Читать книгу Fiddle: - Vivian Wagner - Страница 9

On a hot Saturday afternoon, my husband, kids, and I headed east out of New Concord on Interstate 70 in our Honda Odyssey, before exiting south and going deep into Ohio’s hill country, first on a narrow paved road, next a gravel road, and then a dirt road. We passed stretches of thick woods, trailers, pickup trucks, and dogs tied to trees with lengths of rusty chain.

“Where are we going again?” Rose asked, always curious about what we were up to, and why.

“It’s a bluegrass festival,” I said, not really knowing how to explain bluegrass to her. I wasn’t sure I even knew what it was. A few weeks earlier I’d told my dentist, who played mandolin in a band, that I’d been learning to play fiddle. He mentioned the Mountain Heir Bluegrass Festival, down in the countryside outside of Old Washington. After a couple of Google missteps, as I looked for “Mountain Air” and “Mountain Hair,” I finally found it: Mountain Heir, held at the Old National Trail Campground. It intrigued me. I’d never been to a bluegrass festival, but I thought it might be a chance to catch some fiddling, and to explore the Appalachian hills that were still pretty mysterious to me, even after all these years of living in southeastern Ohio.

I turned forty that summer, and though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, I was on the edge of a midlife crisis. I was evaluating myself, and my life, thinking about what direction I wanted to head in the future. I was happy enough with my life, with being a wife, a mom, and a professor, but I had a feeling that there was more I could do. More I could explore. More I could learn. And though I didn’t quite know why, fiddling seemed to hold the key to this self-exploration.

This festival, I’d thought, would be a chance to investigate fiddling, and also to expose the kids to fiddling. I thought it might be good for them to be exposed to the music, culture, and people right around them in Appalachia. So, I’d convinced them and my husband to go along with me to check out the festival. Somewhat reluctantly, they agreed, and there we were, bumping along on a dirt road headed into the wilderness.

“A bluegrass festival?” William asked. “Is there going to be any music we like there?”

“I don’t know, William,” I said, feeling exasperated. He liked Coldplay, Muse, the Beatles. Sure, he played violin, and we’d been playing the fiddle music with Angela, but that wasn’t the kind of music he wanted to listen to on a summer afternoon. I looked back at him, slumping in his seat with exaggerated boredom. I could almost hear his thought: Mom’s lost it. Even Rose, in her sweet way, looked at me curiously.

“We’re going to see what we see, and that’s it,” I said firmly, matter-of-factly, as if I had any idea what we would see. Besides, it wouldn’t do any of us any harm to try something new.

Rose shrugged. “Okay,” she said, happy to be along for the ride.

William sighed melodramatically, turned up the volume on his iPod, and looked out the window at the run-down wooden shacks, cars on blocks, and outside dogs. Usually when we went anywhere, we went to Cleveland to see their grandparents, or the Colony Square Mall in Zanesville to see a movie, or to Ruby Tuesday in Cambridge. Not to backwoods campgrounds.

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” my husband asked, glancing at the MapQuest printout I held on my lap.

“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. “It’s up here; just keep following this road.”

He kept driving on a road that had become just two tire tracks through the dry grass. Finally, we arrived at the Old National Trail Campground.

As we drove in, we saw rows of RVs, and the air through the open windows of our van smelled thick with the wood-smoke from campfires. We parked and got out, following the sound of bluegrass music up and over the hill to a shady area where mostly seniors sat on lawn chairs. They were listening to a band playing on a makeshift trailer stage. I immediately realized our mistake: we hadn’t brought any chairs. I asked one of the women working at the concession stand if she knew where we could find some.

“Just a minute, I have a few in our trailer,” she said, eyeing me as the outsider I felt I was, but with a look suggesting I wouldn’t be one for long if I just proved myself in some way I didn’t quite understand. “How many do you need?”

Embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of bringing chairs, I sheepishly told her four. She smiled, looking at me and then at my less-than-enthusiastic family, and said she’d be right back.

Borrowed camp chairs in hand, we settled down to listen to the music. We were surrounded by toe-tapping, John Deere cap–wearing men and tough-looking women in jeans and T-shirts, all of them with lawn and camp chairs that they’d had sense enough to bring themselves, sipping coffee, eating pie, and listening intently to the fiddle playing and banjo plucking. There under the pine trees and maple trees of the Ohio woods, just a few miles from New Concord, we had entered a different world, a mysterious realm, a place rooted in these hills for as long as anyone here could remember.

The first act we saw, Melvin Goins and his band, had a fiddler. As the band played its lineup of country and bluegrass songs, I was entranced by the way the fiddler’s fingers ran up and down the fingerboard, the way the music came out of him as naturally as wind blowing through the pines. The more interested I became, though, the more impatient William grew, leaning back in his chair, sighing, tapping his sister on the shoulder.

“When are we going to go?” William whispered loudly to me.

“After a while,” I said. “Just enjoy the music.”

