Some thoughts on Eastern Kentucky on the 2nd day of Hillbilly Days

Although I have been lucky enough to do some traveling, I have not had the good fortune to live anywhere outside the state of Georgia until now. Perhaps my time in Oxford counts for something but I don't consider four months to be much of a residence. Having spent my entire life in the South, around the Deep South, the Old South and the New South, I can say with some degree of certainty that Eastern Kentucky is not the South.

Maybe that doesn't come as a surprise to any of you who study history or know something of the Appalachian ways but I think it would be a hotly disputed fact with the locals of Pike county, where I now live. A cursory glance at Pikeville, the county seat, might reveal may things southern. Certainly the people here share that southern affinity for loud trucks, loud motorcycles, and going fast only in straight lines. Hunting and fishing are popular as are dirt-bikes and all terrain vehicles and obesity. Indeed, many things which one might consider southern are on display throughout Pikeville this week for the annual Hillbilly Days festival.

People come from miles around, quite literally. Hillbilly Days is the second largest festival in Kentucky after the eponymous Kentucky Derby. I doubt the two crowds would mix well anyway. And so, locals drag out their garbage and set up shop on their porches in anticipation of the travelers and their fat wallets. Out come old paintings, knittings, video-tapes, clothes, surplus medical supplies, and all manner of accumulated uselessness. Given the age of all the trash, I can't imagine that the people here sell much. Who goes looking for broken home oxygen canisters anyway?

More enterprising folks, locals and traveling vendors, bring in trailers and set them up throughout down town. All the streets are closed to traffic and, at least for this one occasion each year, the populace not porch selling go for a walk or a waddle or a roll around town. If you've been to a town fair or carnival, you can imagine the kind of good for sale from these trailers. Knick-knacks and t-shirts and do-dads and all the other hyphenated junk hang off the collapsible awnings just begging you to buy the trash which you will later drag onto your own porch to sell during your own town's major festival.

And food. Oh the food! It is the true main attraction for most Hillbilly visitors. In the weeks leading up to the holiday - yes, the schools and business are closed - people begin to talk in hushed and hungry tones about the food. When the festival arrives, the longest and most prominent trailer boulevard is set aside for the food court. Scents and flavors carried on the wind beckon to fairgoers throughout town. Every succulent shade of brown is represented here. All food groups are equal in the mountains. Enter next to the Mountain Dew outdoor stage, presented by Pepsi, and begin the counter-clockwise pilgrimage!

Everyone moving and teeming and heaving their great girth all at once can mesmerize newcomers. It certainly stunned me. Before long I had what must have been a gallon of Pepsi, a corn dog, chips 'n cheese, and deep fried Oreos, which look like hushpuppies until you realize that they're fried cake batter surrounding an Oreo. And that's just the first round! Trailer upon trailer vends nothing more than pure fat-fried magic. Pink Peggy's Pulled Pork. McCoy's Rib Bits. Hatfield's is to be avoided since only people from West Virginia eat there. Stick Chicken 'n Turkey. Gyros, oddly, are very popular. Those capable of reaching the end of the holy circuit (once is enough, no seven cycles here!) are rewarded with free blood sugar screenings. There appeared to be many competing for the high score. 513! We have a winner! Scooter on up here and get your insulin coupon!

Of course other attractions exist. You could go to the river-fill and ride the rickety rocket ships, tilt-a-whirl, or ferris wheel. There are ponies and a hay ride around the converted parking lot between the jail and the movie theater. A few charities have booths too and you could always go by the Kynect tent and get some Obamacare. Or, if you are brave enough to leave the comforts of downtown, you could go watch traffic on the bypass. Big trucks and loud motorcycles ride in long, endless circles around Pikeville; their rumbles and roars echo off the mountains forming an ever present soundtrack. If you're lucky, one of them may get to burn some rubber before slamming on the brakes to avoid a collision with the perpetual traffic jam in front of it. Many try, few succeed.

And yet, all this noise and consumption and endless garbage cycling aren't enough to convince me that I'm in the South. Something is missing here which is always present back home, history. Or, maybe more accurately, a connection to the rest of the world which history provides. Somehow Pikeville seems to just exist without much of any influence on or from the rest of the world. There's local history but not much else. Growing up in the South you find history creeping into everything that happens around you. I had a trench from the civil war in my front yard when I was 10 years old. All the streets are named after dead Confederates or Civil Rights leaders. The neighborhood my parents live in was all part of a plantation and the slave quarters are still there. My university, like most universities in the South, was built by slaves using money donated by slave plantation owners. Atlanta has ghettos.

The South may always be on the wrong side of history but at least it knows where it stood. Ask people around here and they assume Kentucky was in the Confederacy. They assume the heritage and the stupid Confederate flags and the racist posturing all belong to them without much to back it up. Hell, the Appalachian mountains were one of the principal paths of the Underground Railroad to get to Ohio. You'd never know it by the racist trash they're selling on their front porches or the conversations they're having safe in the knowledge that no black person will ever overhear.

I suppose that's the true nature of Eastern Kentucky. It's never really anything except the opposite of what you might expect it to be. It's a study in contradictions. Everything immediately apparent about Pikeville demonstrates man's dominion over nature. The highway and nearby railroad tracks are cut straight through mountains: blasted and carved and dug. Deep underfoot, men toil in coal mines digging out the remains of long extinct life. It will be burned to power millions of homes. Even the city, though I'd hesitate to call it that, Pikeville, sits on the filled-in bed of a diverted river. The long bend long since covered by dirt and gravel and pavement and homes. Now the Levisa Fork flows through a ravine cut parallel to the highway and the train tracks. Upon completion it was the second largest earth-moving project in our nation's history.

The city is home to a large hospital and a small medical school. There is not shortage of physicians to heal the population should they be able to afford it and willing to live. Everywhere signs advertise doctor's offices, pharmacies, pain clinics, chiropractors and other medicalish services.

But, the people here seem to do nothing but rot and die. They bear witness to corpulence such as I could never have imagined. I did not think this kind of obesity was logically or biologically possible. Heart disease is common. Diabetes, "the sugar" as locals call it, is probably more common. Everyone smokes. Everyone eats shitty food. Addiction to painkillers is quite common too. There's always a line at the pharmacy. Physicians are booked into perpetuity with follow-ups, reappraisals, and comorbid diagnoses: sickness, it seems, likes to prowl in packs. Nature's dominion, it turns out, is unchallenged.

Perhaps the river-fill is a fitting metaphor for this paradox. This town, built on dominion over nature and with plans in mind for the living, is sclerotic with disease and death. The formerly healthy river which once flowed here is now home to the lipid buildup of humanity. A bypass had to be performed lest the whole system seize up. Like all procedures of these sorts, it treats only the symptoms instead of the disease.