Top Ten Things to Know Before Visiting My Small Town

My small town is Gate City, Virginia. People most often visit because they have relatives or friends here. Some other reasons to visit Gate City include camping at the Natural Tunnel State Park, hiking in the Jefferson National Forest, musical performances at the Carter Fold, NASCAR races at nearby Bristol (which fills up enough that race fans feel lucky to find rooms only thirty miles away), work for or with the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, and generally exploring the scenic Appalachian Mountain region. If you are visiting for this kind of reason, knowing these ten things will help you not to seem outrageously less informed than those who are visiting friends and relatives.

1. Gate City is not even within walking distance from Appalachia.

The Appalachian Mountains were named for people who lived further south and called themselves Apalachee or Appalatchi. People who live in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, or north Georgia usually pronounce the third syllable like "latch." People living further away from the name's point of origin pronounce it more like "laysh." In many places the whole mountain region may be called Appalachia without causing confusion. 

In Virginia, however, Appalachia is the name of one specific town, and it's more than thirty miles away from Gate City. (People who live in one town might organize car pools to the other town, but not every week, or every month.) Traditionally Gate City enjoyed a more stable economy, though the difference has narrowed considerably within my lifetime. Appalachia was a mining town, while Gate City was a farm-and-market town with some small factories.

2. Downtown Gate City is a model of a walkable community. 

People don't have to live packed in on top of each other to have a "walkable" downtown. People with mailing addresses in Gate City may live ten or more miles away from the town's business district. Once in the business district, most people can walk from any point in "downtown" Gate City to any other point in ten or fifteen minutes. 

3. Though Gate City is not a model of wheelchair accessibility, people can and do roll through town in wheelchairs. 

Drivers should be careful to show courtesy to a vibrant wheelchair-using community who whir on battery-powered chairs and carts along the main streets of town  Not all stores and restaurants have smooth, wide doorways or fully accessible restrooms, but people will usually help anyone who needs help. Respect for our elders includes making things accessible to people with mobility challenges.

4. What "Blue Devils" really means is "students preparing to go to Duke or a similar big-name university." So, yes, you might see a T-shirt advertising that the wearer "still prays"...and, though it's not been advertised on the same shirt, for our "Devils." 

Two separate traditions face off here:

(a) The "blue devils" of alarm and despondency plagued English-speaking people as early as the sixteenth century. In the 1910s, during the war, the name "Blue Devils" was given to a group of fighter pilots and planes. Admiration for the pilots led to Duke University and other schools nicknaming their athletic teams "Blue Devils." High school teams were usually named in honor of university teams. So the Gate City Blue Devils are a football team that have, historically, bagged far more than their fair share of state trophies. Relatively little "satanic panic" has been generated by this traditional name.

(b) Voluntary, often student-led, prayer and Bible study has often been tolerated on campus until someone complained. Most people in Gate City identify as Christians; many attend evangelical churches and feel, or try to become, comfortable praying and leading Bible studies in any social context. During one incident the American Civil Liberties Union told student prayer warriors that an appropriate way to proclaim their faith at a public school might be "on a T-shirt." The intention might have been to stifle effusions of religious fervor; if so, it failed. Someone promptly designed rather attractive T-shirts advertising "Gate City: I Still Pray in Jesus' Name." 

Most religious teachers agree that it's not appropriate to pray that the Blue Devils win games, but it is appropriate to pray for a good, safe, fair game where nobody gets hurt and all college-bound Blue Devils get their chances to qualify for athletic scholarships.

5. The Devil's Bathtub is a naturally formed, deep pool in a mountain stream. 

The place was named before the team was. People who embarrassed Gate City High School by performing badly in competitions--e.g. forgetting all about a school competition in the excitement of getting something of real importance done at home--were traditionally punished by scolding and shunning, not by being thrown into the Devil's Bathtub. Anyway, competent swimmers who dive into the Devil's Bathtub in warm weather usually pop out feeling refreshed. But it is deep enough, with enough current and rocks, that a non-swimmer might be able to drown.

6. The Tour de Possum Creek was a serious bicycle race that many people enjoyed for many years, but it's no longer staged today. Maps of the course are still available for those who want to cycle 43 miles including a long climb. 

Possum Creek is the stream that flows along the other side of the Clinch Mountain, in a pretty rural neighborhood called Yuma. (Somebody had been to Yuma, Arizona, and liked the name.) It meanders along a nice smooth course in between farms, churches, and country stores, for much of the way but does feature about half a mile of heavy pedalling. Events associated with the Tour also included a half-course race for less serious cyclists and a six-mile "Family Fun Ride," for "Little Possums," between family-friendly restaurants. 

