Summer Environmental Writing Program

Writings

Appalachian Snag
Deenah Moffie Vollmer

In the summer of 2004, the brave and adventurous Deenah Vollmer flew from her comfortable house in Los Angeles to Lexington, Kentucky. She was to embark upon a month-long journey in environmental writing through the University of Kentucky. The program was held at camp in the Robinson Forest, a land grant to the University, in Perry County near Hazard. Her company was eight other students and two professors. She was to find a culture and history that would seep into her pores. How would she resolve the tension between the Appalachian land and her Los Angeles home? How would she find her niche between stasis and regeneration?

The Kentucky sky bends and breaks this Californian’s back. The humidity smothers me and the rain pounds me into this earth. But the ever-changing weather patterns give a life to this land that California never knew. The land breathes and smiles and is as moody as anyone. The thunder is greater than anything I’ve ever heard--the kind that shakes the breakfast in your belly and then retreats entirely in minutes, summoning the bugs to rise from their nests and swim through this thick, thick air.

Los Angeles is in a desert though you’d never know by looking. She imports about 80% of her water. California’s two biggest crops are rice and cotton, crops that require more water than California could ever hope to produce on its own. Federal subsidizing has made water cheap for farmers, dirt cheap, thereby making California almost tropical. Almost.
Eastern Kentucky is a wasteland though you’d never know by looking. She looks green as ever, but grassy plains and meadows are not native to Appalachia. In some places her mountains are sawed off so clean that you’d never know life had ever touched them. That is of course until they are reclaimed, reseeded, and sprinkled with elk.
And it’s a hard thing to know. What was? What is? What does it matter if Los Angeles was a desert, but then built up so strong with so much concrete that the rain has no place to go but to sewage, and water still flows to California, government made it so, and is it so bad to be a billion dollar enterprise? Give me 10,000 Mexicans and 10,000 gallons of water and I will show you a Garden of Eden.
And what does it matter if Eastern Kentucky was a forest because there was coal under that forest and if they want the coal and they strip the mountain and get the coal and then they sprinkle packaged exotic seed and the land is reclaimed and the land is green, then is that so bad to be a billion dollar enterprise? Regeneration. Values. Economics. There will always be history.
And Robinson Forest is an educational facility, but if we can exchange that education for coal is anything really lost? I can show you bang for your buck. Dynamite.
And is it so bad for me to mail a check and pack my bags and fill my iPod with more songs than you could ever sing and put on a straw hat and a southern accent and paint football player lines under my eyes with big pieces of coal? And is it really so bad if I put on a past I never had and paint up a future that’s not really mine with an LED headlamp and fleece from REI to get me through those dark, dusty mountains? Is that really so bad? Show me a pocket full of lichen and I will build you a skyscraper.

To Deenah, arriving in Kentucky from Los Angeles on a plane smaller than most buses was like being airdropped into a swollen green watermelon. Ripe, the land was so ripe.

Is this still my country? Yes. But these hills are so green and round; I know purple mountains majesty. And these clouds are so thick and dense; I know thin layers of coughing smog. But if these reclaimed lands can be so green, then so can I. I can creep under the surface, riding the carpet as my foreigner’s status and rise into a ridiculous assimilation.
South, the south. Think yawning drawls and slack jaws and telephone poles dangling shoes and cocked shotguns and lemonade. Think dried strained tobacco and tired slaves and rising confederate flags and white masked horse riders. Think fried chicken and derbies and crayfish and gumbo.
You don’t really know anything, Deenah, do you?

Barely knowing a soul in Lexington, where her little vibrating plane landed the night before the program began, and after an unsuccessful attempt to show herself a good time wandering around the city, not knowing how safe it would be or if she would ever find her way back, Deenah sought refuge on the porch of the place she was spending the night. (It wasn’t so much a porch as a stoop, but an appendage to the house nonetheless.) There was a boy sitting there as she approached and she welcomed the thought of having someone to talk to, but he left just as she arrived. She sat down anyway.

