Coal Country Is Home

To most people, the Central Appalachian coal mining communities aren’t very important. To people like me, they’re home and always will be. And they’re also a far off memory.

The Appalachian mountains are home to communities that look homogenous to the outside world. Primarily Caucasian, conservative politically, deeply evangelical religiously, educated locally or regionally, and having more traditional family structures. Pretty straight-forward, right?

For many of us, there was an undercurrent of basic beliefs that were problematic in our emotional development, our religious views, and even how we took explicit and unspoken societal rules into adulthood.

I had grown up exploring the hills and hollers, going to Friday night football games and church potlucks, and listening to stories from old timers about what the community was like when coal was still king. Though opportunities were scarce, these mountains had shaped me. 

My grandparents, specifically my paternal grandparents, were well-known in the community. Meaning my parents were also, and I felt a constant sense of growing up in a fishbowl. The guidance counselor at my school was a high school and college classmate of my mother’s. And my mother was heavy-handed in requesting my homeroom teacher assignments. 

That situation alone doesn’t seem too helicopter parenting, but it is only one example of how my environment was controlled. Friends, or at least friends that were acceptable, were almost exclusively from other church families. There was a constant sense of being watched over and reporting back to my parents. I felt no sense of autonomy in my daily activities, relationships, even self. And I am still living in a constant state of “should” when trying to live as an adult.

In this adulthood experience, I find myself missing my hometown, the nostalgia of mountain drives, going to The Country Cabin on a road between Norton and Appalachia to two-step and listen to live bluegrass, and my Granny’s biscuits and gravy. The outside world was a shock when I left Clintwood. None of the societal rules were relevant anymore. Life wasn’t church focused anymore, there is the option to choose friends from backgrounds completely opposite of mine. For the first time in my life, I was anonymous whenever I wanted to be. Terrifying.

My hometown will always be the soil from which I grew, even if my branches now reach further. And I hope one day to take what I've gained to give back to my home. The mountains raised me, and my roots will forever be there, calling.