Henry Piggott shrugged and grinned. He would simply order paint and splash on whatever color they sent him. An old man, he said, didn’t care anymore.
Henry Piggott was the descendant of slaves who worked the farms and handled the offshore fishing boats of Portsmouth before and after the Civil War. Free men and women could have packed up their ragged belongings and left. The Piggotts remained. Not a great life, perhaps, but a good life. They were among friends on the island, and Portsmouth depended on them. No one ever paid much attention to the color of Piggott skin. They only knew that Rose, his grandmother, was a midwife who served as the only doctor and nurse in the village. For years, she and her sister Leah fished the surf and dug oysters to scratch out a meager living. But, alas, Rose was burned to death one evening down on the beach while roasting
