© by Chris Bolgiano

The Fall, 2010 issue of Appalachian Journal, which focused on regional identity, hit me where it hurts: in my self-proclaimed, hardly-won, and wholly un-censused identity as Appalachian. Because nowhere in seventy pages of scholarly surveys, speculations, and definitions could I find myself.

Researchers reach out to fourth generation descendants born in industrial cities far from the mountains and deem them Appalachian, and I totally get that. I’ve come to understand, and not just from Loyal Jones, that you can get an Appalachian into Heaven but she’ll still insist on going home to the mountains every other weekend.

I understand, because even though I wasn’t born here, I couldn’t live anywhere else but here on Cross Mountain, with Little North Mountain in front of me. And the trailer court down the road.

In all the confusion over what it means to be Appalachian, the simple fact of mountains is clearly bedrock. As Herrin said, “We definitely considered ourselves mountain people … as Tennessee mountaineers.” Ludke et. al. cite “a strong sense of cultural identity as mountain people” in western North Carolina. Mountains define the region and regional identity.

Careers have been built on the notion that a distinctive Appalachian regional identity emerged from the (only recently acknowledged) human diversity in the mountains. Yet the unique biodiversity of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, with its generous support of small-scale agriculture and home industries, is rarely recognized as the source of what is distinctly Appalachian in American rural culture.

Hundreds of plant species provided foods, medicines and building materials from cradle to coffin. Bear, deer, wild turkey, squirrels, grouse, rabbits and other game abounded, as well as fish that my friend and local author Peggy Shifflett could catch by hand along the creeks. Knowledge of the forests was a fundamental dimension of being Appalachian.

“When I was a kid we did a lot of things related to the forest. We did hunting, ginsenging, swimming, fishing, outdoor activities, mostly,” recalled Larry Stratton of Lincoln County, WV, in the July, 2009 issue of Wonderful West Virginia.

Knowledge of the forest is fading now, along with some of its most valuable species, like ginseng, which have been overharvested or lost habitat or both. Modern ways have replaced many traditional lifestyle habits, although firewood and wood stoves continue as an age-old form of energy independence.

But the mountains are still there, except, of course, for the ones being blown up for coal. Even when they’re gone, mountains define every aspect of Appalachian life, from the location of valley fills to school bus routes. I cheered each time the term “mountain people” was used as a synonym for being Appalachian.

After forty years of trying, I like to think that I have become an Appalachian mountain woman. “We must challenge the idea that there is only one legitimate Appalachian experience,” wrote Steve Fisher. “One way of doing that is by telling our stories.”

So here’s my story, and if it doesn’t lead to the stereotypical Appalachian mountain woman, whose problem is that?

Addie Simmons, who really was a stereotypical old mountain woman and my mentor in West Virginia in the 1970s, would say of opponents that she’d “like to make ‘em swaller my fist.” Honestly, I don’t feel that strongly, but I want to honor her spirit. I’ve learned that Appalachian women are the ones who hold all of what editor Sandra Ballard called “the paradoxes of Appalachian identity” together.

One paradoxical experience that most legitimizes being Appalachian, suggested several scholars, is not living a rural lifestyle, not being part of a close-knit community, not even being dispossessed or murdered by King Coal. The one truly Appalachian experience is said to be leaving the mountains. Appalachian outmigration was brilliantly articulated by Harriette Arnow in The Dollmaker, surely the most overlooked Great American Novel in literature.

Outmigration may have defined the word “hillbilly,” but not “redneck.” When I learned that “redneck” once referred to the red bandanas around the necks of striking West Virginia coal miners in 1920, my image of the word changed. If you stood like David to King Coal’s Goliath, taking machine gun bullets in your tent city because you dared to demand decent treatment, you just might be a redneck.

Leaving where you are to learn who you are is not just Appalachian, though, but a universal human experience. My story turns the Appalachian outmigration trope upside down. Immigrants — people who choose to live in Appalachia — aren’t much considered in Appalachian identity studies, except Hispanics, who form a highly visible Other.

