#but ash doesnt have much history with steven

[vaugarde]

in retrospect, its kinda strange how lance was sorta hyped up to be a potential opponent for ash and then it just. never happened.

[antoine-roquentin]

The superficial “downtrodden Trump voter” story has indeed become an unproductive cliché. And upheavals in industries with larger, more diverse workforces than coal, such as retail, deserve close attention as well.

But our decades-long fixation with Appalachia is still justified. For starters, the political transformation of the region is genuinely stunning. West Virginia was one of just six states that voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980; last year, it gave Trump his second-largest margin of victory, forty-two points.

More importantly, the region’s afflictions cannot simply be cordoned off and left to burn out. The opioid epidemic that now grips whole swaths of the Northeast and Midwest got its start around the turn of the century in central Appalachia, with the shameless targeting of a vulnerable customer base by pharmaceutical companies hawking their potent painkillers. The epidemic spread outward from there, sure as an inkblot on a map. People like Frank Rich may be callous enough to want to consign Appalachians to their “poisons,” but the quarantine is not that easy.

We should be thankful, then, for what Steven Stoll, a historian at Fordham University, has delivered in Ramp Hollow: not just another account of Appalachia’s current plight, but a journey deeper in time to help us understand how the region came to be the way it is. For while much has been written about the region of late, the historical roots of its troubles have received relatively little recent scrutiny. Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance’s best-selling memoir of growing up in an Appalachian family transplanted from eastern Kentucky to the flatlands of southwestern Ohio, cast his people’s afflictions largely as a matter of a culture gone awry, of ornery self-reliance turned to resentful self-destruction. In White Trash, the historian Nancy Isenberg traced the history of the country’s white underclass to the nation’s earliest days, but she focused more on how that underclass was depicted and scorned than on the material particulars of its existence.

Stoll offers the ideal complement. He has set out to tell the story of how the people of a sprawling region of our country—one of its most physically captivating and ecologically bountiful—went from enjoying a modest but self-sufficient existence as small-scale agrarians for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a dreary dependency on the indulgence of coal barons or the alms of the government.

Stoll refuses to accept that there is something intrinsically lacking in Appalachians—people who, after all, managed to carve out a life on such challenging, mountainous terrain. Something was done to them, and he is going to figure out who did it. He links their fate to other threatened agrarian communities, from rice growers in the Philippines to English peasants at the time of the Enclosure Acts. “Whenever we see hunger and deprivation among rural people, we need to ask a simple question: What went on just before the crisis that might have caused it?” he writes. “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.”

The missing history is above all a story about land and dispossession. For roughly a century, starting before the country’s founding, the settlers of central Appalachia—defined by Stoll as the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania and most of West Virginia—managed a makeshift life as smallholders. The terms of that “holding” were murky, to say the least: property claims in the region were a tangled patchwork of grants awarded to French and Indian or Revolutionary War generals and other notables, which were commonly diced and sliced among speculators, and the de facto claims made by those actually inhabiting the land. In some cases, those settlers managed to get official deeds by the legal doctrine of “adverse possession”; in many others, they were simply allowed to keep working the land by distant landlords who had never laid eyes on it.

Regardless of the legal letter, the settlers carved out their “homeplace,” as Stoll calls it. He is evocative in describing their existence, but stops short of romanticizing it, and takes pains to note that their presence was itself founded on the dispossession of the natives. They practiced “swidden” agriculture—burning out one clearing for cultivation, then letting it regenerate while rotating to another area—likely introduced by Scandinavians mixed in with the predominant Scots-Irish. Survival depended on shared use of the boundless forest beyond one’s own hollow or ridge—the “commons”—for hunting game, raising livestock, small-scale logging, and foraging bounties such as uganost (wild greens), toothworth, corn salad, and ramps. “People with control over a robust landscape work hard, but they don’t go hungry,” remarks Stoll.

Yet it was the area’s very natural bounty that would ultimately spell the end of this self-sufficiency. The Civil War’s incursions into the Shenandoah Valley and westward exposed the region’s riches in exactly the minerals demanded by a growing industrial economy. (By 1880, there were 56,500 steam engines in the country, all voracious for coal.) “Her hills and valleys are full of wealth which only needs development to attract capitalists like a magnet,” declared one joint-stock company. In swarmed said capitalists, often in cahoots with local power brokers from Charleston and Wheeling.

