"Is where we live a kind of lost place, Mama?" my Ivy Pearl asked. Without thinking, I answered, "Yes, it is, Ivy." In the few days since she asked, I've been thinking of all the ways that we do very much live in a kind of lost place. Beginning with our cabin being located through the creek and in the woods. People don't visit often. It is like a world all to ourselves if we want it to be, until the summer comes and more people come to visit our landlord and our hearts race when we see someone walking up the road and are unsure where they came from. We can do yoga on the porch in our jammies. We can run and scream like wild banshees. We can fall asleep in the grass and feel safe. We can hear the birds chirping, the creek running, the frogs singing, and the coyotes dueling it out for the alpha factor. It is easy to feel alone and lonesome. Southeastern, Kentucky is that kind of place the rest of the country/world only hear about in terms of coal, poverty, drug addiction, or bluegrass music. It is still perfectly acceptable to publicly make fun of the "hillbilly". Tolerance and equality preaching folks have done it to my face on numerous occasions and I'm supposed to laugh as if it is a funny joke. Many times I haven't the energy to explain to them what they have just done to me and mine. It isn't worth the conversation. Other times, I'm too angry to speak. It seems to the rest of the country that we are good for entertainment, slave labor, and self perpetuated stagnation. Nevermind our beauty, kindness, deeply meaningful art, old and rich culture, and the way we insert complexities into the English language that are older than the country itself. We are a kind of lost place. Only known to ourselves. Visited mostly by ourselves. Praised as home by many and few. The world knows us not. I read an article not too long ago that talked about a study which found that there is a human gene that induces the need to explore. I sit here in this lost place with my children and ache to explore the world with them. These hills are in my blood, in the dust that made my being, in the air I breathe, and they inform every cell of my body. The Kentucky mountains will always be home. Maybe because of that I long to understand the places that aren't lost. I long to understand the other lost places as well. I want to share this world with my girls. It is thought that those people whose ancestors traveled the farthest to inhabit the world have the largest presence of this wanderlust gene. Our ancestors were the Native Americans, Scots-Irish, and early eastern European paid explorers. They came here to find home. They explored the known world before settling here. We have the wanderlust gene. This winter was a rough one for most of the families in the mountains. It kept us home for weeks on end and behind closed doors. Spring is the busiest time for my husband's tattoo shop, and it will be awhile before we can travel as a whole family. The girls and I ventured out on our own to visit my grandparents in South Carolina. With our modern day compass plugged in, we set out like a burden had been relieved of us. My Papaw has been diagnosed with bone cancer. It won't be long for him. He made ready awhile ago. Love and the wanderlust gene made this mother brave enough to travel alone with three small children. A drop in the bucket to some, and yet to those who reside in a lost place it can seem the pinnacle of excitement. I even took the girls to a Cultural and Kite Festival in a city unknown to me. That is something I can't remember ever doing before. We'll travel and know the world as home. Starting out small for now, as finances allow for small, we will go. The limit is through all space and time. We'll come back to our little lost place when we want to feel grounded again and know what's familiar and as connected as our soul. We will be free.
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I can't help but to think it would. It could be my own sadness affecting the way I see southeastern Kentucky, but in this case, I don't think it is. I can't help but be swallowed by this general malaise I feel all around me. I can feel it when we are driving back into the Kentucky mountains from outside. The beauty of our land calls us home and yet, when we arrive, there is this blanket of heaviness. It is such an energetic let down. Our collective subconscious, of which we are vaguely aware but who's impact is not recognizable. The defeat before the game is even begun. I can see it in the eyes of our people. Feel it in the way the wind blows through the trees. I can hear it in the cadence of our voices. It is readable in the sighs and groans of grocery aisles and waiting rooms. To conquer this would be to lift an incredible burden held by generations of a people. Yesterday, we took a day trip to Johnson City, Tennessee. Johnson City is a larger Appalachian city with most of the urban amenities and yet short miles from the joys of the rural mountains. We had to take some Christmas gifts to exchange and purchase some things for my husband's tattoo shop - The Parlor Room Fine Art and Custom Tattoo. It was such a relief to be out of the house and away from the familiar. We visited the Hands On! Museum, ate out, and accessed some great food at Earth Fare. Even though our restaurant experience was less than killer, we were all joy filled. It is those few and far between glimpses of the world outside of home that makes me daydream about what it would be like to live once again away from here. What opportunities would be held for my girls? How would it affect my husband's work and his ability to grow his business? Would I have more opportunities to interact with friends and be involved in my community? Is it possible that I'd feel more freedom? I don't know the real answer. Is there any way to know really? I've read about contentment and ways of living in both rural and urban settings. Now, I feel like we are in a limbo, waiting for some moment to arrive where we can say something really paid off big. There's been all kinds of media coverage of the little town where my husband works and where I was raised - Whitesburg, KY. We have a cultural media center in town called Appalshop that has worked for 40 years to preserve our cultural heritage through diverse undertakings. In no small part, because of their influence, we have had plenty of notable recognition. Yet, there's been outside attention focused on southeastern, KY long before Appalshop arrived in town and part of their efforts were spurred by the media coverage on Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty in Appalachia. Our people have been used, abused, and gawked at in a variety of ways.
