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Crossing Silver Creek: Narratives of Truth, Beauty and Goodness

by Jayson Duffy

85 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0217; ISBN 1-55395-854-3; US$13.50, C$16.10, EUR11.00, £8.00

Crossing Silver Creek is a search for truth, beauty and goodness within the boundaries of life, a successful search of fulfillment.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book Crossing Silver Creek is a collection of personal narratives that create a story cloth of poetic prose. These narratives are sewn together with the common thread that truth, beauty and goodness can be found in the most unlikely places, from the crustaceans that lurk beneath the surface of a creek to the feelings that are dredged from events long passed. Crossing Silver Creek is an honest journey through the events of one person's life beginning with childhood and the doldrums of summer, and stopping along the way for discovery, reconciliation, and celebration. Like any journey, within the pages of this text are hidden moments of clarity, moments that guide and direct the author past some of the most difficult roadblocks. The author explores these moments and invites the reader to share in them. Crossing Silver Creek will challenge readers to look at life and to see the truth beauty and goodness that lies therein. More than just a collection of narratives, this text is an energy that fuels the reader to see the gifts that are at hand and to celebrate that which is the everyday world.

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About the Author     In just 32 years, Jayson Duffy has worn many hats: farmhand, waiter, dockhand, collegiate running coach, teacher, husband, and father. He currently serves as a teacher in British Literature, Mythology and Sophomore Language Arts, as well as head track coach at the same school. Duffy resides in east central Wisconsin with his wife, son and whippet. Aside from a handful of poems and some marketing, this is his first major published work.

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Excerpts

Foreword

    Generations of philosophers turn again and again to a common question, "What does the human value?" Consistently, the answer is, as told by the wise, "Truth, beauty and goodness." These are the elements that uplift the human spirit, relatively vague terms, as a conventional cliché suggests that, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Goodnessand truth are equally subjective, and contingent on individual interpretation. Individual interpretation, in the end, is all any of us have. I am forced to define truth, beauty and goodness within the restrictive world of my own experiences. In seeking to define all three terms, the one detail of which I am most certain is that each of these terms is related to the other, and the existence of one often cannot be in the absence of the other.
    Truth, beauty and goodness lie within the hills of the Mississippi River Valley. As morning breaks, carried by a prelude of birds singing in nature's chorus and the subtle rhythm of the hummingbird's wings, my journey toward Viterbo University takes me along the meandering path of the Burns Valley road that has been cut into the forgiving folds of an emerald landscape. The white lines of birch seem to rise and fall like the expanding ribs of a breathing countryside shrouded in soft feathers of foliage. Fronds of grass and fern line the road, swaying subtly in unison, choreographed under the direction of a benevolent breeze. At the crest of the climb, the Mississippi stretches out across the river valley, spotted with channel markers, vessels in miniature, and scattered islands of forested refuge. Across and just below a hillside lined with apple trees stretches a forgotten cloud, reaching its misty tendrils through the treetops, hiding a mystery understood by few. Descending to the La Crescent valley below, the yellow, aged bedrock protrudes from the darkened earth and undergrowth, leaving testament to the foundation on which life balances.
    I turn from the Great River Road to the wetlands that parallel the Mississippi. Marsh Grass and cattail bend under the gentle push of the wind and occasionally yield to the greater weight of cantankerous red-wing blackbirds hurrying in the quest for sustenance. Between the mottled patterns imposed by lily pads, the marsh waters, like a giant sun-catcher, throw back the fragmented fingers of lost sunlight broken and interrupted by undulating waves.
    Ahead, the strands of a steel cat's cradle, constructed by the nimble hands of a child Titan, bow downward over an expanse of reluctant river. Diligent vehicles vanish within the threads. The hum of the steel grid deck pulls me from my euphoria. Above,the soft movement of a heron, its legs protectively tucked beneath, is held in a snapshot moment, framed within the contours of the bridge and the open view of my car.
    This was a moment of truth, beauty and goodness for me, and I believe these moments are available to each of us through our realizations, through our epiphanies. In Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of a sailor who had callously shot an albatross with his crossbow. A curse fell upon the ship, grounding the vessel on a windless sea as the shipmates died, one by one. Alone, starved and dehydrated, the Ancient Mariner looked downward from the ship that had become his prison, downward upon the sea creatures that writhed and twisted, the sea creatures he had once regarded as hideous. He found beauty in their movement, in their life, and blessed them. This blessing lead to an unexplainable chain of events, events that lifted the curse of deathly still winds, events that lead him on a vessel fueled by supernatural power to his home. It is the mariner's realization of beauty that we must capture, and in doing so, perhaps a curse of sorts will be lifted from each of us as we are led homeward to where our souls yearn to live. Much like the mariner, we may need to peel away the layers of our restrictions to find truth, beauty and goodness hidden within the least likely forms.

