cheese it, the cops!

yesterday, we came over from cumberland/benham/lynch, kentucky, to appalachia, virginia on the vertigious switchback road rt 160. this is the very epicenter of american coal country ("it's a long way to harlan/it's a long way to hazard, just to get a little brew": "nine pound hammer." no: it's not far at all.) coming into virginia, you see a whole ridge chopped away, collapsing into the hollows in heaps of infinite slag. everywhere here trucks are hauling coal, the trains run often and full. i think this story is really complicated, as you can see from the simultaneous sense of trauma and nostalgia that surround the coal industry here (e.g. at the coal mining museum in benham, where the most moving little piece was probably about trapped miners' last words; but of course also in the music of the region etc). but the idea that we're literally going to blow these mountains apart: that can't be acceptable, can it? one would think that coal can't really be the solution anyway. but what would happen, even now, to the tenuous economies of this region, without it?

i'm on a kind of coal-country/bluegrass music road trip with my mom (the indominatable joyce abell, 83) in far southwest virginia, west virginia, and eastern kentucky. we've been staying, believe it or not, at the ralph stanley museum and traditional music center in clintwood, va. jim and jesse, the stonemans, the carter family are all from this region of virginia, and we've been listening to all of them on the drive. ma is being generous about that: probably, all things considered, more into beethoven. we visited the appalshop in whitesburg, ky, which produces important documentaries about appalachia and runs a wonderful bluegrass radio station. ma taught a course on appalachia in 1974 at kennedy high school in montgomery county md, partly based on the classic book night comes to the cumberlands, by harry caudill, and they went through this area, including the appalshop. we did some amazing drives through these astonishing hills, which are as beautiful as any land i have ever seen, and we saw devastating evidence of strip-mining and mountain-top removal. i'm going to do more on that later.

phat

yo i'm heading down to norlins today, and i'll be blogging mardi gras.