I was hoping to find some company, but as the chances seemed slim, I accepted the illuminating fireflies as such. Those hovering insects danced lazily and slowly as if to warn me that the pace of life was going to be different in Kentucky.
I plugged in my iPod.
I took note. “Porches are places to sit.” A writer is always noticing. I sat and rested awhile.
I’d like to catch a firefly in a glass jelly jar. I mean, many fireflies in many glass jelly jars of different sizes and I’d put them on shelves with a cuckoo clock and a sawdust floor under them and listen to the tick-tock light-lock chicken-stock. And the fireflies would glow in metronome time, tick-tock time like blinking turning signals of an old Buick.
And I’d like to have a big old house with a basement and an attic and a wraparound porch that wrapped all the way around. And as it got cold I’d run into the house when the teakettle whistled and grab acrylic fleece blankets and ceramic mugs and there’d be fireflies looming. And we’d sit on the porch until all the color faded out of this world.

My parents have a house in Los Angeles with what you might stretch to call a porch. It is up a number of stairs, surrounded by a white rose garden, and has enough room for a welcome mat and a bench for two that rocks. The neighborhood is called Westwood Village. You’d advertise the property as “UCLA adjacent.” And it is close enough to the University that cars can park with permit only. The house is on the intersection of two busy residential streets. The porch is there--packages and Chinese menus and phonebooks sometimes accumulate on it--but the rocking bench seems only to serve a strange aesthetic purpose. Perhaps it is to convey a sense of neighborhood friendliness or hospitality, but you could never sit there without feeling like an intruder to the closed doors and solemn dog walkers of this neighborhood.
One evening my mom held a Mexican themed party and hired a Mariachi band to play. She wanted them on the porch so that guests could see and hear them on their way in. It felt strange and at first I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed that the porch was being used in such a congenial manner. Watching the band play with big smiles and stamping feet from the bottom of the steps, I noticed my neighborhood opening up in a way I never expected. The couples walking with strollers slowed down and smiled. They even smiled at me. The usually solemn dog walkers stopped to listen to the music. For the first time I felt a connection to my neighborhood. For the first time I considered calling it a community.

The next day, Deenah drove from Lexington to Eastern Kentucky in 15-passenger van with the other students from the summer program and the professors. She kept her face to the window. She plugged her iPod into her ears as a doctor puts on his stethoscope. The country road was narrow so that they would have to pull over to let another car pass. The houses were spread apart and each house had a porch and people would often be sitting on that porch. Deenah noticed.

The intensity with which the locals stare you down as you wail past is impressive, and to a foreigner like myself, almost scary. Why are these people so aware of my presence? What do they want from me? What do they want to know? Many times they will wave or smile or just plain look at you, but they will always notice.
Porches in this region come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they all serve a few similar functions. The main purpose of porches is surveillance. Who’s on my property? Who’s passing by my property? Who’s on property near my property? Land is one of the few things people in Eastern Kentucky have consistently had and they’ve usually had the same land for generations. Work came and left with coal companies and education was nothing anyone could boast about, but property, they had property. And because of the people’s deep connection to their land, they were also deeply defensive of their land and thus a porch came in handy to see what the goings on were.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I do know a thing or two about property. We have zip codes and area codes, all of which in a scientific and aesthetic formula compute to a price per square foot. We have beach side properties and beach view properties. We have houses on hills, down canyons, on ranches, and in valleys. We have homes near everything and homes near nothing at all.
My family lived in a house in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino on a small cul-de-sac with ten houses for thirteen years. By the time we moved out, six of the ten houses had had new owners. That is the way of Los Angeles. There are neighborhoods for young singles and neighborhoods for young couples and neighborhoods for young couples with young children and neighborhoods for families. There are neighborhoods to live in if you’re gay and others if you’re Jewish or Korean or trendy or if you work in the movie industry or if you like dogs or art or retro novelty items. Stability is unfashionable unless of course you live in a neighborhood for stable people.
And it is difficult to grow up in Los Angeles--as with most big cities, I presume, but I have only grown up in one--because most of the people there grew up somewhere else. For this reason communities and neighborhoods are constantly changing. What were once largely white and affluent areas give way to decaying Mexican neighborhoods as the white people flock to newer and more isolated suburbs with better public schools along the fringes of the city. “White Flight,” the phenomenon is usually called. Most homes in Los Angeles are not owned for more than ten years at a time leading to an increasingly misplaced concept of home and an increasingly heightened concept of change: gentrification, renewal, and displacement. This is a cursed blessing of course. It is easy to move to Los Angeles because there is no specific culture or tangled web of root systems to integrate into, but you can fall out just as easily as you climbed in.

