Tag Archives: Mayville

Our People, Our Place

A couple months ago, I watched a documentary about a young woman from my hometown. She was murdered, and the circumstances surrounding her murder were tragic. She was a mother. She was especially young — still a teen, if I remember correctly. They found her on a football practice field. I think about her when I drive past that field, which has since been landscaped with a garden in her memory.

Throughout the documentary, there were repeated mentions of how football has always been a huge cultural asset in our town. This is the kind of place where you have to make your own fun — throw a house party, go to someone else’s to hang out, or drive around looking for other people who don’t have anything else to do. There are restaurants that serve alcohol, but there aren’t any bars or clubs. The only “big” opportunity to get out and be around a crowd of people is to go to the Friday night football games, where there’s almost a guaranteed chance that our team will win, no matter who they’re playing against.

The town’s high school football program is near the top of the list of the “most winningnest schools” out of all the high schools around the country. It’s true that the football program is ancient, and that’s part of the reason they can claim so many wins. But football has cemented itself in this town. It’s the kind of thing that children are scouted for, from the time they’re six or seven – if they have talent, they will be playing football when they’re sixteen.

When it comes to professional sports, I’ve generally been more of a basketball fan than a football fan. But always I love to see local kids play well and get recognized for it. I’m always happy when they make it to the state tournament, because … well, they’ve earned the praise.

The documentary I mentioned earlier — about the young woman from our town — seemed respectful. The narrative covered more than the football program. Although the story of our town is intertwined with the stories and the fate of the people who live here, our town is more than just tragedy or triumph. The story of the town and its best features isn’t the same story as the story of what happened to her — her life and her death, and her family’s path to seeking justice.

It’s not winning titles that makes this town worthy of praise. The people around here are the ones who make everything what it is — from the teams to the neighborhoods, from the crowds at parades and games to the folks you see in passing. Not to sound overly sentimental, but the people around here make the town what it is.

Our people — the ones who care about each other — are really our best feature.

“Jamais Mayville”: Explaining The Name

Have you ever heard of Peter Mayle? He wrote a bunch of books about living in Provence, which is a beautiful place that smells of lavender and sunshine and dreams.

Have you ever heard of Sally? She writes a blog about living in a Kentucky town that’s been anonymized with a fake name — a town called Mayville, which is a comme ci, comme ça place that doesn’t smell like lavender. It smells like vape clouds.

One of the wonderful Peter Mayle books is called Toujours Provence. For this blog, Sally turned that on its head and Googled toujours antonyme, to double-check her high school French. She decided that Jamais Mayville would be an appropriate name to convey … whatever it is that she wanted to convey.

And that’s how this blog was born.

Authenticity

I’m making a list — and I’ve already checked it twice. Earlier this month, I mentioned that there are some people obsessed with proving that they’re “authentically country” or “authentically Appalachian” or “authentically Southern.”

If you’re authentically doing your thing, then you probably don’t need to take great pains prove yourself. I don’t feel like I have to flash my credentials, but if you’d like to see them:

  1. My mom’s mom’s mom’s family — the folks on my maternal side — were sharecroppers. They picked tobacco and corn under the blanket of humidity that smothers western Kentucky every spring and every summer.
  2. My mom’s dad was a cattle farmer. He wasn’t a rancher — he was a farmer, with a small-ish farm and a wood lot and a pond for the cows and the snakes.
  3. My mom’s dad’s dad and his family were sorghum farmers.
  4. My dad’s mom’s brother and his family were cattle dairy farmers. They had cattle, but they mostly did dairy operations. They milked cows all the time and all of that. My dad would go over to the farm and bale hay. My dad’s cousin — one of his favorite cousins, a man whom we all remember fondly — would muck the stalls and sing “It’s Such A Pretty World Today” while he was … tidying up.
  5. My dad’s dad had a tobacco patch, but he never planted again after coming up a nickel short on his crop. (He didn’t make a profit. He lost money on that enterprise, is what I’m trying to say — and he never planted another tobacco patch.)
  6. My dad’s dad was a miner. He ran a dragline and did above-ground strip mining in the Western Coal Fields.
  7. My dad’s dad’s dad could sharpen an ax finer than anyone else in the county. (I’d noticed that this was the kind of job you could do while sitting down, which suited him. He was a pretty … casual man. He would always weigh down his bushels of turnips with rocks before going to the market. That’s just … that’s just how he was.)
  8. My dad’s dad mended and tarred his own fishing nets. He loved to go fishing out on the Tennessee River.
  9. My dad’s dad’s dad was a bona fide alcoholic. He would get … a little bit happy and float down the river — mostly for fun, but also because he didn’t have a license or a vehicle.
  10. My dad’s dad was good friends with the local bootlegger.
  11. My dad’s dad’s dad’s uncle was the oldest living Union Army veteran in Kentucky.
  12. My dad’s mom’s brothers played the violin and the mandolin. The mandolin-player put out an album when he moved down to Arkansas. (He was also a long-haul truck driver. He was a cool guy.)
  13. My mom’s dad’s mom played the guitar. She was a tiny little woman — unlike me, a big-built gal — but she was apparently quite the entertainer.
  14. My mom’s mom — my beloved grandmother — was a hairdresser and a laundress and a housecleaner.
  15. My mom’s mom’s mom ran a hamburger stand and worked in a munitions factory and a clothing factory. She was the real deal. She was hard-working and objectively beautiful. I only inherited the first part, but … I’m glad to be like her, in some small way.
  16. My dad’s mom’s brother was a long-distance trucker. I only found this out years and years after he’d retired. (I guess I mentioned this earlier — but it deserves a separate mention!)
  17. My dad used to drive a dump truck, while we’re talking about big trucks.
  18. My dad’s mom’s brother was blinded in a spar mining accident.
  19. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother’s wife was blinded when she got chemicals in her eyes while sharecropping.
  20. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother was shot and killed on his own brother-in-law’s front porch.

