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Restoring Appalachian Roots

12/21/2013

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I am from Appalachia. I was away from it for long decades, but I am immersed in it again. And what I have come to realize is how much I appreciate the mountain language I no longer speak, but happily still can understand.

After college, I went to graduate school in the Midwest, and then lived in Alaska, California, Colorado and other TV-commentator-accent locales. I moved to those places after college, but that was not when I lost my language. That actually took place while I was in college, a college that sat in Kentucky but not truly in Appalachia. When I was in college, I decided (with some pretty good evidence) that most of the world equated a southern or Appalachian accent with stupidity. Since I was not stupid (on any test you might want to name, I would have outscored a lot of those who took the “stupid” position), and since my ego didn’t care for being thought stupid, I made a determined effort to move my birthplace linguistically, so as not to be assigned to the stupid class based only on accent. By the time I had finished that effort (about six months), I had gone so far overboard that I apparently moved linguistically to England; I sounded faintly upper-class British, with wonderful enunciation and preciseness, and was sometimes mistaken for a Brit.

Sometime after that, as I scoped other parts of the country, I began to overcome my ego, and my speech  mellowed into standard American with just traces of something that people would comment on favorably and ask about. Appalachia never did come back, but people would vaguely peg me as a Virginian (my birthplace) or perhaps from somewhere in the south.

About ten years ago, I resumed living in Appalachia for a good fraction of each year, among Appalachians who never left and who somehow escaped pollution by TV-speak, and became bathed in my mother tongue again. I find it wonderful. Some of its character depends on pronunciation, and some of it on its wonderful expressions, but the sum total forms a pattern you hear nowhere else. Yesterday, we were talking to a local official, and he added an “h” to the word “it.” To be clear, he said something along the lines of, “Hit’s a good thing…” That’s not a pronunciation that you hear everywhere. Of course, I heard it growing up, but not in all the years I was away. Now I hear it again, and I like it instead of deploring it. Let me say up front: the official is not stupid. He has, I am sure, a college degree. His children have advanced degrees. He is successful and they are successful. But he is Appalachian, and he pronounces the word “it” as “hit.” And good for him. I have done a 180 from the days when I tried to lose my home accent, and now I hope it survives forever, if not in me, at least in others in Appalachia.

The prototypical Appalachian pronunciation marker, of course, is in the way we say “I,” the perpendicular pronoun. Our rendering of the vowel “I” is generally characterized as a flat “I.” This is in contract to the standard pronunciation, which is often summed up as a round “I.” I take issue with the description “flat”, and I will talk about that in a minute. But I do have to say that I think characterizing the standard pronunciation of “I” as round has some credibility. The sound does curve. It has a tail, in fact, that almost makes it sound like two syllables. You can’t say it quickly. You are forced to draw out the sound.

In contrast, the Appalachian “I” can be said in a fraction of a second. “Flat” somehow doesn’t convey that short sound. Borrowing a term from music, I would characterize it as the very opposite:  sharp rather than flat. It just has that cutoff sound that “sharp” conveys.

Names that have the same spelling don’t sound the same in Appalachia either. My Aunt Mary has, to her husband Gene, been “Murry” all her life. And that is also good. It’s the way Appalachians say the name, and it’s a difference worth keeping. Most of us have lost that, but Uncle Gene is in his tenth decade, and he is grounded in the old.

Setting aside punctuation issues, I could go on for a long time about Appalachian expressions, but I will confine myself to just one example here. About ten years ago, visiting my former town in Appalachia, I fell into conversation with a neighbor slightly younger than me, but much more genuinely Appalachian in his speech. He was talking about his family’s graveyard. (One of the characteristics of Appalachia is that nearly every family has its own graveyard, which the family maintains. The big commercial burying grounds are uncmmon here, especially if you get out of the towns and into the hollows.) He was talking about the hours he put in on his ancestors’ plots, and he said, about his siblings, “Now, I’m not throwing off on them, but…” What he was saying to me was that, while he was not criticizing them, it was an unfortunate fact that they were not putting in their share of work needed to maintain the graveyard. Internally, I greeted that expression with joy. It had passed from my mind years before, and meeting it again was like meeting an old friend. Then I got to thinking of “Shoot fire (the latter word pronounced “far”), and of “chimlee” instead of chimney, and was off on a recision to my my language youth. Other expressions came to mind, to my pleasure, but I will leave “Shoot fire”, “chimlee” and others to another day.

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2013 Summarized

12/11/2013

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At the end of each year, we usually summarize it for our family and friends. This is it for 2013.

We had a couple of nice things happen to us this year, and a couple of bad ones, but we’ll omit both categories in favor of weather, which loomed large, since we were present in Alaska for two weather records.

This year, we got back to Alaska in March with the intention of renovating our kitchen before fishing started. Said kitchen dates from the seventies and is a teeny bit inconvenient. This is the British understated way of saying the damn thing doesn’t work. If I was breaking eggs into a skillet at the cooktop, I had to walk the length of the long narrow space to toss the eggshell into the trash and to rinse my hands at the sink. (I guess the work-triangle concept had not penetrated Alaska by the seventies.) The oven was not self-cleaning and would not hold a full-size cookie sheet.  I also had cabinets around three corners, which meant majorly - isn’t that a descriptive word? - inaccessible storage at three corners. Plus other less than endearing characteristics.

