Join me on a journey back in time  not so long ago really  back when most things were simpler, problems fewer, and life more fun, at least in the mind and eye of an eight-year-old boy in eastern Kentucky. I was that boy. Come with me on that journey.

It is now daybreak on a summers Sunday morning. The year is 1934. The place is West Van Lear at the junction of two railroads. We are about to embark on an excursion, a special trip by railroad coach. Our destination is Cincinnati, the Queen City, our objective a baseball doubleheader, two games between the Cincinnati Reds and the Saint Louis Cardinals, the Gashouse Gang. If Im lucky, my hero, Pepper Martin will be playing the hot corner!

On the tiny stations platform, a small group of men gathers, most dressed in coat and tie, many with summer hats, all rabid baseball fans, all employed in some capacity by Consolidation Coal Company, either within or outside one of the mines at Van Lear. My father and I are two of those who wait. For me  and, I suspect, for many of these men  the wait is interminable, the excitement almost unbearable. Most of these men have labored all week, deep within the bowels of the earth. This will be one of the major events of the summer. Baseball is big here. There are only sixteen major league teams. Well see two of them.

As I stand there with my dad, dancing up and down in the morning air, I look in vain for someone my age, but I seem to be the only kid from my part of the world who will be privileged to make this trip. Oh well, maybe there'll be others like me on the train. It is still cool, and I pull at my long-sleeved shirt and hug myself for warmth. The cap I am wearing has earpieces, and I pull these down for added warmth. Later today the sun will boil down on us, and I will roll the sleeves of my white shirt up to the elbows, just like the men will do. I notice that some of them are wearing caps like mine, while others, like my dad, are sporting board-stiff straw hats.

After what seems an eternity, the full-throated sound that distinguishes the steam locomotive of the passenger train from that of the less-regal coal drag is heard in the distance. The melodious tenor is like no other. Once you hear it, you never forget it, and you learn to love it. It echoes through the hills. First at Blockhouse Bottom, then as it passes the Auxier and Preston farms. Finally, the train rounds the bend, its headlight flashing, affording us a brief glimpse of Cap Duncans riverside home.

Steam gushes in great white torrents as the brightly polished engine passes us by and moves on. It stops and we board one of the eight olive green coaches. Eight! The normal complement of coaches on the twice-daily runs up and down the Big Sandy is three  four at most! This is special! The conductor reaches for the portable step, waves to the engineer, and we are off! It is all quite magical. It will never be equaled. Never! Not even by the rides at Disneyland!

I quickly find a seat and commence to watch the men, hoping too to find a young boy like myself to while away the time on the train. Maybe we could play jacks, or paper-rock-scissors, or some other game. And we could talk and compare ideas about baseball. But, no such luck. There's just the men and a couple of women. So, I go back to watching what they're doing.

The men laugh and shout to one another and to old friends and relations who have boarded earlier at Elkhorn City and Pikeville, or from towns on left or right Beaver Creek. All are involved in some way with the coal-mining industry. Like I said, almost all of the passengers are male, except for two women in our coach. One, a snappy looker, I would guess is the girlfriend of a young single man, both out for a fling, or rarer-still, both women may be wives who will now surely acquire a bad reputation back home. Male chauvinism, Victorianism, and the double standard prevail.

All this puts me to thinking about this world of ours, don't ask me why. I'm just sort of serious-natured, I guess. With nothing else to do, I think about such things, what I know, or at least what I've been told, and what I suspect. This is a mans world, and will remain so for years to come. There are rumblings of change in the air, however. Middle class Americans lightened up considerably during the Roaring Twenties, almost freeing themselves of some of the shackles of personal inhibition that had gripped them for so long. What I know about that comes from the movies I've seen, the Charleston and all that, and I especially remember one looker who could shimmy like her sister Kate. Van Lear gets all the new movies, and I see most of them. Now, looking back on it, it seems to me that it might have served us well had we only known then that it would be best to keep some of those old Victorian standards. In fact, as I write this as an adult, I would favor returning to Victorian hypocrisy. If we had, maybe we wouldn't be doing some of the outrageous things we're doing today. Of course, we don't always act with intelligence where our own welfare is concerned. We often opt for the immediate gratification of material benefit, sometimes paying a dear price in the process. Am I, a mere child, aware of these abstruse matters? No, but now, years later, my memory of those days is influenced by what transpired in the interim. And this is what I recall about some of my thoughts on that day, now so long ago.

