While we toured the schoolhouse part of the McLeod Museum, I noticed several newspaper clippings they have collected regarding events and people from that area. One of these articles featured the brother and sister Crandall who lived hermit-like in a shack they'd tacked together somewhere out in those hills. As a child I remember going with my parents to their place to visit for some reason or other. Their dwelling fit my dictionary's definition of ramshackle: appearing ready to collapse, rickety, carelessly or loosely constructed. Their refrigeration consisted of a deep, narrow hole where perishables were cooled. She took the cover off for us to look down there, and I think that the small boy I was kicked some dirt down there by accident, not to be confused with a boy who spits from a balcony somewhere. I'm certain that county social service people would not let anyone live like them in today's world, but these folks lived to be old people so the lifestyle could not have been all that bad. At any rate, I do not write to criticize anything about them. They just represented holdovers from an earlier time and didn't seem to care about entering the modern world.
I'm presently reading the novel Gap Creek by Robert Morgan. This book was an Oprah's Book Club pick awhile back and has received other awards. Inside the cover flap it talks of the young couple "and their efforts to make sense of the world in the last years of the nineteenth century." In my mind I make a bit of a connection between the Crandall's and the people in the novel. The author is scheduled as a featured guest scholar at this fall's Theodore Roosevelt Symposium at Dickinson State University. I am making plans to attend again and hope I get a chance to visit with him. His themes are often of the hill country and its people, the hillbillies, of Appalachia. His poetry is especially expressive as witnessed by the poem "Squatting" which opens with this line: The men in rural places when / they stop to talk and visit will / not stand, for that would make it seem / they're in a rush.
