{"id":6732,"date":"2020-08-17T14:24:22","date_gmt":"2020-08-17T19:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/?p=6732"},"modified":"2020-08-17T14:24:22","modified_gmt":"2020-08-17T19:24:22","slug":"archiving-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2020\/08\/17\/archiving-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Archiving Paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When Peabody Coal \u201chauled\u201d the small town of Paradise, Kentucky away, I hadn\u2019t been born yet.<\/p>\n<p>But my life and the lives of all Kentuckians are often landmarked by loss&#8211;in many cases, before we&#8217;re born. The folks that come into being in coal country come into this world with a very specific deficit, are unwitting inheritors of a homeland that has been hollowed out by the very industry that has sustained our livelihoods for as long as our grandparents can remember.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Paradise by John Prine\" width=\"750\" height=\"563\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DEy6EuZp9IY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a paradox, and an old one. At the start of this project, I was trying to answer for myself\u2014what makes this story urgent? Why tell the story of Paradise, a town now decades lost to history? Why now?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, I drove a colleague from his one bedroom apartment in Iowa City to his Grandma\u2019s house in Huntington, West Virginia. Huntington\u2019s a coal town that sits on the banks of the Ohio river, bordered by Ohio to the west, and Kentucky to the south. We passed the plant, mountain after man made mountain of black rock, and my colleague whistled and said, \u201cGoddamn, you\u2019d think they\u2019d run out of the stuff.\u201d &nbsp;I laughed, \u201cWell, yeah, I think you just summed up nonrenewable resources in a nutshell. They are. They did.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s funny, but I\u2019ve rarely seen \u201cthe stuff\u201d first hand. My mom tells a story of growing up against the train tracks in western Kentucky, picking up hunks of coal in her backyard as a girl, stray rocks that had bounced from train cars, and believing this was how it must be made\u2014that coal literally fell from the sky.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Once me and my colleague parted, I made my crooked, diagonal way back to western Kentucky, and to home. My route took me through the Appalachians. It had rained heavily in Huntington the day before I left\u2014a flash flood\u2014and the sky hung low with the aftermath of storm, fog rising from the far-off peaks like smoke.<\/p>\n<p>Ashland Kentucky sits two miles south of the border. It\u2019s the first town you hit when you cross the state line. If you\u2019re coming, as I was, from I 64-W, you\u2019d know it because just before you pass the Ashland exit on the right, you pass Hell on the left.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mercurylines.com\/wp-content\/themes\/studiobox\/timthumb.php?src=http:\/\/www.mercurylines.com\/photos\/color\/05misc\/DSC_1395b.jpg&amp;w=600&amp;zc=1\" alt=\"Oil Refinery, Ashland KY\"><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The Catlettsburg Oil Refinery occupies seven hundred acres of hill and valley, strategically positioned at the banks of the Ohio and Big Sandy River in order to access the Huntington Tri-State Port, which, as the primary means of export for the twin fossil fuel industries, Coal and Oil, makes it the largest inland port in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve honestly thought of the refinery as the devil\u2019s city since my mom gave it that name when I was a little girl. Looking out over those alien, glittering, smoke-stack flames from the backseat, I asked her\u2014shocked\u2014where we could possibly have ended up. Most of the objects that magnify or multiply in the viewpoint of childhood shrink as you age\u2014but not this place. If anything, it was bigger than I remembered.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>To be from Kentucky is to make your peace with paradox. Interviewing old timers about this landscape we share, the only home they\u2019ve ever known, I often think about that Mark Twain quote\u2014\u201cI want to be in&nbsp;Kentucky&nbsp;when the end of the world comes, because it&#8217;s always 20 years behind.\u201d From the vantage of the nation, this is a backwards place\u2014stuck outside of time.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A retired coal miner I spoke to, who worked on the strip mine that took Paradise\u2019s place, told me he had retired after thirty years of brutal labor (the effects of which he continues to suffer), but that if you accounted for, as he did, the weekends, overtime, the break-neck pace he and his team set in order to attempt to keep up with the insatiable demand, the ever-rising quotas enforced by his supervisor, by Peabody, and by the nation, he probably worked something much more like forty years. Rural and poor, the fruits of an industrializing culture rarely trickled down to these parts. But for America\u2019s metropolises, gleaming along the East and West coasts, the urban centers ushering in the Dawn of a New Age, ushering in the future, were able to do so because in Kentucky we were stripping our past for the fuel and the heat, for the means to keep the lights burning in places we would never see.