As I write this today, other thoughts creep in and mingle with my memory of my boy thoughts. We should perhaps give the devil his due: Industrialization had begun to improve mankinds lot. But then came The Great Depression, and common mans march toward economic emancipation stopped dead in its tracks. We were still in the throes of that depression on this summer morning in 1934, especially here in Appalachia, we thought, but now they tell us it grips the entire country. Yes, we children were vaguely aware of this. Money is tight. Yet, there are certain pleasures to be had. And this is one of them.

I settle down in my green mohair-like seat as my dad goes off in search of his brother John and Johns sons from Garrett, and other cronies from up Beaver. It is not yet daylight. I sit for a long time, drinking in the luxury of the coach. I examine the mahogany  varnish, the trainmen call it  and the brass spittoons in the vestibules. In two more decades railroad passenger service of this sort will be no more. The railroads will eventually succeed in convincing the Interstate Commerce Commission and others, who are supposed to protect citizens from misuse and abuse of public transport, that they should be allowed to discontinue rail passenger service because it is unprofitable.

Is Dad aware of all this? Probably. Am I. No, not at age-eight. But now, and for a while to come, my father and I and Dads coal-mining friends will enjoy the pleasures of riding in comfort and style aboard passenger trains in a manner not unlike that of the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts, and the Melons and Carnegies. And that can't be all bad!

Northbound, the train rolls on. This time, in contrast to the regular runs, the excursion special will not stop at all the local stations, just those that have passengers to pick up. It is still too dark to see outside, but I sense that we have passed on through the Dawkins station without stopping. Paintsville, the conductor announces. Paintsville, he repeats as he walks through each coach, a swagger in his step. Next stop, Paintsville.

Paintsville, the seat of government for Johnson County, had been the final home of someone named Mayo, a man who had made lots of money selling coal rights. This I know, for I remember my fathers pointing out the Mayo Mansion, and his telling me that the man who built it once taught in a one-room public school at Van Lear, before Van Lear was Van Lear, but he didn't live to see the completion of the huge home. That mans grandfather, Dad told me, had settled his family on a farm somewhere near here. I have yet to realize the full significance of that mans intervention in my life and in the lives of most of the people of eastern Kentucky. My present thoughts are more personal, more immediate, more inwardly directed.

I mentally conjure a vision of myself competing for my schools Van Lear Bankmules in athletic contests against Paintsvilles Tigers. The two largest towns in the county maintain separate schools, and their teams are fierce rivals in baseball, football, and basketball.

A rushing sound breaks my reverie.

Steam hisses from the locomotive up ahead as it pauses momentarily to take on water before entering the passenger yard. Lights flicker and I can see several men ready to board. In the distance a long, shiny automobile stops, and from it step two elegantly dressed men. They enter the coach just ahead, and I can hear some of the men speak of Consol and Northeast and C&O officials. Brass! The word is uttered with a distinctly derisive tone. There is a sharp cleavage between men who work with their hands, and men who manage money and companies and other men.

Jim! someone calls, and I turn, but the man is addressing my father. I return to the solitary pursuit of watching the grown-ups as they meet and greet one another, laughing and lurching down the aisle of the coach, voices raised above the din of the trains clacking wheels. Each time the vestibule door opens the train sounds grow louder, and the smell of coal smoke enters the car. My father now stands near the lavatory, illuminated by the pale yellow overhead light. He leans against the wall as he talks to Uncle John. The cigar smoke is thick. I tug at the window, hoping to lift it and get a breath of fresh air.

Dont do that, son, Dad cautions. Youll let cinders in. But it is too late. I have already raised the window, and I now feel the sting of a hot cinder against my cheek. I quickly lower the window, the eyes of my father still upon me.