I migrated into Appalachia out of the mainstream, middle-class, flatlander life my parents had just barely achieved. The closest that AJ’s identity investigators came to tracking me was Kansas.

“I see some divides drawn by birthplace,” interviewer Chad Berry said, after posing the question to Roberta Herrin: Can someone born in Kansas be Appalachian?

I am not from Kansas. I was born in the rubble of Munich after World War II, to an American Jewish soldier and a German Catholic, bombed-out single mother whose own mother had worked for Hitler. Growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. gave me an American accent but left an enduring European fear of nationalism. In 1970, during the spring of the Kent State student killings and the first Earth Day, I graduated from the University of Maryland with a husband and a consciousness barely raised above average consumer flood level.

We lived in a small commune in an African-American neighborhood. From there, on weekends and leave days from our jobs, we camped in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina looking for land where we could settle down to some post-industrial pioneering. We were part of the generation that made “Peace and Love” its slogan, “Going Back to the Land” its agenda, and “Eat Low on the Food Chain” its diet. Real estate agents in the small towns we visited had some fun field days with us.

According to the experts, personal identity is not a single face but multi-faceted, like the quartzite crystals in rocks on Cross Mountain. When I turn a rock a certain way, I can light up my “Aging hippie butterfly” vision of myself, which also happens to be my favorite Halloween costume.

Turn the rock other ways, and other identities flash past — liberal librarian, wife and not-a-mother, sustainability freak, and, in a spoonerism kindly supplied by a friend, bird watcher and word botcher. Maybe some of these fit in the categories of “resistance” and “project” identities mentioned in the issue. It was clear from the roundtable discussion that Appalachian regional identity has been a useful tool to hammer the political/economic structure into a more equitable distribution. Rightly so, and right on!

Seeing tar-paper shacks with cords of firewood stacked nearby, tar paper outhouses with no firewood, rusting machines of all species in the yards, and root cellars that had better be stocked up for winter, shocked some of the idealism out of me early on. I hadn’t known America could be like that. Eating the seeds for next summer’s garden in order to avoid starving today is the scene that most haunts me from James Stills’ River of Earth.

And despite decades of vinyl siding, satellite TV dishes in the yards and plumbing in the houses, pockets of Appalachian poverty persist. There are hungry children attending my local elementary school, and lines at the food pantry where we volunteer. It looks like one of my neighbors in the trailer court has lost his job as a truck driver, because the rig has been sitting there for weeks.

If someone is truly in need, sooner or later it’s likely to come up at our Ruritan club. Part of a national organization oriented toward rural areas, the club’s purpose is “fellowship, goodwill and community service.” Our club dates back more than half a century. When we first joined it nearly a decade ago, the husband and I were the only members who didn’t have seven generations invested in the land.

Winona LaDuke once wrote that to belong to a community, you must give up a part of your own identity. The club gives me the opportunity to learn how to do this. I watch my identities chase each other like cloud shadows racing across Little North Mountain.

Some scholars want to define identity through heritage, while others hold that heritage does not necessarily equate to identity. I’m in the latter camp, hardly wanting to identify with my Nazi heritage. It’s like being white: something I can’t help. Obermiller put it this way: “Being from Appalachia does not necessarily make people Appalachian.”

Then what does? If it’s a matter of values rather than birth or heritage, I’d still mostly lose out, because I can lay claim to few of Jones’ ten Appalachian Values. Having tried all my life to outgrow early Catholic schooling, I’m not religious, being more drawn to Buddhism’s lack of deity than to any Christian sect. And while I admire the humility and self-deprecating humor of mountain people, with this being a memoir that is by definition self-centered, I can hardly claim modesty for myself.

But by becoming Appalachian, I’ve learned that I don’t need Buddha or the Bible to keep myself in line. I just put a raisin on my head and tell myself, Now don’t you get above your raisin’.