Deenah arrived at Camp Robinson safely. She knew the other students were unaware of her voice, but that didn’t matter yet, Deenah was still excited about porches.

The cabins at Camp Robinson are built with wide wooden porches with wide wooden chairs and all class meeting would be held on the porch of the teacher cabin. The porch is clean now, uncluttered, but I can imagine the environmental writers shedding their accessories on the porch. I can imagine the camping chairs, field journals, Nalgene water bottles, day-old Herald-Leaders, empty Ale8 cans, course readers, mugs filled with the residue of the morning’s coffee, bug spray, a flannel shirt. And when this happens it will be important. It means we are comfortable.

Deenah hates meeting new people, but she likes knowing them. She wondered how long it would take for the “So why did you come to Kentucky?” “How do you like it here?” “So you’re Jewish?” questions to go away. Deenah answered these questions politely, happy that people were making an effort. She liked her role as outsider, as the California girl. But as she was still just trying to fit in, she noticed something critical was missing and stunting her assimilation process: she had lost her voice.

Pulled out of my familiar environment of friends and family where the etiquette of speech is established, I found myself without a voice. I could speak alright, but I couldn’t articulate. I found myself imitating the accents of the people around me, pulling out phrases I had never used before and ordering words in a way that was unnatural, slow, and undefined. I realized how culturally dependent language is. Within regions and communities there is an established tone, diction, and sense of humor. How strange it was not being able to communicate with people in my own country in my own language. I called my mother to speak to someone who spoke in my own relative idiom, but it didn’t help. I still spoke with a slight southern something; it wasn’t quite a drawl. I’m not sure anyone else noticed, in fact they probably didn’t, but being without a voice was the most frustrating and embarrassing thing. Without voice I was no longer myself. Without voice I also lost thought, so I stayed quiet, smiled a lot, and let my electron spewing iPod narrate my days.
But it only took a few days for a welcoming groove to be etched into the social sphere. One day my voice came back to me, almost as spontaneously as it disappeared, and it was as if I had never lost it. Turns out that time and a few jokes were the answer.
Once I got my voice back, I no longer felt uprooted and misplaced. With my voice I became part of the Kentucky landscape, no longer an awkward appendage.

Upon arrival to Camp Robinson, a biologist led Deenah to the top of a mountain where a fire tower stands tall. The other students came too as did the professors, the biologist’s daughter, and also the world’s favorite nature writer, Wendell Berry, who, dressed in khaki on khaki, looked like he had just whistled himself off the “Andy Griffith Show.” Deenah thought this was funny, but she didn’t say anything. The other students still didn’t know her talent (she was still without her voice) but she thought Wendell did by the way he looked at her and asked her for her name, but Deenah wouldn’t tell you this. She would try to tell you about mountaintops and strip mining and porches.

The trail to the fire tower was recently battered by weather. And when you walk up it you feel completely battered by it. A combination of dense trees and dense air in the mixed mesophytic forest begs to be taken slowly. Hemlocks, beeches, tulip poplars, what a wonderful sight.
At the top of the trail is the fire tower, the only functional fire tower in Kentucky. Her skeleton frame structure provides a geometric order to the quiet mayhem of the surrounding area. Like a stable deity, she stands tall, watching as her landscape changes from season to season, from day to night, from ripe mountain to barren plateau.
By day the steep climb up is encouraged by the kind of wind that unsticks the shirt from your back, as there are no mountains to catch and absorb and convert the wind. You are above all the tangling of life systems, fresh and vulnerable.
From the top of the tower the view is breathtaking; green mountains roll from under you. But at second glance you realize that the Robinson Forest is an island of forest in a sea of strip mines. In the distance you can see a hint of bare mountain, as if unintentionally exposed.
And in that distance rests the Flint Hill Cemetery, one of the only mountaintops left in view from the fire tower. Up a strip mine road, you can find the cemetery’s green oasis. I jotted down this poem on a bench in the cemetery.

