There are two Appalachias, which I'll call "Appalachia I" and "Appalachia II." They're pronounced differently because they refer to different things. Kind of like the different things referred to in "No ofFENSE, but recently the Vol OFFense has been more dog than hunt." So, even if it causes a row, allow me to put my ducks in a row and present my defense (however you pronounce it) of the idea that Appalachia means two different things depending on how it is pronounced.
First off, these aren't the Appalachia One (rich) and Appalachia Two (poor) that Cumberland crusader Harry Caudill wrote about. As will be shown, these Appalachias require Roman numerals.
As to pronunciation: the usual explanation for two of them in opposition is, essentially, a pissing contest across the Mason-Dixon line. One is Southern, the other is everywhere else. Each is intolerant of and excludes the other. One is right; the other is wrong. When in fact there's every reason to accept both pronunciations as referring to different conceptual entities.
By way of easing into the subject, let me relate an experience from my Knoxville days (back when the Vol OFFense showed enough inspiration to go 10-2). I went into a record store and scanned the back of an album: "Here is Bach as he heard it in his head" -- or something to that effect -- proclaimed the liner notes to a switched-on Moogish compilation of Bach fugues. A fan of the cantatas, I thought, "Ah, to hear Bach's music as it sounded inside his head, not timbred of his time, but timbred by his timeless imagination.
I was totally sucked in. By the stupid, self-satisfied, imperial presentism of a passing fad. I knew as soon as I dropped the needle that I'd been had. Some clever marketer had defrauded me just as sure as a card sharp on the street. What I heard was Bach -- Bach as I'd always heard it, Bach as he had always been, Bach as would always shine through whatever glitzy timbral rocketman bullshit anybody might slather it with.
It's this sort of thing -- though at a deeper, decidedly un-stupid level -- that bothers me about the current age of studies of Appalachia, all of them (seemingly, judging from their citations) conceptual shoots from one seminal big bang: Appalachia on Our Minds, by Henry Shapiro, published in 1976 -- a coon's age ago in academic time, not far off from when a half-timbred Bach was flatmate to a Vol OFFense that put up enough points to win lots of games.
Shapiro's "our minds" is a temporal community that stretches from the last quarter of the 19th century until, presumably, the publication of his book and -- through the thinking of all the scholars who continued to advance his idea -- up into the present. His title is an obvious play on the popular song "Georgia on My Mind." Less obvious is the fact that both place names -- Georgia and Appalachia -- are formed with the Latin honorific suffix -ia.
The -ia honorific is ubiquitous when you start seeing it, even only in America: Georgia, the realm of King George; Virginia, the realm of the Virgin Queen; Pennsylvania, the wooded realm of William Penn. Even the capital city sports one: Columbia, the gym of the ocean.
But Appalachia? What is the background of this honorific? The "duh" answer -- that it is an erosion from "Appalachian" -- is false. While it is true that, historically, the adjective appeared first and refers to the Apalaches, a Florida-coast indigenous tribe, its derivation from French/Spanish cognates and its various, non-standard endings (e.g. -en and -ean) clearly demonstrate that "Appalachian" evolved as a neutral attributive, not as an honorific.
On the other hand, "Appalachia" was born as an honorific. It is a coinage whose birth is clearly documented. In 1838 Washington Irving had an idea. Not satisfied with the generic sense of "America" in the "United States of America" (it could include Peru for all anyone knew), he proposed to replace it with a different A-word, something that could represent the grandeur of the nation with the example of a physical reality, namely, the eastern chain of mountains stretching from Canada well into the South. He had two suggestions: "Alleghania" and "Appalachia." For unstated reasons Irving preferred "Alleghania."
In 1846, however, in an unsigned paragraph in Graham's Magazine, a self-professed admirer of Irving's, while approving the idea of a substitute for "America," offered reasons why "Appalachia" was in fact the better choice. Among the reasons, "by far the most truly important consideration of all" had to do with the "music of 'Appalachia' itself." The problem with "Alleghania" is that it was too "guttural." But "Appalachia"? In the mind of this writer, "nothing could be more sonorous, more liquid, or of fuller volume, while its length is just sufficient for dignity."
Here, then, was a word that from its very creation bespoke the "lay" of the land, not anything so curt and rude as throwing an apple atcha. And who was this anonymous writer in Graham's refusing to gag on Alleghania and extolling the sonorous liquidity of AppaLLLAYYYchia? None other than Edgar Allan Poe.
