Barbara Presnell "Kentucky floods: the mountains will not forget you"
To live in the mountains in southeastern Kentucky is to live at nature’s mercy. Always. It’s something the people don’t forget, not for a single day, because the trees, the air, the wildlife, the water, and more remind inhabitants that they are there by the grace of those trees, that air. They know that they are not in charge, but something bigger, more powerful is. That something is the mountain, a living, breathing force.
On Friday afternoon, I listened to NPR as old friend, Dee Davis, spoke about the flooding that has ravaged the region where my husband Bill, son Will, and I lived for 5 years in the late 1980s. Last week, a combination of rain and saturated land caused water to rise a full six feet above the flood of 1957, theworst one on record until now.
I remember Dee Davis, his mother Joanne, his sister Carolyn, his wife and boys just a little older than Will. Remembering him took me back to other friendships from the years we spent in those harsh mountains with people who’d been born there, lived there, and would die there.
Our house was on the side of a mountain, not down in the valley and not in a holler. Below us, where we worked and where Will attended playschool, was the small town of Hazard, a community that sits in the valley surrounded by slate-rocked mountains, the North Fork of the Kentucky River snaking through it.
I remember how vulnerable I felt. The air—you couldn’t see it—was a sift of coal dust that crept into my son’s lungs. I declare even today that it was the air that caused his asthma, the asthma that was mysteriously gone the year we left the mountains. Surrounded by steep hills, the sun rose later and set earlier. All kinds of critters—mice, wild dogs, rattle snakes--lived both in our house and all around it.
Drinking water, which was pumped to a tank at the top of our mountain from a nearby town, often ran dry. But those mountains were the most beautiful, those slate rocks with ice sparkling down them were magical, and the people who lived there were the most down to earth, the most memorable, of any I’ve known before or since.
In his radio interview, Dee didn’t mention the Flood of 1989, but that’s the one we lived through. February, a warmish day, and spring runoff—the melting of that winter’s accumulation of ice and now—had begun. Then rain, pouring down. I got the news when Bill called. “The river’s rising. You need to go get Will.”
The water rose unbelievable fast. Three feet. Four feet. Five feet. The local radio station fed new
numbers almost by the minute. I couldn’t drive through town, where Bill was reporting on the flood from his newspaper office, because a foot of water already covered Main Street. To get to the playschool, I had to circle the mountain, skirting above the water, a clear view of what was happening playing out below me. I couldn’t drive down to the school, because the mud was beginning to slide on the hillsides. Rain was relentless. I parked the car on a narrow, muddy shoulder, not sure if it would even still be there when I returned to it. Mama instinct was strong: I had to get that child. I began my own slide down the hill, joining other parents on the same roadside, some panicking like me, the older ones taking it in stride.
I scooped up my child and headed back to the car, which had slid a few inches toward a ravine. We climbed in cautiously and drove around the mountain and home. Later that evening, Bill arrived, and eventually the rain stopped. Just as quickly, water began to recede.
Our house slid an inch off its foundation and down the mountain that day. Houses on the lower elevations were ruined. People were displaced. Businesses suffered. We were lucky then, though, because no one died, at least not in Hazard in Perry County, Kentucky. These days, when I read the news and see photographs of what’s happening there, I shudder. I’ve had a taste of what those waters can do. I know how destructive they are, how powerful, how fast.
As of this writing, 26 people have died in the flooding in the Kentucky mountains, and more rain is
forecast. It’s like the mountains are claiming them, and the waters are giving them up. This relationship Kentuckians have with the natural world is about nothing less than respect for the power and the fury—and the beauty and safety—those complex mountains offer.
Yes, there’s climate change in the Appalachians, just as everywhere, and environmental issues are widespread. But I’m telling you as an outsider who has seen it, the mountains are alive, and they take what they want.
Barbara Presnell is a poet and writer who lives in Lexington, NC. From 1986 to 1991, she lived on the top of a mountain in Hazard, Kentucky.
