 | |
 |
 |
The Real McCoy
PHOTO: RON & PATTY THOMAS / GETTY IMAGES I’m in a diner outside of Matewan, West Virginia, wishing I could just hang out all day. I’ve got my iced tea, everybody’s superfriendly, there’s a meal coming and I’ve got a brilliant plan to linger over coffee and pie while reading local newspapers. I have perfect confidence in my ability to linger. I’ve spent a few days camping in the hills and driving along the curvy roads that follow the riverbeds of the mountains of what is distinctly Appalachian coal country. It’s been rainy and the hills are misty in the afternoon. Steam rises off the ridges that keep most of the small mountain valleys, or hollers, in the shade, where, as an old song puts it, “the sun comes up about 10 in the morning and the sun goes down about three in the day.” It’s hard to imagine any kind of conflict in this tranquil setting, but the Tug Fork River area is where the world’s most famous family feud, between the Hatfields and the McCoys, raged in the latter part of the 19th century. On one side is Mingo County, bordered to the south by the Tug Fork River, a muddy tributary of the Ohio, and, just across the river, is Pike County, Kentucky. I came up to Feud Country following Route 23 out of Tennessee, the so-called Country Music Road that twists through the mountains. Settled long ago by the Scots-Irish, who brought their fiddle music and whisky-making skills with them, this is where the idiom of American country music was born. The towns are small and cozy, built alongside the narrow banks and hollers of the creeks that circle the mountains. The coal mountains dominate the landscape, and the constant turning makes touring akin to go-karting. Everything shares the path of the holler: the road, the train tracks, the direction of urban development. I was fascinated with the feud, not only because it’s a classic story that informs almost all of the stereotypes about hillbillies but also because I am quite good at keeping grudges myself. Though it seems indefensible, I can appreciate the kind of person who insists, “I will not talk to so-and-so because in 1977 he scalped my Led Zeppelin tickets.” But as I get older, I wonder if I’m becoming more forgiving or just softer. If the Hatfields and McCoys could make up, what’s the point of keeping a grudge about being deprived of the thrill of hearing a hairy man sing “Kashmir”? I’ve been living on pepperoni rolls (a West Virginia staple, where pepperoni is baked into a small loaf of bread) and following a Hatfield-McCoy driving tour. I picked up a map from the Coal House (a chamber of commerce made entirely out of black coal) in Williamson and hit the road, trying to breathe in the smell of buckshot from a time long gone. Nobody knows for sure how the feud started: Some say it was over pilfered livestock, some suggest it was a classic Civil War dispute, where Confederate-supporting Hatfields shot Union sympathizer Asa Harmon McCoy. Regardless, the feud lasted over 30 years, and there was nothing cute about it. Back and forth over the river and in these same hills, there were show trials and kidnappings, home burnings and shootings at sheriffs as well as the murder of the McCoys who accused the Hatfields of stealing hogs. Along the twisting, serpentine roads, always near the imprint of coal mining and never far from a church, markers explain significant events of the feud, but it is not an explicitly marked historical trail. You have to improvise a bit, which makes it more fun. One unexpected delight was coming across a small trailer home that billed itself as the Hatfield Museum and also sold used overalls. You can have your fancy state park tour guides, but I’ll take a chain-smoking woman who asks, “You wanna see Granddaddy’s grave?” anytime. I’m glad she advised me to be careful about climbing down from the steep gravesite of notorious Hatfield patriarch “Devil Anse” (an opulent, Italian-made marble statue). |
