Junkyard Heaven

Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood was much different than anything I've read this semester much in part because it is a memoir.  She uses a lot of strong metaphor and vivid detail to explore the environment of her unique childhood.  Like Gift and Abbey, Ray is reliable.  She has a strong hold on her surroundings.  Just as Gift knows weeds, Ray knows junk.  Ray shows her knowledge of the junkyard and everything in it whether learned from her own experiences or her father.  Ray's passion for the longleaf forests also show similarities to Gifts love of weeds.  Throughout Ray's novel, her writing resembles that of Abbey's at times when describing nature.  She gives vibrant and popping details that set me in southern Georgia.

Her eloquent description of the pine trees singing is one example:

Rustle, whisper, shiver, whinny.  Aria, chorus, ballad, chant.  Lullaby.  In the choirs of the original groves, the music must have resounded for hundreds of miles in a single note of rise and fall, lift and wane, and stirred the red-cockaded woodpeckers nesting in the hearts of these pines, where I also nest, child of soft heart.  Now we strain to hear the music; anachronous, it has an edge.  It falters, a great tongue chopped in pieces.

Something as simple as the wind blowing through the pines is described as this beautiful compilation of song.  She turns around at the end and tells us how the song is now misplaced in time, lost.  The melody has been destroyed.

The difference in Ray's writing with the others is her story.  Her memoir is a powerful and moving story, which tells of her poor and hard times growing up in a rugged land.  I feel that Ray uses her knowledge of the land and its history to make herself more believable.  When she did tell second-hand stories, they came off truthful and valid.  Because of her confidence and telling of the actual facts, I did not find myself second guessing her.

I thought that her stories were unique and outrageous, which made them even more believable.  I absolutely lost it when she briefly describes herself steering and braking cars home with her father, while connected to his truck by an "eight-foot range of iron chain."  Her short anecdotes sometimes serve to describe the traits people or the area, rather than Ray telling us.  Her father might not have had the book smarts, but he had enough brains to understand hard work.  Working five days on the math problem just gives me an understanding of her father's dedication and desire to finish.

I thought that Ray used the major theme of the vanishing longleaf pines to symbolize the life of her father.  The pines, which she was born from, are massive and godlike.  "You look up at leaves so high their shapes are beyond focus . . . you stand and press your body into the ancestral and enduring, arms wide, and your fingers do not touch."  Although uneducated, her father was a smart man and a great salesman who knew how to deal with people and make the best of his business.  Even though "an invasion of a terrible army of axemen" may have caused the vanishing of longleaf pines, this seems like an uncontrollable force.  Her father falls at the hands of a similar force, a mental state that almost seemed unavoidable.

I don't think that I could write about my childhood with such passion and description.  My memory is not as strong as hers.  I think that her circumstances differ from mine.  Her childhood was tough and in the deep south, in the backwoods.  Mine was in the suburbs where both parents held steady jobs.  I believe that those hard times in your life stick out the most, because you know what you had to go through to come out barely breathing.  My past as a child holds few similarities to Ray's.