The confused legal property claims offered the aspiring coal barons a window: they could approach longtime inhabitants and say, essentially, “Look, we all know you don’t have full title to this land, but if you sell us the mineral rights, we’ll let you stay.” With population growth starting to crimp the wide-ranging agrarian existence, some extra cash in hand was hard to reject. Not that it was very much: one farmer turned over his 740 acres for a mere $3.58 per acre—around $80 today. By 1889, a single company, Flat Top Land Trust, had amassed rights to 200,000 acres in McDowell County in southern West Virginia; just thirteen years later, McDowell was producing more than five million tons of coal per year.

The coal industry had a positively soft touch in the early going, though, compared to timber. Stoll describes the arrival of the “steam skidder,” which “looks like a locomotive with a ship’s mast.” It “clanks and spits, chugs steam, and sweats grease from its wheels and pistons” as workers use cables extending from the mast to grab fallen trees, “pulling or skidding the logs hundreds of feet to a railroad flatbed.” The steam skidder crews would cut everything they could, “leaving the slopes barren but for the stumps, branches, and bark that burned whenever a spark from a railroad wheel or glowing ash from a tinderbox fell on the detritus.”

The harvest was staggering: “Of the 10 million acres that had never been cut in 1870, only 1.5 million stood in 1910.” Stoll quotes one witness from the time: “One sees these beautiful hills and valleys stripped of nature’s adornment; the hills denuded of their forests, the valleys lighted by the flames of coke-ovens and smelting furnaces; their vegetation seared and blackened . . . and one could wish that such an Arcadia might have been spared such ravishment. But the needs of the race are insatiable and unceasing.” Indeed, they were. As one northern lumberman put it: “All we want here is to get the most we can out of this country, as quick as we can, and then get out.”

Such rapaciousness did not leave much of the commons that had sustained the makeshift agrarian existence. Of course, there was a new life to replace it: mining coal or logging trees. By 1929, 100,000 men, out of a total state population of only 1.7 million, worked in 830 mines across West Virginia alone. But it is in that very shift that Stoll identifies the region’s turn toward immiseration. With the land spoiled and few non-coal jobs available, workers were at the mercy of whichever coal company dominated their corner of the region. They lived in camps and were paid in scrip usable only at the company store; even the small gardens they were allowed in the camps were geared less toward self-reliance than toward cutting the company’s costs to feed them.

Stoll quotes a professor at Berea College in eastern Kentucky who captured the new reality in a 1924 book: The miner “had not realized that he would have to buy all his food. . . He has to pay even for water to drink.” Having moved their families to a shanty in the camp, miners owed rent even when the mine closed in the industry’s cyclical downturns, which served to “bind them as tenants by compulsion . . . under leases by which they can be turned out with their wives and children on the mountainside in midwinter if they strike.” As Stoll sums it up, “Their dependency on company housing and company money spent for food in company-owned stores amounted to a constant threat of eviction and starvation.” Of course, Merle Travis had this dynamic nailed way back in his 1947 classic, “Sixteen Tons”: “You load sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt. / Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go, / I owe my soul to the company store.”

Nor did the industries bring even a modicum of mass prosperity to compensate for this dependency. By 1960, more than half the homes in central Appalachia still lacked central plumbing, helping give rise to all manner of cruel stereotypes and harsh commentary, such as this, from the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “The Appalachians present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.” An extensive 1981 study of eighty Appalachian counties by the Highlander Research and Educational Center in Tennessee confirmed that, in Stoll’s summary, coal company capital had brought “stagnation, not human betterment,” and a “correlation between corporate control and inadequate housing.”

“Banks in coal counties couldn’t invest in home construction or other local improvements because the greater share of their deposits belonged to the companies,” Stoll writes. “No sooner did that capital flow in than it flowed out, depriving banks of funds stable enough for community lending.” Not only had the coal industry, along with timber, supplanted an earlier existence, but it was actively stifling other forms of growth and development.

Stoll recounts a scene from 1988, when a man named Julian Martin got up at a public hearing to oppose a proposed strip-mining project in West Virginia. Martin described the disappearance of Bull Creek along the Coal River, which he had explored as a kid decades earlier. He pointed out that places that had seen the most strip mining had also become the very poorest in the state. “My daddy was a coal miner, and I understand being out of work, okay?” Martin said. “I’ve been down that road myself. And I know you’ve got to provide for your family. But I’m saying they’re only giving us two options. They’re saying, ‘Either starve—or destroy West Virginia.’ And surely to God there must be another option.”