My thoughts turn back to the hills  mountains, outsiders call them  which we are now leaving behind us. The farther north we go, the smaller the hills. The real hills are the hills of home. From Johnson County southward they grow even more magnificent. My friends and I are reluctant to make this concession. We regard our hills as the greatest, especially the Big Rocks, two giant monoliths that stand somehow detached from the surrounding terrain, high above Van Lear at the head of Possum and Schoolhouse Hollers, overlooking miles of Appalachian ridges and valleys. The Big Rocks are one of our favorite spots on the face of the earth.

We concede  grudgingly, you may be sure  that the bluffs above the New River Gorge in West Virginia are higher, or even those in our own state at the Breaks of Sandy above Elkhorn City, but if we are aware that this magnificent chain of mountains of which we are a part stretches all the way from northern Alabama to Canada, we blissfully ignore that fact.

We have some knowledge of the history and geology of our homeland, more perhaps than any of us is willing to admit. Our teachers and our parents have told us some of the facts and legends, and we read a lot. We have some faint recollection of words such as Precambrian, Paleozoic, Pleistocene, all of which have something to do with various periods of time, back in antiquity; when all of this was formed. We know that coal is the regions principle resource, the reason for the coal towns, the source of employment for our fathers. We know  or at least we were once told  that most of the coal in North America and Europe was formed through successive stages of plant growth, sedimentation, heating, and compression. All of this decomposition and chemical change occurred during something that historians have chosen to call the Carboniferous Period. We know that coal usually begins as peat, becomes something called lignite, and then later changes into either bituminous or anthracite coal. Most of the coal in our region is bituminous or soft coal. Yes, we know many of these things. We even have some knowledge of how the earth was formed. And some outsiders think we Appalachian Hillbillies are ignorant!

We know that many thousands of years ago, the earth buckled, folded, then cracked and split apart all along the Appalachian Range. As the folding took place, some parts fell, while others were lifted up, often forming long, parallel ridges. This movement altered the course of rivers. Some of the cracks and fissures we see as we play along the tops of those ridges are the result of these movements of long ago, while others were created only recently when the miners below  our fathers and brothers  removed the final pillars of coal, allowing the mountain to drop.

A jolt back to reality! The excursion train jerks to a halt. It has stopped at Whitehouse, another small coal camp on the banks of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Then Torchlight. Even now, in 1934, these towns are mostly worked out, their buildings falling into disrepair.

As we pull into Louisa where the Tug and Levisa forks join to form the main body of the Big Sandy River, the eastern sky across the river in West Virginia is becoming lighter. A man identified as Fred Vinson, a local attorney who had played on some of Louisas better town baseball teams, has boarded the train. Old teammates and those who have played against him rally to his side to greet the popular lawyer. Years later he will be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by President Harry Truman. Today, he is just another baseball fan boarding our train at Louisa. Mr. Vinson is a handsome man. He has the long nose and high cheekbones often found on those who have Indian blood. I sit there in my seat, wondering if he too has Indian blood. We youngsters often romanticize the American Indian, perhaps with good reason. Many of us have Indian blood in our genetic makeup. We do. It showed up most prominently in me and Uncle Everett. Many a single white male took as his mate a young Indian maiden. John Looney was one. My great-great-great-grandfather William Vaughan, a Welshman, married Johns granddaughter, Fereby Benton, and thats how we acquired a measure of Cherokee Indian blood. This was not exceptional in those times, the mid-1700s, years before the American Revolution and the formal beginning of the nation.

As we Appalachian youngsters play along the steep hillsides and ridges, sometimes high above the clouds, we often wonder about serious things like the origins of man, the redman in particular. Somehow, even as youngsters, we dont quite believe everything were told in our history books. We suspect that the redman has been wronged. Although we are told that early Spanish and English explorers found the Indians in a wild and uncivilized state, we are not too certain that this is an accurate statement of facts. In truth, we know that they  the redmen  discovered us encroaching upon their native land. We youngsters somehow know this as all young people seem to know and understand truth. We even sense that their civilization was in many ways superior to ours, possibly more humane and probably less greedy.