I have no people, so cannot partake of the extended family values, sometimes called clannishness, that characterize Appalachia and many other rural societies. Even self-reliance is a value by choice for me, not the necessity that born Appalachians grew up with.

Nor do I fit the socio-economic characteristics of low educational and occupational status that Alexander and Berry identified, although, like many Appalachian students still yet, I was the first in my family to attend college.

Love of place is the common ground where values, heritage, and identity meet, an odd cove built by the deposits of three major creeks. Trying to understand that cove I’ve chosen for home, I have gone bear hunting, panther tracking, horse logging, sorghum pressing and ginsenging. I’ve reported on mountain top removal in Kentucky, a successfully aborted Earth First chip mill protest in North Carolina, and the Hatfield family cemetery in West Virginia. I have interviewed Dolly Parton’s uncle and fended off a pass from my old mentor Addie’s husband.

Does that authenticate me?

My Appalachian identity is built from the dirt in my garden and the firewood in my forest, from gaunt faces of coal miners I’ve met and laughter of Ruritan club colleagues during our annual Lawn Party fundraisers. We fry ham and chicken in the hottest part of July, producing a sweat equity investment in our community as well as good-tasting, bad-for-you food. Then, over the winter, the club divides the income among many competing demands for charity donations, scholarships, and the occasional heating-oil fill-up for a cold, broke neighbor.

In the same way that coming from Appalachia does not make one Appalachian, so does not coming from Appalachia not mean that one cannot become Appalachian. Not that it’s easy. Like Silas House’ character Clay Sizemore, who fits pieces of family stories into a memory quilt of his murdered mother, I am piecing experiences together in an Appalachian identity quilt.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s a crazy quilt.

Steve Fisher asks, “What are the conditions that lead people to identify themselves as “Appalachians?” Yearning for the comfort of a home-made quilt is a pre-disposing condition, a longing to belong not just to the nature of Cross Mountain but also to this human community, as it tries to hold on to its best traditions in a flood of change.

Maybe there should be a census category for “Wannabe Appalachians,” because there are a lot of us: people who moved into Appalachia in the late twentieth century with the intent of spending the rest of our lives here. Just as one person can have many identities, there can be many communities in one geographical area. The Been-heres and Move-Ins operated on parallel planes for the first few decades, but the lines converge over time.

Being an outsider does have advantages, offering some neutrality from the particular historical process of any given place. That is a polite way of saying that an outsider has never been involved in any feuds. But there lies the great divide: an outside perspective that can never be undone, like a gorge that the Cherokees believed was a gateway to another world.

Satterwhite writes that Insider/Outsider dynamics obscure “crucial lessons about power relations within the region, class dynamics … racial dynamics, gender dynamics.” Several contributors to the issue declare that the Insiders vs. Outsiders division is false and useless. Yet it persists, at least in the academy. To the original question posed by Berry, whether “divides drawn by birthplace” bar outsiders from becoming Appalachian, Herrin’s reply was that an outsider’s relationship would be a kinship, rather than an identity.

Whatever. My kinship with Appalachia is not of blood but of bloodroot, bear, and the universal human needs of families in that trailer court down the road. Appalachia has given me everything I ever wanted from a place to call home, and more than I ever bargained for.

Having worked my way through the issue, I decided it doesn’t matter anymore how scholars and the census define me. I know I am home because of something Garnett Turner said recently. He’s the founder of our Ruritan club and one of our most respected elders. A local newspaper reporter was interviewing him about the fiftieth anniversary of the Ruritan club, and Garnett asked me to be there to talk about the club history I had written. The reporter asked me if I had grown up here, but before I could answer, Garnett said, “She’s not from here, but we’ll claim her.”

*

Chris’s next book is due out in September, a collaboration with photographer James Valentine from University of North Carolina Press titled Southern Appalachian Celebration: In Praise of Ancient Mountains, Old-Growth Forests, and Wilderness.

