A thanks to those who came before us

This is the talk given by Dr. Paul Burns at Decoration in May 1985.

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When we look out over this beautiful setting, we each have our private thoughts. For each person here, these thoughts and memories and hopes will always be different. For here it has been the best of times and it has been the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the epic of belief, it was the epic of incredulity. It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope and it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had noting before us. (A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, 1859). It has been a harsh land and it is a beautiful land.

In July and August, it is too hot, dry; and often in January, too cold and raw; and then spring time, as it is here today, it rains, the warming of spring, the flowers bursting to life. It is at times a beautiful land and at times a harsh land, but it is our land, and we understand it; we love it.

Today, here at Heflin, I would like to pause for a minute and say thank you to those who have come before us, who brought us where we began, and left with us a heritage we are inexorably bound to. And to our children and to ourselves I would like to say, “How incredibly lucky you are and we all have no excuses.” The fact that each of us is here today means that we have roots that began in this land and which tie us to this land. To all of us, roots and heritage are important, but the provincialist that cultivates only his roots is in danger of becoming more root that plant (paraphrased, John Graves Goodbye to a River). The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him, withers into half a man (John Graves, Goodbye to a River). It is from our roots and our heritage that our ideas and our very lives are molded; the way we think and act and plan and carry on our daily lives has been influenced by those who have gone before us and by those who are here now at Helfin. It is not necessary to like being from Clio or from Texas or from anywhere else, although most of us do, most of us are proud of it. It does not mean that life has always been happy or pleasant as we grew up and surely as those how have gone before us grew up. Life was sometimes harsh and at times terribly unpleasant. However, it is still a part of each one of us. It is, I think, necessary in that crystal chamber of the mind when one speaks straight to oneself, that he is what he is, and for any understanding of the human condition, it is necessary to know a little about what one’s past consists of. And all of the people here at Heflin and my ancestors -- Colonel Burns and Mommie Winn and all the rest of them haunting the country they had known – are all a part of my thing. And all of them, for reasons known to them, had sometimes beyond their control come to this country in covered wagons and on horseback to a country we would scarcely recognize if we saw it today: tall grass as high as the stirrups and the shoulders of their horses, spread out for miles before them, the trees mostly only along the draws and creeks and open prairie that one could ride for miles over. Much of the good and bad that they had seen was stuck in me as certainly as the memories of growing up in this land is stuck in me: the memories of the call of the bob white quail on a cool summer morning, or a warm still summery evening, after finishing up the chores and it was still hot and the wind was calm in the early evening before the wind picked up at night and cooled things off.

The memories of sitting at the piano with mother playing I’m Always Chasing Rainbows and The Old Rugged Cross. For here we have always chased rainbows and looked for a better way of doing things, and every generation has chased a rainbow and chased a dream and hoped their children would have a better life than they did and had a faith in God, and feared God, and feared not much else. And singing “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame.” And when I stood on the rocky hillside of Calvary, outside of Jerusalem, it looked a lot like the rocky hillsides of our mountains. And I hope we will never tire of chasing rainbows.

The memories are stuck in me of the drought of the 1950s, and the sight of the dust storms blowing in from the North, when a gray black line would rise from the horizon and soon after you would realize what it was, it engulfed the whole land. For several years the crops were no good and the land would support fewer and fewer cattle until February of 1957, when the drought abruptly ended.

And the memories of the first day we had electricity. Mother had been home alone that day when it was turned on. Then, just before supper, she waited until we were all in the kitchen with the lamps on and flipped the switch, and once more, life in this land was never the same, Electricity changed all our lives as surely as the coming of the first automobile changed my parent’s and grandparent’s lives.

Our ancestors brought us into this land and our memories of it can never be taken away. But, you wonder especially hard if something in you really believes that land is really owned more with head and heart with eyes and brain, and not with title deed. When we think of the ten thousand years this land has been lived on, we don’t really own it, as occupied for a while and accept responsibility to pass it on, unabused and loved. We will be nearly finished, I think, when we stop wanting to understand the old pull toward green things and living things, toward dirt and pain and heat and water and what they spawn.  In the Book of Numbers, we are admonished to “defile not, therefore, the land where I dwell, for I the Lord, dwelleth among the children of Israel (Numbers 35:34). With these memories, and each person’s personal memories, let’s pause for a minute and look back at our ancestors and tell them, “Thank you.”

