As I mentioned in an earlier post, we hosted a group of students from Berea College for a day of sustainability, Appalachian-style. One of those students, Alexa Lloyd of Louisville, Kentucky, shares her impressions of the weekend below:

"Letcher County Reflection
 As I began reading “A Tale of the Future,” it hit me that the very first word was “imagine.”  The words that follow describe a sort of utopia, a land better than what we now know and certainly better than we could hope for in the aftermath of mountaintop removal mining.  They describe a sustainable and resilient community, conscious of their environment and of their actions.  So why is this an “imaginary” idea?  Perhaps because as of now, very few people understand what mountaintop removal is-except for the fact that it gets them the resources they need. It isn’t commonly accepted knowledge that energy-hungry consumers are destroying land in order to get fossil fuels and in turn also destroying the atmosphere.  Consumers of fossil fuels are in denial that without major efforts on everyone’s part, we the people will never see “fields of waving grasses, grains, and pastures that reflect in their colors the diversity of the farms below.”  No, instead we will be saddled with “a moonscape, devoid of both life and of people”-and wondering how it got that  way.
           
These are the thoughts that came to mind as I was riding over the  scarred, carved land in a terrifyingly small plane. 
At first I was solely focusing on that plane, how small it was and the sounds I heard as it rattled against early morning winds. Then I started looking out the window and saw the steam and fog rising from the valleys.  I was amazed at how “pretty” it looked, until we flew further and I saw plains and mountains once green that had been utterly stripped of life. Not nearly so pretty-if anything, it was terrifying.  Being from Louisville, I was born and raised on one extreme end of the spectrum.  I never saw the mountaintop removal, I never saw beautiful valleys ruined by machinery and backhoes and explosives. Instead I grew up in one of the cities in Kentucky that consumed most of those resources.  Massive
buildings and heavy vehicle traffic was the norm, as was the resulting thick cloud of pollution that made it nearly impossible to breathe some days.  My parents would drive off to work in the morning, contributing to the pollution that made air quality advisories the norm in my life-and I would sit at home knowing nothing about what we were really doing to our environment.  

In some ways, although I am more informed as an adult, I don’t think it really clicked what we were doing until that flyover sort of pushed it in my face.  As our hosts put it, when you see things like that “you can realize how fragile things
are.”
             
I was still thinking about that as we continued driving to get to where  we were staying.  I had almost  nodded off when we had to get out-the mountain hills were so steep we had to  help the van make its way up the mountain.  The first thing I noticed was the air-it smelled so much cleaner than what I am used to in Louisville, definitely.  As I looked around and tried to stay out of the way I noticed all the vegetation that was around-also something very foreign to me. As we walked up the hill laughing about how good it was to finally be there, I noticed somewhat of a growing sense of camaraderie among my classmates.  Taking us out of our “city” and putting us in an unfamiliar environment was already showing results-moving us in the direction that resilient community members would hope for.
             
In all honesty, I expected to be bored off my rear end. I was pleasantly surprised to not be.  I watched soap being made as men far wiser than us described the farmer’s almanac. I watched older men and women sit around an already crackling campfire and play music, talking about the environment that  they had made their home in.  The land they had made their home and their living from-not the city they lived in, or the car they drove-but instead the crops they were raising, and the food they preserved for their families.  I sat and laughed with my classmates in a circle as we watched a chair being completed, and smiled at the happy blush on Jenn’s face when she got to keep it.  I sat on the porch with Sean and Rachael, laughing at the fact that none of us “city kids” could string beans terribly well-and some people couldn’t even thread the needle to do so! 
 
I think I can speak for everyone when I say dinner was amazing.  There’s nothing quite like the feeling of good food after a busy day of working, traveling, learning, and experiencing.  Even better was the fact that the food was home cooked-and natural. Shoveling down bowls of potato soup and cornbread with fried apple pies to wash it down provided an entirely different mealtime experience than say, eating a triple whopper at Burger King. The sense of community was still there-how different it was to see how different we were living from how we could and should be living.  Even in Berea, which is far more advanced than many communities in terms of sustainability and resilience, we still depend on many outside corporations and businesses to “get by.”  These people were living how we should-in the aftermath and continued destruction of mountaintop removal and coal pollution; they were growing their food from the land and conserving their resources.

