Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images
READ MORE ABOUT:
Watch, read, or listen to Coal Country, and learn about the destruction to the environment and human health that comes with coal mining. It's happening on a large scale, and for the good of the country, needs to be stopped. But there's also the personal side of the issue: the people who live in Appalachia, whose lives and communities are being destroyed by this dirty practice. This essay is part of a series leading up to the premiere of Coal Country, written by Nick Clooney himself:
Most of my ancestors came to this country from Ireland during the potato famines. We came floating in on adversity, as did most who found a new home on these shores. I am told that my Irish forbears headed down the Ohio River because they'd heard that in spring and summer it looked a great deal like Ireland...that it had a hundred shades of green. They settled on the banks of the Ohio in the little town of Maysville, Kentucky. At first they were laborers, but in time some became professionals. My grandfather Clooney was a jeweler and gemologist, and he later became the mayor of Maysville. He was also a wonderful writer, with a real Irish flair.
Like all the immigrants, once we got here we assimilated and became part of the Appalachian culture. There's an Appalachian touch to all of our family, such as our love of the land and our love of music. Religion was also central to our lives. My grandmother Guilfoyle was a singer, a pianist and a teacher. She was the one who made sure we had a direct line to the Grand Ole Opry and to the WLS barn dance and to the Ozark Jamboree, none of which we were allowed to miss. And we never wanted to.
Grandpa Clooney was a very smart man. He had no idea how to talk to children; to him, children were short adults. So he would talk to us about politics and worldly things. I remember once, when we were five or six, he took us down to the river. He said to everyone as he pointed to the river, "Put your hand in there." We put our hands in there. Then he said, "Now, something from your hand is going to go down the great Mississippi River and it's going to go past New Orleans, and it's going to go out into the Gulf of Mexico and it's going to sweep past Florida. It's going to go all the way up to Europe. It's going to touch the places where we came from and our forbears came from originally. You can never think small again. You've got to be part of the big world, and this is part of the big world. You've just touched it." I didn't want to be bothered with this kind of conversation. I wanted to go get an Eskimo Pie. But of course I heard him and I understood him. I knew what he meant then, and I know even more what he meant now.
Even though our business requires that we travel a lot, my wife Nina and I have always tried to keep a home in Kentucky. Every time I go away, I feel good about coming back. I feel that I'm coming back to something that is quite real and maybe have just left something that wasn't quite so real. I know that my heart is still by that muddy river and those stubby hills.
If there is a difficulty in describing Appalachia and what it means to the rest of the country, it probably is in expressing the initial experience, the isolation of our culture. Many modern advancements have passed us by, and our land and natural resources have been exploited by outsiders for over a century. We found ourselves stereotyped as hillbillies; that meant you didn't have shoes or running water. And we may not have had those things. But my guess is that out of those negatives, out of the isolation and the poverty, came a positive, and that was identity. What we did have was a deep understanding of ourselves and our family and how important we were to that family. Our very isolation made us turn inward toward family and friends. We may not have been mobile, but we were centered and we were grounded. And that is our gift to the rest of the nation.
This essay is excerpted from the Coal Country book.
Watch Coal Country on Planet Green
Related Posts:
Coal Country Essays
Find Out Your Connection to Mountaintop Removal
Focus on Focus Earth: Coal's Hard Truth
Ten Dirty Things About Big King Coal
-
- {}
