Rosalea Barker: Kentucky

What’s not to like about Kentucky? It used to have more whiskey stills than Feds to enforce the Prohibition. The official state drink is bourbon, which a) must be chugged straight from a 750L bottle, while b) learning to bootscoot to the Villebillies.

Okay, okay, okay! Every statement in that first paragraph is a bald-faced lie. The official state drink is milk, and you might like to chug that while listening to “Po’ Folks” by Nappy Roots. Seriously, watch that video for a completely different view of Kentucky.

I just didn’t want the first things to come to your mind to be bluegrass music and horseracing. But if you must go to that Kentucky, here’s a link to a 1969 performance by NZ’s own Hamilton County Bluegrass Band, who were mightily popular Down Under at the time, and to a posting of the magazine article that gave birth to the term “gonzo journalism” 39 years ago this month.

Originally part of Virginia, the land that is now Kentucky was formed into Kentucky county, Virginia in 1776. Four years later it was divided into the Fayette, Jefferson, and Lincoln counties of Virginia. It became the fifteenth of the United States in 1792. (So sayeth the state’s official website.)

Kentucky is the birthplace of Lincoln, and of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. One of the earliest promoters of settlement there (prior to statehood) was Daniel Boone, who left it less than two decades after he arrived saying it was “too crowded.” It is one of only four states that are called Commonwealths.

It’s more than a little ironic that one of the emblems on the state flag is the goldenrod, which turns from green into gold. The part of the Appalachian Mountains that is in Kentucky was plundered for timber and coal, resulting in the devastation of huge areas of forest. That plunder continues today with the practice of mountaintop removal to get to coal deposits.

A group called Kentuckians For The Commonwealth have posted a virtual flyover of MTR sites on their website, using Google Earth and NASA’s World Wind “to show anyone the scale of the destruction of Appalachian mountains as if from the air and create informative maps by overlaying data, such as poverty rates, on-top of scaled maps of mountaintop removal mining sites.”

KFTC are currently supporting a candidate for Jackson Energy’s board of directors, Randy Wilson. The Jackson Energy Cooperative has been in existence since 1938, and has 51,000 members in Southeastern Kentucky. (Rural energy co-operatives are common in the U.S.) Wilson also hosts a weekly children’s radio show on Mountain Community Radio. A recent show consists of an interview with someone who has been getting into solar power since 2000 as a way of saving money.

You can listen to or download “Solar in the Holler” here. Once you get past the vaguely disquieting introduction by the host, the interview is a fascinating insight into the life of the rural poor. The interviewee’s wife grows and sells strawberries to help fund the purchase of materials, and lugs the solar panels to their place in the sun because her husband has long been on disability due to a back injury sustained during his working life as an electrician.

He speaks about the steeply rising price per kwh of electricity from their supplier (not Jackson Energy), especially since a rate hike caused by the oil price spike has never been reversed. Nothing beats radio for allowing you to imagine what their mobile home looks like, with its gadgets and a ton-and-a-half of batteries to store the electricity. The insides of the walls are lined with styrofoam sheeting to reduce the electricity needed for heating and cooling.

It’s a far cry from the images of solar energy currently so popular with the media who are beating to death the new “Green Economy” by showing vast solar panel arrays in the desert and rooftop installations in inner cities. Especially when you realize that these people are living in a hollow in a mountain range, where it rains a lot. Even that is not a problem, says the interviewee.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this guy is some undiscovered backwoods genius. His story appeals to me because I grew up in a country where the ingenuity of individuals has its very own symbol: No. 8 wire. (Which now even has its own art category at the national agricultural field days.) And my childhood home was heated by an adapted 44-gallon oil drum with a flue and air-intake pipe whose design my father was always tinkering with to get the most heat for the least wood and/or coal burned in it.

But some of the ideas in the radio program are worth thinking about. Attaching solar panels to an old satellite dish—the type that tracks satellites as they go across the sky and are common in rural areas. Set the angle of declination to follow the sun instead so you get the maximum number of hours to store electricity. Or use amorphous panels, which work off ambient light rather than direct sunlight.

And the styrofoam got me thinking how all those thrown-out cups in workplaces could be recycled as wall insulation. Not by remanufacturing them into sheets, but placing them inside walls, where they’d make a honeycomb of air pockets that would be part of the insulation along with the properties of the styrofoam itself.

Whatever. Kentucky was an unexpectedly interesting place to visit, and I really hope to go there some day.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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