My favorite memory from this trip, however, was the time spent by the fire singing songs and telling stories.  Our hosts also told us that “These hills are full of stories,” but they’re the type of stories you don’t realize exist until you’ve heard them and even seen them for yourself.  As the adults retired to either warmth or sleep, the rest of the class continued
incinerating marshmallows and flicking embers at each other.  We sat and talked until late at night-our lives back home, our experiences growing up, and what we thought of what we had seen that day.  Even once we cuddled up in the tents to try and stay warm, we were still laughing hysterically about jokes we had told or remembering songs that had been sung around the fire.

Overall, I think I learned a lot more from this trip than I expected to.  For me, I was simply lucky that I wasn’t really sure what to expect and therefore kept somewhat of an open mind.  Being receptive to the new ideas that were coming forward made it much easier to appreciate those ideas."


 

We count among our Board of Directors an alumna of Berea College, which was founded to serve Appalachia, and we have been working with the College for  a number of years, as the Other Projects page indicates. Much of that cooperation is with the Sustainability Department directed by Richard Olson, since there is a lot of commonality between what Berea hopes to encourage and much of Eastern Kentucky has never quite given up: the old farming and food preserving skills that once made people nearly self-sufficient. Loretta Lynn once, when asked by a talk show host what she had been doing, replied "Canning," and went on to enumerate how many hundred quarts of corn, beans, and other foods she had preserved that summer. The talk show host asked her why she did that, with the implication, at least, that with her fame and money, she clearly did not need to can. She replied that money and fame can disappear in an instant, but you'll always be all right if you have a garden and a cellar full of canned goods.

We annually host students from the college for a day in Eastern Kentucky. This year  that visit took place on 22 October The emphasis was on sustainability as still practiced in this area. The class consisted of about a dozen students plus faculty from two places, Berea and Wayne State University. The students are interested in the environment and sustainable living, and the day was all about sustainability Appalachian style. We recruited our friends to help us, and together we strung green beans onto thread and hung them up for drying into shuckey beans (which my father called leather britches), pulled the husks off ears of corn, shelled the ears of  corn, ground the corn kernels into cornmeal,  used the husks to make a  shuck mattress like the kind my grandparents used on their beds (and that I slept on  as a child), and  boiled some of the dried corn kernels with lye to make hominy. While the hominy-making was going on, one of the faculty kept asking, "That's lye? Real lye? And you're going to eat what comes out of that pot?" But  when supper came, she did eat the hominy, and loved it.

 Besides preserving food, we caned a chair seat with hickory bark, made homemade soap, also with lye, and used a draw  knife and shaving horse to make furniture legs. We also built a huge bonfire and made music around it. 
 
The process was educational to me as well as to the students. For one thing, since it was too late in the year to use green beans from the garden, I had to buy them. I parceled out about five pounds and told the students that we first had to remove  the strings  from the bean pods before runing twine through the beans to render them "hangable" for  drying. To my surprise, the bought beans had no strings. One of  the participants (the cornmeal grinder) said that these days what  you buy in stores  are hybrid beans that have had the strings bred out of them, along with the taste. Can't speak for the taste, but they certainly had no strings. So we went  straight to needle and twine and produced a dozen nice strings  to hang on the porch  of the cabin we were using.

I also learned something about cornmeal. Home-grown and -ground is much healthier than store-bought. Apparently, the little seed at the base of each kernel is taken out of commercial cornmeal, either to make cornflakes or to extend shelf-life, or both. So you are missing important nutrients when you  buy corn meal from the store. Home-grown and -ground tastes better too.

