Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (26 page)

“I'm not real good at telling the difference in mining operations, in how they're doing it. But in this case, it was just so obvious: the mountaintop was
gone,”
Keltner says. “I couldn't believe it. It got me so upset that I had to start writing songs, and the first one I wrote was ‘Jellico.' Since then, I've read that Campbell County, Tennessee, is one of the poorest counties in the state, and like in Kentucky, mining has hurt tourism and the environment and the economy long-term. I'm not sure what mine I saw, but after that I read about the Zeb Mountain mine, with a permit to mine 216 acres in Campbell County, so it has to be pretty close by. Then I read that between Jellico and Middlesboro,
⁴
the Clear Fork Valley, it's 90 percent corporate owned and heavily mined, and 90 percent depopulated.
⁵
So I just had to write about it and get involved.”

At this point, the sisters have long since finished their berry-picking. A gallon of the day's gathering has already been made into a cobbler, which is bubbling in the oven. The gloaming has set in at the homeplace, so the logical place to gather is the back porch, which lies in the shade of old apple trees for the last half of the day. The porch looks out over Teges Creek and the still green mountain, where birdsong has been replaced by the sounds of cicadas, katydids, crickets, and frogs. The heat of the day has crept back into the cool cliffs of the mountain or nestled like a thin mist above the creek, easing down off the farm.

The two sisters laugh often, and this sound carries out over the homeplace. It's safe to say that these trees have heard similar laughter for the last hundred years at least; many a past summer's evening saw the sisters' family members watching night close in like this, too. The two siblings are proud of the stock from which they came, frequently mentioning the strength and resolve of their ancestors.

It's no wonder that Shelby and Keltner got involved in the movement to stop mountaintop removal. They are the daughters
of Luther and Jessie Bishop Gabbard. Luther, a soil conservationist, spent most of his life fretting about erosion. Jessie, a teacher, always stood up for what she believed in.

“Dad took the charge of being a soil conservationist very seriously. He was serious about stopping erosion,” Shelby says. “He loved to grow these big gardens, and I think he really
loved
soil. He knew the value of it, and he knew what it could do if you took care of it.”

Their mother, Jessie, was outspoken about her beliefs and felt that dissent was a responsibility everyone should take seriously. “Our mother was the only person we knew who was against capital punishment, or who would speak up when she thought the school system was doing something wrong,” Shelby says.

“She spoke out against World War II some, too,” Keltner offers. “Our dad and her brother were both in the war, but she spoke out against it. She felt, as a strong Christian, that she should. To them, that meant that you were to be compassionate and gentle. I think that Mom and Dad exemplified what is good about the mountains. They loved their homeland.”

The sisters say they are fighting mountaintop removal not only to honor their ancestors, who worked so hard on this land, but also to help preserve the land for future generations, including their own kin. Shelby is the grandmother to triplet grandsons Luke, Leo, and Ace. Keltner is also close to the boys, serving as a sort of extra grandmother.

The pair look on the current state of affairs in Appalachia with a mixture of hope and frustration.

“I sometimes have a nightmare vision of Eastern Kentucky being left to kudzu, mountaintop removal, and the drug culture,” Shelby says. “I always think I would never, ever leave this place because our family has been here such a long time, but if they were to start taking these mountains down around me, this place would be gone, in a way. The thing that I stay for would be gone. It wouldn't be the same anymore. So I might have to leave. But, in another way, they can't blow up culture, they can't run it out.”

“But this region could be turned into one big coalfield. That's possible,” Keltner interjects. She pauses, listening to an especially loud chorus of cicadas. Darkness has overtaken Appalachia now, and her face is lost to the shadows. “And you know, maybe Appalachia will just exist in one little trailer in Georgia or something. That's drastic, but it could happen.”

“Yeah, we'll all take that Appalachian culture with us wherever we go,” Shelby offers. “It's always been on the brink of disappearing anyway, as its own particular culture. In a way. But it's proven remarkably resilient and strong. It's defied all extinctions for 150 years. So we'll keep right on.”

