Good Stock

I live in the Appalachians and for all the joking about mountain hillbillies and moon shiners and fundamentalists you hear here, there is also an incredible amount of history still alive.

I may be one of the very last generations to ever really experience that. Television, movies, and an intense desire to be one of the up and coming hip are quickly taking away whatever is left after nearly three hundred years. There are still people playing music here that harkens back to Gloucester, Ireland before the 1730’s.

I live in the southern Appalachians, where most of the people who came were Scotch Irish, but there were others and I have heard that when the English came, they built churches and the Germans built barns, but the Scotch Irish built stills. They were a rough and ready people who loved music and freedom and wanted mostly to be left alone. They were also intelligent people who realized they made more money from whiskey than the corn it was made from. Unfortunately so did George Washington, so he taxed them and, ultimately, they lost, but the last remnants of their life styles still echo throughout the area.

Many Carolinians are transplants from the rest of the United States anymore, including me, but my ancestors moved from Scotland to Charleston shortly after Culloden, so when I find myself at home here in a land of morning mists and rolling mountains, it is not all that surprising.

I live in a small mill town up in the mountains. A mill created to give mountain people a way to make hard cash, something they couldn’t do after the whiskey and before the mill, but which ultimately took away the self sufficiency which kept them alive for generations. A local minister says these people don’t want to work, they are happy just to have what they have and go on living. In today’s world that sounds lazy and implies something is wrong with them,

I’m not sure I see it that way. Before the world became one big megalopolis united by modern media, it was okay to have enough to eat, clothes to wear, a family to love and a sense of belonging. Now we all want to belong to that mythological family on the screen where everyone appears to live in sophisticated luxury, driving around in fast cars, wearing designer clothes and seldom if ever having to work for what they have in life.

The few locals I know here have hard lives. The men have long scraggly beards they cut off every year at Easter, the women have tired eyes from trying to rear children on 1950’s incomes in 2010’s depressions. But they have a solidity that comes out when I speak with them. They know who they are and where they came from and they seem pretty sure things will be okay in the long run.

Sure they sound funny with their nasally “hillbilly” idiolects, but get past that superficial noise and I have discovered the stock that America springs from. It seems like it was pretty sturdy.