(10/4/23)

Last night, I dreamed about mountains again. They crowded around the distant, noble and horrifying. They were rising outside of my hometown, De Kalb, Kentucky, which didn’t make any sense. De Kalb is about an hour south of Evansville, Indiana, and if you’ve ever been to western Kentucky, you’d know that it is flat as shit. We barely even have hills, just fields of tobacco and low floodplains. It’s coal country out there. All my uncles mine coal or drive coal trucks. My dad went to college and is now an orthodontist. The coal just missed me. My whole town is undermined. We used to have a Walmart, but the floor started caving in so they had to build a new one a town over. When I was a kid my class took a fieldtrip to the tech school and we practiced what it was like to work in a coalmine. The teachers strapped headlamps to our little heads and sent us crawling through a pitch black tunnel made of desk chairs and filing cabinets. I knew from then on that coal mining wasn’t for me.

De Kalb is named after some French guy who fought with America in the Revolutionary War. The French probably pronounce the name way differently than we do. We kind of say it like “Dee-Cab,” which is our Southern approximation. Going to college in northern Kentucky has made me realize just how Southern my town is. To me, De Kalb is a whack town that doesn’t have any mountains. And I’m not talking about Appalachia. The mountains around Prestonsburg or Pikeville are pretty, but I’m talking about real deal mountains. After I graduated high school my parents took me to Estes Park, Colorado to see some real deal mountains, the Rocky Mountains, with snow on top and everything. It’s hard going back to De Kalb and to Kentucky after seeing the Rockies. It’s like seeing heaven out the window but your destination is still boring old hell. I yearn someday to move to the mountains. I want to live among them, and if I’m lucky, get trapped among them, like the Torrance Family in the Shining.

~clancy