7. People who keep horses still don't like possums. 

Possums are awesome. They can and do eat ticks--though ticks are hardly their favorite thing and I often do find dog ticks within a few feet of the resident possum's den. They are more likely to eat roaches, including the wood and palmetto roaches that nibble on old wooden houses in damp weather. They do love to clean out cats' litter pits and eat things the cats catch and then don't want to eat, themselves. Although possums eat dung and carrion and can carry disease germs for short distances, their peculiarly slow metabolism and low body temperature kill most virus and bacteria. Most people avoid getting close to possums; therefore very few diseases are spread among people by possums. (Possums are, for example, probably the least likely of wild animals to spread rabies.) 

Most possums don't want to get close to humans any more than humans want to get close to them. A normal possum has about fifty teeth. If you try to pick up a possum the animal may sink every one of those teeth into you...though possums really do collapse into a comalike state, showing minimal vital signs, when they're scared and the possum might seem to have "died of fright" before you touched it, especially if it was in a trap. 

However, if everyone in the family, including cats and dogs, allows a possum to clean up nasty messes in peace, possums can become friends. You don't have to touch an animal to bond with it. Possums aren't very clever or entertaining animals but they do learn to come and go on call, and they can completely eliminate the most unpleasant part of routine cat ownership. 

Horsey people, however, will never forgive possums for one thing the little animals can't help: there is one parasitic infection they do spread--to horses--and it's fatal. If you keep horses, you never feel safe keeping a possum.

8. Raccoons, bears, coyotes, and rattlesnakes really don't mix well with humans. Most other wild animals, however, do. 

If you stay long enough in a place where most wildlife have adapted to coexist with humans, you too may have an unforgettable relationship with an unusual animal--a "personal moth" who feels safe in your woodbin, a wren who nests on your front porch, a neighbor's horse who comes to lean over the fence for a friendly visit every evening. Bonding with a spider is not a sign of desperate loneliness or even heavy drinking. It can be an indication that you were able to recognize one of the local spider species that naturally live in a near-symbiotic relationship with humans.

It's not unusual to meet a deer, wild turkey, or stray chicken on the street in my town.  I wish it were still unusual to meet a bear--but it's not really. 

9. You can tap maple trees and make maple syrup in the South, too. 

In Vermont and Canada, maple sap rises in March. Here, it rises in the February thaw--some years, even in the January thaw. The proportion of sap to syrup is still ridiculously high. You have to boil off the water in about 40 gallons of sap to get about a pint of thick maple syrup. 

All maple species yield usable syrup. Ironically, sugar maples were rated the best because they tend to produce syrup and sugar that taste least "maple-y," most like white sugar. People who buy maple syrup now tend to prefer a more "maple-y" flavor.

However, maple syrup never became a major local tradition here because boiling down sorghum syrup was a more efficient way to get a sweet taste. There is a local beekeeping tradition, too, although I often wonder how many of the people who display bee-motif "country" decor items had the fortitude to talk to our local beekeeper when he was alive. (Beekeeping was traditionally a hobby for weird old men and we had one who filled the bill.) 

10  Most people don't know what they have till it's gone. 

A surprising number of people in Gate City are denatured humans who don't know one useful herb from another. You don't have to know what natural richness is in and around this little town to live here, have family here, or belong here. But it would be nice if more people did.

Book/Record Reaction: Music of Coal

Reading and Listening to Music of Coal

        
Author/producer: Jack Wright 

Date: 2007 

Publisher: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth (www.lpoy.org)

ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

Length: 68 pages (book), over 2 hours (recorded music)

Quote: “Few occupational traditions...have inspired more songs than coal.”)

        
Music of Coal was one new album of music I wanted to listen to, and review, when it came out. I didn’t, because the music was published on CD’s only. I bought LPs and LP players, cassettes and cassette players, and then I took a vow that I wasn’t going to spend any more money on yet another musical gimmick whose manufacturer wouldn’t even be able to make routine repairs on the thing ten years later. So I had to wait for someone whose new car came with a CD player to find this album and share it with a car pool, while we were driving through some of the scenery photographed in the book. It was quite a thought-provoking experience.

        
This document was meant to inform readers and listeners more than to entertain them. Two hours of coal mine songs, many of which were written to report bad news, can become depressing. Some of the songs were written by miners who say they like their jobs; probably most of them mean they like being able to live close to their rural roots, but Merle Travis famously had another explanation: “It will form as a habit...like a drunkard his wine, a man will have lust for the lure of the mine.” 

