How America Came to the Mountains

doi:10.5810/kentucky/9780813125237.002.0009

Front Matter

How America Came to the Mountains

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https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813125237.002.0009

Pages

xiv–xvi

Published:

October 2008

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The way the Brier remembers it, folks weren't sure
at first what was coming. The air felt strange,
and smelled of blasting powder, carbide, diesel fumes.
A hen crowed and a witty prophecied
eight lanes of fogged-in asphalt filled with headlights.
Most people hadn't gone to bed that evening,
believing an awful storm was coming to the mountains.
And come it did. At first, the Brier remembers,
it sounded like a train whistle far off in the night.
They felt it shake the ground as it came roaring.
Then it was big trucks roaring down an interstate,
a singing like a circle saw in oak,
a roil of every kind of noise, factory
whistles, cows bellowing, a caravan
of camper trucks bearing down
blowing their horns and playing loud tapedecks.
He recollects it followed creeks and roadbeds
and when it hit, it blew the tops off houses,
shook people out of bed, exposing them
to a sudden black sky wide as eight lanes of asphalt,
and dropped a hail of beer cans, buckets
and bottles clattering on their sleepy heads.
Children were sucked up and never seen again.
The Brier remembers the sky full of trucks
and flying radios, bicycles and tv sets, whirling
log chains, red wagons, new shoes and tangerines.
Others told him they saw it coming like a wave
of tumbling dirt and rocks and carbodies
rolling before the blade of a bulldozer,
saw it pass on by, leaving a wake
of singing commercials, leaving ditches
full of spray cans and junk cars, canned
biscuit containers, tinfoil pie plates.
Some told him it felt like a flooding creek
that leaves ribbons of polyethylene
hanging from willow trees along the bank
and rusty cardoors half silted over on sandbars.
It was that storm that dropped beat-up cars
all up and down the hollers, out in fields
just like a tornado that tears tin sheets
off tops of barns and drapes them like scarves
on trees in quiet fields two miles from any settlement.
And that's why now so many old barn doors
up and down the mountains hang by one hinge
and gravel in the creek is broken glass.
That's how the Brier remembers America coming
to the mountains. He was just a little feller
but he recollects how his Mama got
all of the younguns out of bed, recalls
being scared of the dark and the coming roar
and trying to put both feet into one leg
of his overalls.
They left the mountains fast
and lived in Is, Illinois, for a while
but found it dull country and moved back.
The Brier has lived in As If, Kentucky, ever since.

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