Rubble at Home & Abroad: I Am Appalachian Before I Am American
I’m Appalachian. I’m from the piedmont, the foothills, of the Carolina border. We’re textile mill, cow pasture Appalachia, so a little left of the assumption that Appalachia is 100% coal mill, rocky creek, mountain side holler. But all of it resonates. All of it eases my muscles, warms my bones. My whole life — rain or shine, hale or snow, sheltered or no — I have been held by those mountains. She is me and I am her.
I’m on the west coast now — Vegas — through a decade long comedy of errors that has seen me have to pick up and travel to wherever there’s unofficial, off paper, under the table housing for me. I can feel how far away I am from her. It aches. I’d never been here before I moved here (from Chicago, the last place I had to land to avoid the final ruin of living on the street). The first day I rode around and saw the mountains here — sharp, naked, and baby-faced — I found myself tearing up. Maybe it’s spiritual, maybe it’s childish, but all I could think was, “Do they know her? Can they feel her? Can they tell her where to find me?” Chicago was flat and when I looked out at the sky all I felt was empty. Alone. But here… maybe here… maybe Appalachia could hear me.
But I don’t feel her. The distance is too much. Hell, even when I was only five hours down in College of Charleston, I could feel the distance. Any time I got to go back home, I could feel it. Not just a shift in the air but a shift in me. I could feel when I was under her watch again. As the speed limit slows and you turn onto backroads, cows, goats, horses (fun size and regular) stand to greet you. You could see a sparkle in them. Like they too know they’re in her arms. Blessed. Loved. Shining.
My whole life adults told me a story about myself. That I was something smarter, better, greater than those hills and mountains. I thought if I believed them I could save my family. From poverty, from isolation, from enmeshment, from addiction, from a hundred or two years of “gettin’ by”, from so many things that I now know are symptoms of a systemic illness that those with power — be that power electoral or financial, god help you BOTH — revel in infecting us with. A thing being done to you, turning around to grab you hard on the face and tell you the cure is giving up who you are, shoving yourself into college applications, then mentorships, then cover letters, then fluorescent-lit, minimalist buildings with other flavorless, stock photo Gifted and Talented™.
I never wanted it. I thought it was the cure for something.
I wanted to lie on my back on clover, halfway down a hill, feeling the lightest tug of gravity at my toes, while a wolfdog I got by accident curled around my head and gave me kisses. I wanted to go on impromptu hikes, barefoot in creek beds, hair caught in honeysuckles, the thrill of an encounter with a watersnake, while my friends laughed a little too loud around me. I wanted to pause to let a bear cross, head bent and eyes sober because mother nature is the only flag I pledge my allegiance to. I’d have produced wrestling shows in parking lots, performed Shakespeare in the park to ten people, a stray dog, and the birds in the loblolly trees, written short fiction only sold in the too-small shop of an independent publisher in all one mile of any various “downtown” area open to me.
I’d have done it and been happy. Been content. To be making art, to be alive, to be held by Appalachia in all her glory.
They told me if I traded ain’t for is not, buggy for shopping cart, and gave up my twangs, my flips, and warbles for an imagined standard I would unlock a greater world. I was too small — my family was too small, my town was too small — to know that I needed it. But didn’t I want to live up to my Potential™? Didn’t I want to be Good™? What if your family never had to hunt down a junkyard car again? What if all those little ones around you, siblings, cousins, and beloved strays, never had to limit themselves to one piece of candy ever again? What if you could do that for them? What if you could speak so good — well — and play The Game™ with such precision that you tricked everyone with money into thinking Appalachians were people?
I thought it was the cure for something but it was just another poison they spoon-fed me.
I watched live reports on a dam at Lake Lure and felt like I was watching a nuclear blast head towards me. I watched bridges where I carved my name wash away. I saw mountains I’ve hiked slip away into geographical formations I can’t yet process.
There is a hole in my heart… and I am lucky. I am lucky to be out of the mess. I am lucky to be alive. I am lucky my family is alive. I cannot help them, nothing will ever be the same, and I am the lucky one. How do you start to process that?
Climate change is man-made. Corporate owned. Government sponsored.
I watch shit-eaters lower than landlords (agents too slimy to belong to the devil) whine about damage to their AirBnBs. I watch upper middle class to we’re comfortable ocean front Carolinians cry about rescheduling trips to the aforementioned AirBnBs. Every place I window shop on Zillow is under water. I am transient but not-quite-unhoused but not-entirely-housed thousands of miles away from my home because I couldn’t keep up with the fucking AirBnB economy. I couldn’t add miles and miles to on-foot trips because the woods I used to cut through become cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs for out-of-towners who came in to step on our necks at any number of recognizably-named corporate factories.
War is man-made. Corporate owned. Government sponsored.
I watch a news report of a little boy pulled out from under the rubble in North Carolina. His dog was with him. They both survived. They have no home. But ain’t it heartwarming?
I cannot stomach the propaganda that it is heartwarming for one of the most isolated, rural, and poor regions of the United States to have hundreds or more missing people, unhoused people, children pulled from rubble after a climate disaster we have been warned about since before I was born…
But I do not know how to even begin to speak about that pain because I watched American-made, American-funded, American-supported weaponry and explosives gleefully slaughter an entire culture of people. I have child after child after child reduced to body parts or less pulled from — or else lost — in rubble in Palestine seared into my mind. The child in North Carolina is traumatized, homeless, hungry, and he is the lucky one. We are the lucky ones.
Because I’ve seen what else they will do to people.
All of it is a choice. All of it.
All you’ve read so far, I wrote a month after Helene. I stopped. I sat here. I waited for it to make sense.
But it just doesn’t.
Nearly six months since Helene ripped my home and my heart to pieces. Almost a year and a half since Israel’s escalation of genocide in Gaza and the unlimited checks both sides of the political spectrum wrote them to do it. And I am sitting in a hole in my heart while I watch fascists and techno-oligarchs do worse. And the people who are supposed to keep watch, to stand by you, to lift you up, are saying my community, my friends, my family, and I deserved our heartache because the authoritarianism hurt us first. And they’re still writing those fucking checks.
Is there a point to this? I don’t know. Can you find a point in something this hateful? Can you have a purpose while the river of your soul circles a drain? Religious trauma aside, I do know one thing… sometimes you step forward and you testify. Is it God that put this on my heart? If it is, where else am I meant to see them or hear them? Are there prayers for this?
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Causes in the Carolinas:
The Pansy Collective: A DIY trans-led benefit collective.
Support Food Not Bombs in the Carolinas.
Causes in Palestine:
Help Wael. Wael reached out to me months ago on TikTok. Please help his family try to rebuild their lives.