Anne and Jessie Lynne talking…

Anne:
There were always hills wherever we went. Seems like if you grow up with hills around you, then you miss them when you leave them—or when they leave you, which is starting to happen more with this mountaintop removal. People from the mountains often try to explain—in songs and poems—why we feel this way about the mountains. But it's hard in a way because it's inexplicable, really, why we feel so much better with hills around us. We lived in Jackson County, and in this town, McKee, it was like a little bowl, with hills all around us. And we felt so secure there.

Lynne:
We were at Gray Hawk part of the time, and we always came over here, to Clay County, because Mom's parents were here. Even after we moved from the mountains to central Kentucky for about four years, before we came back to London, Mom nor Dad neither one ever came back to live in Clay or Jackson, but we did. We came back because of the history we had heard from our families, from the stories. We knew that our people had a long history, and you could tell that they were very proud to be from the mountains. They were really conscious of it.

Anne:
And we were aware, even as kids, that there was a richness to something here. Our grandparents had this little store—Bishop's Grocery—

Lynne:
The sign said: “Bradley Bishop Grocery.”

Anne:
But everybody just called it “Brad and Carrie's.” After they died and our uncle, Millard Bishop, ran it, they called it “Millard's.” And after he died and Edmund and I ran it, they still called it “Millard's.” People were always coming around here, on account of the store. It was just rich with stories and lots of laughing. There was a common group of stories that everyone knew and told. They enjoyed each other's company, enjoyed making fun of each other sometimes. There was also this shared history that existed. Everyone knew everyone's ancestors and who they had been, and everyone else's families and their histories. When we went other places, pleasant as they might have been in other ways, those places didn't have that. And I think that's partly why we kept coming back over and over again.

Lynne:
We knew who we were here.

Anne:
That we were Appalachians, even though that wasn't a word that was used then. Nobody used that word until the seventies, I don't think, when there was a sort of movement of consciousness of being Appalachian. Since both of our parents had gone to Berea College, they had, from there, a real strong sense of the region and of wanting to stay in the region and to be of service to the region. That was always part of our growing up.

Lynne:
Our parents came back here to teach after they graduated from Berea, Mom at Oneida and Dad over at Jackson County. So they had that regional consciousness and a real love of this place. There was a strong sense of community here, as small a community as it was: one little store, and the church, and at one time there was a mill at the mouth of the creek. People in this area considered themselves as the people of Lower Teges Creek, and they had a real strong sense of that community. We saw them at the store a whole lot. They were always telling big tales about their farms and families. They'd launch into memories or jokes. They'd start talking about the weather or something and end up telling some big, hilarious story.

Anne:
A lot of the time there would be big long periods where
people wouldn't come to the store, so Lynne and I would play Store. Lot of the time on a summer afternoon people wouldn't come for hours, so this was great to us. We'd act like we had been locked up in the store because that's what we really wanted to happen. 'Cause that way we could eat all the candy and drink all the pop without any limitations passed down on us from the grown-ups. Our mother was always trying in vain to keep us from eating and drinking too much there. She'd say, “Now, no more than six pops a day or four candy bars!” We chafed against those limitations. It was heaven for a kid. You know, Bill Cosby says that a child's life is a constant search for candy. And that was us.

Lynne:
Plus, you could walk outside the store and there were apple trees full of apples and men whittling, and there were all kinds of pop lids to play with. There were all kinds of kids who would come to play with us while their parents visited.

Anne:
And since it was a public place, the grown-ups couldn't really control who came there and who we would be exposed to, or what we would hear. So we'd hang around, wide-eyed, to see what big tales we might hear.

Lynne:
It was real different than when we were living in Burkesville, or Stanford, or London, because as late as the late seventies, there were still people riding mules up to the store after they had been working in tobacco or something. But in the last twenty-five or thirty years it seems like to me the community has really fallen apart. There's very little sense of community left. Everybody just runs to Manchester now.

Anne:
Yeah, there's no place where people can really get together as much. There's a little store at Oneida where people get together some, I guess, but mostly people go to Wal-Mart. And when you see somebody you know at Wal-Mart you'll stand and talk to them a while, try to catch up, but everything's just so different. Back then, people worked together, in tobacco and farming. Nobody farms much, so there's not that contact. It's just harder to get up with people. And there's a pretty rigid division in the community between the church people and the drug
people. So if you don't fit in with either one of them, like us, you're just stranded!

