Letcher County, Here We Come!

by Mary Love

On Saturday morning, June 16, six middle schoolers (Jessi Dierks-Washington, Lindsay Curcio, Emily Pauw, Claire Lockard, Luiz Kemmerle, and Jack Deutsch) and three adults (Mary Love, Kate Husk, and Ian Husk) squeezed themselves and all their stuff into a 12 passenger van and said goodbye to parents and friends. After a stop at Kroger to stock up on ice, water, soft drinks, and snacks, we set off for Letcher County and the town of Whitesburg in the eastern Kentucky mountains.

By lunchtime we had reached Berea, where we stopped for lunch. Then it was off to downtown to explore Kentucky crafts. We stopped at a number of shops, but the highlight of our visit was to the shop of Warren May, master woodworker and maker of fine dulcimers. He called us over to a counter covered with 6 or 8 dulcimers. He showed us how to play them and then had three of the kids play while the rest of us sang along. It was a real treat!

Too soon it was time to load back into the van and head for London and the turnoff to the Hal Rogers Parkway. Sixty beautiful miles later, we reached Hazard and turned south on KY 15 to Whitesburg. We arrived at our motel around supper time, checked in, and ate supper. We had a special treat that evening. We drove over Pine Mountain to Eolia (pronounced Eola) to see the community center where we would be staying and to visit the Valley of the Winds art gallery. Sharman and Jeff Chapman-Crane are artists who have lived in the area for over 20 years. Jeff is a wonderful painter, and Sharman creates beautiful pieces from everyday objects. The highlight of the visit was being able to see Jeff’s sculpture The Agony of Gaia depicting Mother Earth being torn apart by mountaintop removal.

Sunday morning, Ian got up early and was on top of Pine Mountain to watch and photograph the sunrise. He then went down into Whitesburg and took pictures of the sleeping town. He came back with 400 pictures!

As we checked out of the motel, we were joined by Lily and Phoebe Priel and Andrea Trautwein. They had driven over from Bowling Green in the middle of the night so that Lily could join the mission trip.

Breakfast was at Graham Memorial Presbyterian Church in Whitesburg. The pastor was the youth minister at Kate’s home church when she was a teenager. They were having their annual Father’s Day breakfast and invited us to join them. It was a great home-style meal with fresh biscuits, sausage gravy, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, toast, coffee, milk, and orange juice. It beat Bob Evans by a country mile! The challenge, of course, was to stay awake in church after that great meal.

After church Andrea, Phoebe, and Ian headed back to Louisville, and we headed for Carr Creek State Park. There is a great swimming area on the lake, and we spent several hours splashing and sunning. Then, we were finally ready for lunch! After sandwiches at Subway, we stopped in at Wal-Mart next door for some last-minute shopping for needed supplies.

Then it was back over the mountain to check in at the ECCO (Eolia Christian Community Outreach) community center where we would be staying and working. Pete and Stephanie, their three children, and Stephanie’s Aunt Marie introduced us to our time together and the work of SWAP (Serving with Appalachian People), an outreach of the Mennonite Central Committee. There was at least one other SWAP group working at another location in the county that week. We were at ECCO with a group of adults from Chambersburg, PA who were there to do some serious construction work. (We, of course, were kept away from power tools and roofs and were given other tasks for the three days we were there!) After an energetic romp in the playground at the Eolia Community Park (really cool!) we were ready for evening devotions and a good night’s sleep.

Monday morning we got up, got dressed, made our sack lunches, had breakfast and morning devotions, and got ready for our work project for the day. We went to Miss Brenda’s place “just down the road a piece” and scrubbed and washed down the siding on her trailer with a mold and mildew killer. After we had been there for an hour or so, Pete and his son Caleb, who is 5 years old, came by to check on us. Caleb wanted to stay with us instead of going with his dad, so we let him spray off some of what we had scrubbed down. He got a devilish gleam in his eye and proceeded to spray the girls instead of the siding! For a while there, we were lucky to get any water on the trailer at all.

Even though we had brought our sack lunches, Miss Brenda offered to fix lunch for us, and we gladly accepted. We sat on the porch and feasted on hot dogs, chips, and cookies. It took a couple of hours more, but we finally finished cleaning her trailer and headed back to ECCO. We had time for showers and naps and journaling before supper. That night, Stephanie taught us more about Appalachia and its people.

Tuesday morning came too quickly, but we were soon up and functioning in the morning routine. Our projects that day were: staining the porch of the community center, scraping the exposed-beam ceiling of the dining room (to get rid of footprints on the wood that had appeared before construction), and painting doors and trim in the open area by the kitchen.

We stained all of the porch area, not realizing that stain takes a lot longer to dry than paint. We effectively cut off all of the primary entrances to the building! And since it turned more humid that day and rained a little that night, the porch stayed sticky and wet until after we left on Wednesday afternoon. At least everybody was well aware of how hard we had worked!

Luiz and Jack were given a different task that afternoon while the girls scraped and painted. They moved dirt around in the side yard to level off a parking space for Pete’s truck. And they moved 3’x6’ pieces of tin roofing from the picnic pavilion to the back of the building.

Supper on Tuesday was comprised of local favorites, to give us a “taste” of Appalachian food. We had soup beans and cornbread, fried taters, sauerkraut and weenies, and banana pudding. A great meal!

That night we had another special treat. Two local men, Darryl and Jerry, had heard that we would not be there on Thursday night, their regular night to play and sing for the SWAP volunteers. So they made a special trip to play just for us! Darryl is a retired coal miner and Jerry still works strip mines. They both play guitar and Jerry plays his fiddle some, too. They start out with faith songs that people have sung for years on porches and in front yards. They were mostly composed by the people in the community and have grown to be favorites of these two men. They come to sing as a way of saying “Thank You” to the volunteers for coming to work there. And they didn’t just sing for us, we had to join in, too. Luiz even volunteered to sing a solo, with Darryl and Jerry accompanying him on their guitars.

After singing 6 or 7 verses of Amazing Grace, we ended the evening (much too soon!) with a rousing rendition of Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Then it was time for evening devotions and bed.

On Wednesday morning we packed up the van and worked on our final chores. Luiz and Jack finished moving the BIG pile of tin roofing sheets. The girls divided into two groups and did some more painting next to the kitchen and also primed the walls of the room upstairs where they had slept.

After our last sack lunch, we headed out for the return trip to Louisville. We stopped in Whitesburg to visit Appalshop, a multi-disciplinary arts and education center. After a brief tour of the facility, we went into the studio of WMMT, the community radio station that broadcasts to communities in at least four states in Appalachia. The host/disc jockey/announcer was chatting live on the air with Lee Sexton, an 86 year old legendary banjo player who lives in the area. We all crowded into the studio and got to talk on-air with Lee and to tell the folks a little about what we had been doing. One of the things that was mentioned a lot was how friendly everybody is and how much we enjoyed getting to know people.

Finally it was time to leave Letcher County. This time, we took KY 15 north all the way to the Bert T Combs Mountain Parkway. We stopped at Natural Bridge for a swim and supper, and then it was on to Lexington and home.

We are all grateful to everyone who helped to make it possible for us to go on this mission trip. Each of us came away with a new understanding of eastern Kentucky and the beauty and problems there. We hope that in the coming months we will be able to share more of our experiences with you.