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy has nothing on me.

A Good Thing

The best part of living in this town?

The coolest person you know — someone who you admire, someone who you’re jealous of, someone who you want to impress — will never, ever want to move here.

You will never run out of the house with unbrushed hair (or unbrushed teeth!) and unexpectedly bump into them in Walmart or Save A Lot. It just won’t happen!

Not so bad, right?!

Judge of Character

For every person around here who sucks, there’s usually an explanation for their behavior. Not always — but more often than not.

I don’t mean an excuse — I just mean an explanation. I tend to consider that first, now that I’m older. I can figure out — either through recognition or through gossip — whether someone had a terrible childhood, an abusive relationship, a history of addiction, or some combination of these.

So I’ve learned to shut up — about some things. If I see racism or prejudice or some other shitty bullshit behavior, I still say something. But if I just see a miserable sadsack walking around with their crack* showing, then I try to realize that this person is probably just used to living like that.

That’s actually one of the reasons why I won’t settle in a relationship. I know that there’s a bigger, better world out there. And I know that most people around here have been beaten down by life — in a different corner of the world, their life might be much, much better.

Or worse, perhaps. That’s also possible. But the point still stands.

So I think about the folks I see around here, and I feel a degree of protectiveness for my brothers and sisters. These people are struggling. And I don’t look down on them — I look across the way at them, and I tell myself, “This is what the world has done to us, has made for us, and we can all try to be better. But we’re all just working with what we have.”

* Of the bottom variety. Not the nose candy variety.

A Brush With Fame

Several years ago, an author from our town — an excellent writer, a writer who’s critically-acclaimed and commercially successful — wrote a book that was so riveting, they decided to turn it into a movie. And when they were looking for a place to film that movie, they settled on filming in the author’s hometown.

This place. This … wild and unforgiving place.

There isn’t much scenery around here — which is kind of the point of making a movie here. Sad story turned into a sad movie set in a sad town. The movie is …

Well, it’s not bleak. It’s not Winter’s Bone. But it’s supposed to be emotional, not sensual, sexual, or conceptual. Emotional.

There’s only room for one -al in this town, baby!

This town, it’s not in the mountains or by the water. There is a creek, but the only people I’ve seen in the creek are vagrants, to use an all-encompassing and decidedly more quaint term.

But … yeah. That’s all there is to say about that. A less-than-remarkable town, which served as the setting for a novel and a movie.

That’s pretty kind of cool, right?

And now, in 2023, it’s inspired a blog. Welcome to the digital age, Mayville! Our town is a microcosm, but the web is world wide!

A Place With Sights & Sounds

On a sunny day, I decided to take a quick drive through town. The most anxious woman in the world becomes freewheeling and relaxed behind the wheel of her car. (That’s how it works for me, I should say.)

I usually take the highway that encircles the town, rather than heading straight through the city’s center. Traffic isn’t bad in town, not really, but we don’t even have traffic lights anymore. Not since December of 2021. Because, on an unseasonably warm winter night, our town disappeared.

A massive tornado hit our town — a massive wedge tornado, a wall of debris, a tsunami wave of other peoples’ homes. The tornado carved a mile-wide scar through the area. I think a lot about the homes, the old buildings, the churches, the businesses — but I mostly think about the people. The people who died, the people who lost their relatives, their homes, their town. Our town.