Around the dead they mined for coal
Perhaps thinking no one would mind
The mountains wouldn’t mind being moved either
The trees wouldn’t mind the miner’s saw
But the dead saw everything
Perched on a mountaintop with
Garish fake flowers and manic bees
Searching for nectar where there is none
The dead can hear the dozers growl
They can watch the rocks melt into sand
As their modest mountaintop becomes the tallest land

The bench in the cemetery has an inscription that reads, “Set and rest awhile.” I did, naively wondering why sit was written as “set.” It was one example of many spelling and grammatical errors that were etched in the cemetery. How, on something so permanent, could so many mistakes be overlooked, I wondered. “Because they’re illiterate,” someone told me with emphasis. Even the stonemason? What do I make of this?
One night we strapped on our LED headlamps like miner’s carbide lamps and walked the battered trail to the fire tower, but by night we call it the moon tower. Up on the tower that night, you would never know any of this land was ever touched by anything but the soft and lingering clouds. A full moon was our big round light post on the night crisp as burnt toast as the fog ran in and out of the ridges like the ocean on an early Caribbean morning.

Deenah has some friends from college who grew up in San Francisco. On some long weekends they would take the Greyhound to “the city” where they would embark upon adolescent and sometimes illegal adventures.

In San Francisco there is an old tower in the middle of the Presidio. An unkempt trail leads to it and at night the trail has an atmosphere that a friend of mine likes to call “cutty.” I’m still not entirely sure what he means, but the tower is abandoned and rickety and fenced and locked. And with a flashlight and some careful maneuvering it is definitely penetrable. The tower shakes as you climb the innumerable ladder-like steps to a comfortable if not safe platform at the top.
On that rare San Francisco day when the fog has hiked up the coast and the clouds have risen like hot air balloons and there is clarity in detail that you never thought you could know, I like to be the tallest thing in sight. Jacob, show me your ladder. Angels O angels boost me up for sacrifice, then guide me down again.
From the top of this tower the steep San Francisco streets ordered with perpendicular parked cars are almost comical. The Golden Gate Bridge is bigger than ever and you can almost see a precarious dangling body gripping that rusted metal over the bay.
By night the rickety tower instills a fear of heights you never thought you had. Atop the soft glow of the condensed city, a game of connect-the-dots can be played from light to light as if the world was plugged in like the pieces of a “Light-Bright” set. So carefully ordered, what did the city do to be so beautiful?

Deenah attends college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She likes it there despite all the shit she got from other people who told her to go to other schools. She probably won’t tell you that she got into Berkeley (she’s a modest girl) and she probably won’t tell you how hard it was for her to turn down Berkeley (it was hard), but she will tell you about how much she loves the Redwood forest. Isn’t that right, Deenah? (yes!)

In Santa Cruz, California there is a giant Redwood referred to as Tree 9. It is located behind College 9, one of the ten colleges of UC Santa Cruz. The branches of the tree are arranged in a ladder-like fashion so that with an amateur’s climbing ability you can climb to the top. On top of the forest canopy you can supposedly see everything from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters. I doubt this, but I’ve never climbed that tree so I wouldn’t really know. Is that anticlimactic? (Pun intended) Yes, so it is.

Deenah has friends all over the USA and she likes to brag about California because it is the state that fulfilled manifest destiny. She might tell you about the gold rush miners or the Steinbeckian migrant workers or the color of avocado flesh. She might act like it was her sweat that made California the golden state.

A friend of mine from Virginia came to visit Los Angeles. She told me how pointy the California mountains are because they are younger than her rounded rolling hills. I think that’s why the pioneers headed west.

