When I returned home a few nights ago, I was delighted to hear my first whippoorwill of the year, a sure sign that the cold is mostly behind us and that we can forge ahead with our warm weather rituals. The call of the whippoorwill is among my favorite sounds and brings back many fond memories of younger days and special times spent with my daughter when she was a child.
This connection dates back to my college days (War Eagle!!) when I had a fraternity brother who was the club clown. His name was Brushwood, and from time to time, maybe when he'd had one too many beers, he would recite portions of some poem that had a line about "the brushwood laurel" and another line about "Hell's broke loose, Hell's broke loose, Hell's broke loose in Georgia...". He didn't seem to know much more than those couple of lines, but he had them down pat.
So at some point, post college, I made it a mission to find the origins of these lines. Somehow, 30 years before Google, I managed to find that these lines came from a beautiful poem written by Stephen Vincent Benet, called "The Mountain Whippoorwill". When I found it and was able to experience the whole poem for the first time, I was captivated by the exquisite language and imagery of mountain fog and woods and trees and cockleburs and whippoorwills and mountain laurel and frogs a chuggin' jug a rum, jug a rum, and"God sleeping in his big white beard". I could just close my eyes and SEE and HEAR the wonderful scenes that Benet described. Turns out old Brushwood was on to something.
So next, I decide to memorize the poem. I don't know why. I guess I just thought it was the coolest thing I had read in a long time and I wanted to "own it". It's a fairly lengthy poem and it took a while of adding a few lines at a time on days when I found myself travelling alone in my truck. The irony was that once I finally mastered it, I realized that the journey was over, but there was no real destination. I was 27 years old, I had memorized this cool poem, and then what in the rip was I supposed to do with it!!? I remember one time I was asked to recite it for a couple of my young nieces and another time, a teacher friend invited me to recite it to her 3rd grade class. That was about it. Until Beth comes on the scene...
The answer finally came to me after 1986, when Beth was born. One of the joys of my life was the privilege of tucking her in at night and telling her bedtime stories. I made up stories about Buck The Deer who lived way, way back, deep, deep in the woods, and about Bull The Frog, who lived in the creek behind our house, and then voila', The Mountain Whippoorwill! Finally, I found the reason that I had learned that poem so many years ago; it was for my incredible daughter who had not even been born at the time I learned it. Funny, how God works those things out for us.
So one night I carried Beth upstairs to bed, and was just about to sit on the edge and launch into our story time, when suddenly the house alarm goes off, and the horn on the roof directly over Beth's room, starts BLARING out these blood curdling, pulsating, amplified shrieks!
Beth screams and jumps back into my arms and I walk her back downstairs to help calm her down and assure her that Mom had just accidentally tripped the alarm.
After a few minutes of quiet and calmness, I start back upstairs with her, and as we reach the landing just outside her room, I sense her apprehension again, as she holds me tighter and looks at me and asks, "Is it still up here?" And I answer with a question,
"Is what still up here, Beth?"
And she replies, "The BIG WHIPPOORWILL!"
