Been watching a documentary about the Appalachians, the accent, and a bit of the lifestyle. I have found it interesting because of some relatives and a couple trips to their homelands when was a child. My specific relatives were the Rabers from the area of Morgantown, West Virginia. My mom dropped her step-dad’s name on me, and on his side, I have met his mom and dad, his mother’s mom, and his father’s mom and dad. That would put them at the relation of great-great-grandparents to me.
My trips back to West Virginia were by plane and by car, and they took me to see Bobby West in his band, and to the University where he showed up a ball and feather drop in an vacuum tube, and to see Joanne, and their house, as well as the house of Erma Foor, and Lester and Willa Raber up on Black’s Run Road at the Pennsylvania state line. Grandpa took me up to the state line, which is of course also the Mason Dixon Line, where we pissed on it, which was probably his way of saying that the country ought not to have ever been divided.
Some of what showed up in the documentary I was watching reminded me of the folks back in the hollow, who had likewise said themselves long before the film was put to light that the only reason they ever knew they was poor was because the government came along and told them so. They remain some of the most down to the earth, hard working, sincere people I have ever met. And as could be deduced, they lived long lives. If I were to guess as to the reason they lived so long, sort of divining the Fountain of Youth, as people seem to want to do, then I would say it was a combination of three factors. One is the amount of vegetation they included in their diets, as vegetables are cheap, and easily raised. The second is the hard work they put into staying alive in the first place. There were many who relied very little on the grocery store for their survival. Lastly, I have to include a bit of dumb luck, because living as hard as those people do, it is a wonder they don’t get killed off before any of them reach the top of the hill, much less wander down the other side. Between lightning strikes, hunting accidents, farming accidents, mine collapses, and just about any old thing else that could kill a person, they have a pretty good chance of looking up at the sod before they get much chance to look down at their little one’s little ones.
Both of the houses I went to had aspects that have stayed with me all my life. The old house on Black’s Run Road looked like any other bungalow on the inside, but for one of the cupboard doors on the built in hutch in the dining room, which when opened revealed a steep stairway up to the second floor. It served pretty much like a secret passage, and if you were just visiting and not shown it, you’d be hard pressed to ever find your way up to the top floor. The house that Erma Foor lived in had a small store and filling station out front, which was a treasure trove of antiques. But the thing about the house itself that stuck was a little hatch in the floor that opened by a pull chain, which you could throw your laundry down, and it would drop into a cupboard in the cellar where the washing machines were. Those features changed the way I viewed a house as just a place to put your furniture and park your ass. There was imagination, simplicity, and practicality to them which inspired my desires for my own living space for all the years of my life after. Now I am in my own place, I am still working out the wash room and where the catch cupboard is supposed to go.
As for the people, Lester Raber died not too long after I met him. His wife, Willa, was too stubborn for a graveyard, so she moved to California, and I never was around when she did finally lose her wrestling match with the Grimm Reaper. I suspect she may have broken his scythe before she went down. Erma Foor had passed away not long after I had met her, too, and her passing was the reason for one of our trips back there. Kelsey Raber Sr. eventually developed a brain tumor and moved back East with his wife, Dorothy, where he lived out his last days before she returned to California for a spell, then went back again herself. While Kelsey was ill, his doctor recommended that Dorothy either leave a bottle of sleeping pills or a gun on his nightstand and let nature take its course. It’s not the kind of medical advice you can expect to hear today, but truth be told, it is more compassionate than what the law allows, which cuts to the heart of what I remember about those West Virginians.
There are another aspects to those folks that one can only understand by getting to know them. One day I was over with grandpa Kelsey to visit his mother Dorothy, and to give her an old violin that we had come across in his possession that once belonged to her. I was welcome to it if I was going to learn it, but I never did, so she was to have it back. This thing was in pretty bad shape to look at, and I was not sure if it would ever make a proper sound, anyhow. When presented it, I said something about it needing some work, and so she picked it up, tuned it with a few plucks and turns, and then grabbed up the bow and made it holler out in a voice I never dreamed it could have. I didn’t even realize she played, but there she was, sawing out a bluegrass tune that made my toes tap, and my legs want to dance. That was when I found out that she used to play fiddle and her husband the banjo, on a radio program in Wheeling West Virginia, the Nashville of Bluegrass music.
Appalachians are a solitary people, and used to being alone. So they brought out the strings and rolled out the rug whenever someone came to visit. There was no need to call ahead, as telephones were the kind of thing you used to call the neighbor just the same as you might call on someone across the country. If you showed up, you got put up. That is just the culture. It was a bit of a rude shock to me when my cousin in Salt Lake told me one day how his mom and dad hated our grandparents for just showing up now and then, and expecting them to drop everything for their visit. But this is where cultures collide, and knowing both sides of the story, I think grandpa never meant to be rude. But I know where this comes from, and I know why he seemed to his step-children to be such a coarse man. He was from a place where hard work was just survival, and courtesy was just the way the kids are brought up, but that courtesy was given and taken in different ways to the family out west. It could often be heard in his side of the family, “If you show up, we’ll find a nail to hang you on.” I never heard him say he hated anything about anyone in the family so long as they had a lick of common sense and were willing to do some hard work. If anyone came up shy of that, though, they would not find his favor. But that’s just because of how he grew up.
The film was only meant to be about accents and words, but it opened a wellspring of memories in me from my early childhood, and of people I knew only when I was young, not even a teen. It reminded my of some of the reasons I find myself drawn to what is commonly called “the simple life,” which anyone stirring bacon fat in a Carolina cooker over a fire, or ploughing a hillside because it is the only plot of land they can grow their vegetables on, or pulling down a few trees to keep warm all winter by, will tell you, ain’t simple at all. It might be hard to imagine an Appalachian out of the hills and living in anyplace other than a trailer park, but it is also hard to imagine them not making the best of anyplace they live, and doing so with work and ingenuity that is not found just anywhere else.
Kelsey J Bacon
Fairview – Preston, Idaho