But the truth hurts, the thoughts are suppressed. Eventually, such thoughts will die. These thoughts  the truth as we see it about these and other such matters  come to us, we children of Appalachia, in a variety of ways. Some of the influences on our character are subtle. One of the most important sources of our strength, knowledge, and wisdom  and the effects are destined to remain with us throughout our lives  is the Appalachian Matriarch. Some families had one, sometimes two or more. If a family were fortunate, there would be at least one such older person  a grandfather or grandmother, usually  and that person would wield great influence on his or her immediate family and on the younger generations privileged to share that kinship and special relationship. Phil Moffitt had Etta Lee. I had my fathers father, Anthony Wayne Vaughan, and my mothers mother, Lyda Burgraff Lynk. The Reavis family of Leslie County had Mollie Reavis.

These people had that special aura in their manner and bearing that told us that they loved us, but they were in charge, and they had some common sense values to hand down to us. Not only that, they sent a message to all those who were related to them in any manner whatsoever that they meant for all of us to listen and take heed. As a result, we got the message, and the message was clear: Each of us is an individual human being, but each of us is also a part of a family and society, and each of us is expected to act responsibly in all our roles. Governments and bureaucracy may play a part in our lives, and we must act within the laws of government and society and according to certain generally recognized and accepted moral standards and precepts. But these forces, powerful and important as they are, are not as important as the values we share in our families  values passed down from one generation to the next. These values are far more important and enduring than the sometimes fickle habits of society at large. Some would call these collections of values "culture." We were in danger of losing much of this in 1934, and somehow we youngsters could sense this. We would eventually replace many of the old-time values with non-values or no values. We would soon change for the sake of change, and we would be wrong. Etta Lee and Lyda Lynk and Mollie Reavis would be right. But one day we would no longer hear them or heed their gentle warnings.

The Etta Lees and Lyda Lynks and Mollie Reavises  the matriarchs of our Appalachian society  would hold out longer than the old patriarchs. This is not to say that the old men didnt exert a very real and positive influence on our lives. In some families their influence was dominant or at least different and sometimes complementary to the influence of the women in our lives. Anthony Wayne Vaughans legacy to me was his advice to "read everything you can lay your hands on."

The Appalachian Mountain Woman was the stronger of the two, as a general rule. She often did not articulate her thoughts, advice, and values; rather, she just sort of exuded them. There were words spoken and, in time, perhaps those words were what impressed us most, but mostly it was action, demeanor, an almost spiritual essence that we assimilated through just being there, a kind of genetic and environmental osmosis. As Phil Moffitt described his granny Etta Lee, in his memories she seemed "less a physical presence than an emotional one  a presence not visible to others, like the wind in those mountain valleys, rustling and touching but never seeming to have a place of origin."

Theyre gone now, but I was very much aware of them as I sat there riding the rails on that memorable journey. Odd, really, how I had these thoughts. Now, thinking back on it, I realize that, even in 1934, women had begun to gain status and independence, but I cant help but believe that the older women and their ways of guiding us left us poorer when they departed. They were part of our strength back then. Yet, although they are gone, they remain with us even today. Many readers will know what I mean by this bit of introspection. How much of this was a young boy's thoughts, and how much those of a boy grown to manhood some fifty years later? I really don't know.

The train once more jolts me back to reality. I glance back over my shoulder as the train moves on. In the distance I can now see the faint outlines of the lock and dam, a device which Dad once told me never did the job it was designed to do, which was to make the Levisa navigable all the way to Paintsville, with another dam to contain the water to a useful depth to Pikeville. We rumble on and more station stops are called out by the conductor. "Catalpa ... Buchanan ... Catlettsburg." The trainman, snappily dressed in his white shirt, black bow-tie and cap, bounds through the coach once more. "Ashland," he intones. "Next stop, Ashland. Well be in the station for ten minutes at Ashland."

My spirits rise as always with the mere mention of Ashland. I was born there, not that I remember that event, nor even the two years that followed at Pollard or on Thirty-Third Street. Dad had worked briefly for both the C&O Railroad and Semet Solvay, but he always maintained that he felt better deep within a mine where the temperature was cool. He and his father, my Grand dad Anthony Wayne Vaughan, had operated a small coal mine together near Summit in Boyd County where their family had lived for a time in the early years. The benefits offered by a larger coal company and a more modern community beckoned. Dad had lived at Van Lear in the early 1920s, and liked what he found there. Along with my mother, brother, and sister he moved us back there in 1928, but we still returned to Ashland to visit relatives, usually traveling on a train like the one in which I was now riding, but one with fewer coaches.