Chris was featured on the Woodrat Podcast back in early 2010 in a two-part conversation with Marcia Bonta: Episode 7, “Tales From the Nature-Writing Trenches,” and 8, “Greening the Appalachians.”

by Chris Bolgiano

Dear President Obama:

Thanks to you, America is turning green again, nearly forty years after I went “Back to the Land” as part of the first Earth Day generation. You came within twenty miles of my passive-aggressive solar homestead on Cross Mountain last October, when you spoke in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Surely, as you flew into the Shenandoah Valley airport, you noticed to the west the long, sinuous lines of forest-covered mountains, fall colors blazing in faux fire.

A century ago you would have seen smoke billowing from real fires, caused by a rampage of steam-powered logging. Flooding caused by deforestation of the mountains became so costly by 1911 that Congress passed the Weeks Act, authorizing the U.S. Forest Service to buy land from willing sellers and repair environmental damage. Some of the highest ridges you saw when you looked westward are in national forests that were established then, along the spine of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

These forests now face their greatest threat in a century.

Reflecting a nearly 50% nationwide increase in wind electricity plants in 2007, developers are arriving in what they themselves called “a gold rush” at a recent industry conference. There, a wind map ranked thin red currents along the highest Appalachian ridges as just possibly strong enough to power turbines for massive industrial wind installations.

Glossy ads for wind power always show turbines in open fields, never in forests. That’s because every turbine requires up to five acres of deforestation. Hundreds of turbines are being built here, burgeoning to tens of thousands if the U.S. Department of Energy indiscriminately pursues its “20% Wind Energy By 2030” program. Do the math, and factor in the forest fragmentation that multiplies the loss of habitat, and the super-wide new roads that destroy the last remote, wild ridges.

Slender, rocky ridges are blasted and bulldozed to flatten pads for turbines. Each pad requires hundreds of tons of concrete. After the 25 year life span of the huge machines, the pads remain as dead ground but possibly good tennis courts in a summer camp for giants in the future.

Deforestation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuel burning. The rest of the world agreed at the recent U.N. climate summit to protect maturing forests that sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide — like those now healing from old abuse in the Southern Appalachians. In Transition to Green, the 400 pages of nature tips sent you by a coalition of environmental organizations, the first recommendation for the U.S. Department of Agriculture is to “manage the national forest system to secure climate benefits.”

Industrial wind will blow this opportunity away.

It’s already blowing away a lot of wildlife. Turbine blades reach 450 feet above ridge crests where songbirds migrate, bats feed, and eagles rise on thermals. Just across the state line in West Virginia, thousands of creatures are being killed every year at new wind plants, the highest kills ever documented worldwide from turbines. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service strongly recommends against turbines on nearby Shenandoah Mountain due to the likelihood of killing endangered species, yet several projects are underway.

Some of the people living near turbines suffer from chronic sleeplessness and other symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome (including depression over loss of property values).

Death, destruction and insomnia are marketed to urban consumers as “green” electricity, what little there is of it. Turbines produce only about 30% or less of their maximum rated capacity, and some of that is lost along hundreds of miles of transmission lines. When the wind does blow, the aging lines can hardly handle the surge.

What drives this high-cost/low-benefit gold rush is the federal production tax credit. More tax breaks beckon in national forests, where no local property taxes are levied so local communities wouldn’t share in revenues produced by turbines, plus the Forest Service helps pay for building roads. In the three years that the federal tax credit hasn’t been reauthorized since first enacted in 1992, the skyrocketing wind industry plateaued like a mountaintop-removal coalmine.

The coal mining that has ravaged the land and people in part of Appalachia for a century is our major source of electricity, and is obscenely destructive to forests. But destroying more forests in order to stop destroying forests doesn’t make sense. And building industrial wind plants in Appalachia isn’t change. It’s a 21st-century version of the same old pattern of taking value out and leaving costs behind.

These ancient mountains are well-documented as the biologically richest temperate woodlands in the world, one of North America’s greatest natural treasures, rich in globally rare species and communities, including human ones. So you can’t dismiss my aging hippie protest merely as NIMBY, which in any case is simply love of place. It breaks my heart to see these murdered old mountains assaulted again.