It seems some media outlets want to focus on what is going right in our neck of the words, or at least an effort that is being made by some to make a life here on their own terms. Al Jazeera Amercia picked up a piece I wrote for The Daily Yonder (New Risk Takers in a Post Coal Economy) and came to Whitesburg to do a story on the ideas and work of the townsfolk - 5 Days in Kentucky: Small Town Conceives New Life After Mining. Here we are two full years after the article still in same place. I honestly can't say I have any clue what life is going to be like here when most of the coal mines are gone and if our region is sustainable as it is. Transition takes time. There are growing pains. I don't know what will become of Whitesburg and other southeastern Kentucky towns. For as many as give entrepreneurship a go, as many must step away. Even one of the business women in the Al Jazeera piece will soon be closing shop. My hope at this time is waning. I'm not sure if we'll be able to peek far enough from under this heavy quilt (as beautiful as each bit is) long enough to see the sun. I wonder if it is time to again see the world from another lawn. I've been laying in bed for hours every night before falling asleep. Not completely unusual except for what is keeping me awake is not my racing mind. It's so loud my mind cannot do any thinking beyond what could be making this overwhelming noise. Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, gurgle, pop, swoosh, swoosh, to the beat of my heart. It's the sound in my right ear. It is there all the time since September. Sometimes it is so loud I have a hard time hearing people when they talk. Other times it is subtle and barely noticeable. The best times are when there is background noise. At night, the sound is all that there is.
I Googled it. It's potentially a lot of things, some of them major things. Coupled with my terrible migraines it makes me a little wary of it not being looked into quickly. I went to my family doctor as an ER follow-up for migraine and stomach cramps a few weeks ago and mentioned it to him. He looked in there and listened to my carotid. Nothing is clogging my ear. My carotid sounded fine with the stethoscope. He recommended I try to get my neurology appointment moved up. It is scheduled for January. The appointment was made in October. I call. I tell the receptionist why I'd like to get in sooner. She explains that I'll have to go through the ER at the hospital and the ER doctor will do a consult with the neurologist. That will be the only way I could be seen by him any sooner. Thanks and no thanks. To think we wonder why the cost of healthcare is so outrageous. Don't blame it on the docs. So, I wait. I wait and I analyze. I wonder. I wait. I wait like I've been waiting to see a dermatologist for this thing that has come up that needs examined. Again, the referral was made in October and I don't see her until December. After finding out that no dermatologist in my region of the state will accept my insurance, I had to make an appointment with a doctor in Lexington which is three hours away from home. This isn't unusual for those of us who live in the Kentucky coalfields. I feel incredibly sorry for people who have limited transportation, funds, and are dealing with a major illness. A good doctor comes into the region and it is like rolling dice as to when you might actually get an appointment. Otherwise, you are referred to the surrounding cities for care - two or more hours from home. Fred D. Baldwin writes in an article titled, "Access to Care: Overcoming the Rural Physician Shortage": "Rural residents must often travel hours to consult specialists, and many rural communities lack even primary care physicians (physicians certified in family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology, and psychiatry). In fact, rural Appalachia still labors under a double burden, according to Lyle Snider, research director in the University of Kentucky Center for Rural Health's Division of Community Programs, Research, and Health Policy: the fewest primary care doctors and the most severe health problems. These situations are related: having too few doctors means that dangerous conditions go undiagnosed too long." The problem of physician shortage has gotten better as I have gotten older. I can directly see some of the strategies the state and healthcare agencies have used to recruit more doctors into the area. The most obvious one being recruiting residents of these rural counties into the field. I can think of my small graduating class and the class under me and point out at least seven of them who became a doctor, midwife, or PA-C and came home again to serve. I, too often for the small number of times I have actually used an ER, have had the experience of there being cultural and linguistic barriers to receiving proper care. It seems doctors from outside of the country and/or state were at one time given incentives to practice here. That's a good thing because without them we'd have been up the creek without a paddle. However, I very much doubt that they went through any cultural sensitivity training and I know personally from experience that there is often a language barrier as well. It hasn't been unusual to hear of disappointment in a doctor's visit or a feeling like the doctor didn't take the time to listen and understand. I know people who have left that little room having no clue what the doctor ordered. So, that said, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to see a neurologist without leaving eastern Kentucky, even if I have to wait until January. It is a step forward. However, the problem is far from being solved. A report, Rural Kentucky's Physician Shortage: Strategies for producing, recruiting, and retaining primary care providers within a medically underserved region says, "Then there is the issue of retention. One source of dissatisfaction on the part of rural physicians could be that the workload and demands placed upon them generally are greater than those experienced by their metropolitan counterparts. Those within Kentucky’s health care industry also point to decreased opportunity for professional contacts in medically underserved areas as a reason for premature physician departures from rural regions. There also are economic concerns. The federal government has become the largest contributor to graduate medical education, paying more than $7 billion annually toward that effort. Yet, federal and state governments have been criticized for failing to develop incentives that better encourage rural practice. Rural physicians typically derive a larger share of their gross practice revenue from Medicaid and Medicare patients, but these publicly supported insurance programs pay physicians at lower rates than private insurers. Rural physicians also typically have received lower Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements than their urban counterparts for performing the same medical procedures." Well, what do we do? I couldn't imagine serving in the healthcare field here. Being a patient within it can be stressful enough. And, is just another way that living rurally is vastly different from metropolitan living. So, I wait, albeit not very patiently, to figure out what this potentially big deal thing is going on in my head. I pretend like it is no thing at all until I lie down at night and it begs for my attention. |
AuthorKelli Hansel Haywood is the mother of three daughters living in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. She is a writer, weightlifter, yoga and movement instructor, chakra reader, and Reiki practitioner. Categories
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