Deenah is a bit of a summer program junkie. A few summers ago, Deenah went to Oxford, England for a month long academic program. At Oxford, Deenah studied Photography and Literature. Sometimes in conversation she likes to put on a haughty voice and say, “When I used to study at Oxford…”

When I used to study at Oxford, there was a music room on the downstairs floor of the dormitory building at Pembroke College. One night the rain pushed us out from a card game on the quad and into the music room. Perched on the baby grand piano was a Kentucky Mandolin, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. I picked it up with fingers that knew their way around a guitar and plucked it with a triangle pick for as long as the night would allow. A cute boy who was known to wear a Grateful Dead t-shirt on occasion walked in and said to me, “Hey, is that a mandolin?” I spent the rest of the night calling it a mandarin, like the orange.
The next morning it became known that the mandolin belonged to a boy named Graham from New York City. He noticed my excitement for the instrument and almost gave it to me. I had to beg him not to. He taught me a short riff and I was sold. I didn’t know a thing about bluegrass or string bands, but it didn’t matter. I knew I would get a mandolin and I knew I would play it hard. What I didn’t know was that the mandolin was going to thrust me into a culture I was never prepared to enter.
I went to a music store in Los Angeles and asked an employee where I could find a mandolin. “A mandolin,” he said almost in shock, “Where are you from?” Because you must not be from around here, he implied. They had four mandolins at that store and I bought the third one from the right, an F-style Tacoma mandolin from Tacoma, Washington.
And from here I was subtly rolled into a world of bluegrass music.

Deenah’s been playing the mandolin for about three years now. She used to study in Los Angeles with Bob Applebaum, a mandolinist who used to play for Bela Fleck and with Tim O’Brien. Now she studies with Jeremy Lampel, a mandolinist for the band Strungover! (The exclamation point is part of the band’s name, but it is also exciting) Despite her prestigious instruction, she is still afraid to play in front of other people. Don’t believe her if she acts like a Kentucky Mandolin inspired her to go to Kentucky. It didn’t. Deenah went to the Bluegrass State to find something more than bluegrass music.

There is a stream that runs through the Robinson Forest in Kentucky called Clemens Fork. In a fit of restlessness I strapped on my Chacos, grabbed my iPod, and set off alone against the afternoon. I like to set my iPod to shuffle, a setting that plays all the songs in your library in a random order. This provided me with a spontaneous soundtrack to accompany my thoughtful walk. My journey started with The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” a good introduction, I thought. The day was hot and humid under a post-storm sun so I sought the shady canopy over the stream. I made sure to take it slow. I also made sure to walk directly in the middle of the stream, slapping my feet in the cool, clear water.
A bug decided to circle my head and I, of course, tried in vain to swat it, inevitably hitting myself in the face. All the swatting in the world would not make this bug retreat and my head was beginning to hurt. I eventually accepted my fate with this bug as the hero in an animated Disney movie accepts his annoying animal sidekick.

Deenah has been having a problem lately. Whenever she exposes an inch of skin, a bug pulls to it like a magnet. Deenah strives to be well liked, but not by bugs.

Bugs in Kentucky can sense vulnerability. You’re not from around here, they say. We will make your fair skin burn red. We will find the undersides of your knees. We will burrow in between your toes. We will decorate your arms and legs with oozing polka dots that you will scratch until they bleed. And then they will scab. And then they’ll leave scars. And you will remember us forever. We will buzz around your head until you scream, “fuck off” and run inside hysterical and crying and swearing off the outdoors and this state and this whole goddamned country forever. The bugs are just like that.

But back to Clemens Fork…

Under a break in the canopy the sun shown through the shadows on the water on the rocks like the reptilian legs of a box turtle. As the sunlight danced on the water surface I was reminded of the David Hockney paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles. The sun was still, but the rays danced over the water like the scribbling of thick white chalk. I thought of the heavily chlorinated swimming pools and that strong Southern California brightness and a 1960s LA lounging atmosphere as conveyed in the opening scenes of “The Graduate”. It was not an LA I’ve ever known, but one I feel connected to nonetheless.
As I walked the stream, the music gave a bounce to my step which I let evolve into a dance. I did a little dance in the water. I did a little dance on the rocks. Holding my beautiful white iPod in its blue leather case with its sleek white headphones plugged into my ears, I became aware of my own presence in Kentucky. Song after song would play from rock n’ roll to folk to bluegrass and back again. Johnny Cash’s “Water into Wine” came on just as I entered slightly deeper waters. Here the water came up to my calves instead of to my ankles. To the words “he turned the water into wine,” I kicked up the sandy sediment from the bottom of the stream and watched it mix like cream in coffee.
Doing my leisurely dance upstream I felt like an iPod advertisement. Those advertisements love to play the nature card and those bright white earpieces are unmistakably Apple. I looked down and noticed my Chaco sandals, my shirt from The Gap, and I knew I was a walking product placement, even in rural Kentucky. Because I am part of the landscape, so are the name brands I carry on me. I am as much a part of the consumer culture as I am a part of nature. I am as much a waster as I am a conserver. I looked up and remembered the surrounding coalmines. Perhaps I should thank King Coal for burning his smoke into cushy products. Or perhaps I should thank him for promoting and endorsing this lifestyle accented by labels via a manipulation of an innocent population. Or perhaps I should consider my relationship to other regions.

