In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

When the Smoke Clears Leigh Ann Eagleston If you look at a road map of the South, you will see hundreds of miles between Memphis, Tennessee, and Southeastern Kentucky. On a cultural map, the distance is even greater. As a native of Ashland, an industrial Kentucky river town, I find little in Memphis that looks like home. But I have a quick remedy when I get homesick. I just drive by the Mapco Petroleum plant. Mapco is a city in itself, just this side ofInterstate 240, with great vats of oU surrounded by skyscraper smokestacks coughing into the hundreddegree sky. So many skyscrapers that they form a skyline of their own-a familiar view to me. Without its factories, Ashland, Kentucky, would have no skyline. And whfle tiiey fiUed our sky with smoke, they lined our daddies' wallets on payday. Thousands of cars would stream out of the hills to the plant entrances every morning. And every evening those same cars would return to homes where supper would hit the table at five o'clock sharp. The smokestacks made me feel as safe as the hills that rose Uke big shoulders around me. Back when I made the drive from Pittsburgh to Catlettsburg, the sight of Ashland Oil, glittering like a city of diamonds on the Kentucky/West Virginia border, was my sign that I had come home. But now when I see these factories, I don't feel safe. I feel sad. Downsizing, merger, Japanese buyout. These factories symbolize jobs leaving the region, men out ofwork. And die smell ofAshland-there has always been a smeU-isn't ofwealth and productivity, it is ofage and decay. Men Uke my father don't Uve in houses anymore. They Uve in apartments . They don't meet at work anymore. They meet at the food court in the mall once a mondi and discuss old times. Then they do a couple of circuits around the shopping center to combat their widening girths. But they are the lucky ones. They have enough to live on, and they look forward to getting Social Security. They are not Uke the ones who decided a pink slip meant life was not worth living. When I visit my home now, I see things that escaped my view before. It is a shabby town, begrimed by an age ofindustry that has passed. But I Leigh Ann Eagleston currently works as a newspaper reporter for the Memphis Business Journal. She grew up in Ashland, Kentucky. 38 can't help feeling a pang for the childhood security those factories represented -the unshakable sureness tliat Dad was always at Armco, and Armco would always be there. Armco is A-K Steel now, and Ashland Oil is moving its headquarters to Findlay, Ohio, following a merger. That is reality. And I have learned that dependence on any large organization for a paycheck or an identity could leave you without eitiier one. I have found that it works out best when you can generate your own paycheck and that your identity comes from inside, not outside. That, too, is reality. But I also know that my identity is tied up in hills and smokestacks and dinner at five p.m. That my soul Uves in a place where bridges make connections. My internal landscape is a river valley, not flat farmland under a wide, blue sky. As the physical landscape of my childhood diminishes, I am surprised to find it living—larger than life—inside ofme. And it always will be part of my reality. Significant Incongruities Tell me the story of a Uzard in a glove, ofpornography in the possession of a holy man. Tell me stories of geography lessons in the sand, of sooty-faced girls waving at trains in wartime, of one who broods about her father's cast stones. Tell me stories of homecomings in the desert, of sweet homemade wine, ofwoods spiders living their living unknowing of my own. Tell me to listen to the rhythm of the snow, to the silence oflaughter, to the magma roiling hot and unseen beneath my path. Rock me to sleep with the fables of our living, and I will hear the...

pdf

Share