Lynne:
People came to the store to socialize, mostly. There weren't so many other things to do—not that TV or the Internet are good substitutes—so people would come in the evening and just visit. There was always singing, too, seems like. Our mother sang more like Sara Carter than anyone else I ever heard. She actually sounded like her. We listened to a lot of music over and over because we really didn't have very many records. Our grandparents had these old 78s. We had a few religious records, maybe one Disney record. A classical collection that our mother wanted us to be exposed to. Church music was real strong in the little Baptist church where we went. We'd just continue it on after we went to church, we'd go to my grandparents' and sing with our cousins and uncles and aunts. We'd harmonize and they'd play guitars. I still like music of all kinds, but folk music and hillbilly music and old hymns are just something that I have a strong connection to because we did have that culture and that exposure. The first song I ever tried to play on the guitar was “When the World's on Fire.”
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Anne:
A nice children's song! How old were you?

Lynne:
Ah, 'bout six or seven.

[They laugh.]

Anne:
You know, I never did reject being Appalachian. But I did get away from it. I had a rediscovery. When I was growing up in the fifties, it wasn't a subject of conversation, it wasn't an issue one way or the other. I don't think. But I think that that period in the seventies, when you could get access to the old music again, and the writing, and people were talking about Appalachia and being Appalachian, it became exciting to rediscover and reclaim that. I had mostly identified myself as a hippie more than anything else for a period of time. But I remember one time, I was looking in the back of that book
Yesterday's People
, by Jack Weller.
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In the back he had these characteristics of what he thought made an Appalachian, as opposed to everybody else in the world. And of course he was thinking of these things on his list as negative
aspects—all the Appalachian characteristics he saw as negative—but I was looking at it and I thought, “But this is the list I want to be on.” I identified with the list that placed an importance on family and community and being a real person, and not the one that placed importance on schedules and money and ambition. And so, at that moment, I think I began to identify very strongly as an Appalachian, and then to learn as much as I could about what that meant. At that time there were no Appalachian history or literature classes, not a strong sense of what Appalachian music was, in the context of American music. So when it became possible to learn more about those things, people began to learn more about who they were, that they were Appalachian. I began to see all the things that were good about being Appalachian. Before, we had known we were from Eastern Kentucky and that meant a lot of things, some of which were real good and others that weren't good, like when people would make fun of you. I got made fun of terrible when I went off to college because of the way I talked. And so I think I did try to change it. I never tried to cover it up, though. I was proud of it; sometimes I'd even lay it on thicker. But I never rejected it, although at the same time I was young and wanted to be a citizen of the world.

Lynne:
You don't necessarily have a consciousness of something so much until there's the threat that you might lose it. I think, back then, we had the security of the land and our family and the history and music. As long as we had it, we didn't have to think so much about it. But this was around the same time that strip mining started coming around, and the old musicians started dying off, and so we became more conscious of who we were as a people.

Anne:
The first time I ever saw strip mining I had been hearing a lot about it because in the seventies the
Courier-Journal
was real good at covering what was happening in Eastern Kentucky. We don't have that now, we don't have a strong investigative reporting presence, and I think that's making a big difference in awareness. At that time we lived in Laurel and Knox County, and
there wasn't too much strip mining going on, but some. But my husband and I had this little convertible, and we loved driving it around. So one day we decided to drive to Hazard. I had been reading a lot about strip mining and was fairly alarmed by it. I remember going up into Perry and Leslie and Harlan counties, and there were so many mountains, and they were so beautiful. And every once in a while you'd come up on a horrible gash in the mountain, and stuff pouring down, but I remember thinking, “Well, these mountains have been here so long, and there's so many of them that these men and their little 'dozers are not going to do that much damage.” And I was really comforted by that. I couldn't foresee, of course, the use of explosives to bring down a mountain, and the big permits and the giant machines they have now. So I'm not comforted anymore.