He rolled his eyes and kicked the dirt. Rose giggled, looking over at me and quieting down when I gave her a look that said shush. My husband sat there stoically in his lawn chair, glancing over at me and the kids when we started whispering.

“Want to walk with them around the campground for a bit?” I begged him. “Please?”

He looked at me just as William had a moment earlier, and I was struck, not for the first time, by the similarities between my husband and our son. Both were charismatic and boyish, with blond hair and a natural attractiveness, as well as a tendency toward frustration when things weren’t exactly right, exactly perfect. And it occurred to me, looking at my family, that maybe it had been a bad idea to bring them all along to this festival. Maybe I should have just come myself. It had been my crazy idea, anyway.

“I guess,” he said. “Come on, kids.”

He walked off with them to the edge of the audience area, and the kids scurried around under the pine trees, picking up sticks, looking at holes in the trees. He stood nearby, his arms crossed, glancing over at me now and then. Sitting there alone, I turned back to the music and listened, entranced, to the notes cascading out of that fiddle. I was amazed by the way the fiddle player picked up melodies and riffed on them as if such improvisation were the easiest, most natural thing in the world.

And in that moment, I fell in love with fiddling.

After the band wrapped up its set, I walked over to where the fiddle player had gone to the side of the stage. John Rigsby, he said his name was when I introduced myself. He seemed surprised by my interest, and shy, looking at his feet now and then, scratching the campground dirt. He told me that he lived down near Martha, Kentucky, that he also played mandolin and sang, and that he had played off and on with the Melvin Goins band for a few years. In his blue-and-red-plaid shirt and jeans, he had dark-cropped hair and the demeanor of someone comfortable in his skin, comfortable with his profession, happy with his performance, and slightly flattered by my questions—though he didn’t seem to much fathom what I hoped to find out by talking with him. Honestly, I didn’t know myself.

He told me he’d played fiddle since he was nine. I told him that I played violin, and he looked at me curiously, the beginnings of a smile wavering on his lips.

“Is that right?” he said, his words rolling out in a slight Kentucky drawl.

“Just violin,” I said. “But I’m trying to learn fiddle.”

“You know how to read music?” he asked, eyeing me rather like the concession woman had a while earlier.

Surprised, and not sure if this was a trick question, I said, “Yeah, don’t you?”

He looked at me, bemused, smiling broadly now, as if he were letting me in on a fairly open secret.

“Nope,” he said. “Do it all by ear.”

I stared at him, stunned. All by ear? All that music? How could that be? How could he not know how to read music and play so well?

Almost conciliatory, he said, “Want to see my fiddle?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”

I followed him back to the band’s trailer, this time with Rose, who’d left William and my husband to run over to join us, interested to see what Mommy was up to. John carefully took out the black leather fiddle case and opened it up on a stump by the truck. Then he pulled out one of the strangest fiddles I’d ever seen: a five-string fiddle with a ram’s head carved in great detail in place of a scroll, the horns curving down on the side, the eyes staring hard out at anyone who might pick up the instrument, as if saying, So let’s see what kind of fiddle you play. Let’s just see. I stared at the ram’s head, considering the challenge inherent in the glint of its ebony eyes, the deep shine of its wood.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a beautiful instrument.”

Rose looked at it, pointing to the scroll.

“Look at the eyes,” she said. “Weird.”

“It’s got a nice, deep sound,” he said. “Not too loud a fiddle.”

He himself was also soft-spoken, but he clearly loved this fiddle, and loved talking about things related to fiddle.

“Any more, that’s all I play,” he said.

He handed me the instrument, and I took it gingerly, not sure what to do.

“Go ahead; try it,” he said.

I bowed a few notes, mostly open strings, unable to think of any of the fiddle tunes I’d been learning from the Mel Bay book, and suddenly shy, worried about measuring up. Plus, there was that ram’s head. I felt it looking at me, up from the scroll. I played a few scales starting on the low C fifth-string, which made the instrument something of a cross between a violin and the lower-keyed viola.

“It’s lovely,” I stammered, because it was. Rich and full, just like he’d said.

“Yeah, it’s a remarkable instrument,” he said.

I looked inside the f-hole for the label that would tell me who made it.

“It’s an Arthur Conner fiddle,” he said before I could locate the little label in the bright sunlight. “Down in Virginia.”

I nodded, reading the label: Arthur Conner, Copper Hill, Virginia.

“So he makes fiddles down there?” I asked.

“Yup,” he said. “He’s gettin’ pretty old, but he’s still making them, near as I can tell.”

I thought about Copper Hill, Virginia, envisioning hillsides covered in copper-flaked rocks and thick woods. It seemed like a magical, mystical place. And as I stood there, looking at that fiddle, I began to formulate a plan.

John and I shook hands, and I thanked him for his time.

“Sure thing,” he said, placing the fiddle away carefully in its case like he was putting a baby to sleep in its crib.