On the last night of my freshman year of college we set out for the meadow. We sat around my barren and boxed up dorm room with confused emotions looking for a way to end this year with a bang. I hate when things fizzle out. It was a cold night but I wanted to be outside. I couldn’t stand the sight of my empty room piled high with grotesque boxes whose furniture and walls had turned generic. It was no longer my room. No, not without my Vermeer print and Radiohead poster, not without my G4 PowerBook and outdated calendar from 1982. I had to get out. It was our last night and finals were over and we were all restless and ready to go home.
The meadow was deemed the appropriate place to go. It is simply the place you go. My friend, Matt, grabbed his laptop and we embarked down the hill behind our dormitory buildings of Porter College. It was a majestic night. The stars were out, but so were the clouds hovering largely above the tall dark trees which contrasted with the meadow, lit by Matt’s laptop. From his computer where one might expect a psychedelic jam or a scratchy Bob Dylan song, Matt began to play rhythm and blues music from the mid-90s like “The Boy is Mine” by Brandy and Monica, popular songs from our grade school years. We all started to laugh and dance. The mellow glow of the computer screen surreally lit the meadow as it cheaply amplified the music we’ve all long since outgrown and it occurred to me that we were mostly kids reared by LA private schools bringing our own spin to the grossly predictable liberal environment. We don’t think about coal in California.

Like the iPod in Clemons Fork, Deenah thought that the environmental writing program in Eastern Kentucky was a bit like the Monica and Brandy song in the Santa Cruz meadow. The nine students and two professors were the vegetarian types with fancy educations in Chaco sandals and deadlocked hair holding Nalgene bottles with stickers advertising liberal politics and guitars sometimes playing hippie music in a land of coal mines and illiteracy and oxycontin where the dining hall serves meat and potatoes on Styrofoam and most people would willingly trade in their rare mountains for lumps of coal.

At Camp Robinson our weekday meals are eaten in the dining hall. It would be an overstatement to say that the food was cooked: heated, reheated, or defrosted would be better terms. This soggy and greasy mess is probably a result of the vegetarianism and liberal politics of the environmental writing program, concepts that baffle the dining hall staff. You don’t want meat, you must not want protein either. Here is a medley of precooked vegetables from the freezer. We bring in our own mugs and cups into the dining hall as to avoid the Styrofoam cups that pile dauntingly next to the electric yellow lemonade. They specialize in cooking for the forestry students where pork chops and mash potatoes and biscuits suit them quite well. It’s like home cooking, they say. Where’s the free-range eggs, the nutritional yeast, the hemp granola, the baked tofu, we say.

Recently, Deenah’s environmental summer program went to Hazard for groceries and laundry. She put two quarters into the newspaper dispenser in the vestibule of a local restaurant and pulled out a crisp Hazard Herald.