Songs

    Within the most unlikely, brute tasks, truth, beauty and goodness awaken, like a butterfly forcing its way from a paper cocoon torn and fragmented, to spread its new wings, fanning life into the framework that will bear it upward. Such is the case with splitting wood for kindling late October into the early evening, the sun dropping below the horizon, stealthy, virtually imperceptible if not only for the reluctant passing of time. The coming of fall is witness to the yellowing of maple, the reddening of oak and sumac, and the contributing of other trees to make nature's palate.
    Each mass of wood holds a mystery in its bark patterns and ring clusters. I imagine the whisper that tells, "I was a strong lofty hickory, parent to many generations. I was custodian to wildlife that fed upon my fruit and lived within my boughs. I lived those years recorded by my rings, years before the angry gusts tore my time-tested roots from life." The force of the maul splits each mass, preparing it for use in the winter months, shaping each into sizes the wood stove can accommodate. The fibers cling to each other, split and torn, yet straining against me, fighting for the last moments of existence. In a way, as I shape each piece, each piece shapes me, back and shoulders aching, hands thick with calluses, fingers more resistant to a firm grip.
    Nightfall's progress is marked by shadows, stretched and distorted, silly-putty newspaper images pulled almost beyond recognition. The maul grows heavy in my hands and the concussion of each impact grows farther apart; the heavy hand of fatigue presses downward onto my shoulders. I concede the closing of Day, noticing the crescendo of a choir rising from the creek; frogs sing praise of the newborn night, a persistent serenade in hopes of finding a mate. Crickets strike a steady strum with their wings, a pace and tempo measured by the great number of musicians in a Lilliputian orchestra. The flood of sounds is complimented by the stirrings of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, who shakes branches of the canopy above, rustling the leaves of an oak instrument. Softly, just as night becomes a heavy blanket across the landscape, bats scramble from their hiding places and begin to beat the wind currents with the rapid flutter of leathery wings. They seem to move without direction, sometimes so close that the lift and fall of their swift wings is softly audible. But in the senselessness of the flight, the bats move without incident between the grey-steel bones of the windmill, skeletal and long out of use.
    Long ago, at the coming of dusk, the yard light hesitantly quavered into existence, casting a light for a new horde of shadows while serving as host to a mass of flying insects that swarm the fluorescent moon. Blind yet persistent, massive moths on dusty wings collide with the light. They batter themselves again and again until a hungry bat, sonar senses keen with hunger, darts in and snatches the morsel in mid-air. The aerial assault persists through the night, yet the insect numbers fail to falter.
    Glory rises tonight from the ridge overlooking the house, its dark outline a cloud of ink spilled onto paper. The first high pitched yammer sends a tremble through me, skin tightening with a shudder of bated breath. I imagine them gathering, lining the ridge in the anonymity of night. The greetings increase, and the choir begins to warm its voices. Suddenly, cued by an imagined director, the valley is fills with the harmony of coyote voices floating on night air, carried into the creek valley and over rolling hills beyond. I bathe in frosty moonlight, close my eyes and howl with them - Whitman's barbaric yawp. Once Thoreau had gone to the woods to live deliberately, but tonight, the woods have come to me.

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Catalogue Information

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