Anyway, I had talked for years about this kitchen update, but only talk. This was going to be the year. Alas, it wasn’t. I won’t recount the obstacles we met, but they were many and chafing. So we ended our stay in Alaska with the kitchen the winner. Maybe next year.

What getting up there well before the end of March actually did do was remind us of how unreliable an Alaska spring can be. Usually by the end of March, breakup is over, the roads are clear, the snow and ice are mostly gone, and transportation  of the sort enjoyed in the Lower 48 is possible.  This year, breakup started, but underwent a change of mind.

Thanks apparently to the North Pacific Decadal Oscillation’s taking a notion to go into a cold phase, Alaska had a very delayed spring. All told, we had more than a half-dozen March thru May snowfalls, some substantial. Nothing like waking on a late April or May morning to fogging snow. In fact, Anchorage set a record this year for longest snow season. The first snow of this winter of 2012-2013 fell on about 9/27 last fall and the last one at the end of May this spring. When, before that last snow, the meteorologists alerted us that, if the predicted fall exceeded one-eighth inch, we would set a new record, most of us were thinking that if we had to get snow at the end of May, we at least wanted the record, and planned to cheer the snow on. We need not have worried. Parts of town got six inches.

Worse than the snow was the eight inches of packed ice that topped all the parking lots and sidewalks, and all except the main roads. Since we don’t winter in Alaska any more, we don't have studded or even winter tires. Most Alaskans keep theirs on until all the threat is gone (which is usually about 1 May, though not this year) so driving was very dicey for us, especially when the temperature rose into the thirties at midday and the top layer of the ice started melting on the roads. We had to stay off the roads when we could, and creep around very tentatively when we couldn’t. Even when we started off very carefully at traffic lights, the wheels sometimes spun. Then, somewhere in there, we got a streak of four snows in about a week, the first one six inches, and even the main roads were back to bad. It took more than two weeks to get the roads clear again, and another week to get the sidewalks clear. But there was still snow everywhere else, all the yards, roofs, etc

While we were cowering under unending winter, John Back, a Kentucky neighbor, rubbed salt in the wound by calling to tell us Eastern Kentucky was having a great April morel (aka dry-land fish) season. I've hunted morel mushrooms once, and I quickly discovered that there's a knack to it. Dean kind of got the hang of picking them out of the forest-floor debris, but I never developed that sight trick. In several hours of staring, I think I found just one.

After our one expedition, a friend advised us to soak the morels in salt water overnight, and I was glad I did because the next morning there was about a three-inch worm floating in the water. It must have been sheltering in one of the hollow stalks. I fixed the dozen morels three ways, fried like fish with cornmeal and flour, sauteed uncoated in olive oil and garlic, and sauteed plain in butter, and I think I liked the last one best.

Our morel hunt mirrored our one ginseng expedition with another Kentuckian. He would take us within a few feet of a plant and invite us to find it, and I would consistently fail. I’m about as good at finding dry-land fish as at finding ginseng, and wouldn't want to depend on either for a living.

I can’t leave the issue of the no-spring without giving you the Alaska definition of the seasons. According to Alaskans, there are two in Alaska:  winter, and Damn-Late-in-the-Fall. It sure seemed like that. But the weather made up for the infernal spring in June. We had long sunny days all month. In fact, we set another record. We virtually leapt past the old record for number of June days over seventy degrees, and a lot of us were complaining about the heat. For some reason, the seventies in Alaska feel more like eighties or maybe nineties feel in the lower 48 (sun closer? atmosphere thinner because of the ozone hole?) and Alaskans aren’t used to those extremes.

The late spring did do us some favors. We got some wonderful video of a pair of trumpeter swans that also arrived in Alaska too early. They landed on the ice at Eastchester Lagoon near here, and since they didn't have any open water to use for take-off, they had to hang around on the ice waiting for a lead to open and give them a long enough reach of water to flap and paddle their way into the air. That happened after a couple of weeks of cooling their feet on the ice, and they went winging northwest toward their breeding grounds, likely with frostbitten feet. We were hoping they'd establish summer residence there, as some very occasionally do, but no such luck.

Fishing was a mixed bag. The first run of salmon had decent numbers, but the water was a foot higher than normal and the current horrendous. To wade out far enough to get at the fish was taking your life in your hands, especially on a bottom as unstable as the Russian River’s. Dean went into the river four times, and once you’ve done that, you can’t get out on your own. You just can’t get up with that icy current pouring over you and pounding you down. Fortunately, there was always someone around to help. He was not close to drowning any time, but there were several close calls in other cases. In one case, a man’s chest waders filled with water and took him under, and it was a near thing. We’re used to falling in the river, but it’s usually not dangerous, at least to the extent we experienced this year. I had a hard time standing against the current when I was out no further than my calves, so I took the coward’s path and stayed practically on shore. Dean, however, will get out there nearly over his hip boots, with the inevitable result.

The bears made up for mixed fishing. We saw a lot on the river, and captured some very good footage, especially of a huge, blonde-colored brown bear (coastal grizzly) sow with a very tiny brown cub. He had a struggle following her around the river, but he was dauntless and plugged along.

Have a very good 2014.

Dean and Nina

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    Author

    Nina Cornett is  presently at work on a memoir, is pulling together a concept for a mystery novel  set in Alaska, and is keeping a log of the Cornetts' efforts to bring  attention to timber theft in Kentucky with the thought that it might be the germ  of a future book.

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