Mountains Inside of Me
Is it possible for a place to become part of your soul? This outcropping of rock and soil has been my life long companion. It has faithfully kept my secrets, blushed at my cursings, and darkened under my tears. Some of my earliest memories are sitting here, just girl and her dad full of dreams and sharing our visions of the future. I wish Dad could be here with me now.
When the mines were running strong, I didn’t get to spend much time with dad, but during the strikes, we were inseparable. The Pittston strike, when I was 7, lasted almost a year. Mom took a job at a local factory. Looking back, I can’t imagine how difficult this time was for my parents. I think dad came here for the same reasons I do. We would walk in silence to this spot on the back of our land. Once here, dad would begin to tell me of all the magical adventures he had planned for us. He would say that when he went back to work, he was going to have so much extra money that we would travel the world. We would pretend the nearest mountains were the pyramids of Cairo or that the creek we crossed was really an ocean. His hope was contagious.
After the strikes, dad would disappear from our lives into the darkness of the mines to work every shift that he could so we might have enough money to last through the next strike. I hated the good times. When I was a little older, I would come here and curse him for his hollow promises and false hopes. Now I know that he was just trying to survive. He really did want me to live my dreams, so he sacrificed his.
I used to take my boyfriends here to escape the gaze of my overprotective mom and then I would return here to cry when things went south. I remember coming here almost five years ago, the day I became a widow. The pain was so searing that I knew people couldn’t hold it. I had learned that lesson the hard way; somethings only a mountain can bear.
My husband was the sort of dreamer whose passion and excitement was infectious. We had met in college. I, a backwoods girl who thought Blacksburg was an urban metropolis and him, a city boy who saw the same place as an escape to the country. We could not have been any more different but the attraction was undeniable. He swept me up with his stories of adventure and the purity of his faith that burned like a fire.
It’s funny how just sitting here brings back so many memories. I remember how he was so mesmerized by my stories of coal camps and mountain people. When I first arrived at college, I was ashamed of where I came from, but he made me feel proud. He would beg me to tell stories of ginsengin’ or frog giggin’. He couldn’t believe that I had skinned a deer or gutted a fish. My world was so foreign to him that it took on a sense of enchantment.
These mountains have always had an allure. Over the years, they have attracted immigrants and refugees from around the world and hammered in them an unmistakable identity. The promise of life here was never that it would be easy but that no one here was an outcast. Maybe better said, we all were. They came for the promise of work, no matter your background. I grew up in a true melting pot. Blacks and whites, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, and the Scotch-Irish. Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches lined the hills. We were all so different, but being poor had a way of leveling the field, it’s hard to look down on anyone when you are all struggling.
College was so different. I did not really understand how the rest of the world worked. I had a naive view of social dynamics that made for a somewhat lonely existence. But, I think the fact that I struggled to fit in only made me more exotic to him. I always wondered if I was just a temporary fascination; if the enchantment would break, but it never did. Even when his family expressed their reservations, it only seemed to strengthen his resolve. Our wedding, the weekend before graduation, was a secret tryst in Gatlinburg, not just to avoid the family drama, but because spontaneity defined us. I’m not sure either of our families ever forgave us.
Sometimes I wish I could have made him understand the weight of these mountains, that I would have spoken more of their jaggedness and the inescapable pain. I should have recognized that idealism doesn’t have a good track record here, but he was dead set on us making a life in the mountains I called home. He saw it as his opportunity to make a difference. He saw poverty and addiction as mountains that he could give his life to level. I hate I never told him that daddy was a dreamer too.
Daddy called the spot where I am sitting Jimmy’s Knob. Apparently, in ages past, a man by that name would come here to pout when his wife was upset. I don’t believe this tale, because this place has never allowed me to pout or feel sorry for myself. Like the coal they dig out its ground, this mountain has been used to forge steel inside of me. It has made me stand back up when others would have been crushed. I think Jimmy, like me, came here to keep from giving up, to keep on fighting. Sure, this spot has a way of holding me that makes me feel safe but it always pushes me out and convinces me to keep going. No, this mountain is not for pouters, it is for survivors.
That’s what I am. I am a survivor, the obituary told me that much. Fifteen years ago, we started Mt. Zion Church. It was going to be a city on a hill, a place of refuge, and an agent of healing. Now that he’s gone, I pastor Mount Zion alone. It’s a small Pentecostal church full of people who have loved me in ways I could never explain to outsiders but it has also been a place of so much pain. Sometimes I struggle just to get the nerve to show up on Sunday morning. That’s where I am right now. It is Saturday night and I have to have something to say tomorrow. I need words of hope and comfort, probably more for me than for them.
But, I guess I’m getting ahead of myself…
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