The July 14th edition of the weekly Hazard newspaper is replete with exclamation points, ellipses, paragraphs starting in the middle of sentences, and most articles are written as first person accounts. The cover story’s headline was “Williams gets 25 years for setting dowtown fire.” Arson in Hazard? Fire. Destruction. Insurance money, of course. Referring to the county’s problem with excessive pill-popping, the newspaper contains an article entitled “Methadone is just another addictive drug” which continues on to three different pages. One of these pages contains an advertisement for Huff Drug where “prescriptions are filled while you wait!!!” The opinion page contains a letter to the editor called “Keep up the good work” where Barb Kleiva writes about how much her father enjoys reading the Hazard Herald. The cover of the sports page shows an intense picture of a sneering young boy holding a baseball. The caption reads, “Hazard Perry’s Trevor Combs brings the heat during the 11 year-old all-star game.” There is a nostalgic article about how milkshakes were better in the old days. On another page is a picture of a small child under which states the caption “Happy B-day Jordan! Jordan Paige Hickman celebrates her second birthday…”
And then tucked into the last page is an article titled “Reports indicate coal may be energy of the future.” In a town practically owned by the coal companies, this article shouldn’t seem like a surprise, but to me the obviousness of this propaganda comes as a shock. The article begins, “What will be the dominant energy source in the future? Trends are indicating that much of our energy in the future will come from a source you are already familiar with—coal.” I can imagine the tired eyes of coal bucket driver light up as he reads this, excited that his long days hauling illegal loads of coal have been for a greater good, that is, of course, if he can read. I am not so sure. Towards the middle of the article is the question, “So what are coal’s major drawbacks?” and then, “The only real drawback with coal is its environmental impact.”

But I loved the Hazard-Herald for what Gurney Norman would call its “texture.” The newspaper, though unjournalistic by big city standards has an intimacy I would never see in the LA Times. This newspaper is not meant for me and my eyes of higher education. This newspaper is for the community and I imagine it reflects the attitudes of the community quite well.
I felt strange even reading the Herald, as if my eyes alone were exploiting the culture. I giggled through every spelling error, every mention of oxycontin, every twang of provincialism. But who am I to judge this culture? Who am I to jump out of plane with my fancy iPod and straw hat and liberal politics and put two quarters into the newspaper dispenser in the vestibule of a local restaurant and pull out a crisp Hazard Herald for shits and giggles? Who am I to write about Eastern Kentucky? Appalachia has never been my home.
But why are spelling and grammar so important to me? The stonemason must have known that sit is not spelled “set”. Is “Set and rest awhile” truer than its “sit” counterpart? Recently in Hazard, The Broke Spoke Bar changed its sign on the front to The Broken Spoke (though it still says The Broke Spoke on the back) and a store changed the sign hanging in front from “We has fireworks” to “we have fireworks.”

Coal is the underbelly of Kentucky, the residue beneath the soft rolling hills. The only drawbacks of coal are not it’s environmental impact. Now what will happen if we sweep these mountains clean? What will Kentucky become?
We went to the Starfire Coal Company strip mine site. Let me tell you that it was no Japanese rock garden. They had dozers big as houses that would raise dirt like a snow globe. And dozers just as big to spray water to suppress the dirt so that you even could see and breathe. It’s a moon landscape that these forests become.
It’s difficult for me to image a single industry having such an enormous impact on a region. In a way I view this power very romantically. The coal miner has the same cultural sentiments to me as the railroad steel driver or the migrant farmer, heroes who appear in old American lore and song as working for the great machine, but are so disconnected from me. I imagine dirty hands working the earth like a calloused heart of America. But in truth, the heart comes from men in suits with expensive pens who make decisions that affect millions. And in my life I have seen many office buildings with swollen file cabinets and many rooms with moaning computers and many cars with leather interiors, but not many dirty hands at all.
And I often think back to Shel Silverstein’s song “Folk Singer’s Blues:”
“Now, I'd like to sing a song about the coal mine,
A-chippin' away in tunnel 22.
And when I hear that timber crack,
Why, I support it with my back,
Until my comrades all crawl safely through.
But -- what do you do, if you're young and white and Jewish,
And you've got to be in class at half past nine,
And in spite of all your urgin',
An' your pleadin', an' your cryin',
Your mother says it's too dirty down in the mine,
That's what she says,
Your mother says it's too dirty down in the mine.”
In the tiring world of cosmopolitanism and academia, there is an urge to be nearer and dearer to the land, to find these dirty hands. What good are these shopping malls, these digital cameras, these mp3 players? What good are these theories, these aphorisms, these philosophies? And sometimes I say, “Fuck it, pragmatism’s the life for me. Give me a shovel and a carbide lamp, I’m going in.” But then I think back to my sushi and my iPod and my clothes from The Gap. I think back to my well-thumbed books of literature and my dog-eared books of poetry and my boxes of broken pencils and I know that it is through these things that I can begin to find the land. And it is through writing that I can be a thinker because I know I can’t be a doer. (My mother says it’s too dirty down in the mine.)
On July 24th of the same year, the brave and adventurous Deenah Vollmer boarded a plane back to Los Angeles. She was tattooed with a myriad of bug bites and an excited patch of poison ivy, Kentucky souvenirs. She had other souvenirs too like the Hazard, KY t-shirt her friends bought for her that she would wear with her gut hanging out while shouting about property and oxycontin. (It was only part of her assimilation, she would say.) She had to switch planes in Atlanta.
In the Atlanta airport, between flights I entered the shuttle from terminal D to terminal E. I was wearing my Northface backpack and my green shoulder bag and I was holding my grey and white striped pillow from Ikea. A man in the shuttle looked at me and said, “You must be flying international.” International? I asked. No, I’m just flying to LA. (In my mind I wondered if I should clarify between Los Angeles and Lower Alabama, but I realized that was probably unnecessary.) “LA’s practically international,” he said.
In a newsstand in the airport a picture of a sleek white item drew me to the cover of Newsweek. “iPod, Therefore I Am,” the caption spoke, as if to me. Of course I bought the magazine. The article, written by Steven Levy, begins with a collage of pictures: a business man in a suit walking to work, a woman holding her baby, a man chopping wood, a tattooed man in a baseball cap, an Asian man sitting in his car. What all these pictures have in common were the white earpieces, unmistakably Apple, plugged into each person’s ears. The article discusses the iPod’s role as “an icon, a pet, a status indicator, and an indispensable part of one’s life.” It’s a club of consumerism; I’m happy to be a member.
I also purchased the new edition of RollingStone Magazine with Doonesbury on the cover featuring an interview with Gary Trudeau about the war in Iraq. The article contains a picture of Trudeau sitting at his desk in “the top-floor studio of his summer home in Connecticut.” He leans over his drawing board alongside some sketches, a clock, some CDs and, yes, a sleek white iPod leaning into its stand.

