BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT…. GOING DOWN TO EGYPT. The dark-haired boy is bent over blank white paper, black-and-red flannel obscuring a thin and insecure frame. His desk is dark brown, dark brown like his eyes, eyes like his father’s. The desk is handmade by his grandpa, pine impossible to scratch beneath layers of resin laminate. This is his father’s desk, an appropriated corner spot in the bedroom, framed by windows on two sides, old 1973 window screens letting in the late autumn air. High school, home school, this is a desk of unwanted algebra and welcome classical literature and requisite Bible study and comforting US history and biology with a heaping helping of Creationism, testimony to Christian home school, difficult pioneering in those 1990s’ of conformity.
Beyond, the cedar trees are caressed by cold winter blue skies, skies that portend change and loss at that time unimaginable. Despite the apparent chill, the air is yet warm, southern breeze gentle against the change. Strange chirping fills the air. The cedar waxwings uncharacteristically descend in clouds, magic in the morning air. Pen is placed to paper. Words appear.
Blank pages can be scary things, just as are blank canvases. There is such fear in getting something wrong. Omission is far safer. No one will miss the art that we never create. But inaction is also an action, inescapable and troubling reality. We were, of course, meant to create, meant to say something, anything. To do less risks senescence, the ending of all things. Words are immortal beings. Our thoughts will outlive us all, even if simply as a hand-scrawled card mailed to a friend, stuffed in a desk, found decades later, all context lost. Sobering thought from the bright lights of the Hallmark aisle in the drug store. Don’t think too much about it or the overwhelm can drive you mad.
The cedar waxwings wing their bohemian way southward, south to a different land entirely. Little Egypt calls from the lintel spaces of my distant mind, a delta of dark black soil, rich in lore, rich in deep, dark nutrients, feeding for a nation growing fast. The soil smells different when the winter frost comes on, the smell of earth and ice and hope heavy on the air, hanging like fog and frost as the morning sun shines bright and cold over a world in passage. Earth moves beneath the feet, times change. The air — breath of life and time itself — hovers in the ether, over those forgotten and overlooked, those in places named for a sacred and ancient land. Thebes, Karnak, Cairo, Memphis, the humdrum of American infrastructure conceals the holy, holy behind the Phillips 66 truck stop sign.
Rivers cut deep in the dark soil, just as creeks cut down into the mountains, granite and limestone, mountains overlooking from the West, mountains with a spirit all their own, secrets embraced as the sun traces on, chariot of the sky. Steel tracks gleam bright but the old railroad bridge at Thebes remains rusted and dark, haunted by too many passings. Stare too long at the great river here and you’ll shiver, seeing your own soul in the thick water as it boils shimmering over sandy shoal. This river is a graveyard, though now tamed we are told. Rivers and roads roll on, wheels toward the sun. That’s how the West was really won.
The greenish white lights are too bright and I squint as I stop for high-octane truck stop coffee. The bored clerk behind the counter turns the chicken tenders and egg rolls beneath the broiler light, red refracting silver of Thor’s hammer bouncing on his wide chest. “You need anything?” No, just the coffee. God died a long time ago according to the philosophers of the last century but here, in a world bereft of the sacred, the holy invades. Time out of space, time standing still in a world of gas prices and bad coffee and corn dogs, this place is, for a moment, a holy space, consecrated by the ticking of an unseen clock. I will buy a 12 dollar t-shirt and cut off the sleeves, cutting the shirt way down to the waist, blazing reminder I am no longer thin and insecure.
The sunset is red through woodlot trees, scrubby elm mostly. Here, a brief, incisive winter sunset before the predicted storm of sleet and ice descends, darkening the sun-lost sky. A haunt of fox and crow, vole, and rabbit. Is this Missouri? The in-between where hardwood forest meets meadow, then prairie? A thousand sacred and unkempt spaces, a thousand places across states with names like Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois. All such woods are easy to overlook in this singular moment of sunset magic. Here, though, the southern mistletoe hangs like witch’s hair, tangling in the high along with black tendrils of fox grapes.
The same dark-haired boy bends over blank white paper, pen poised. This time, he has a beard streaked with white. This time, 200-some pounds of muscle balance his movements. The cedar waxwings were 30 years ago but they may appear again outside his window, next fall, as a soft southern wind gentles a winter sky. “Going down to Egypt,” he whispers to himself. And so it begins, all over again.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2007-2025
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