Allegheny Mountain
by John Hesselbein (9781425720414)

Allegheny Mountain Shortly after the Revolution young men and women and their children poured over the mountain wall and made lives for themselves in the Alleghenies, land that was formerly denied to them. Some of them were my people and became the People of the Hill. My grandchildren are eight generations from Cambria County. We don't live there now but those of us who are alive today are remarkably similar to our ancestors who lived on Pringle Hill. These were intelligent and brave people of great emotional depth who could love. They expressed themselves in writing. Philip and Mary Pringle were writing love poetry to each other in 1856. I included some in this book, and also Civil War letters regarding the Seven Days, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg, written by members of my family who participated in those battles, and their women. Their women were of high quality and did not deserve the war that took their men away just so rich people could own slaves and not have to work themselves. Those were hard times and the rolling hills were bled dry, stripped of their men. Their strength is mine. In times of great danger I get calm and can feel them with me. Philip and Martin didn't think much of their chances of making it through the war. I've often stood by their graves on a green hillside in the Alleghenies. They could write. They could love. They could fight. We kept writing poetry too. I lost the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest the same year a friend of mine lost the Boston Marathon. My younger brother was also a soldier and a poet, but much better than I could ever be. He was like a God walking the earth among men. The higher elevation of hissoul was apparent in his manner and verse. One day he fell in love with a mortal woman. He was brave and did not hold back, and she humbled him. The evil enchantress hurt him very badly, as Sampson was by the Philistine temptress. Rhys was driven, in his despair, to write some really hot love poetry. It is very good. It is too bad it was bought at such a high cost. I put five of them in the book. They are some of the best of that sort I've seen. By way of contrast I added two of my poems, Burning with Fever on Sheldon Street, and a sensitive poem about the death of a young friend. Since I know little beyond roofing and Army service, much of this book is dedicated to those. Roofing can be rough stuff. Many men choose other lines of work because the work is hard and it is easy to get badly hurt or killed and you can get all sweated up and dirty too. I did about 25 years in the trade. I worked on famous buildings. You can read about Woolsey Hall in New Haven, and the Old Governors Mansion in Sacramento. George W. Bush, Fishmouth and I lived in New Haven at the same time. George was attending Yale University pretending to be a scholar and I was working for a big roofing company. In the book I compare my military service with that of the President's and examine Fishmouth's worldviews, so similar to those of George W. Bush. The roofing game is not for the overly sensitive. I didn't make any of it up. Those were real people getting busted up and killed. I even had time in the chapter to beat a guy up in a parking lot. Every once in a while you have to step off the merry-go-round and beat some guy up on the fairway. I guess you can read about how they dropped the heavy steel gravel scoop on me, but how my leg didn't break after all. Perhaps it is time you learned that not everybody in the world is nice. The nice people more then make up for all the really bad people, and there are a lot of them out there. There is a thing out there called love. That is the most important thing of all. As a student at Eastern Connecticut State College I took a course called Writing for English Majors. The text was Modes of Literature by J. Bard Mc Nulty. I have been playing with mixed modes in writing for over 25 years. Several of my chapters involve quest. In Fa

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