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Cogan's Woods offers a fond look back at 1960s small-town America: sweating red metal Coca-Cola coolers filled with bottled soft drinks whose caps are imbedded outside the store in "an asphalt apron paved with hundreds of flattened bottle caps, country stores where "old timers of various shapes and sizes leaned into their stories," fresh-picked tomatoes that were "still warm and tasted of the sun," and legendary baseball teams like the Undefeated Persimmon Gap Bobcats."
Ellis offers lasting images and sensory paintings, all gleaned from this land where he and his father traveled, hunted, and rested. In the end, it is this simple mantra, offered first by a gravedigger and later by his dying father that settles into the boy's heart: "It's important to remember, it's so important to remember."
As the car purred and swayed its way east toward Belden County, Kentucky, we munched on peanut rolls and sipped White Castle coffee and hot chocolate from blue and white paper cups, the kind with the folding cardboard handles. The glow of the blue light coming off the Mercury's instrument panel lit the creases in my father's face, and the ash of his cigarette, the size and shape of a pencil eraser, glowed red in the dark interior of the car. Dad steered the Mercury through the advancing gray and talked of other days spent in just this way. "This is a perfect day for squirrel hunting," he said. "Now if the wind will just lie down at daylight, we'll have a good calm wet day."
The fog thickened as the road twisted back toward the river and sheets of mist doused the light from the low beams, slowing our progress. And then the road turned back toward the hills, the sweep of the headlights revealing pockets of tired land where the skeletal remains of outbuildings stood as lonely reminders of the life that had once been lived there. I opened the "cozy wing" on my side of the car to check the temperature, to see if the weather was going to be just right for the coming hunt. With the little triangle-shaped window pushed open, the night air--damp and thick and smelling of summer and road tar-rushed in and swirled around our faces, pushing the cigarette smoke out the window on my father's side until in joined the fog ghosting above the Ohio River north of the road.
While squirrel hunting was the major focus of this upriver journey, I also enjoyed the chance to spend some time with my father when he seemed to be free of life's pressures. On these trips, there was never a cross word said between us. Just the two of us: father and son, teacher and student, travelers and hunters.
Overview
Cogan's Woods ...