Life always seemed good whenever I thought about Ashland. With a population of some twenty thousand, never to grow much larger, Ashland is arguably past its prime in 1934. At least that was Dads subjective view of it. Yet, to a youngster of eight, accustomed to the comparative isolation of the small communities up Big Sandy, Ashland has all of the allure of a big city. It was conventional wisdom back then to think that bigger is better. Thus, Cincinnati was better than Ashland, Ashland better than Paintsville, and so on. People everywhere had come to believe this myth, and it was destined to persist for another half century. Here and everywhere in 1934, almost everyone holds to the view that small towns and rural areas are inferior. I am thankful that my Dad and I dont believe this. I love Ashland, but I love Van Lear even more.

Neither Dad nor I could have recalled anything about Ashland when it was known as Poages Landing. Nor could we have any recollection of Ashlands beginnings in 1854 when the Kentucky Iron, Coal & Manufacturing Company bought property and laid out the town along the Ohio River. Grand dad would remember that. And Dad recalled and told me about George Verity, who established the American Rolling Mill Company  ARMCO  at Ashland in 1920, just 14 years ago. Some said that ARMCO had been a mixed blessing. Verity built the worlds first continuous steel rolling mill, and this brought a new prosperity to the regions miners and steel workers.

Hundreds of young men had left their rock-pocked subsistence hill farms to work for ARMCO. But some said ARMCOs domination of the labor market had stifled the citys growth and development. I heard the men speak of such things. But, even at age eight, I am inclined to question this. I liked Ashland, and the wholesale indictment of capital and management seemed to me to be unfair. Labor had its side, to be sure  and my Dad is on the side of labor  but it just seemed to me that more good could be accomplished if labor and management cooperated with one another. But what does a kid know. Still and all, I am now vaguely aware that life itself is linear. We cant foresee what lies ahead, neither can we go back and re-do what we did in the past. And, of course, no one could possibly have foreseen the consequence had Ashland not attracted George Verity and his ARMCO. Like I said, I liked what I saw, and it might not have been there without their presence and influence.

There were ample reasons why I liked Ashland. For one thing, the town had been planned with some foresight under wise leaders during her earliest years. The streets were wide and lined with trees. Large expanses had been reserved for parks. I always loved Central Park, across from Aunt Mins and Uncle Crocketts, and the trains and electric trolleys were a treat. And then there were private cars called Jitneys that you could hire to take you anywhere you wanted to go.

More than fifty years ago, in 1880, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company had laid track into Ashland, connecting it with Cincinnati to the west and Washington, D.C. to the east. Both passenger and freight terminals were built, and this city on the banks of the Ohio River soon became a distribution center. Even before the arrival of ARMCO someone had called Ashland the city where coal meets iron, an apt description. Years later I would learn that that someone was a man named John C. C. Mayo. Now that I think of it, I believe that was the name of the man Dad said used to teach in a one-room school on Millers Creek, the man who sold all the coal rights to Consol in order that they could build our town, Van Lear.

I look out once more at the modern city of Ashland, and contrast it with my coal town. There are big differences. With revenues generated by steel and coal, the city fathers laid trolley tracks and paved most of the main streets with brick. Gas lamps provided street illumination. Later, when the brick streets were covered over with asphalt, the electric trolley lines removed, and the gas lamps replaced with electric lamps, that much grander ended. I cant help but wish they had left things the way the used to be.

*

I sit at the window and stare out into the early dawn, aware that two women and I are the only ones in the coach. The male passengers are now returning from the modern red-brick terminal building. The mellow whistle sounds once, twice, a third time, and we begin to roll again. Soon we are passing through the big rail switching yards at Russell. There has been a minor and temporary economic boom, and the yards are filled with C&O, N&W, and L&N hopper cars and gondolas, each loaded with black coal.