Irving's coinage paired with Poe's pronunciation seems to be unknown in the contemporary scholarship of Appalachia. Neither fact appears in Shapiro. In his effort to establish an "Appalachian otherness" as the meaning of "Appalachia," he buries a truncated history of the word in the academic's version of a balladeer's shallow grave -- in footnote #3 of chapter 3. And well might he, because the honorific Appalachia is not the one that he inserts parasitically into our minds. His "our" Appalachia is the cultural, "other" Appalachia that Shapiro's scholarship labors to establish, in but not of the United States. It is the "problem" Appalachia of mountaineer isolates: unshaven, unchurched, unschooled. Not us, for sure.
Alas, poor Appalachia, we knew him: its skull is Irving's coinage. But the corpse in Shapiro's shallow grave lacks it. In its place, topping a kind of etymological Frankenstein's monster, is an idea belonging to Berea College president William Goodell Frost, who Shapiro says "seems to have been the first to suggest that the southern mountains composed a region in the modern sense of a territory defined by its characteristics and its civilization as well as by its location."
The Modern Sense! Bach as he heard it in his head! Behold Appalachia! But wait! Look back in the grave! "Although Appalachia was the title of the journal published by the Appalachian Mountain Club of Boston, an 'outing' organization, from 1876, …" Holy baroque organ harvesting! "Although"!? Here is the heart of Shapiro's Frankenstein. In order to animate an anachronistic, modern sense of the word, he kills off a different sense altogether that just happens to have been contemporaneous with the time period of his study.
Because there was in fact an Appalachia on the minds of the 19th century educated class about which Shapiro writes. It was in direct line of descendence -- and transcendence -- from Irving's and Poe's: the mountain realm stretching from Maine to Georgia. By that time the Appalachia that was on their minds was more than symbolic. It was no less than the realized nirvana of the lapsed-Congregational, secular, scientific heirs of Transcendentalism. On the rocky slopes of Mt. Katahdin, Appalachia was where Henry David Thoreau had felt the cold breath of absolute, man-disdaining Nature and screamed his ecstasy: "CONTACT!"
And the Appalachian Mountain Club's journal, Appalachia, published from 1876? It is still being published today. Shapiro calls AMC an "outing" organization. Buried in a footnote, those quote marks work, rhetorically, like air quotes. They serve not only to discount the importance of the AMC but to render it irrelevant to Shapiro's thesis.
This is like being frozen out of the Northwest Passage. Here, in fact, is the way to understanding the sense of "Appalachia" contemporaneous with the historical period that concerns Shapiro. Admittedly, this is not "our" sense of the word. But why should "our" sense be shipped by time-travel UPS into the minds of people who had a different understanding? More importantly, to follow Shapiro's lead is to lose utterly the lost sense of the word, which can inform our current understanding in profound ways.
In naming its journal, the AMC fell into the inspirational embrace of "Appalachia," applying Poe's music to evoke the patriotic grandeur of peaks in its New English heartland, many of them named for nation-builders: Washington, Adams, Madison. The AMC belongs in the same class as the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society. Moreover, it was formed before either of them. It had the quasi-religious mission both to preserve and glorify the mountains -- as well as to make them more accessible, for reasons some of which had to do with national physical and mental health. It influenced the passage of legislation creating the national forest system; it spawned regional affiliates, including one way down in Asheville, NC; and it was one of the organizations responsible not only for the creation of the Appalachian Trail but also for the assurance of its future as a National Scenic Trail. To leave out this aspect of Appalachia is to fail to see the continuous intellectual chain that manifests the philosophy of Transcendentalism with the physical reality of the Appalachian Trail.
Similarly, Shapiro footnote 3/3 damns with faint praise writer Horace Kephart, the unexcelled interpreter of mountain life in the early 20th century Smoky Mountains. He is credited with causing "Appalachia" to catch on in the 1920s as a term for the "southern mountain region," but once again the detail that the book first appeared in Outing Magazine -- while factual -- consigns Kephart to the category of writer who, were he alive today, would be producing copy for Outdoor Life or Garden & Gun.
While this accurately captures an important aspect of Kephart's appeal, it slights the full nature of his influence, particularly as regards the word "Appalachia." Kephart was a star librarian (if there can be such a thing) before he left his job and family in St. Louis in 1903 and sequestered himself in the Smokies. He also took with him his lifelong experience as a camper and a hunter -- yes, an outdoorsman. But there can be little doubt that what drew him to the mountains was a Thoreau-like belief that the mountains were themselves the essence of nature; they were the "Back of Beyond" whose mercilessness would test his ability to belong there. There can also be little doubt that this former star-librarian-and-expert-outdoorsman knew of the AMC journal Appalachia. By incorporating the word into his own nomenclature, Kephart applied to the Southern mountains -- his touchstone -- the same honorific sense that the AMC had inherited from Irving and Poe. It is a glorious place, this Appalachia, Kephart says. And let us be clear about one thing: it is not the towns or the valleys. It is the mountains. It is only the mountains.
