My Appalachia

Abstract

My Appalachia Robert Connor My Appalachia is not a factor of heritage in my life; I have no ancestral roots there. I am not from Appalachia but, like so many others, am rather an invader, an explorer, a student, a defender, an observer and a portrayer by virtue of having photographed the people, hollows, strip mines, rocky hillsided farms, pearl gray, sagging, tin-roofed barns, giant coal-cleaning plants and the tiny, unincorporated communities that slow you down every couple of miles on secondary roads. Long before I came to Appalachia to live and work, I knew it as a storied region starting with Kentucky as "the Dark and Bloody Ground." For me, Appalachia began with Indians; The Last of the Mohicans had me picturing the forests of Kentucky as a network ofwelltraveled footpaths, bordered by dense forests teeming with wild game and used by the Indians primarily as a hunting area. To imagine it with few permanent settlements made it seem all the more wild, mysterious, primitive, and dangerous. As a consequence, I had a tremendous respect and admiration for those hardy souls who dared penetrate this unmapped wilderness. As a boy, I read everything I could about pioneers. I know now that many of the episodes I read were romanticized. These were hardy pioneers, so I wasn't able to share any physical suffering with them; while they encountered many obstacles, they overcame them. In my fantasies about them I wanted to live that kind of life. I wanted buckskin clothing trimmed with fringe. I wanted to wear moccasins so that I could have supreme stealth, able to feel every little twig underfoot (and therefore not loudly break it for everyone to hear); and, of course, have my trusty hunting knife on my belt, along with my throwing tomahawk. My muzzle-loading flintlock would be exactly as long as Daniel Boone's. Of course, I had no idea how much a muzzle-loading flintlock weighed, but it couldn't be too much because I had read where ole Dan'l could Robert Connor, freelance photographer and editor ofMountain Life & Work in the early 1960s, went to Bluefield, West Virginia, from Berea, and then retired to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 13 load on the run, while being chased, mind you, by screaming native Americans. And in these fantasies there were no mosquitoes and my thinking never got so far as to consider gong to the bathroom out in the wilderness. As I grew older, my concept of Appalachia expanded to accept the setting ofthe mountain regions, the extensive timbering, the discovering of coal, the penetration of the railroads and the growing exploitation of the region's prime resources: minerals and people. But in spite of a growing population and pockets of industrialization, Appalachia retained its aura of wildness. And there emerged, in my mind's eye, a prototype, characterized as a "mountaineer." He was taciturn, suspicious of strangers, a crack shot with a rifle. He didn't have much learnin', but he had a lot of savvy. He was adept at "folkways" and well versed in "folklore." He knew the healing nostrums that were available in the fields and forests. He liked to hunt and trap; but for some reason I never associated him much with fishing. And, of course, he made moonshine and was constantly at odds with revenooers. He spoke an odd language that scholars said went back to Chaucer, and he played music on the dulcimer and sang songs that had somehow traveled through time and space from the Old Country of his ancestors. I remember seeing Gary Cooper in Sergeant York. Cooper seemed to embody all the characteristics of my mountaineer prototype. And then there was the film The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a movie that made mountain living more acceptable, more desirable than ever. I remember crying freely when one of the film's characters died, a casualty of feuding families. For years Appalachia retained, for me, a mystique, as a separate realm, peopled by a special breed, either puzzled over or ignored by the outside world; an area visited only by those who wanted to take something from it. It wasn't that...