The Kentucky Range

May 17

Met a lady at a library after I'd cooked lunch on some stairs beside the building. She stopped to talk, seeing the bags on my bicycle and feeling some affinity toward travelers. Told me she was from Asheville, North Carolina, a haven for swarming kids like me, gutter punks, hillbillies and all sorts together.

It's a place you just visit, though. If you stay too long you might find yourself leaving on parole.”

I spent most of the day after in the library while it rained. The sky was still spread gray, but the forecast assured me for not much longer.

May 18

I rode up growing hills through the morning and into the afternoon without much event. The light rain grew a bit heavier. Biding the weather I anxiously recalled the sun's scheduled return tomorrow.

Stopped half way up a hill I saw a man in a truck in my path on the shoulder, his brake lights lit red. When I'd gotten closer he hung himself out of his window a bit, looked back at me and yelled a muffled exclamation – “Ride?!” I stopped my bike behind his truck and he hung out a bit farther then opened his door and got out. His truck began to roll backward down the hill toward my bike and, noticing this, he quickly flung his right leg into the truck and onto the brake pedal. Now dangling half-in/half-out of his truck he threw it successfully into park and came out again. Ignoring his little fiasco I smiled at him as he walked down the shoulder toward me. He asked me more formally if I wanted a ride, telling me he was headed east. I unfolded my map. Raindrops began to spot its surface and he stuck his finger where he'd be going. I was headed generally northeast now and accepted, not wanting to become further dampened.

We got my bike in his truck bed and set ourselves in the front. He started to drive and we began talking about where I was from, what I was doing and where we were headed. He seemed more interested in conversing than specifically what I had to say. I asked him his name and he told me Gene.

He was a gruff looking guy. The reddish hair beneath his cap ran over his ears and in the back to the nape of his neck, the goatee covering his mouth speckled with traces of white.

In a deep Appalachian droll, every syllable resounding like a boulder plop in a pond, he told me, “I don't usually pick people up but I got a long ride home to a lady and my dog.” After a silence he told me he'd picked up a sixty-seven year old guy a couple months back harboring a backpack and a will see the world. The guy had said he'd been 'round it once before and figured he could do it again before he died.

Gene rolled down his window a sliver and lit a Pall Mall. “At your age I was chasin' women and drinking. Had a time of it, too. South Carolina's where they got Myrtle Beach, right? I think I'd like that there, just to sit and watch the women.” I chuckled and he responded with a shrug, “Least I'm honest.” Old habits die hard I suppose. He guessed my age right on his first try and went on, “Yeah, I got married at twenty-three. Going through divorce now after eighteen years.” It sounded like a sad story was there, but I didn't want to press him and the conversation began to die out as tends to happen when driving keeps on.

Eventually he stopped us at a gas station and asked me what kind of pop I drank. After stumbling a little I told him, with wide eyes and a smile, “Root beer, I suppose.” He came back out with a scratch ticket in hand, and a pop for me and himself. I thanked him profusely. Kindness seems to find you out when you've made yourself available. Gene was both kind and gentle. His soul and life was rooted in casual, unassuming mountain life. When we'd gotten amid the mountains he began to point out the places where strip mining was done and I asked him how he felt about it.

“Maybe if they reclaimed the mountain like they supposed to it wouldn't be so bad. Seems like none of these companies doin' the minings does what they supposed to. Doesn't seem right. In fact a bunch 'em gettin' sued now for it.”

He didn't say much more about it, but I felt he was disappointed more than anything else. Riding into the Appalachians I'd kept an eye out for any mountains missing their caps and had figured the people here would be angered and roused at the desecration of their summits, but I now wondered at the feelings expressed by Gene. Rather than unbridled anger I saw in him hollow disappointment. Maybe it's the nature of the people. Having invested whole faith in big coal business to enrich the place they'd become the subject of blatant exploitation for revenue. Now their betrayed faith condensed as disappointment and calm frustration in the face of a dominant enemy's established occupation. The people here are poor and don't possess the power to fight by traditional means.

Rather than hiring people to burrow into the mountains and extract the coal the companies come wielding explosive force to blow away the mountain tops, laying bare the coal. Through this process valleys are filled and sites oft abandoned to rot naked in the sun, a detriment to every inhabitant. The waste pollutes watershed streams and deters the established equilibrium held by the mountain's system. Reclaiming, as Gene mentioned, refers the expectation of the mining company to revitalize the peak and nurture it back into health and vigor, but this usually remains a theory rather than practice and even if it is carried out things can never be the same.

So the paper tigers are blown about by torrential corporate winds. Like mountains built of dollar bills the corporations themselves hold the power, quelling the cries of mountain valley dwellers. Their voices suppressed, the people resign to subjected disappointment, hoping and waiting in duress for the scales to be evened by substantiated law. And I hope with them from passenger seat solidarity.

The truck wound over roller coaster roads. The infinity of trees at the road's banks stood high under an overcast late afternoon sky. The mountain's carpet waved precariously but the mountains themselves stood still as the clouds and winds rolled through. Gene told me to let him know when I wanted off, but I stayed to the end of his drive. We were deep in Appalachia and he recommended I take the main way north. There were few choices anyway as most of the roads filtered onto the main way, winding through the valley bed.

He dropped me in a parking lot and thanked me for my company. I saw his truck drive off into a trailer lot across the street then went into the mountainside town. On a corner in the nearly empty downtown I found a guy in cop attire talking with another man. When I stopped and asked them about places nearby I might camp at they both set off in mountain-speak rambling every available option and their accompanying directions. I picked one from the many and a couple miles down the road found the park they'd described. The turf was soggy from the rains and spread out beside a swelled brown stream. I set myself up, laying my tarp and tent and dozed to pedal Appalachian valley shoulders at the Appalachian dawn.