Once there, of course, he immediately discovered and engaged the uniqueness of his mountain neighbors. Eventually, they became the focus of his writing, but it was the mountain-shaped lives alone that interested Kephart; townies and valley dwellers need not apply. Also, as in the case of the AMC, Kephart became an advocate for the preservation of unspoiled mountain refuges apart from any settled humanity. He was instrumental in the creation of the Great Smokies National Park and helped lay out the path of the Appalachian Trail there and in Georgia, because he believed in the intrinsic value of the mountains as a source of human well-being.
Kephart certainly didn't refer to the mountains as "Appalachia" because the mountaineers did. He records that "the Carolina mountaineers" still referred to their homeland as "the Alleghanies" (a nice irony, remembering Irving's preference). In the mountain south, when the word was used, as Appalachian historian Ron Eller writes, it had a very, very specific connotation: "The word 'Appalachia' itself was seldom used by mountain residents, except in reference to the town of that name in southwest Virginia," [italics mine] a rail junction coal-mining boom town formed in the 1890s.
The observation as to the historical non-use of the word or its derivatives by the region's inhabitants as a term for the region -- mountain or human -- is confirmed over and over again. Read the interviews with such now-classic culture warriors as James Still and Harriette Arnow Simpson in Interviewing Appalachia, and they confirm what Appalachian poetry pioneer Jim Wayne Miller also says therein: when he studied literature at Berea in the early 1950s "there was no such thing as Appalachian studies at that time." And if ever there was an Ur-Appalachian college, it was Berea. Its President Frost (he of the Shapiro footnote) spoke all over the country -- even in Boston, the cradle of Appalachia I, where in 1898 his audience was the AMC -- to raise money to educate the mountain youth of the area he called Appalachia. The Berea president knew this word would strike his listeners with a grand, inspiring, unifying impression of a mountainous region. But back in Berea, among his students, there was no such organizing, cultural principle.
Here, then, is the ultimate comeuppance to novelist Sharyn McCrumb's take-no-prisoners defense of the "Apple-atcha" pronunciation and her snide dismissal of any alternative. Her account of some hoary folkish usage of "Appalachia" is a fiction (which is, after all, her craft) employed for purely polemical reasons. There was no such thing -- other than the Virginia town -- except among furriners.
In Kephart we do see the cleft in Appalachia I that will completely break off in Appalachia II. Even if it was the mountains that drew him into the Smokies, he fell under the spell of his mountain neighbors from the get-go; and even if his first book was about how to live in the woods, his second book was entirely given over to the lives of his mountain neighbors. It wasn't man against mountains so much as man among mountaineers.
But by the 1950s -- when that second book got into the hands of Jim Wayne Miller, a young man in North Carolina attuned, like Poe, to the music of words (he became the poet laureate of Kentucky) and reared in a family with middle class on one side and hillbilly (his word) on the other -- an idea of Appalachia began to sprout in the minds of some of its natives. Miller is explicit as to Kephart's influence: "The first book I read which influenced me on the subject of Appalachia was, without a doubt, Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders. It really set me off. … It was probably the most important single factor that put me in touch with my regional identity." Miller had found a life-forging identity. At high school's end, trying to decide what to do next -- business college in Asheville? Army, navy? Detroit? -- Miller chose Berea: "By that time, I had already read Horace Kephart. I figured I was a southern highlander, and here was a school … that existed for southern highlanders."
But by that time as well had long disappeared the highlanders' agrarian base, the subsistent forest "commons" that had flourished in the southern mountains between the time of the Indian Removal and the invasion of large-scale resource commodification, mostly timber and coal. Steven Stoll's 2017 Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia vividly describes this process, calling it no less an "enclosure" than the well-known example of commons clearances in the British Isles. The real irony for the word "Appalachia" is that, by the time its natives began to use it -- with its southern pronunciation -- to refer to their homeland, the economic culture whose characteristics had attracted the attention of those furriners described by Shapiro had been destroyed.
