Finding Starlight

a journey begins...

art by Peter Corbin from The Starlight Creek Angling Society (1992, Meadow Run Press)

I’m sitting here with a cold IBC root beer and Little Walter’s tongue-blocking blues harp buzzing through the speakers. I’ve been dreaming lately of misty mornings on boulder-strewn creeks full of dyspeptic trout. You’d think given my current surroundings in Montana this would mean native cutthroat in alpine drainages accessible only by putting in miles on bootsoles and quad-burning elevation gains. But the streams I find myself on in that last bit of dawn subconsciousness are all well east of here. They are deep in the Ozarks and the Smokies, places that have become embedded in my psyche due to my deep and abiding love of the writing of Harry Middleton.

Harry Middleton was a Southern writer whose eloquent prose centered on nature and the outdoors. His first book, The Earth is Enough, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1989 and remains his best known. He wrote four other books, publishing his last two in 1993, the year he died prematurely of heart failure at 44. Along the way, Harry also wrote for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Field & Stream, Smithsonian, and Sierra, and he was the nature editor and Outdoors South columnist for Southern Living magazine for six years.

I didn’t discover Harry until three years after he died when Pruett Publishing released his first two books in paperback. The first time I read The Earth is Enough I was enthralled. It’s ostensibly the story of Harry’s upbringing from teen to adulthood while sequestered with his grandfather on a hardscrabble farm in the Ozarks, along with his great uncle and that “irascible malcontent” Sioux, Elias Wonder. Harry’s gifts as a writer are on full display in The Earth is Enough. He was an incredibly descriptive narrator, able to craft a scene with such wonderfully detailed prose that it brought you not only physically into his world, but also emotionally.

I have books that have become like old friends, stories that I am drawn to again and again. The Earth is Enough and Harry’s second book, On the Spine of Time, are two such friends. There is rarely a winter that passes that doesn’t find both my dog-eared copies sitting on the nightstand next to my bed, where I work my way through them, reliving scenes and revisiting characters that feel like people I’ve known my whole life. Sometime around the millennium, I had the idea that I could weave the twin narratives together into one cohesive story and write a screenplay based on it. I even reached out to Jim Pruett to see if he might know who held the film rights to Harry’s work. Alas, it didn’t come to pass; I had no idea how to write a screenplay, had a newborn son at home, and was juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet as we had just bought our first house. Something had to give.

Then, a couple of years ago while rereading The Earth is Enough for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me there was still an untold story out there waiting to be discovered. I wrote myself a Post-It note and stuck it on my desk. The note sat there collecting dust but resisting my attempts to tidy up and discard it. Giving up and letting go of this story wasn’t something I could bring myself to do. Then 2020 happened and I was given the gift of time. After hearing a reference to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way on a podcast, I picked up a copy and started writing every day. Turns out there’s a fair amount of catharsis involved in this daily practice and I found writing to be incredibly helpful in working myself through the grief of losing my job and moving on to what was to come. One of the things I promised my wife when all this went down was that I would take some of this newfound time to return to writing and developing story ideas. After our move, I discovered an old set of notes jotted down when I’d been thinking about that untold story and started to refine them into a more cohesive plan and idea. And I soon realized what I was looking at was a book about me and Harry Middleton.

One of the things I’ve come to realize in my early research is that Harry Middleton was an enigma. Very few people actually knew him well, if at all. Harry himself admitted as much in the introduction to The Earth is Enough: “A writer may write alone, live alone, but sooner or later he must get up from his desk, leave his garret. When he does he is more than likely out of his element, an awkward sort. So it is with me.” I think it is possible that subconsciously Harry preferred it this way because it fed into the opacity of his stories which by his own admission were “more real than imagined”. Harry was a master of what is now commonly referred to as “creative non-fiction”. He took events from his life and molded and shaped them to better fit the narrative of the story he wanted to tell. Harry’s characters are so richly written, so uniquely odd and eclectic that readers are left wondering whether any of it really happened. But Harry was adamant that it all did.

There is something to the notion that stories are out there in the ether, just waiting to be paired with their intended storyteller. Over the last several weeks as I’ve been digging into this story, the sheer volume of serendipitous connections I’ve experienced can only be construed as a sign. They seem to be uniformly pointing me down a path, so much so that I fear I risk losing a part of myself if I don’t complete this journey. I feel very much like Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams when he goes to find Terence Mann and says to him “you once wrote ‘there comes a time when all the cosmic tumblers have clicked into place, and the universe opens itself up for a few seconds to show you what’s possible’”. In my soul, I feel this story has been chasing me for the last 25 years while also waiting patiently for me to get to the place where I can devote myself entirely to telling it.

It’s always mystified me that Harry’s work hasn’t found a much broader audience. The core ideas and values espoused in his writing are more relevant now than ever. The title of The Earth is Enough refers to the idea that all any of us needs as human beings is a direct connection to the earth, time spent outside close to the wilderness and water and mountains. Nature is a sustaining force in our lives, a place of restorative power, and sharing it with the people we love is as essential as breathing, eating, or sleeping. There is a resonance to this belief that is everlasting and worth celebrating, and Harry’s books are that celebration for me. If by sharing our collective story I can shed new light on the inspirational power of Harry’s work, this journey will have been worth it. I’ll be honest and acknowledge that this is as much about me as it is about Harry. I feel like we’re on this cosmic path together and there are still some unknowns out there waiting to be unearthed. My next step on this adventure will be to travel to the locations Harry featured in his work that have so invaded my waking hours as of late. If there’s any truth at all to Harry’s insistence about “more real than imagined”, I’m hoping this trip will help readers understand why these places so inspired and sustained him.

I’ll end with the scene at the end of The Shawshank Redemption (itself an amazing short story by Stephen King, from the collection Different Seasons).  Red is on his way to Zihuatenejo to find Andy, and King writes:

I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting on a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

(I’ll paraphrase from here)

I hope Harry is there.

I hope I can make it to Starlight Creek.

I hope I can find Harry’s spirit and feel his presence.

I hope the Ozarks and Smokies are as deep green and blue as Harry described them.

I hope.