        
Here are the thoughts I noted while reading and listening:

       
1. The album begins with “Down in a coal mine, underneath the ground,” and mentions that this was a British song that came to the U.S. via vaudeville theatre. The version on the album was performed by the Edison Orchestra, as a march, and includes only the chorus (there were five verses). Coal mine bosses were known to have organized brass bands, which presumably would have imitated this performance, but the record doesn’t include any of them.

        
2. A picture of Lancashire pit lasses does not belong next to the song by Sara and Maybelle Carter. Women had no place in the Virginia mines until the 1970s, when some women imagined that working in coal mines would be “liberating.” Originally the intention of banning all females from all coal mines was to end the abuse of women and children, as documented in British coal mines, where smaller workers were sometimes wanted but were expected to work harder for lower wages. As mining became more mechanized, some bosses continued to refuse to hire women out of fear that sooner or later some male laborer would make either a joke or a flirtatious “pass” at a woman, who would claim to have been insulted, and there’d be a fight. There are legends of cross-dressing women who worked in Virginia coal mines in the early twentieth century; I have not seen documentation.

        
3. Nimrod Workman claimed that water seeped into the mine and “I...come outside and my clothes would be wet...and they would freeze into ice. My wife would build up a fire and it would take me a time to get my clothes thawed up to where I could get them off.” Is this possible? Yes. Coal miners adapted to constant 55-degree damp by wearing lots of layers. If the inside layers of clothing are thick and sturdy, the outside layers can freeze without the person being frostbitten. Kentucky, like Virginia, does have days like that, though not in every year.

        
4. All coal miners were black; according to photos some of the coal camps were so well integrated that it’s hard to tell which miners were Black, underneath the coal dust, and which were White. There are practically no African-Americans in coal communities today. I once commented on this to one of the older generation in Appalachia and was told, “There used to be some Black people around here. I suppose they’ve all moved away...don’t remember the last time I saw any of them.”

5. A photo-op showing Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly greeting a miner, whose face looks black, is interesting. FDR is beaming and reaching out to shake someone’s hand. So is the miner. They do not, however, appear to be reaching toward each other’s hands.

        
6. Apart from the vintage of the cars in a picture from about 1950, Main Street in Appalachia hasn’t changed much.

        
7. Around her 70^th birthday, Jean Ritchie’s voice had only grown higher and sweeter than ever. Her rendition of “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Any More” was still fine.

        
8. Many early coal mining songs were composed, sung, and sponsored by the unions, which later became as corrupt as the bosses the unions had been formed to fight. Some unions were led by Socialists and, while their party was overt and legal, by Communists. Sure enough, this album contains a song in which folk singers attempt, without much success, to berate “the dirty capitalist system” in two-part harmony. Nobody's heard that on the radio.

        
9. The photo of the widow and four orphans Fisher, of Kentucky, taken after Tommy Fisher and 24 other men died in 1943, will remind some readers of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Were their eyes all dilated by some drug they’d been given “for the shock”? Did someone poke holes in the original snapshot with a pin?

        
10. Carter Stanley’s performance of “Daddy Don’t Go to the Mines” is here remixed with harmony by his daughter, Jeannie, who was four years old when he died. You can tell she’s spent a lot of time singing along with the records he left her.

        
11. The car in which I was listening to the CD's passed the ruins of a settlement called Derby. According to this book, it was the site of an explosion in 1934; seventeen miners dead, 74 trapped underground for hours (they nearly had to swim out). A broadside verse was composed shortly afterward, but not recorded until 2006. A note on a copy of the lyrics said that it was composed to the tune “Picture on the Wall.” I never heard the story or the song. A major news event in Wise County was not necessarily of much interest in Scott County. This has not changed.

        
12. Billy Edd Wheeler claims that he’s seldom able to sing his song of coal-camp nostalgia: “It’s been a long time since I’ve been home, but I’m not going back soon...The town’s all gone, it’s gone away. The people are straw the wind has blown away...How could anybody know that the next year or so, We would all be traveling over mountain and plain, Tryin’ to plant our roots again.” The coal camps have disappeared. A friend of my mother’s, one of the lucky coal-camp children who’d married well and found something better than the Bonny Blue coal camp where she was born, wanted to show Mother where she’d grown up; they weren’t even allowed to drive past the site of her home. 