It’s a powerful moment, and it captures the tragic political irony that is one of the most lasting fruits of the region’s dependency: despite all the depredations of resource extraction—all the mine collapses and explosions (twenty-nine killed at Upper Big Branch in 2010) and slurry floods (125 killed in the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972) and chemical spills (thousands without drinking water after the contamination of the Elk River in 2014)—many inhabitants, and their elected representatives, remain fiercely protective of the responsible industries. Even the empathetic Stoll can’t help let his frustration show, as he urges the “white working class of the southern mountains to stop identifying their interests with those of the rich and powerful, a position that leaves them poorer and more powerless than they have ever been.”

Well, yes, but many a book has been written to explain why exactly the opposite trend has been happening, as Appalachia turns ever redder. It shouldn’t be that hard to make sense of the coal-related part of this political turn, and voters’ rightful assessment that coastal Democrats are hostile to the industry. The region has been dominated by mining for so long that coal has become deeply interwoven with its whole sense of self. Just last month, I was speaking with a couple of retired union miners in Fairmont, West Virginia, who are highly critical of both coal companies and Trump, and suffer the typical physical ailments from decades spent underground. Yet both said without hesitation that they missed the work for the camaraderie and sense of purpose it provided. Their ancestors identified as agrarians; they identified as miners.

Stoll is on more original and compelling ground as he tries to determine what that “other option” might be for the region. He imagines a “Commons Communities Act,” under which land would be set aside for shared use, not unlike the great forests of old—farming, timber harvesting, hunting and gathering, vegetable gardening, cattle grazing—by a specified number of families. Residents would own their own homes and could pursue whatever sort of work they cared to beyond their use of the commons. Social services and education in the communities would be paid for by a surcharge on the top 1 percent of U.S. households and an “industrial abandonment tax” on any corporation that “closed its operations in any city or region of the United States within the last twenty years . . . and moved elsewhere, leaving behind toxic waste and poverty.”

It is an admittedly fantastical vision that will fare better with Wendell Berry than with Congress or the West Virginia legislature. But in one sense, it is not so far-fetched after all. Coal is on the wane in central Appalachia, however much uptick it enjoys in the Trump era. Not only is it being undercut by natural gas, but the easily obtainable reserves are gradually tapping out, at long last. Coal’s decline is having wrenching effects on its dependents, not least the depletion of local government and school coffers. Something will have to replace it, and the odds of Amazon picking Morgantown or Charleston for its second headquarters are slim. West Virginia’s population has fallen by nearly 10 percent from its peak in 1950, a reversal of the crowding that helped bring the agrarian existence to an end more than a century ago. So perhaps it is not so crazy after all to suppose that a region so proud of its heritage could reach back to an earlier, almost-forgotten part of it, before the steam skidder showed up, and lay new claim to its land.

[stuprosu]

march 17th, 2020 1:50 AM

yeah

listen

it’s pretty well established that i am absolutely atrocious at keeping this updated. and i always say that i am going to keep it updated. but i never fucking do, do i? so i’ll say it again. and maybe i’ll mean it it this time. but i really do want to keep this up. there’s so much that i am forgetting lately. things i shouldn’t be forgetting. things i want to remember. this is another situation where i am going to have to outline each thing by each month. hold on to your butts. 

[october 2018] see i don’t remember even what’s going on. this is almost two years ago. i saw the national this month. i also went on a date with sam. it went fine but i just wanted to be friends... so he ghosted me. yahoo. it’s coming back to me now. i go to worlds of fun with kady, marissa, ashleigh, amanda, and conner... love these goons so much. 

[november 2018] my other friend - an online friend, one that lived close. we talked all the time and we played a lot of overwatch and shit together. and i’m intelligent. i’m smart. i know when i’m being taken advantage, or know when people try to do this. he asks me out on a date. we meet up in leavenworth. we spend the whole day together and we drink alcohol. i found out later i have a pretty severe alcohol intolerance. i don’t remember much of that night. maybe everything that falls down eventually rises. that whole experience was that stupid fucking bright eyes song. i can’t remember much - that pretty much makes it nonconsensual, right? i have no memory. but it’s been too long. the next day he texts me and tells me he only wants to be friends. i only remember him kissing me and his house and brooklyn 99. my aunt said i was pretty incoherent when he dropped me back off there at 2am. 

i don’t really know what to make of that whole situation. best to not think about it. we have a friendsgiving. but we don’t relaspe. i actually took up smoking, lmao. i cut him completely out of my life. i am talking to people again. i start dating a boy named drew. we were both pretty lonely people.

[december 2018] yooo drew gets in a fucking wreck after leaving my house at 2am lmao i forgot about that. he was trying to avoid a snowstorm and like broke his femur in half. he was hospitalized for 2 weeks. i visited him. he couldn’t walk for about two months. i felt really bad but i didn’t really want to keep dating him. the whole thing was my fault and i don’t know how to feel about it even now. nothing else much happened during this month. someone wrecked into my parked car. i got zaba this month, my ball python. 