We pick up speed and race on, the tracks now paralleling the Ohio River, which seems huge compared to the Big Sandy. We pass through Greenup. I cant see it, but I know that somewhere to my left is a place called W Hollow. Unknown to me, Jesse Stuart has just put the finishing touches on Man With a Bull Tongue Plow, his collection of some seven hundred sonnets, which will win for him many awards. In four more years, he will go off to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and while there he will complete his first novel. I know something about this man even now. One day I will hand him my ticket and enter the gymnasium at the school where he is principal and, like many of his neighbors, I will be ignorant of his true worth to literature, the region, and the world.

The excursion train rolls on. Soon we reach South Portsmouth, then Maysville, home of the Clooney girls. The candy butch comes by and I grudgingly spend one of my precious dimes for a Hershey bar. They only cost a nickel at the store in Van Lear. Some of the men are now drinking. Most of them are having a good time. There are no ugly incidents, at least not yet.

Finally, we arrive! We debark and enter the great train terminal at Cincinnati, merging with a torrent of people from other excursion trains like ours. They've come from all over Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio to see the Reds and Cards play. The clock reads straight-up twelve noon. My gut has begun to roll. The giant mural on the huge wall is overwhelming. We take ten minutes for a quick lunch. Bean soup costs forty cents, a dime back home, so we opt for hamburgers and a Coke. Then, after learning that a taxi charges a dollar, we set out on foot for Crosley Field.

The walk to the ballpark takes us straight through "colored town" and, as we walk along we can hear all sorts of sounds; blues music, people on porches talking, deep voices, some taunting us, saying things like, "White trash!" Dad grips my hand and we walk even faster, glad to see the ball park at last.

This Sundays doubleheader, like most all such events, is a sell-out. Dad chooses seats far out in right field. There, we have a good view of Ival Goodman and Enos Slaughter, but everyone else is too far away to really tell what they look like. I strain hard, trying to see my idol, Pepper Martin. If he is playing third base for the Cards, this fact is known only to Pepper and those sitting closer for I can't make out the faces of the players in the infield. I can see big old Ernie Lombardi behind the plate, and both Bucky Walters and Paul Derringer are recognizable with their distinctive windups and delivery. Dad reminds me that his brother Everett, my Uncle Sook, and a team of Big Sandy amateur all-stars played the Reds in an exhibition game at Louisa in the 1920s, and beat them! When I ask, he tells me that he doesnt know if Fred Vinson was one of the amateur all-stars.

The first game is a real pitchers duel. And no one wins any prizes for hitting in the second, either. The Reds take the first one, the Cards the second. By the time the final out is made, were all ready to pack it in.

The return trip late that night and into the early hours of Monday morning is anticlimactic. Throughout the latter part of the journey, I sleep, dreaming all the while of the great baseball players I have seen, and of my beloved mountains back home. Their magnificence inspires me and my buddies, and fills each of us with awe and wonder as to their origin. Our parents and teachers have told us a lot about them and now as I drift off into a deep state of unconsciousness, in my minds eye I can almost see them as they once were.

Centuries ago, some say 400 million years ago, great masses of lush vegetation grew, matured, and died, depositing layer upon layer of organic matter that would one day become coal. Those hills and valleys bloom anew each year in rich profusion. We boys spend most of our waking hours in them, far away from the busy coal camp environment, in touch with the peace and quiet of mother nature. The hills and valleys of Appalachia are our home. They nurture and protect us, and add to our storehouse of knowledge and sense of well being, even as our beloved parents and grandparents do. We are fortunate to be here in this place and time, and we know it, even if others do not.

As we wander the hills and build our summer play cabins, we marvel at the great natural beauty that surrounds us. In our ramblings we learn a lot about our land and culture, often finding species of plants that seem strangely out of place, plants and even trees that are usually found only in northern climes. This, we are told, resulted during the Glacial Age when vast quantities of vegetation were forced by advancing ice and water onto the hills and valleys of the southern Appalachians.

