Two Sides to the Coin of Creepy

.......

There's the warm side, of friends and firelight, holidays and companionship...romantic language and story-forms.  Tradition.  Tales told over and over but never written down...the same stories told in different ways in different places, the children of travelers, adept at blending in and looking at everything familiar through a different lens in each new location....and all the stories that have been written down.  Literature and folklore, transmission of cultures...Festive and social,  awash in spiced harvest foods, candy, and alcohol.  Creepiness as entertainment: a costume that can be put on and taken off with little or no risk in the comfort of society.  Quaint idioms to universalize and tie a clever bow around the primal reality symbolized and played out by the natural world at this time of year.

But the other side of the coin is not so much cold, as devoid of warmth.  There is no companionable feeling here.  No stories to distract and thrill.  Stories can be put aside, but what is here can never be put aside, because it is part of the whole fabric of which we are made. Nothing is familiar, there is no blending in.  No literature or art to make beautiful that which is inevitable and terrifying.
It is not human, not in our image or the image of any other creature we know.  It does not care or feel.  It is cold.  It is bleak, most of all.  It is what is left when there is nothing else.  Despair and emptiness.  Gray daylight ordinariness.  The most disorienting dream you have ever dreamed.
Sometimes you will catch a glimpse.  This is a warning.  Nothing lies beyond but more and more of the same.  This is what you have been looking for, and it's like nothing you could have imagined.  It is truth.

Doctor's Report from 1880 Census....St. George Dist,. Accomack County, VA - transcription.

'The only contagious diseases that have prevailed in my district during the past year are the mumps and whooping cough; the latter of which has proved fatal in a few instances.  My district is situated in an exceedingly level section of country, extremely well adapted for railroads, which may here be constructed at less expense than perhaps in any other part of the United States.  It has long sustained the reputation abroad, of being very unhealthy, so much so that strangers regard it as a sort of death spot.  But its exceeding healthiness for the last six years has contributed greatly to retrieve its character in that respect.  Indeed, I believe it to be as healthy as any part of Virginia which is not mountainous.  It is true, that the mortality on this shore in bygone days was very great, but that, I think, was owing more to the luxurious and epicurean style of living which then prevailed than to the climate.  For now, when terrapin and oyster suppers and bacchanalian carousals have become less frequent, a very decided improvement in the health of the Peninsula has taken effect which is likely to increase as the Sons of Temperance are making very strenuous and successful efforts to do away with the use of intoxicating liquors, that well known source of disease and premature death.  The district is free from rocks, and contains but little timber adapted to ship building………..however there is enough that is useful for building small schooners; and also the erection of dwelling houses.  The most common tree is common pine, which grows very rapidly, the leaves of which are much…….making beds for hogs and cattle.  This when decomposed and compounded……substance makes a very excellent manure, and is very  generally used.  There is a compound, de…..nated among us “……..”, which has also been found to be highly useful as for fertilizing the soil; owing to the salt with which it is very strongly impregnated, our lands requiring manure of character.  This grass is ….. in great abundance to our bay and ocean…it is also much used in our ice houses for ….. ice, which it has the main …..of preserving.  ………. Are unknown on the Eastern Shore.  ….., known…….(next page missing.)'

(this is a snapshot of the place my grandfather's family came from, thirty years before he was born.  they had lived in this place for about 250 years, at the time. I think this was written during the time that there was a campaign to persuade the railroad to come to the eastern shores of Md. and Va.)

Sleep Story

At my grandparents' house, I usually slept in the guest room on the first floor.  Down a tiny hallway off of the 'entrance' hall (which wasn't really an entrance hall since only strangers used the 'front' door), the guest room had three windows, two of which faced the spacious side-yard, which was bordered by the Chincoteague Bay and PawPaw creek on the east and south sides, and was empty except for a weathered picnic table and a large cedar tree.  The third window looked out on what I thought of as the 'front' yard, since it was the side of the house that we saw first when we arrived, since it faced the road.  Later I learned that the real front of the house was the side that faced the water, and was fronted by the wide, screened porch.  The 'front' yard contained the willow tree that I liked to climb and sit in. The willow branches made swish, swish noises when it was windy, which was always.  Inhabited by rhythmically-singing cicadas in the summer months, it was easy to climb.  I loved to collect the crispy brown shells that the cicadas left behind.  My grandmother would give me a paper lunch bag to keep them in, and I would take them home to my house in Elkridge, for my mother to throw away months later, no doubt, when these summer days were more distant and my thoughts were absorbed in the worries and business of school days.  Behind the willow tree ran the white-painted, two-planked fence which separated the yard from the end of the tar and gravel lane that dead-ended at the creek, and the low, narrow, ramshackle pier that reached out into the shallow, muddy water.  Across the lane stood the neighbors' house across a damp grassy lawn, and an expanse of salt marsh, and finally, from this same window you could see the bridge that crossed the creek.  Bayside Road ran, and still runs, along the Chincoteague Bay coast from Public Landing, swooping inland at Boxiron Creek and Brockatonorton Bay.  In the 1970s, the bridge still wasn't paved, and each car or pickup truck rumbled over the wooden bridge, the sound echoing off of the surface of muddy PawPaw Creek and drifting back toward the house.