Cherrylog Road

When Dickey read “Cherrylog Road” at poetry readings, he would often introduce the poem at length, saying that it was entirely autobiographical, although there are many reasons to doubt this. A recording of one such reading has survived from around 1980 and is available on YouTube. In his amusing talk, Dickey describes “Cherrylog Road” as a “love poem,” his variation on the Romeo and Juliet theme. According to his telling, there really was a Cherrylog Road in a town called Crabapple in North Georgia, where he attended high school and met a girl named Doris Holbrook. She was a cheerleader who had the locker next to his, and they became friends. Her father, however, exercised a stern control over the girl and also took a dislike to Dickey, in part because, Dickey supposed, he did not like Dickey’s noisy red Harley Davidson motorcycle. Dickey was scared of Doris’s father, since it was rumored that he had killed several people. The young couple found a way around the father’s restrictions, however, by meeting in a nearby junkyard. This was in the early days of stock car racing (it must have been in the late 1930s) and there were many discarded stock cars in the junkyard. Doris would come with tools such as wrench, pliers, crowbar, and hammer and get the scrap metal off the cars so it could later be sold. Then he and Doris would have their rendezvous in the back seat of the Pierce-Arrow, as described in the poem.

Dickey’s biographer Henry Hart, in James Dickey: The World as a Lie (2000), notes that Dickey often created a fictional or semifictional autobiographical narrative around some of his poems. He would also tell fanciful, romanticized stories about his own life and achievements. His background story about “Cherrylog Road” (which takes longer than the actual reading of the poem) might thus be regarded as a tall tale. Hart reports that Dickey’s romantic adventures in high school were rather limited and the girls he pursued tended to escape his grasp. It can also be argued that Dickey did not attend high school in Crabapple. He actually attended North Fulton High School, which is in the same county, but he certainly could not have been known as the Crabapple Cannonball, due to his exploits as a football player, which he claimed in his talk. Hart also noted that Dickey had told him that an old friend named Peter Hall from Vanderbilt had told him a story about “taking a high-school girlfriend into the middle of a junkyard in his hometown of Helena, Arkansas, and making love to her in a dilapidated car” (p. 149). This helped the young couple to avoid the girl’s stern, disapproving father. It seems that Dickey may have adapted this story to create “Cherrylog Road.”

Dickey’s telling of the fictionalized origins of the poem got him the laughs from the audience that he clearly wanted. It is as if he was the warmup act for his own poem. At the end of the introduction, in a wink or nod to the obvious exaggerations, Dickey said that after publication of the poem in 1963, 17 women wrote to him from different states saying they well remembered the events recorded in the poem. They also asked him why he had changed the location. Dickey said that he replied to all of the women—which again got him the hearty laughter he was no doubt expecting.

Perhaps his most interesting comment is not on the actual story but the theme of the poem itself. He said it is about the

advent of adult powers as it comes so mysteriously to children thirteen, fourteen years old and so on . . . in the boy’s case, last year he was riding a bicycle . . . now there’s this huge engine, he can do a lot more things this year, a lot more sense of power from various sources . . . and it’s about that too—mystery, danger, youth.

In that, Dickey surely spoke the truth.