And many of those furriners had seen it coming. Miller would have read the words that end Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders: "The great need of our mountaineers to-day is trained leaders of their own. The future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such leadership. Here is where the nation at large is summoned by a solemn duty. And it should act quickly, because commercialism exploits and debauches quickly. … It is an economic problem, fundamentally, that the mountaineer has to face."
So by the time the native boys and girls are educated and self-aware as to the existence of something they call Appalachia, the exploitation and debauchery of commercialism have run rampant two and three regimes over, and now beyond that to the point that whatever Appalachia has become, actual mountains are irrelevant. "Bluegrass," for example, is often described as the music of the southern mountains -- it is indeed popular there -- but anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Kentucky geography must know that the name of the music comes from the grand region of Kentucky distinguished as entirely distinct from the mountains. Radio music marketing had the further flattening effect of enabling "hillbilly" to apply as much to the Indiana lowlands as the Cumberland hollers. The hills are alive with the sounds of Nashville -- which isn't mountains by a ways. Keep going along that line awhile and next thing you know you wind up with an Ohioan-gone-to-California expat like J. D. Vance claiming to speak for hillbillies.
With the mountain economic regime a thing of the past, never to return, this new idea of Appalachia became "history and culture" in the mind and words of Miller, a German professor by day job (make that Geschichte und Kultur high and lonely). "Appalachia" resonated because it thumped like a washtub bass the class division found in his own hearth and home. Even in his "hamlet" of Leicester, there were "the better people" with their "mindset" like those who lived in towns -- his father's family, one of whom had been mayor of Asheville -- and, on the other side, the "hillbilly class" and their "country" ways like those of his mother's family -- particularly the maternal grandfather, a tenant farmer and fox hunter -- who attracted the "feelings and affections" of his grandson. In fights at school no less than his literary career, Miller's "stand" was always with his "friends from the country." Now is the time to throw that apple atcha.
Cultural Appalachia hollowed out mountain Appalachia into a repertoire of cultural characteristics exhibited like wooden bowls on sale to tourists. The mountains retreated into a backdrop, like a painted sheet for the annual Big Stone Gap community theater production of Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Whatever people did "down there" -- hauling moonshine in a coal truck to goose up a feud -- mountains had less primacy than a good set of tires. This is quite a change from Kephart. Miller's "regional consciousness" was a town-country divide transportable to any other modernized region in the world, like, say, Detroit, where it was in fact transported. Cultural manifestations lost their essential link with a well-defined topography. It wasn't long after this "Erwachen nach Appalachia" that the cultural manifestations of poverty -- promulgated by newly televised mass media -- became the essential marker calling forth the federal Appalachian Regional Commission, which with less than poetic justice entitled its journal Appalachia.
And along came Shapiro (hey, there's a song in there) with his conceptual bulldozer, burying Appalachia I into a nonentity. But once you realize that there is not one but two mythical Appalachias -- one alive, vibrant, and symbolic of the highest the earth has to give; the other downtrodden, abused, and symbolic of utter dereliction -- and that Shapiro downplayed the former to the point of extinction, you can't read any of the subsequent scholarship about Appalachia without the noise of the synthetic, anachronistic fallacy ruining the mix.
Circa 2019, those who purport to explain Appalachia -- like Elizabeth Catte in What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia -- cannot even say what it is. They expressly relegate geography to the "unimportant" file. The remote, elevated wildness standing in for the power of nature has been replaced by a hodgepodge catch-all of internal combustion, Southern-ish cultural you-name-it. The bloat is due in large part to the Federal government's county-based system of defining Appalachia for the purposes of fighting poverty. Not surprisingly, perhaps, its "development" strategy favors those locations that are most, er, developable, which -- surprise! -- tend to be less than mountainous. Unsubtle bureaucratic cartography has had the staggering intellectual ripple effect of rendering Appalachia indistinct and undistinguishable. We are now at such a pass that even the ultimate townie Thomas Wolfe is considered to represent Appalachia, simply because the home he couldn't go back to is in a county considered, according to the government's criteria for poverty, part of Appalachia. This is bunkum (literally: look it up).
