Tilling away on strip jobs with bad water

Larry Webster - Contributing columnist

Pikeville's Expo Center came about during the sub-prime era, when we had our personal governor, who gave it to us.

I know what it is like to have somebody give you something that is real hard to take care of and you don't know what to do with it. Joe Brown once gave me a live goat.

So now we have this big place and have to pay its bills. So we have sub-prime entertainment, people either on their way up, or on their way down, or as with our short-lived professional basketball team, people fresh off some college B Team.

Professional basketball as a business model was predicated on the theory that mountain people would go watch basketball all seven nights a week, a theory only six-sevenths true.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise that the grandest entertainment ever expo'ed at the center came free, well, as free as anything else the government gives you, because it was provided by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, a bunch you gotta wonder about who spells a word corpse and pronounces it "core," or calls colonel "kernel." Isn't a kernel right under a general?

The entertainment was a giant celebration called "The End of Mountain Farming," and it turned out to be funnier than The Cable Guy, noisier than Lynrd Skynrd and slicker than Disney on Ice.

The event had to do with whether or not it was good to blow the ZZ Tops off mountains, and put their Kid Rocks in the creek leaving the water on its downstream Journey with Traces Adkins of Poison, leaving it all with the Blackfoot, Haggard like it had been chopped up with a Mollie Hatchett.

The End of Mountain Farming celebration gave those who want to try and prevent famine in the mountain regions a whole three minutes to justify how to do so, provided they were willing to risk life, limb and ridicule by thousands who think it is their continuing duty to fatten frogs for snakes.

You can blame their great-grandfathers for the eventual destruction of mountain farming. By 1928, farmers took corn hubris and went to plowing up too much mountain topsoil, and bad rains all year washed most of what they plowed down into the creek, so that mountain farmers had, like Larry Kelley wrote about such things in Estill County, land in Indiana, land in Louisiana and white half-runner beans way down in New Orleans.

They got scared and many jumped at the chance of becoming industrialists, of going to work and getting money and buying food instead of having to stare a mule in the tail to get it.

Since then, those who went to mining have had, by and large, good jobs, just as tobacco farmers had good work — until it ran out. Their children have grown up with stuff, chattels, the kinds of things farmers cannot usually afford.

In a gradual continuum since then, the idea that you can actually sustain a family on the mountains as the Lord presented them to us, if you keep your scale small enough, has been all but lost — let alone the practical skills to know how to live off the mountains.

You can't do it with elk around. Even those kids on Sesame Street know that. Maybe one family out of 10 can live off strip-job cattle, but not a culture or a region because it takes hundreds of acres for each rancher.

When the last mountain is leveled off — something about as lovely as taking one of those beautiful hairdos that stand majestically on top of Regular Baptist women and turning it into a flattop — when there are no jobs, when these fine and honorable young men and women who wear the coal shirts and have the good jobs cannot get money here, and they cannot get money anywhere else, but still need to feed their progeny, will they be able to do so on the mountains as they are then?

If they have no money to buy water or if terrorists destroy the public water system, will water quality be something with meaning to them then, or will it be too late?

There are studies that show that if mountaintop mining were abolished, only about 1,350 people would lose jobs and the rest would be absorbed in underground mining. The nation is not going to allow coal to be burned much longer, just as it forbade tobacco.

The reasonable coal needs of our nation can be met by underground mining, which can be accomplished without the loss of our capacity to stay here and live without money, if the time comes.

Memo to Joe Craft: That $7 million of coal money being spent on tall people from out of state would provide 140 mountain people with $50,000-a-year jobs.

Memo to Wild Bill Gatton: Why didn't you make them name the School of Business after the name you got famous by? There is something kind of Kentuckyish about the "Wild Bill Gatton Business School."

Memo to Joe B. Hall: If you would have just let the guards shoot, we would not let some guy from Texas take your name off the lodge and rename it.