The Book I Never Wrote

In the Appalachian region that is defined, not by grant writers or statisticians, but by topography, the vertical becomes the rule, with horizontal the tempering exception.  The rises and falls in the Appalachian nation follow the rise and fall and rise of its denizens.

My mommy let me dip my head into the icy mountain water when I was a baby boy and it has kept me nearby.  The smell of dying apples on the ground.  The smell of coal smoke.  My grandmother's intoxicating wafts from the frock folds of her plain and sleeveless house dresses that revealed the black hairs she did not shave beneath her arms on goddamn purpose.  Pork meat.  Creasy Greens from the Emory Riverbed.  Highway 27.  The Cord House.  Coal trucks.  Hollers.  Deep ones.  Mountain Laurel.  That odd sensation that rose when we passed the garage and junk yard just south of town.  My Daddy.  The word, "PENITENTIARY" that I learned so early on.  Shotguns and pistols and more cash money that I have ever seen.  Secrets.  There were secrets in every closet and beneath every made bed.  We mined the hollers to find that dead baby in an empty dynamite box.  These were the tickets torn in two -- I was illegally admitted to an NC-17 cinematic masterpiece that still haunts my many musings.

So now, post modern, post mumblecore, I spend the nanoseconds and half hours reflecting upon "the way things came to be this way."  I now conclude that I cannot ignore the hollers and the shotgun blasts of my youth.  The thrill of the fall.  Clouds came down and misted up the mysterious people who hung tight to the bluffsteep sides of tectonic rises.  I did not then know that I was deep inside the belly of Appalachia.

I would eventually dare to open my eyes under the icy water and look to the rounded creekstones for some meaning.  I would eventually realize that I, too, was in a state of constant change, constant flow.  From whence came the icy water.  I would learn to question the etiology of the flow.  The mountains.  Wiley Arms mountain in particular was my focus.  I remember climbing to a point near the top and being chased away by a large dog with a chain looped around its neck.  What was it guarding?