As a cultural construct, Appalachia II has had no choice but to follow along in the subjugation of the mountains by the forces of extraction and development. In its watershed TVA puts in a series of dams, and a lake culture all but replaces river and creek culture. Federal and state highways dilate the capillaries of the ox-drawn sledge into arteries for the almighty automobile. Radio, TV, and the Internet deliver a turbocharged stream of furriner. Beneath the quaint syndrome sold to tourists in Dollywood -- the cosplay feudin' and moonshinin' and log flumin' -- Appalachia has come into its commercial own as the branding iron of choice for any small business or community organization or university department hanging out a shingle in the upper South. What passes for tradition these days is ubiquitously symbolized by the Confederate battle flag, a complete inversion from the days of Appalachia I, when the mountaineers were lauded for their loyalty to the cause of the Union. Kilted bagpipe bands proclaim the Scots-Irish heritage of a region that never knew a bagpipe until recently. Call it "Appalachia" and fill it with anything. It's not so much Dystopia as Entropia.
This is the most American kind of decadence there is, the decadence that comes with following the money, the closest thing to an ideology that America has. In practice it is of course the opposite of anything as intellectual as ideology, because no set of beliefs can hold up to the moral and ethical perversions that come with mindlessly privileging profits over people. Example after example comes easily to hand from American history, from slavery to the election of Donald Trump as US President.
There's no reason to think that the southern Appalachians could have been spared. As mentioned above, the trampling of the southern mountains by commercialism was not unforeseen by those who regarded the mountains with a quasi-religious reverence, but what, after all, could they do against a juggernaut? In the wake, the prophets of Appalachia II rage impotently against the destruction visited by human upon human for something as empty and irreligious as wealth. But there is little to be done where exploitation is in fact the solution, because the formula is as baked into the American way as apple-atchas are into pie.
Meanwhile, Appalachia I still exists in the ridge-running preserves carved out by the AMC and such allies as the Appalachian Conservancy, in partnership with the US government, whose crumbs (see formula above) can only be bestowed so as not to threaten potential economic exploitation with something as trivial as scenery. But the champions of Appalachia I -- for all that they deserve pride in the accomplishments of long, steady effort for the public good -- seem to have abandoned any pretensions to the name, even if the AMC still uses it as the title of its journal.
For example, one need only look at the introduction to The Appalachian Trail Reader, an excellent compilation of everything from Thoreau's CONTACT on northern terminus Mt. Katahdin to ephemeral trail register comments on southern terminus Springer Mtn. (one of which asks, "Where's the water?" Reader, I've been there; oh, how I've been there). Editor David Emblidge, whom the dust jacket lists as a board member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, writes, "It's only a quirk of place-naming that one part of the Appalachian chain -- the extreme southern and south-central end -- came to be called 'Appalachia.' And it's only an ironic, sad fact that this beautiful area with its stalwart people came to be a poor and undeveloped (though much exploited) socioeconomic territory. For our purposes in this book, we'll acknowledge the term 'Appalachia' as belonging to specific places and people, and we won't expropriate it for use elsewhere."
Poor guy. You can almost hear the resignation in this sighing passage, with its "quirk of place-naming" and the final, sad surrender of "we won't expropriate," despite the fact that the place where he lives -- Yankee Massachusetts -- is where the word first went to work. Better to stay away from Sharyn McCrumb and her apple launcher.
And poor Appalachia II. Its alienation is complete and comes -- contra Shapiro -- from being as fully, deeply, and exquisitely American as Illinois or Minnesota, just with fewer Democrats. Whence cometh its help? Can it look to the hills of Appalachia I? Can the preservation of a sliver of America's mountain patrimony for the public good be regarded as not only a vision but a seed for its future?
Remember that Appalachia I began as a symbolic link to a founding idealism that saw in the mountains a source of inspiration and pride. Consider that its yeomanry represented -- to those who believed in the mountains -- an independent stock that could be sustained only if it were allowed to employ the mountains and their resources in some kind of sustainable, ecological balance (which, of course, did not happen). But also consider the continuing thread -- from Kephart, who sounded the alarm; through Benton McKaye, whose visionary 1921 "Appalachian Project" succeeded in generating the Appalachian Trail, but also called for a much broader system of "camps" for community, food, and shelter; through Caudill in the 1960's, who called for a TVA-style "mountain authority;" through historian Eller, who questioned whether modern development must always be the answer; up to Stoll, who includes in Ramp Hollow a manifesto for an agrarian commons -- that looks for a solution in schemes that place first, foremost, and always the preservation of mountains and mountain-based living, independent of any capitalist, extractive, market-based factors unless they are kept within the bounds of sustainability. Thus might the two Appalachias become one.