Our mountains are the foothills of the Cumberlands, which are but one of several ranges of the southern Appalachians. We youngsters rarely dwell on these facts, if indeed we are even aware of them. Our teachers tell us these things, but most of us commit these facts to a short memory. We simply love these hills. We share with the redman and the early white settler  our forbears  a deep and abiding love and appreciation of the majestic beauty and isolation of the hills and ridges where we see through the eyes of the poet, even if we cannot describe the scene in the poets words. I dream on of the verdant foliage, the rivers and streams now long wedded to their convoluted course. In my dreams I can almost see our hardy old pioneer ancestors. Our heritage is old and rich in tradition, and these thoughts strengthen us, each and every one who can see through the veils of what we call civilization.

My tranquil dream is of a land well worth preserving. Yet, even as I dream, that land and its beauty and the people who love and cherish it are threatened with destruction. The bulldozing strip-miners have yet to appear on the horizon, but they are there, lying in wait.

The people are changing too. Even now, there are fewer Etta Lees and Mollie Reavises and Lyda Lynks, the quiet yet firm and determined little Appalachian ladies who loved and schooled us, often wordlessly, in the ways of being human and caring. They were cut from the same cloth as that lady of legend in my region, Jenny Wiley, who survived the massacre of her family at the hands of renegade Indians, a lady who managed to escape after a year of torture to return to her husband and raise another family. As I dream, I can visualize this heroic woman, and I vow to tell her story one day, for she too is a part of our Appalachian heritage.

The rugged terrain of the Appalachians has always held a strange fascination and attraction for strong individualists, men and women of great self reliance and independence who were seeking refuge from the oppression of governments and people who would enslave them or otherwise limit their personal freedom. This fact, indisputable in 1934, would be at odds with conditions that would evolve within the next fifty years when many of the regions inhabitants would become almost totally dependent on government welfare grants for sustenance. Had someone told us this in 1934, we would not have believed it. The intervention of man into both the geophysical and psycho-personal world of Appalachia was totally predictable even then, although we were not aware of these kinds of things. Adults, for the most part, trusted their elected officials, never suspecting that their nefarious ways would lead to the bureaucratic society that would follow the Great Depression. Etta Lee and Lyda Lynk and Mollie Reavis might have told us, might have forewarned us. But no one asked them. And no one would have listened. The essence of this, my story, is of a time and place and circumstance that was, in many ways, both oddly destructive and at the same time benign, even beneficent and desirable. This, despite the rampant greed of man.

While the greed and neglect and unconcern of the owners and exploiters of the regions mineral wealth would ultimately lead to a despoiled, unsightly, and almost useless environment, there were advantages to living in one of the better company-owned coal towns. Although the health of many of the miners would suffer, and some would be maimed or would die within the mines, the mine owners were not totally without concern or feeling. The coal camps were never Camelot, even the best of them, but the best of them were better than much of what society had to offer the average person as an alternative live style in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Suddenly, as I write these thoughts, I realize that I have been preaching. But I make no apologies. If there is one central theme to this exposition, it is that we walk a very narrow line in our efforts to provide for the common good. If we do not exercise extreme care, if we do not seek the help and advice of intelligent counsel, if we do not carefully define the limits to which capital, labor, and government can go in directing our lives, we are destined to suffer dire consequences. Somehow, some of us sense this, even in 1934.

The lonesome train whistle wakens me from my reverie. In the early morning hours a haze hangs over the low valleys, obscuring the peaks and ridges as it so often does in these parts. The moon shines through, but dimly. On this particular summer morning it is a blue moon, a once-in-a-great-while moon. The moon and haze bathe everything in a pale, ethereal blue, adding to the feeling of isolation and solitude, as only a blue moon over Kentucky can do, and the sight of that moon fills me with a strange foreboding. But that feeling is short-lived. In truth, a blue moon has nothing to do with its color; rather it is a second moon in a single month, occurring once every 2.7 years, but our folklore prefers to think of it as a truly blue moon.

The conductor has announced our station, and I am once more almost oblivious to his call as we approach West Van Lear. Dad rouses me.

The narrow cinder path is faintly visible in the haze of the morning. We board the waiting bus for the final three miles up Millers Creek. It has been a good, but long and tiring day. Tomorrow Dad will return to the mines, and I will join Richard and Billy and play in the hills once more. It is still Summer  lovely, carefree, glorious Summer!

-End of Chapter One-