        
13. Ron Short claims that in West Virginia miners who wore red bandanas, who fought in an armed rebellion against mine “operators” and eventually federal troops, were called “rednecks” and made that name a term of pride. I never heard that story either.

        
14. “Sixteen Tons” was first recorded by Merle Travis, then made a hit by Ernie Ford, but on this record it’s performed by some youngster called Ned Beatty. His version passes over the original first verse, “Some people say a man is made out of mud. A poor man is made out of muscle and blood,” to focus on the reason why a Gate City man might have to take a job in a mine: “I was born one mornin’ it was drizzlin’ rain. Fightin’ and trouble are my middle name.” In communities closer to the mines, a coal mine might have been among the first places a young man looked for a job, but in my home town the mines were where a man went if he was really desperate...as it might be because he had a record for "fightin' and trouble."

        
15. By and large the book that accompanies the albums manages to remember that Appalachia is one town, and there are others. Nevertheless, on page 51: “A.J. Roach...speaks from his roots in Appalachia. Raised in the hollows of Scott County, Virginia...” Appalachia is in Wise County.

        
16. A.J. Roach’s song is entitled “Black Lung.” It makes me wonder why no miner photographed in work gear, in this book, has a face mask. 

        
17. And I’m not sure in what part of Scott County A.J. Roach’s grandfather “was—like most men in my area of Virginia—a coal miner.” Wise and Lee County men were coal miners. Scott County had an active coal mine in the early half of the twentieth century, but even while it existed that mine never employed most of the men even in one town. Roach is not a Gate City name so my guess would be that this grandfather lived somewhere closer to the coal mines. Possibly he was from Appalachia.

        
18. In 1992, deep in a mine outside Norton, some idiot lighted a cigarette. “Many of his co-workers might have survived if that small explosion hadn’t kicked up a  cloud of coal dust that also ignited...and the fireball that developed spread to every part of the mine at about 600 m.p.h...Coal companies are cited for dust violations far more often than any other problem.” Hmph. What about violations of laws against smoking in other people’s place of employment?!

        
19. Some kid from East Tennessee State University made up a song about a disaster in the Coeburn mine: “Twenty men saw their Maker’s face.” There was no disaster in the Coeburn mine. The compilers of this album wanted the song, and apparently were able to get it cheaper than either of the authentic versions of “Sixteen Tons,” so they went to the trouble of digging up the detail that another mine, “about three miles from Coeburn,” had two explosions, in 1907 and 1910, and a total of nineteen miners were killed. Hmph, again.

        

20. Between 2005, when Jack Wright and friends started compiling this book and record, and 2007, when Music of Coal was published, 64 miners died in the U.S. alone. In China, it was reported that 4746 miners died in 2006 alone. There is still (although that song is not included in this collection) blood on the coal.

As documented in this collection, some people still work in coal mines, and still want to. Some people speculate, "They wouldn't do well in other jobs." Some coal miners have, like our inactive member Adayahi, done quite well in other jobs. There are no easy answers, but this collection may provide as much emotional insight into the situation as most of us are ever going to get. People who belong here will do, and do without, a lot of things in order to stay here.

Music of Coal was originally sold as a fundraiser for charity, and its value has gone up not down since its release. This web site will offer it as a Fair Trade Book (with CD's). The best price we can offer will be $80 for the set + $5 for shipping, and if you send that amount to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com we'll send the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth $8.50. 

Tray of Bracelets at Tree & Tra Fashions

Readers have voted and made it official: Blogspot does the best job displaying photos. So here's another photo from the Store Security Sequence of pictures I took at the Tree & Tra Fashions store this summer.

You can still buy any of these bead bracelets online, along with other handmade and imported fashion accessories, here:

https://www.facebook.com/TreeAndTraFashions

If you don't use Facebook, you can't contact the store via that page. If you would like to order something without using Facebook, you may e-mail our Message Squirrel:

salolianigodagewi@yahoo.com

As of Saturday, the bracelets were still in the store on Route 23, although the store no longer has phone or Internet access and may close its physical doors soon. Local readers may look for Tree at Duffield Daze.

If the store closes after Duffield Daze, Tree (Teresa Vernon) will still have the bags, beads, cell phone covers and other fun stuff shown on the Facebook Page until they are sold; since they are "fashion" items they are likely to be replaced rather than restocked. She will also have the physical copies of the books available to local supporters without shipping fees. These items can still be purchased locally without paying shipping fees, publishing your real identity via Facebook, or using a credit card, whether they are displayed in a store or in a private home.