I'm not much of an old book collector, but somehow or other I own an 1885 edition of The Land of the Sky, or, Adventures in Mountain By-Ways, by Christian Reid, the pen name of Frances Christine Fisher Tiernan, author of more than 50 novels who was born and died in Salisbury, NC. Originally published in 1876, the book's popularity was such that its title endures as the nickname for the mountain region of western North Carolina centered on the resort city of Asheville. The story is a straightforward, destination-by-destination travelogue -- with an itinerary that includes such enduring must-sees as Hot Springs, Mt. Mitchell, and Bridal Veil Falls -- overlain with the prattle of Victorian courtship. But the romance is quite incidental to the trekking, which is carried out in full dress regalia whether in a coach (this is before the railroad had made it so far as Asheville), on horseback, or on foot. As such it is a very accurate description of how a family of means would have taken an extended mountain vacation at the time. The intrepid voyagers swoon over sunset after sunset and mountain vista after mountain vista; an entire thesaurus of superlatives is emptied into the descriptions of scenery.
What makes it most interesting in connection with this discussion is the matter-of-fact way in which mountaineers are treated. There is little of the human local color -- either descriptive or linguistic -- central to the novels of such interest to Henry Shapiro. The mountaineers are pretty much just there, and largely they are there to provide lodging and food free for the asking, with no notification, to these strangers traveling through the mountains when for whatever reason they find themselves to far from hostelry or otherwise stranded by flooded fords. Air BnB has nothing on this system. (By the way, this hospitality confirms what is largely reported in the literature about the mountains up through Kephart.) The only downside -- for our travelers of means -- seems to have been the universality of the frying pan liberally supplied with lard.
Here, then, are no Shapirovian strange people -- unless hospitality makes them so. They are part of a mountain landscape that provides the reason for the travels. To some extent they make the traveling possible. The word Tiernan most commonly uses as the name for the area where the traveling occurs is Arcadia, the literary geographic honorific designating any rural, pastoral idyll. Coincidentally -- and importantly -- this word is also one frequently employed by Steven Stoll in Ramp Hollow. It is as if it provides a temporal bridge between the two books: one of them a description of travel in the heyday of an agrarian mountain commons (or before its breakdown), and the other an effort at least in part to prescribe the means by which it might be restored. We moderns think of Arcadia as necessarily mythological, and yet the globe is full of actual examples that are both well-inhabited and well-visited.
Might this not be at least a vision for a "back to the future" for an Appalachia re-united with the source of its inspiration? What kinds of answers might arise from a pursuit of restorative and sustainable solutions -- for people and for the mountains -- that held the natural beauty and fecundity of mountain Appalachia to be essential and elemental to the effort?
As for those being qualities valued only by hikers and other furriners, it isn't so. We know from Kephart and others that the mountaineers of the agrarian commons loved the water and the open air where they lived, and that they felt stifled and poisoned in cities. We can let the testimony of a West Virginia man, Julian Martin, trying to save his homeland from strip mining, as reported by Stoll in Ramp Hollow, be conclusive:
"All my life I've watched the destruction of my native state. When I was a little boy 40 years ago, I used to walk up Bull Creek over on Coal River. Bull Creek's not there anymore. It's gone. My Uncle Ken used to work timber up in the head of that hollow with a mule, and he did the least amount of destruction you possibly could do. That place was beautiful. It's not there anymore. It's just simply gone. It's been destroyed by a strip mine … The first time I saw a strip mine it absolutely stunned me into silence. I was sad and I was sick. I couldn't believe what people could do with a bulldozer to land that used to be beautiful.
"Is it wrong to love beauty; is it wrong to love nature? Is it wrong to say that we have only one earth and it will never be reclaimed -- you can't reclaim a destroyed mountain -- you can put something back there but you can't put that topsoil back on -- just try it. You never, never can walk through that little glade where the ferns are growing. …
"And if you think strip mining is going to bring jobs, look where they've got strip mining in West Virginia and look where they've got the most unemployment. Mingo County. McDowell County. You go to the counties where they have strip mining -- that's where they have the worst of everything. They've got the worst roads; they've got the worst schools; they've got the highest unemployment rate. Everything is wrong with those counties. Is that what you want this beautiful place to become? My daddy was a coal miner, and I understand being out of work, okay? I've been down that road myself. And I know you've got to provide for your family. But I'm saying they're only giving us two options. They're saying, 'Either starve -- or destroy West Virginia.' And surely to God there must be another option."
Appalachia and Appalachia. Pronounce it both ways so it carries sense. The sociopolitical region in the South that's made molehills out of mountains gets to throw the apple atcha; the mountain empire gets the sonorous pronunciation that so appealed to Poe. No ofFENSE, Sharyn McCrumb. And go Vols. May you have enough OFFense to at least beat Vandy.