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When our ancestors arrived on this land, it was a harsh land, it was a frontier, where only the strong and the weary and the competent were likely to survive and succeed – this fact permeates us today. We are not so much competitive as contemptuous of incompetence. The resources of this land were thin and sometimes it did not rain and the crops did not grow, and when they did grow, often we did not have control over the price that our produce brought. The price we were given for cattle and grains was not determined by us but was dictated largely by others and it made life hard and unpredictable. Even though the families sometimes cooperated during times of danger or misfortune, it was a very clear understanding then and even today, that every family head was expected to really manage for himself. The people who settled here were survivors and the survivors, out of total experience, came to see the land, their land, as more than mere acreage or prosaic business. It was a land hollowed by their dreams and their sweat and their buried dead. The conditions of this land and the type of people who settled it have indelibly imprinted the characteristics necessary for survival on themselves and, whether we like it or no, upon us too. The people who settled this area and their descendants were ferociously self-motivated and self-reliant. Prideful and intolerant, hard-working and ambitious. They had a passion for the land and, though politically aware, wanted one thing from their government: to be left alone.

This is the land they left us, this is the heritage that they have left us, and I say to them, “Thank you.”

In 1965, after I finished internship, I was called up into the army, and then my number came up to go to Vietnam, and even though I had an absolute reason that I did not have to go to Vietnam because of asthma as a child, I waived my exemption when I was called because I felt that it was my duty to go if I was asked. I am sure this feeling of responsibility comes from this land where we grew up, where one was expected to carry his share of the load and not shirk his duty if he was called. I went to Vietnam, and it was not fun. And there were times when I terribly wished I was not there. For 26 days I traveled on a troop ship from the West Coast to eh coast of Vietnam. There was very little on the troop ship to do other than think about getting to Vietnam and worry about what would happen when you got there. As we would lie on the deck for hours at a time, I noticed a very simple, but strange, somewhat comforting, thing that I kept with me the whole time I was there. I noticed that if I would lie on my back and look straight up into the sky, the sky looked exactly the same as it did here in Central Texas, the clear blue of the sky, the completely unpolluted air, cumulous clouds drifting slowly by, and at night the sky so clear and black and deep that the stars seem to almost come down closer to you. And I found that if I looked up in the sky I could drift back to Salt Mountain and Gap Creek and I could shut out the unfamiliar land and dangers and risk of Vietnam. I did it many times when I was in Vietnam, I would look into the sky for a period of time and in my mind I could drift right back home again, and with that memory of home here and the telegram mother and daddy sent me in Fort Gordon, Georgia, just before I left that said: “Dear Son: Our hopes and prayers are with you until you are safely back home again.”

The heritage of this land and the knowledge of their love, and faith in God and anticipation of the future helped me get through those times. When I came back from Vietnam, I came back to these mountains and Gap Creek and I was home, and I say to those who are here at Heflin, “Thank you.” And I understand better the poet who said, “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,/Who never to himself hath said,/This is my own, my native land!” (Sir Walter Scott from The Lay of the Minstrel, Canto sixth).

