Giving Thanks to Mountain Mama

“Mountain Mama Dreams” Mixed media painting by Barbara Fisher

I was born and raised in West Virginia—the only state completely bound within the confines of the region known as Appalachia.

And for this, I am thankful.

Because, I am a hillbilly.

And I am a mystic.

Being a hillbilly is nothing to be ashamed of. Nor is being a mystic.

Outsiders may look down upon Appalachians for our culture, and skeptics might shake their heads at mystics who have visions and experience things outside the bounds of most people’s understanding, but none of us should be ashamed of who and what we are.

I bring this up because the film version of J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy came out this week. That book, and now, I fear the film, will be viewed by the media not as a single person’s experience but as a universal Appalachian truism. The film is full of scenes of poverty, addiction and violence and people seem to be thinking this is all that Appalachia ever has been and ever will be.

But that isn’t the Appalachia I know. Or at least, that isn’t all of the Appalachia I know.

It’s much more complicated than that.

Appalachia is an enchanted place to my eyes. The magic, for good and for ill, is sunk deep in the red clay earth and seeps out into the muddy groundwater,. It has colored every interaction I’ve had with consensus reality from early childhood on.

And that muddy iron-tinged water runs through my veins as sure as hemoglobin does.

Appalachia is indeed a hardscrabble place. The hills and mountains are rugged, heavily forested, and scarred by the ravages of extractive industries. Salt, coal, iron and gas have been dragged from the bowels of the unwilling earth by the exploited labor of our sons and daughters. Their hands and bodies have bled into the hungry ground, while the riches from those resources clothed monied outlanders in wealth, power and prestige,

Little of that prosperity stayed in Appalachia to benefit her children. Her people are strong-backed and stiff-necked by nature and have been for hundreds of years, and they can be as harsh as the environment in which they live.

Yes. There is horror in these hills, as depicted in both the book and film, Hillbilly Elegy.

There is poverty.

Gods above and below, there is poverty. I grew up using outhouses off and on, and knew folk who didn’t have running water in their houses just outside the limits of the capitol city, Charleston. I saw hunger in the tenements and hollers, and experienced it briefly myself in childhood.

There is addiction.

Appalachians are known to be hard drinkers and I have to say, the number of alcoholics on both sides of my family is…staggering. I’ve never tasted moonshine, but my Gram knew moonshiners when she worked in a speakeasy during Prohibition, and she told me their stories.

There is violence.

So much violence, on a personal, familial and societal level. And yes, that does affect the culture of Appalachia. It can’t help but do that. I experienced violence, and witnessed it from an early age. Trauma shaped my spirit and mind, my heart and my soul.

For both good and ill, I am a true daughter of Appalachia.

But by all the Gods above and below, by the spirits within and without, by blood and bone, iron and stone, Appalachia is a place full of magicks and myths as old as the sky and as young as a newborn babe.

There is Mystery here, dancing up the airy mountains, and lurking in the deepest, darkest hollers.

The Other lives in every boulder, river and tree, and calls to us in the voices of wren and owl, crow and whippoorwill, cardinal and nightjar.

The Other’s music slips into our consciousness, dripping into our awareness in the cold notes of the banjo, the bright bells of hammered dulcimer and the wild banshee wail of a fiddle, It calls our feet to the dance that is always beginning and ending in a circle of life that spirals inwards to our hearts and outwards to eternity.

For all of these things, I am grateful. So very grateful, because of these magicks I was born, and to them, I will return when my body is finished.

Appalachia is home to the second oldest mountain range on this planet—the Blue Ridge Mountains.—and I think this may be why it is so filled with wild wonder and dark, chthonic power. Creation and destruction live here, in the dark bowels of Mother Earth—or as I called her as a child, “Mountain Mama.”

She was my first Goddess.

I got her name from that John Denver song—you know the one—the one he wrote about Virginia, but West Virginia scanned better, so, he changed it.

I caught a glimpse of Her sleeping, a tree-covered giantess laying on her side, her hips as wide as the world, shoulders strong enough to carry generations on them, her breasts full enough to feed us all. She lay across the Kanawha River from the high ridge where my grandparents’ farm perched—up in Red House, in Putnam County. That was where I first saw her as a child and I said hello to her every weekend on the drive to their farm, and I said goodbye to her on the way home.

My mother thought me strange, but when I pointed Mountain Mama out to my father one rare morning when he came with us, he nodded and said, “You’re right. That does look like a giant woman sleeping there.”

She was the first embodiment of a female deity I met in person. As I rambled and tumbled through the woods on the farm, running wild with three dogs as my companions, I heard Her whispers in the wind through the leaves and Her laughter in the chortling creek. In the nights, so dark and silent up on the ridge, I heard Her mourn with the voice of owls, and and sing the songs of stars, in the clear cold sky.

And when I lay down in the warm newly cut hayfield, I felt Her love wrapping me like a cloak, the scent of drying grass and clover rising around me in the heat of an early June sun.

I am so grateful to have grown up in this enchanted land, and to live still in Mountain Mama’s embrace.

Yes, there is sorrow and darkness, for the land here is soaked with blood and tears.

Appalachia served as our nation’s battlefields through three tumultuous wars—one fought between two colonial powers and the Native peoples, another that birthed our nation and one that nearly tore it asunder. And then there was the forced removal of the Native tribes who dwelt in these mountains, And the battles the tribes fought to try and hold onto their homes. The battles of coal miners seeking to be treated decently by coal operators.

So much bloodshed, horror, sorrow and death.

No wonder there are nightmares here. No wonder we think of bleak shadows when we think of Appalachia.

But there is light in that darkness. Beauty, and love and music and poetry and magic, woven together with the blood, death and tears.

Appalachia is betwixt and between. It’s a liminal space. It stands between the past and present, between the known and the unknown, between the darkness and light.

And I am a child of that liminal place, and walk barefoot the winding paths that separate the truth and the lie, matter and spirit, history and myth.

My feet are forever stained red with mud and blood—Appalachian henna—and I am grateful, and humbled by this ensorcelled place I call home.

And by blood and bone, iron and stone, I hope it never lets me go.