Since 1911, the Forest Service has salvaged the land and regenerated trees in watersheds that, today, supply drinking water to millions of people (not to mention clean air). Tens of millions of people depend on these national forests for access to the outdoors, spending in local economies as they go. Timber from regulated harvests supports local companies.

National forests are the last vestige of the rural commons, where, as you noted in a recent speech, “the proud tradition of hunting is passed on through the generations.” Deer eat my flowers and I eat the deer in an Appalachian adaptation of flower power.

No flowers bloom now; the mountain forests you saw in autumn glory are bark naked and blue with winter cold. Warmed by firewood from my hundred acres of oaks, I’m writing you on a computer plugged into nine solar panels that power my house. I believe in green energy so much that I’ve started a new savings fund to buy one of those million plug-in hybrid cars that you’ve promised to get on the road by 2015.

Industrial wind power has a place, and T. Boone Pickens knows exactly where that is: On the plains, where winds are incessant. Other potentially low impact sites are mid-western cropfields, eastern strip mines, and off-shore waters, much closer to the coastal cities that need the power.

But in forested rural areas like Appalachia, community-scale rather than industrial-scale would better contribute to your goal of 10% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2012. Solar panels and small wind turbines have enormous potential for on-site, small-scale power generation, with hardly a ripple on the grid.

Consider how much stronger our nation would be against disasters both natural and criminal if schools, hospitals, community centers, businesses, nursing homes, farms, houses and apartment buildings across the country made enough electricity to pump drinking water and refrigerate food.

Americans haven’t enjoyed that kind of independence since they drank from dippers and packed pond ice in sawdust for the summer icebox. The decentralization of electricity represents a new perspective on the old rallying cry of democracy, “Power to the People!”

Can’t we make some of that $150 billion you want to invest in “building a clean energy future” available to ordinary people, small businesses and neighborhoods, as well as distant corporations? And can’t we keep our national forests intact for future generations?

My hope for change is that you will answer, “Yes We Can!”

Yours in the Red, White, and Blue Ridge,

Chris Bolgiano

(Chris Bolgiano is the author of five books, innumerable articles, and one short history of a small place — her own community. She has generously made this essay available for free distribution on the web; feel free to reproduce it on your own blogs and websites. A PDF version is available from her website for print distribution.

Via Negativa also published Chris’s essay “My Best Friend is Building a Hummer of a House” last year.)

Supporting Documents (A Very Few of Very, Very Many)

Arnett, E.B., et al. 2007. Impacts of wind energy facilities on wildlife and wildlife habitat. Wildlife Society Technical Review 07-2. Bethesday, MD: The Wildlife Society. The Wildlife Society is a national association of natural resource managers.

National Library of Medicine. Pubmed and Environmental Health and Toxicology databases (approx. 30 other citations available):

• Harding, G. et al. Wind turbines, flicker, and photosensitive epilepsy: characterizing the flashing that may precipitate seizures and optimizing guidelines to prevent them. Epilepsia. 2008 Jun;49(6):1095-8.
• Findeis, H. and E. Peters. Disturbing effects of low frequency sound immissions (sic) and vibrations in residential buildings. Noise Health. 2004 Apr-Jun;6(23):29-35.
• Pedersen, E. Wind turbine noise, annoyance & self-reported health and well-being in different living environments. Occup. Environ. Med. 2007 Jul;64(7):480-6.

National Research Council of the National Academies. Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects. 2007. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.

Pierpont, Nina. Wind Turbine Syndrome: a Report on a Natural Experiment. In publication.

Transition to Green: Environmental Transition Recommendations for the Obama Administration. Nov. 2008.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Elkins, West Virginia Field Office. November 16, 2007. 12 page letter “Re: Proposed Construction and Operation of a Wind Power Facility, In Pendleton and Hardy Counties, WV [PDF].”

