Appalachian Feelings

APPALACHIAN FEELINGS by ANDREW D. GRAY A young man from New England (and somewhat from New Mexico and Ohio) spends a few days and nights in a forgotten area of America— and takes time to write of his experiences, April 1977. Down here in Knott County Kentucky the grass looks like it invented the word green; and mountain tops of thin tall trees and sheer ugly cliffs where tractors, shovels and dump trucks toiled, marring the land, stab the eyes. The hills are limitless, and it seems as if you're always surrounded by them; the hills are always full of hollers that hide the shabby shacks, and hunched over houses with their laundry hanging on the front porches, and smoke singing in pipes protruding from leaky shingled rooftops probably from a coal fire burning in an old pot-bellied stove. There are also better homes, most likely the dwellings of coal company owners or higher-ups, or some local politician, and they stand out along the roadsides to defy the unknowing mind. Here in a town called Hindman, I met a mountain girl, with cream colored naturally soft appealing face, slim and well figured, with deep dark eyes that blended a shyness and a womanliness in a magical manner that remains a mystery, and a warm sweet smile that became prettier and revealed an inner beauty when her lips parted in a wider smile, 75 and her eyes glittered like the Appalachian night stars. I watched, spell-bound by her free-spirited, genuinely joyful whirling and twirling folk-dancing, her long brown hair bouncing in rhythm to the music and movement. It feels good, somewhere deep inside, in the deepest part of my being, in the deepest corner of my soul: to join in with the friendly folk and learn how to set the feet in motion the way they have always done; and to sit, circled, all together and singsome songs they've always sung; or to walk the steep slope slowly then stand in silence, broken only by the sound of tree frogs calling or a car passing by, every not so often, on the windy road down below the hill, and reach out and rub a hand up and down the slim trunk of a birch, as a stream goes flowing along at a rapid pace, gurgling its unique identity in the invisibility of a cool, clear, black-coal night, full of a multitude of bright Kentucky stars, bearing witness to and being an integral part of all that peacefully passes in harmony, according to their purpose and place; or to sit, composing this inadequate verse, of words which convey somewhat, but still perhaps lose the essence of vital living contact, on the porch of a wooden building lovingly clinging to the hillside, while two of my brothers attempt some honest communication, that can so easily come to be in the clean fresh air of the Knott County atmosphere. The worst flood in Appalachian history 76 has just passed through the hills; there in the aftermath of the rushing, silt-filled water, the damage is staggering to think about, and impossible to ignore or forget; thank God the crops weren't there to be wiped out; but death paid his expected visit to a few folks; the destruction of property was very extensive and families were left with only each other. I saw them huddled together, blank stares of disbelief drawn on their faces, as they stood on the front porches of their drenched homes with all of their furniture piled in the front yards. Yes, on all the people in all the area, were faces full of a hundred different feelings, although on almost all of them one could read the signs of past hard times and the scars of the strange struggle within themselves between fleeting hope and happiness and ever present, ominous fear and desperation, as an unstoppable, all powerful force engulfs their dreams. I've seen the stripped, rusted out shells of man's progress in transportation slipping down the muddy sides of the creeks beside the dilapidated wooden shelters, some of them dragging their bodies in the water, that grows ever...