[january 2019] kady asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. i break up with drew. it’s cold as fuck. i am sure there are other details. oh, ashleigh tells kady and i she will not be renewing the lease as she is going to move in with her boyfriend. ashleigh, in the past, like august 2018? was dating this homophobe so i didn’t talk to her. when he dumped her (after taking the old v card, which she told me about, which i responded to with indifference, which upset her) i was there to pick up the pieces but i told her she made a really dumb decision and i don’t know what else she expected and that it hurt that she knew my feelings about something and still dating someone so gross. ANYWAYS. new boyfriend. ashleigh wants to move in with the new boyfriend even though they havent even been dating a month... okay. we tell her not to. she doesn’t listen. ashleigh just starts being shady as fuck. jake , her bf, dumps after 2 weeks after she decides to not renew the lease. dumbass. 

ashleigh is still set to move out in may, when the lease is up. so, that’s not my problem. 

[february 2019] i really love my classes. i took ornithology that semester and i really loved it. i also cut my hair then and i came out publicly as bisexaul cause i realized how problematic being pansexual is. i also think i came out publicly as a nonbinary person, too. for so long i had issues with my gender, but i always pushed it aside and literally told myself don’t think about it, don’t worry about it, just stop. cringily, steven universe helped me figure out a label for what i was experiencing through rebecca sugar. pretty awesome stuff. 

[march 2019] a lot of shit went down this month. ashleigh started dating a guy named zane, who she first originally described to me as a creepy guy in her history class. they went on one date and fucked in her CAR in a museum PARKING LOT. lmao  and then proceeds to never sleep with him at our apartment, but will book hotels and shit. like how self conscious can you be?? anyways. i am fed up with it and i vent to some discord server and forgot ashleigh was in it. i delete it just in case but turns out she got screenshots and never told me. ash wanted to come to nakakon the weekend of march 16. march 15, ashleigh brings over zayn and theyre in her room. kady and conner are watching the office and marissa is there too. 

i come home at like 1am and they tell me ZAYN is there and has a fucking GUN on his hip and i’m?? what the fuck. so we start playing that episode of the office with gun safety dwight really really loudly. and then marissa messages ash and asks zayn to put the gun in his car. the gun is a REVOLVER and doesn’t have a fucking safety. she also doesnt have a gun safe? everyone is just super uncomfortable. zayn comes out and makes a huge deal. he tells us we’re being immature and that it isn’t a big deal. i said something along the lines that we live here, he didn’t ask, we’re uncomfortable, respect it or perish, smth like that. he leaves to go put it in his car. comes back in and starts it back up. says that “the big scary gun is put away” shut up cuck. 

anyways we get into and conner steps in because zayn is yelling at me and i am ready to brawl. zayn mentions something abuot how i treat ash like shit. i can only assume she showed him the screenshots of my discord message lmaoooo . anyways the day after that incident ! i cannot resolve it because ash is coming with me and staying at my dad’s apartment with marissa and i for nakakon. ashleigh is really obnoxious some of the time but mostly quiet. but since we were in such close quarters, i couldn’t bring up the whole shit with zayn. so. 

i am fed up and amanda, kady, marissa, ash, and i go to ihop to try and hash this out. we have a talking straw. we talk about alllll of our issues. i thought it went good. i was not aware that ash was aware of the screenshots. we told ash we were uncomfortable with zayn and would appreciate if he would apologize for disrespecting kady and i in our home and how he talked to me especially. this wasn’t unreasonable, considering three other people were witness to how zayn was talking to me. 

zayn said to ashleigh he wouldn;t apologize because he’d done nothing wrong. i told ashleigh i didn’t want him in the apartment. she moved out at this point and we got into it pretty heavily over messenger. ashleigh blocked all of us on facebook. i miss her but she’s a really toxic person who is in a relationship with a really toxic trump supporter who hates antifa and is really cringe. 

[april 2019] nothing much happened. college is good. i still have a massive crush on carter. marissa moved in. she has found out i am a giant recluse by nature and i think that has had an impact on our relationship even today. my past journal articles have illustrated i can only take people in doses, but we’ve found how to get along. 