Please see also www.vawind.org for extensive further coverage of wind power issues in eastern forested areas. See also windaction.org, nationalwind.org, stopillwind.org and hundreds of other sites for the worldwide grass-roots struggle to make industrial wind responsive to environmental and human health concerns. —Chris

Our best friends Philly and Jake retired last year and built their dream house a short walk over the ridge from where my husband and I live amid a hundred acres of Appalachian Mountain forest. We all met in college and bonded on the first Earth Day. Since then, my husband and I have gone “Back to the Land,” homesteading in the lushest temperate woodlands in the world, while Philly and Jake worked their way across continents. For 35 years, we’ve looked forward to retiring together.

Now, their dream has become my nightmare. It began with their plans for a 4,000-square-foot house — twice the size considered comfortable for a family of four just a few decades ago. Suddenly I felt frightened for the state of the world, and saw the situation in double negatives: If my nature-loving friend Philly wouldn’t choose not to build a mansion, who would?

“It’s a personal decision, how much space you need,” Philly said, not in answer to my question, which I’ve never asked, but after I emailed her a link to a website that calculates the environmental footprint of such “personal” decisions. Every decision an American consumer makes is environmentally charged, because we use more of everything and pollute more than anyone else in the world. Philly knows this, and she knows that I know that she knows.

As Philly’s blueprints materialized, I recognized the green-eyed face of jealousy, namely my own, reflected in the wall-sized windows of her cathedral-ceilinged great room.

Philly’s house is much bigger and far more elegant than my rustic, passive-solar cabin — House Beautiful magazine versus Field and Stream. Trading jealousy for guilt, I joined Philly on shopping forays and shared her new-house happiness by buying toxic remodeling products likely made by exploited Chinese workers.

Meanwhile, Jake was directing bulldozers to open the view by pushing down two acres of big oaks and pines. No one limited the tread of tires, no one tagged any trees for protection, no one saved the mossy-carpeted forest topsoil for reuse.

In a footprint eight times larger than the standard quarter-acre suburban yard, nothing above microscopic level was left alive, and even the soil microbes must have been pretty hard pressed. Then dozens of dump trucks delivered soil mined elsewhere. Jake just bought a riding mower.

The real test of friendship came when I first walked down the southern slope of Jake’s new yard. Fallen trees sprawled across the property boundary and their wilting canopies sagged into our creek, where they would, in a sudden storm, divert the flow and erode the stream banks. I knew this to be a violation of a local erosion ordinance.

Talking to my husband later, tears sprang to my eyes. “If it was anybody else, we would turn them in just like we did those other two neighbors when they threatened the creeks.” One case involved a careless logger and the other a careless house-grader, and both times the creeks ran the color of bad coffee.

“Yes, that’s true,” my husband acknowledged. “But these are our best friends. We’re not going to… turn them in? His voice took a Valley Girl swing upward.

No. Ethical questions about who is responsible for protecting the environment faded in the harsh light of being a snitch. Who am I to criticize, anyway? We sent our share of sediment to the beleaguered Chesapeake Bay when we built our quarter-acre pond. Our ecological footprint here casts a shadow even at high noon on a clear day.

Scales of space and time determine what is sustainable. Extrapolated to each of the world’s six billion plus human beings, the scale of even my (minimally) more modest materialism would crash the earth’s ecosystems sooner rather than later, according to climatologists.

Well, I’m hoping for another twenty good years of living next door to Philly and Jake before the world collapses or I take the ultimate “Back to the Land” trip. Now that they’ve moved in, we get together regularly for dinner and a movie. We laugh at all the same jokes, just as we did in our youth. Our dear old friends have become poster people for the American environmental disconnect, but like siblings committed to family peace, we skirt the topics of our personal contributions to consumption, climate change, energy wars, and pollution.

For me, friendship trumps ideology. And if environmentalism is a religion — if the Creation is sacred — then I want to be a “hate the sin but love the sinner” kind of believer, not a “if thine eye offend thee pluck it out” kind. All I can do is ride herd on my own damage to the earth.