Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

How America Came to the Mountains

J I M WAY N E M I L L E R How America Came to the Mountains “Brier” is the name applied, in a cycle of “ethnic” jokes, to Southern Appalachian people who migrate to midwestern and northern industrial centers. The way the Brier remembers it, folks weren’t sure at first what was coming. The air felt strange, and smelled of blasting powder, carbide, diesel fumes. A hen crowed and a witty prophesied eight lanes of fogged-in asphalt filled with headlights. Most people hadn’t gone to bed that evening, believing an awful storm was coming into the mountains. And come it did. At first, the Brier remembers, it sounded like a train whistle far off in the night. They felt it shake the ground as it came roaring. Then it was big trucks roaring down an interstate, a singing like a circle saw in oak, a roil of every kind of noise, factory whistles, cows bellowing, a caravan of camper trucks bearing down blowing their horns and playing loud tapedecks. He recollects it followed creeks and roadbeds and when it hit, it blew the tops off houses, shook people out of bed, exposing them to a sudden black sky wide as eight lanes of asphalt, and dropped a hail of beer cans, buckets and bottles clattering on their sleepy heads. Children were sucked up and never seen again. The 1970s ❚ 45 The Brier remembers the sky full of trucks and flying radios, bicycles and tv sets, whirling log chains, red wagons, new shoes and tangerines. Others told him they saw it coming like a wave of tumbling dirt and rocks and car bodies rolling before the blade of bulldozer, saw it pass on by, leaving a wake of singing commercials, leaving ditches full of spray cans and junk tires, canned biscuit containers, tinfoil pie plates. Some told him it fell like a flooding creek that leaves ribbons of polyethylene hanging from willow trees along the bank and rusty car doors half-silted over on sandbars. It was that storm that dropped beat-up cars all up and down the hollers, out in fields just like a tornado that tears tin sheets off tops of barns and drapes them like scarves on trees in quiet fields two miles from any settlement. And that’s why now so many old barn doors up and down the mountains hang by one hinge and gravel in the creek is broken glass. That’s how the Brier remembers America coming to the mountains. He was just a little feller then but he recollects how his Mama got all of the younguns out of bed, recalls being scared of the dark and the coming roar and trying to put both feet into one leg of his overalls. They left the mountains fast and lived in Is, Illinois for a while but found it dull country and moved back. The Brier’s lived in As If, Kentucky ever since. 46 ❚ The 1970s ...