The winner of the 2016 GonzoFest Literary Journalism Contest is Kevin D. Smith, a West Virginian known as OK Osborne. He is an adjunct professor who (mostly) enjoys life burning up the roads between the Blacksburg, Athens and Beckley in a lifted Wrangler, which he parks in Princeton at night, sleeping snug as a bug in a rug with his wife Kim and newly adopted pit mix Petie. To read the honorable mentions Aramie Louisville Vass Trumps Amerikkka and The Shotgun Wedding, by Brittany Howard ? go here.
I still remember what that Halloween night was like in 95. My head was all fogged up from a good nights psychedelic revelry, and my face was still painted ghoulish. By the end of that night, I got to watch my mom get strapped to a gurney just a few miles uphill from the big state U here in West Virginia. She swore up and down that they were framing her, and it took all the restraint in my then 18-year-old being to hold back violent vengeance on the officers who did the strapping. They didnt want to do it. Im sure if we had a rational conversation, theyd have said so. Theyd have surely gone on for hours about how fucked the system is, when a mom gets hauled off by the police for crazy. Im sure theyd rather bust up one of the dozens of currently ongoing keggers, pulling just another Abercrombie model down, mid stand. Instead, their job that night was to pull our family down from the hopeful delusions that it might be OK one day for mom. They knew a few of the Motown, Dub-V crazies, to be sure. They probably knew Bob, who could drink beer while standing on his head, a super-power he gained after being struck by lightning, as local legend had it and they probably knew the guy who played the pan flute and would buy us kids beer, then talk our ears off for hours about his kooky time in Scientology. They already knew the myth about the guy who thought he was a glass of orange juice too. Chances are, they, as West Virginians, even had some family crazies all their own, lurking and howling a branch or two away. I still try to empathize with those now nameless, faceless uniforms, imagining that they too grew up in a modular with a beam down the middle in a holler by a crick til their moms left their dads with broken backs and dreams, to remarry and move into the crown-molded and ensconced luxury of town only to watch mental illness creep into the wood and rot the turn-of-the-century gables quicker than the damp can find purchase. I always imagined that a good knock with the sledge to that beam would split our house in two like a cracked egg, and that is what happened.
You see this place breaks people down, as surely as it does the hills. For generations, we have prayed at the feet of the anthracite pyramid scheme, and the water that trickles down is just as poisonous as all the wells and cricks and rivers in the bottoms. In the 90s, the drainage problems caused by irresponsible mining practices started a flood that washed out the towns from Maben to Welch, and left a muddy view for everyone who stayed on after. I still remember many nights when I was awakened by my parents, who would hurry us and drive us up that hill in Hotchkiss (our own unincorporated bottom town, complete with gravel road and backyard crick), the proverbial high ground that would save us from the floods when it rained hard and the slapdash Slab Fork dam up the road predictably burst and the crick ran brown and angry. Don Blankenship will only get a year for his well evidenced abuses and intentional negligences (wait, if theyre intentional never mind the details right). There are audio recordings of him pushing the foremen to cut corners, and all those cut corners folded in on themselves and led to a massive explosion on April 5, 2010 at the Massey owned Upper Big Branch Mine, killing 29 miners.
Mental and physical illnesses are more than commonplace in West Virginia families, whether miners live at the house or not, because we have all seen and heard about many fatal accidents over the years, and we have watched a whole bunch of nothing happen to the responsible parties, while safety regs are conveniently slouched into the waste bins that are beneath the bottom line profits. Other industries have been shut out for years, so that high school grads have largely been funneled into the dark maws of the hills or out of state, never to return.
Being honest, our current POTUS race handed Dub-V an easy scapegoat for the coal industrys downturn, which has caused many of our financial struggles; but then we all know that coal has been sliding toward the bins of history for some time, as our family members have gone through the ups and downs of layoffs since the 70s, and weve all watched the movie Matewan (my mother even had an uncredited job in the hair and makeup department, before that gurney). Once, Robert C. Byrd, longest serving senator, stalwart, filibusterer of Roman politicians and mountain fiddler, went on to haunt the hills and streets named after him, many West Virginians started voting with their prejudices, and we all know that means Republican. We all know dam well the deal is rotten, but maybe we pride ourselves too much on settling for that rotten deal. They call that Appalachian Fatalism, Im told. But what ever happened to our John Brown blood? Our Mother Jones blood? Our Blair Mountain blood? Why do we sign onto a social contract that means nasty, brutish, short lives and even celebrate the oath with the blood of our own young and old? Why was my mother raped as a child, and why does she get a trip to jail every time her brain goes haywire over it? Why do African-American populations in Glen White and East Park and Redbrush and the other black neighborhoods suffer even worse chances that often include jail time and abject poverty? Why, in the state that separated itself from big brother Virginia during the Civil War, are there so many deluded stars and bars flying and so many black neighborhoods with substandard infrastructure, so many years after Jim Crow and segregation and slavery ended? Why do we gripe about the people in the grocery lines with EBT cards and iPhones, who might as well be, might even well be, our kin?
I think a lot about the bridges here: Not just the famous one at the Gorge where a woman once threw her dead abusive husband over but all those tiny log bridges that stretched across small streams and cricks down in The County (aka McDowell County, where both my folks grew up). We used to walk up the gravel roads in Carswell or Big Jenny Holler and across them and one day many of us drove over the big one or through one of the big tunnels to get to the other side of hells border. Now, we visit our lost parent, who we might suspect wants to die a little from the looks of it just like our state, which is currently busy working to fly fish angry lips with right to work, old religious bigotry, drug tests for the poor, and the whole failed litany of neocon-job bullshit designed for division and conquest: HB 4014, HB 4012, permit-less carry, cuts to education, and a big greasy bag o chips. Daily, I oscillate between trying to pitch in and build better bridges and driving over em and out forever then burning em down. Paw-Paws and Maw-Maws farm was bought and sold a few times since the firefly days after they both got sick and passed from Almost Heaven to the Real Deal. Now I hear the timber companies own it all; I dont know if I can bear to visit that holler to see the scarred land that used to be so beautiful with sweet corn growing on the hillsides. Moms back on the gurney too and I still answer her calls from the state hospital in Weston but I just cant force myself to visit her up there, either. The dregs of brokenness past are too strong a pull for me to breathe in again for now. Instead, I will try to take good care of her mutt terrier, a hermaphrodite, who compulsively chews the fur out of her ass when we arent watching. But we youngins are more watchful now, and a few of us have sprouted like weeds since the last time they saw us.
When I moved away the first time and wasnt watching, a good friend from my Latin classes (at one of the best high schools in WV) hurled himself off the big bridge over unrequited love, not long after graduation. It was a sad thing to learn. I always thought it could just as well have been the unreciprocated affections tied up in the trellises of the West Virginia state of being that made him take a dive. Maybe he should have brought matches or money. Don Blankenship and his cronies brought both a long time ago, and theyve been burning through generations of backs that could have been bridges, ever since. Montani Semper Liberi. That means two things: Mountaineers are always free
and Mountaineers are always children. We could stand to be a lot more of both.
OK Osborne 3/2016
This article appears in April 13, 2016.