Television usually bores me. The news programs are nothing more than a redundant regurgitation of the daily wires and most of the situational dramas are either flaky or far too predictable. But tonight, while sipping some hot and sour soup, I clicked on Trio to find a documentary about Shelby Lee Adams.
My life began in the hollers along the Virginia and West Virginia borders. Of course, my mother's only dream in life was to escape the hills. At the robust age of 6 months, I was packed up in an infant bath tub and strapped into the front seat of my mom's brown Pinto hatch back with everything she owned stacked to the ceiling behind us. She drove until she ran out of gas and up a telephone pole cable where a police officer found her, gave her 20 bucks, a meal and a place to sleep for the night. She made it out of the holler. Something no one else in the family had accomplished.
Mom always told me stories of the hardships they endured in the holler just outside of the mining towns. I laughed at the fact that she flushed a real toilet for the first time when she was 16. She said, "Me and my cousins flushed that toilet probably a thousand times before Daddy Duck came in smiling and said 'Good lord, that is enough boys! Your gonna use up all the water and I won't be able to go fishing.'" (Daddy Duck, who I called Pa Duck, was my mother's stepfather. He always wanted a boy. Never having one, he called all of his daughters and granddaughters his boys.) She remembered how much she hated the "damned pots" and the cold or sweltering stinking outhouse. Of course, with the flushing of toilets she also learned the luxury of running water in all of its forms including faucets and a bathtub. No longer did she have to fetch water in the morning and evening or share a luke-warm bath with the five regulars and whoever else happened to be spending the night in that tiny house.
As I get older and look back on the stories she relayed to a wide-eyed middle class child who in comparison could want for nothing, I see the beauty in the simplicity of her life. When I travel to see relatives who still reside in the hollers, some of whom continue to pump water and cook on wood stoves, I am unsure whether to feel sorry for them or to feel sorry for myself surrounded by unnecessary objects and gluttonous fare. There is something to be said for waking up at 4am covered in goosebumps from the chill to stoke up the fire for biscuits and bacon. I found it exhilarating to reach into the dewy hen house to a flurry of feathers and clucking for some fresh eggs and then sitting around a table and saying grace with those you love before the working day begins. Even a "devout" agnostic, such as myself, can appreciate a moment like that.
I realize I took a bit of a trip to get to my point but watching Shelby Lee Adams portrayal of mountain life and hearing some of the art critics who chose to see nothing but the poverty and lack of formal education really pricked my heart strings. My Grandma Cleo never made it to the third grade but she taught herself and the 13 of 18 siblings who survived to read using only the bible. She became a mountain minister and midwife. She rivaled the angels with her singing and mandolin playing. Her life was not trivial or empty; it was pure, simplistic, filled with community, brimming with love for family and devotion to God. I guess it just made me realize that sometimes we choose to see things through the blinders of our own reality and in doing so discredit the beauty that resides in the lifestyles we do not understand.
I couldn't imagine life without a flushing toilet. If I have children they will not be able to envision the olden days before the Internet. But I can only hope that my link to the hills and hollers will never be broken...Man that reminds me of my Grandma Cleo, I can almost hear her singing "Will the circle be unbroken? by and by lord by and by...."
If you want to take a peek into the life of the people in Appalachia, Shelby Lee Adams' pictorial representations are absolutely magnificent (see, I finally got to the point):
http://www.faheykleingallery.com/featured_artists/adams/adams_frames.htm
Or check out The True Meaning of Pictures on Trio http://www.triotv.com/schedules/
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. That night...errr morning I stayed up untill 2pm the next day writing and then picked up a brush and tore into some canvas. Shelby Lee may have actually tore down the walls of my creative block. It has been 3 years since I painted anything other than my toenails.