[may - july 2019] nothing too crazy happened here either. it was an incredible summer, though. i worked, but i went to the lake so much and got close to toby! i hung out with marissa and kady so much and i really love those two girls. dad and amy are together all the time but they’re not “dating”. i know they are, just amy’s kids are young and wouldn’t understand. i know they’ll tell me when they’re ready. i also watched all of hunter x hunter and loved it. rewatched neon genesis evangelion, too, and loved it. i can’t remember when, but danielle handed marissa a letter for me to read. it was really intense and kind of perception-shattering. i texted her and we agreed to become at least non-hostile and chill with each other. i have really been meaning to see danielle irl and talk to her... but i keep forgetting and don’t have much time during the semester. i feel bad but... i don’t know what else to say. i reached out to her in december but was left on read. that was my fault, as i hadn’t responded to her in months. it’s better than what it was, to say the least. 

[august 2019] golden year baby ! just kidding my golden year was whenever i turned nineteen. anyways august is pretty chill. i started my senior year and took entomology. i loved that class so much and had it with carter. i really love the people in my field and i am going to miss them so much. love the biology goons. i also found out from my doctor i am allergic to most alcohols after i had an allergic reaction on my 21st and went to the doctors. i have a pretty severe intolerance. also started playing dragon age again. i don’t really talk to mom at all. my maternal grandfather, cliff, who i have never met/spoken to, has a relationship with my sister ashlee and was at my nephew’s first birthday party. cliff met my brothers and i and was very kind to us. however, i love my aunt shanna with my whole heart and she doesn’t like him at all. there was a very clear and obvious divide of my mom’s sisters and family, like jordan, kenadee, brettney, nana, and my grandfather’s family, like his other children and their spouses. it was all very difficult. i know my grandfather doesn’t have much time left in this world, but he still was rude and treated the family who HAS been there like shit. i know my mom cut my grandfather out, but i am inclined to side with my aunt because she knows best. however, she didn’t pull me aside at the birthday party and tell me not to believe a thing cliff says. cliff, however, did that. told me to believe what nana says and that it was all in the past. that rubbed me the wrong way. i still don’t know what to think about that situation. 

[september 2019] just school and work still, nothing crazy. mammalogy trips, entomology trips, school is really really fun and a lot of work but i love it so much! oh, and carter got me a bernie2020 magnet for my birthday. 

[october 2019] i saw the band cigarettes after sex. they were really awesome. i broke my glasses. i went to ren fest. nathan was creepy. i saw my mom and my aunt brenna at toby’s marching band game. dad, ash, and bentley were there. it was awkward and i didn’t try talking to my mom. a few months prior i kind of ripped into her on messenger and tried to tell her that i wanted a relationship but she had to acknowledge that what she did in the past was wrong (and i told her exactly what she did wrong, and i had talked about this with my siblings and dad, who agreed) and how she could fix it and how i still wanted her in my life. and she refused to acknowledge this. i kind of broke down over it because i realized my mom was never ever ever going to change and it broke me. anyways, i saw her at the game and i didn’t talk to her and answered her questions with as much grace as i could manage. that’s all. she lives in olathe now. that guy and her broke up. toby lives with dad full time now. dad has a good job and bartends part time at top golf. 

[november 2019] there was a praying mantis on my aloe plant! she laid an ootheca. it should hatch any day now :)i went to a deer aging check station. i slept in a bath tub. had some good conservations with my sister. we also had kady’s bridal shower. kaycee’s house is amazing and so is kaycee! i wish she lived closer. 

[december 2019] kady got married! it was a really beautiful reception. i finished my semester with all As and Bs! entomology was really hard, but i got a B in there! most people in ento got Cs or Ds so i did really well :) we started playing left for dead again 

[january 2020] kady is on her honeymoon. marissa and i watched midsommar on new years eve. i started my new classes. i am taking herpetology and paleontology and local flora. i also TA for plant phys and am doing research with dr. barta! life was pretty good. oh, i tried getting glass animals tickets, but they sold out, so i was really bummed :///

[february 2020] chiefs won the superbowl, played dragon age, went to class. i spend a lot of time with amanda and love her so much. i also got my resume together! waiting to hear back so i can start applying for jobs.

[march 2020] it’s the current month. it’s been a wild month because of the virus. i was supposed to find a place to live by may and a job this month but the virus has made that pretty much impossible. my dad has been reassuring but also not at the same time. it will all work out. i voted for bernie in the primaries. i have become extremely socialist in my views. right now, i am really into NGE and jojo’s bizarre adventure and i am listening to a lot of the kinks. jyro turned 11 this month. 11! he’s getting so old. i hope i can find a place to live but i need to find a job first. it’s a stressful time. hopefully i won’t get the virus but... we will see. also, i’ll try to keep this updated. maybe monthly! 

see ya xox

lex