God's Country

GOD'S COUNTRY Early advertisements intended to encourage settlers pictured Kentucky as a Garden of Eden, a trans-montane paradise. One can recall the story of the old preacher who, in trying to describe Heaven to his listeners, resorted to this comparison: "Heaven is a Kentucky of a place." There are stories and more stories of the New Adam running wild in this wiUlerness paradise-his marvelous boasts and exaggerations arising from his sense of freedom and expansiveness: He could hang his shot pouch on the new moon's horn and pick it up handily the next time around; he could ride the lightning and grin a knot from a hickory tree; he could jump from Wise County, Virginia, to Knott County, Kentucky, and leave proof for posterity in the rock where he landed; he was half alligator or half wild cat or about any other half he wanted to he and could out-fight, out-cuss, out-drink, knock-down-and-drag-out any other varmint in creation. He spoke hyperboles about the richness or made wry ¡okes about the oddities of the larul he inhabited. Anyhotc, it was God's Country. Some of this sense of expansiveness that got into the popular literature of the past persisted for a long time in the hilb. Some can still say God's Country, but with the various pollutions we are now heir to, it begins to sound more like irony. Perhaps now one has to read the following eulogy that J. AV*. Hall assigned to Judge Brown with humorous nostalgia. "You see, the mountain girls breathe the pure air of the hills and drink the pure running water of the mountain streams, and their complexion is as fair as the dawn of the coming morning, and they are as agile as the roe on the hillside. You see, fresh air is air which is not contaminated with carbon dioxide, sewer gas, cuss words, or tobacco smoke. It consists of the highest finality of oxygen and nitrogen with a little ozone thrown in to give it tone, and it is the finest article used for breathing purposes . Out in the Cumberland Mountains here, far from the ha«nts of man, the air is fresher than country butter. After a man has breathed in a few million cubit { sic) feet of it as I have for the last two weeks, he can eat an ox, hoofs and all, and think nothing of taking a small-sized bear across his knees and spanking him severely. But the air in a large city like Chicago or ancient Babylon, with fifteen million of people who were pent up inside of one wall, is of a much inferior quality. It has been used so much and has been mixed with so many kinds of odors and gasses and has had to minple with so many sex plavs in the theaters and so much politics outside that it is no better for breathing purposes than so much tar. After a baby has spent a few months in a one room tenement breathing the air after six older people have been using it and the sun has been frying it until it has addled like an egg, and said baby usually gives up in despair and goes to a country where harp music is used in place of oxygen to sustain life. "I am going to make a yearly visit to these mountains for I feel like that I would never die. I can heartily appreciate old Moses after staying a hundred years or more among the burning sands of Egypt going up into the mountains of Palestine to try to live longer, and whether he got lost and starved to death or the bears eat him up or the Lord took him makes little difference so he was able to get shet of the filthy air of the desert before taking his departure." 38 Until recently you could still find mule and wagon travel as a means of getting somewhere rather than as a reminiscencece of times past. Photo: Dean Cadle 39 Photo: Don Anderson 40 ...