I don't "put away" food, as we call canning and preserving, since we're not here in summer, but a lot of people pitched in with home-produced sauerkraut, pickled corn, pickled beans, canned berries, dried apples, molasses, etc. I received   a particular bonus in that one of our friends gave me two quarts of mixed pickles.  You are probably this minute thinking of something made with cucumbers, like  bread and butter pickles or dill pickles, but "mixed pickles" here conveys corn, green beans, and cabbage (and sometime onions and green peppers) chopped, mixed, and pickled with salt and vinegar (no sugar). In the old days, the chopping would have been done with an empty, sharpened Carnation milk or similar store-bought can.They turn out like sauerkraut, unsurprisingly. To serve them, you rinse them and fry them in what once was lard or bacon fat, but now commonly is something like olive oil for health's sake. I love the things, and have fried and eaten one quart pretty much singlehandedly, but am reserving the other for a special occasion.

Anyway, the students seemed to have a great time, and they sent us a sort of poster on which they had drawn sketches of ears of corn, green beans strung on twine, a big  campfire, the chair we caned, and similar reminders of the day, with notes about what they enjoyed most.

Richard Olson and his wife Cheyenne practice what he teaches about sustainable living. They have started a non-profit called Sustainable Berea (click on the highlighted name or go to http://www.sustainableberea.org to visit their website). Kami Pothukuchi, an Associate Professor at Wayne State who also accompanied the group, has founded two efforts toward sustainable living in Detroit. One is an award-winning project called Seed Wayne, which focuses on raising food in the city, and the other is called Detroit Fresh, which concentrates on providing a supply of vegetables to inner-city corner markets. To access either web site, click on the names above.

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We went to a molasses stir-off this weekend at the farm of friends. Not many people make molasses any more, but Randy and J.P. Campbell and their cousin Jesse Campbell hold a stir-off almost every year. J.P. grows the cane on his farm, and they all pitch in at stir-off time. It was a two-day affair that started Friday afternoon and lasted through Saturday. We took a camera in hopes of getting material for a short documentary. Some of the video is pasted on this site on the documentaries page.

Saturday was the social day with a lot of non-participants attending and a lot of good conversation - visiting, in Appalachian parlance - but from the point of view of learning about stir-offs Friday evening was much more interesting, because it included setting up, stripping and cutting the cane, and squeezing the juice. They were using an old-fashioned cane press but had converted it to be powered from a tractor drive-shaft, which turned the grindstones a lot faster than mules could.

Still, it took at least two hours to feed in a quarter-acre of cane stalks and press out the juice. The end product was a little over a hundred gallons of juice, all of which was poured into a foot-deep, 4'x8' rectangular steel pan. The second day consisted mostly of straining the juice, building the fire under the pan, and boiling the juice. It took almost nine hours to boil the juice down, which Randy said was the longest it had ever taken, and which he blamed on mostly wet wood for the fire.

Two people skimmed foam the whole time the juice boiled, essentially while standing in a steam bath for nine hours. It was only in the last half hour that molasses seemed to come, but it came fast at the end, turning from a thin greenish to a more viscous light-brown liquid topped with golden amber foam..

Cutting the cane and skimming the juice as it boiled were the two labor-intensive and dirty jobs, although Matt Oaks, one of the party, told me what he hated worst was feeding the cane into the mill. He said it was boring and seemed to take forever. For myself, I liked that part best because of the instant gratification. As the cane stalk went in, you could immediately see the juice running out.

As said, Saturday was the social day. The wives brought food and set up lunch for the participants and the hangers-on like us. We contributed, of course, but we brought dessert while we ate mostly soup beans, shuckey beans, sauerkraut fried with weiners, and cornbread, all traditional Appalachian foods and all delicious. It was a good trade-off.

What started as 100 gallons of juice and many hours of labor ended as perhaps ten gallons of molasses. The whole process brought home to me the reality of how hard our ancestors toiled for their food. As I was mulling this over, it occurred to me that the only sources our Appalachian ancestors had for sweetening were honey and molasses. I'm sure a few of them could have afforded sugar, but not many would have been able to. Their cash, when they got it, was usually reserved for salt, which was much more critical, and perhaps shoes.

It took a lot of persistence and unremitting effort to start with cane seed and end up with molasses, with the product being winnowed down and skimmed all the way. That's the way it is with a lot of life,especially the successful bits. The tools are just different.

If you would like to attend a stir-off, there's one held every September in West Liberty, Kentucky. Their web site is http://www.cityofwestliberty.com/sorghumfestival.htm.