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What does this mean to us today? This reminds me of a time when I was young, of a revival meeting at the Methodist church in Blanket. They were having their revival on a Sunday night and the Baptist church across the street let out so that we could all go across and hear the visiting Methodist minister, I remember it was a hot night, of course there was no air conditioning. The women were all fanning, the men were just as hot but, of course, did not fan. And the children were fanning mostly to pass the time away. I still remember the words of the Methodist minister that night, at the end of the sermon when he raised his voice to a feverish pitch and said, “ I would not give a dime for your ‘use-ters,’ it’s your ‘now-sters’ that count.” Even though I was only in third grade, I understood what he meant and I understand it now. As all the people who settled this land and lived in this land, and all of those who come after us surely must understand. In order to survive in this sometimes harsh and sometimes fruitful land, we know that what we have done in the past does in fact count. But (also), that we cannot dwell on that, and we have to look to the future. And we can take this heritage and use it as a basis of our very being, but know that now it is up to us to carry on and we can offer no excused as those before us offered none. In my medical practice, I have noticed that you can actually measure the amount that a person is dying, not really dying in a physical sense but in a psychological sense, in an emotional sense. I see people in my practice who talk and think only about their accomplishments in the past and they are psychologically dying. And I see those with hopes and dreams and plans and they are alive and fun to be around. And I think that the percent we are dying is the percent that we look back at our lives to the most important events that we accomplished; and the percent we are alive is the percent of the time that we are looking ahead with plans and hopes and dreams for the future. And the heritage carved out by our ancestors by their toil and hopes and sweat and failures has steered us to the right course and it has all been unbelievably good to me.

And I look out over this countryside and cannot help but say (the lines from Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”):

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

To those in Heflin, I say, “Thank you.” And to our parents and our aunts and uncles and relatives that have come before us who taught and guided us, I say, “Thank you.” To myself I say, “I have no excuses.”

Our heritage is strong and to the young ones in this youth-oriented society, I say, “You have no alibis.” We are wrong if we think for one minute, the pressures that we face today, are any greater than the pressures of those who lie here. They faced the pressures of a dry spell, causing a crop failure, and their families not having much money. The pressure of having a sick family member with nothing to treat the sickness but home remedies. They also faced childbirth at home. Feeling the labor pains, they would send one child to get her husband from the field or pasture, and the husband sending someone on a ling horseback ride to Blanket or to Brownwood to try and find a doctor, and another family member hurrying to a neighbor who had some experience in delivering a child. And then face, possibly, uncontrolled hemorrhage or bleeding or infection: These my friends, were pressures. And they faced the depression with no money, no matter how hard you worked. The story my dad tells of digging a grave for R.A. Dunsworth’s mother, who died during a terrible cold spell, during the flu epidemic, when the ground was frozen and the weather was terribly cold, they really could not have a regular burial. Or of Colonel Burns dying in Dublin, sending wagon to take his body back to their home and keeping it on the front porch, where it was cool, until they could bury it. And the buggies lined up for the funeral down the road, here at Heflin. Infections in children with no antibiotics. And injuries with no emergency help except what the family could render. And the stresses and pressures faced by the family of the first person buried here at Heflin. A child who died as the family was passing through the area, most likely dying of infections. The family watching helplessly as the infection spread through his throat and lungs with high fever and difficulty breathing, as he literally smothered as the infection filled his lungs and consumed his body. Infections we cure so routinely toady with marvelous drugs, and almost terrifyingly complex intensive-care units. These were pressures like we hardly know today. But they were survivors, and to the young, I say. “Take a minute, look over your shoulder to those who have gone before you. All their tool and tears and sweat and hope and joy and excitement, we have been well served.”

To those buried here at Heflin and to those who are not buried here, but who lived on this land and fought to deliver the land and the heritage to us, I think “You are here in spirit.” And to all of those before us, I say, “Thank you.” And I say fervently to my daughters, and to the sons and daughters of all those here, I say this land has been inhabited for ten thousand years, as the seasons have changed with the cold ‘northers blowing in the winter, followed by the winds blowing from the Chihuahuan desert in the summer to heat the land and dry it out. And not much else really changed but the seasons until a little more than a century ago, when our ancestors arrived. Since then, it has come a long way. Those who have gone before us have served us well. We owe you a great debit of thanks, and with that, a great responsibility. Life has never been easy and was not meant to be and never will be. Life will not be easy for you, as it has not been for any generation. I did not want to go to Vietnam, and I have worked all day and all night without sleep, more nights that I would like to count. But, we offer no excuses and no alibis. Nobody promised our ancestors a rose garden, and no one promised any of us one.  But, because of them, we are promised the ultimate gift, to be able to make it on our own. Our roots and heritage run deep and when times are hard, we all have something to fall back on, our ancestors and our parent have seen to that , Now, your future is in the palm of your hand.”