Deenah’s family was waiting for her when she got off the plane in Los Angeles. Her family promptly took her out to sushi to celebrate her arrival. Deenah realized how quickly it was that one could slip right back into the culture one left. Her mind was on LA time and the people she knew were quite the same.

The other day in the Border’s bookstore near my Westwood house, I stood inline at the café preparing to buy a lime flavored Diet Snapple to quench my thirst. The man in front of me was wearing an iPod mini attached to his belt. “Hey is that the new iPod mini?” another man inline asked him. “New? Well I bought it last week,” the first man said. “Don’t you just love the shuffle function?” I interjected. “Yes!” both men agreed. I wondered if these guys knew about coal. They didn’t look like they’ve ever been bothered by coal.

Last week as I was navigating a complex system of LA freeways on my way to the beach, my iPod set as always to shuffle, wirelessly connected to the sound system of my minivan, played the song “The Bluegrass Country” by The Del McCoury Band whose chorus goes something like, “I’m lonesome for that Bluegrass Country and that Bluegrass home of mine.” “Deenah, you’ve been talking a lot about Kentucky lately, but isn’t this song a bit much?” my beach companion asked.
Arriving in Malibu after a stint of traffic I noticed how brown those pointy mountains are. So brown and huge—I had hardly ever noticed them before, but I’ve been taking to noticing lately. I had also forgotten about that ocean--how in that hour before it gets dark the ocean can turn metallic and endless as you drive along the Pacific Coat Highway mesmerized by the sea, but still managing to keep your eyes on the road.
But this was a bright day, hot, and the sun shown down endlessly as I rubbed a thick and sandy sunscreen into my fair skin whose bug bite tattoos had already begun to fade. As my beach companion pulled out her summer John Irving book, I pulled out my Barbara Kingslover. I am yet to be wooed by her writing, but she brings me right back to Kentucky and to the Robinson Forest.

My friend from Virginia was visiting Los Angeles when I got home. She came over and I found out that her mom is from Louisville. We chatted about bourbon and coal and Appalachia and ended up sitting on the porch in front of my house with the bench for two that rocks. It was a warm night and cars screeched past us on the intersection of the two busy streets.