Day 17, 6/21/77
We rode the twenty-five miles into Berea with no problems outside of myself. But I started feeling less excitement about the trip. Perhaps it was the hitch hiking—spoiling the purity of the grand endeavor. Perhaps it was boredom, or the unrelenting ugliness and filth of Appalachia. And certainly the rain and steep mountains had reduced my fervor.
I began to think that perhaps now the beginning had worn off, and now I could really be in touch with the trip. The beginning was over. Seven hundred miles of the toughest grades in America. Twenty-seven hundred more miles to go. We were about a fifth of the way across America, but we were on the other side of the toughest section. The grades in Appalachia are the steepest, because the back roads there were mostly made before the invention of the bulldozer. And we weren’t allowed onto the interstates. It seemed like quite an accomplishment.
On the way into Berea, I was aware again of how hard it had been to leave the job. Now, with the trip having lost its glamour, the decision to quit that job seemed less wise, or maybe even stupid. I argued internally: I need to stay with this, live it through, spend more time with my journal, and be in this space. This still could turn out to be one of the most positive things I have ever done for myself.
Appalachia, from Damascus, VA to Berea, KY, with a slight respite around Pippa Passes (and Alice Lloyd College) was a very dreary place. It was mountainous throughout. Most of the people have come down from the mountains, where they had some marginal agriculture going, and now live along the roads and work in some aspect of the coal industry. Everybody seemed to wear “Clinchfield Coal” baseball caps back across the Virginia line. We had spoken with a few of the people, and they had rationalized staying in the mines:
“The mines are cool in the summer, warm in the winter.”
“Freeman thinks we need that hospital card—my sister’s baby cost her $1400 last year.”
Just as there are few blacks—we had seen two in the last week—there is little flat space in Appalachia. The houses lined the roads, with none back in the mountains and trees. The people didn’t appreciate the natural beauty and threw their Mountain Dew and RC cans anywhere. They dumped their trash off mountain roads. Although they were uniformly nice to us, the younger people seemed to be mostly into cars—gaudy, noisy cars, racing them around like dozens of Richard Pettys. All these cars seemed to need mufflers. Coupled with the huge noisy coal trucks, creating potholes in the road, and the proximity to the roads of 80%-90% of the population, Appalachia was not the idyllic rural setting I had imagined.
I was glad to be done with it.
![Automobile [au]](/emoticons/emotion-34.gif)
In Berea we found another quaint and pretty town, built around a college which was dedicated to the honor and study of Appalachian culture. We met Tim Bailey, a jumpy, friendly guy who invited us to crash at his house. We did—after eating a delicious dinner at Nancy’s Restaurant in Berea. From that point on, we looked for another Nancy’s as we crossed the country.
We walked around the picturesque town. Inanna bought a postcard and wrote a brief note, dropped it in a mailbox. It was a part of her strategy for getting a job. She had interviewed for a job as a counselor in a high school back home, and had been politely told there wasn’t an opening. She told her interviewer that she would be bicycling across the country, but would be back in the fall, and to keep her in mind should an opening crop up. He had seemed to have some doubt on his face—so she promised to send him postcards to remind him. It was also a way to prove she was actually doing it. She would send 10 or 15 such cards to him over the summer.
I wrote a letter back to my friends at the Outreach clinic: “The excitement has worn off—we can now see this trip directly, but we still can’t tell you what we see. I’ve been having heavy dreams about Outreach and my Navy experiences. I guess I am concerned about what the next phase will be…”
Tim opened his house to us and opened the gallon jug of sun tea he had brewing on the porch. He was very nice but wanted to show us how to cook granola, so we had to stay up until 11:30 PM, which was very late for us. We had to appreciate his hospitality—he even gave us breakfast. As we left he filled my water bottle with Gatorade.