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I know a poet from Ashland\u2014or used to\u2014a boy I met when I was nineteen at a writer\u2019s retreat in Hindman, Kentucky. After three intensive weeks workshopping each other\u2019s heartbreaks and traumas, swapping dishwashing shifts and pulls of bourbon on the front porch of a sleeping cabin, we said our goodbyes. I hadn\u2019t seen him since. Last thing I knew he was living in Lexington, a city I had to drive through to get home. At the exit for Ashland, I got, as my Papaw would say, a wild hair, and I reached out.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHey\u2026 I\u2019m a hundred miles away. Busy?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cloudfront.traillink.com\/photos\/legacy-trail-(ky)_116902_sc.jpg\" alt=\"Legacy Trail (KY) | Kentucky Trails | TrailLink\"><\/p>\n<p>We walked along a small portion of the city\u2019s newest green initiative, a 12-mile bike path called the Legacy Trail\u2014parts of which are scenic (groves of yellow wildflowers and muddy streams preserved by the University of Kentucky\u2019s agricultural department), but much of which is industrial (grey and beige concrete, vacant slabs, buildings advertising office space). To account for the disparity, the poet pointed out small anachronisms, a drag of sidewalk that ended, abruptly at the base of a dogwood tree, a gaggle of geese that backed up traffic at a nearby intersection. We talked and we walked and we asked and tried to answer,<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo, what\u2019s new?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In the seven years since I\u2019d seen the poet, I\u2019d graduated college, he\u2019d finished his Master\u2019s, we\u2019d found and lost jobs, found and lost love, but from these separate spheres, at times thousands of miles apart, we\u2019d both witnessed what felt like a steep and steady decline in hope. We no longer shared only the markings of the same home. We had become marked as a generation, as a nation, by the authoritarian, xenophobic, racist, climate-change-denying administration that had risen to power in the years since we last laid eyes on one another, last wrote poems in the woods. And we found ourselves, again, swapping stories of trauma. Some intimate, the deteriorating health of our family members paired with the exorbitant cost of their treatment. Some distant, asylum seekers imprisoned in internment camps at the country\u2019s south-western border. And we talked, as I rarely do now, about Kentucky from the inside looking out.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Born and raised in Ashland, the poet had never not known the realities of the coal industry firsthand. He never experienced the distance most of us take for granted in our desperation to get food on the table and keep the lights on, the distance between what it takes, and literally what is taken, to keep the lights on.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/image.cnbcfm.com\/api\/v1\/image\/105086055-Hazard-from-the-bypass.jpg?v=1529477834&amp;w=678&amp;h=381\" alt=\"The Kentucky coal town fighting to survive after coal mining closings\"><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;Living in Iowa City, especially during an election year, I am often asked to speak for my state. Why do we, a place and a people ravaged by environmental devastation, by an opioid epidemic, by poverty and pre-existing conditions, vote against our own interests?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Undeniably, it\u2019s a paradox. But it\u2019s not without logic if you consider the most fundamental premise by which many Kentuckians live\u2014you make a living by sacrificing your home. No distance between the devil\u2019s city and Paradise.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If I am able to make an archive for a buried place, it\u2019s possible that distance between the consumers and those consumed will become a little more visible for the rest of us too.<\/p>\n<p>-Amelia Gramling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Peabody Coal \u201chauled\u201d the small town of Paradise, Kentucky away, I hadn\u2019t been born yet. But my life and the lives of all Kentuckians are often landmarked by loss&#8211;in many cases, before we&#8217;re born. The folks that come into being in coal country come into this world with a very specific deficit, are unwitting<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2020\/08\/17\/archiving-paradise\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Archiving Paradise&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":5479,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"syndication":[30,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6732"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6755,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions\/6755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6732"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=6732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}