The town hasn’t truly recovered since then. Hundreds of buildings — homes, businesses, churches — were ripped to pieces, splintered into shards, transformed into piles of debris. The debris has since been swept up. The lots have been cleared off. But no new buildings have replaced the old ones.

Now that I say that, I know about a couple of big buildings are currently under construction — a year and a half after the storm. A new subdivision also sprang up on the outskirts of the town. No one’s moved in yet, so far as I know.

But other than those construction projects, there’s little visible progress. The process of rebuilding is painfully slow. I heard — from a fairly reliable source — that the town’s recovery funds were almost entirely used up during the debris-clearing process. This means that there’s hardly any money left for rebuilding. This is why so many lots sit empty.

On my drive through town, I noticed some new LED signs and new branding in front of businesses, which makes it feel like we’re moving forward — even if it’s minor progress.

I kept driving, looking at everything I could take in. So many familiar sights, which made me feel like — for better or worse — I’ve made this place my home.

Sometimes I think about moving to the nearby college town — because it has more resources. But that town is (naturally) more expensive to live in. And that town has lots of traffic. And I’m just not used to living in that kind of environment.

The people who live over there wear Premier League football jerseys. The people who live here wear NFL football jerseys for teams that don’t even exist anymore. (The team from St. Louis, in particular.) The people over there wear helmets when they ride their bikes! The people here don’t even wear helmets when they ride their motorcycles. And I’m not endorsing or defending our end of things — but it’s just what I’m used to.

I also find myself getting mad whenever I visit certain places — stores and restaurants — over in the college town. I’ve decided that I’m either one of the ugliest people who’s ever lived, or one of the most attractive people to ever do it, based solely on the way I get stared at whenever I’m over there.

At a drive-thru, a relatively lovely-looking young woman kept glancing over at me, and I think she either thought I was gorgeous or hideous. I’m shy, and I generally avoid eye contact, but I couldn’t help but notice that I was being watched. Something similar happened to me in one of that town’s sit-down diners. A middle-aged couple — well, that’s being generous! An older couple kept gazing at me while I ate my breakfast. They did a full-on, turn-around-in-your-seat stare-down.

I had a hard time finishing my food. I think I got a to-go box.

A BRIEF ASIDE: I also got stared down by another older couple at a local Cracker Barrel. This is embarrassing to own up to. I don’t like the food or the ambiance of the ol’ CB — with no D 😔 — so I have no recollection of why I went there. Probably to eat a sweet potato. I love a good sweet potato.

But, for whatever reason, I stand out. And most people in that town are still kind to me — but a small number of people have given me pause. They’ve made me very aware of my status as an outsider.

(If I could marry into a family from that town, then I could probably fit in a little bit better. As it stands, I’m related to about half the people in my home county, so I need to cast a wider net anyway!)

AN ASIDE/TANGENT ABOUT THE PHRASE “HOME COUNTY”: When I was in college, I had a professor who absolutely hated the way we Kentuckians mention our home counties instead of our home towns. I can understand how it can be confusing, but that’s how many of us identify with each other. I feel a certain kinship with people from my home county — even if we grew up in two different towns, if we’ve lived in the same county, we’ve had similar experiences.

Anyway, this professor wasn’t fond of this practice. It “made more sense” to just say what “city” we were from, and then to just clarify what part of the state that “city” was in. Uh … okay.

I was willing to hear him out, until I remembered that the John Prine wrote a great song that went a little something like this: “And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County /
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay.”

I’m sorry, but if folks who are one or two generations removed from Kentucky can say things like “my folks are from McCracken County” — and if Grammy Award winners can sing songs about life in Muhlenberg County — then county-based identification should be accepted as a bona fide practice.

Leaping back off of that li’l soap box, I’d like to go back and revisit that earlier thought: the idea of marrying someone from another county. I’m afraid if I married another Kentuckian, the gravitational pull of Mayville would drag us back down here. If I could marry someone from another state or country, then I think we’d spend less time over here.

But I know I would want to come back every so often, just to check on things. Just to know what I might (or might not) be missing.

Hmmmm. Would I have anything nice to say about this place if I weren’t from here? Probably not. But I imagine that’s true of any place. It took me until my adult years to realize that just about everyone has a complicated relationship with their hometown.

Welcome to Mayville

Dispatches from the worst town on Earth.

Our lives would be better if we weren’t cursed with the misfortune of being born in southern Kentucky.

(No one says “southern Kentucky” — it’s either western, eastern, central, or northern. I’ve even heard people say southeastern Kentucky, but not southern Kentucky. For what it’s worth, I don’t live in southeastern Kentucky — I’ve just heard of it. It’s miles and miles away from me, far off on the other side of the state. Kentucky is actually a wide state with a flat bottom, so there’s not a clearly-defined southern portion. But I’m keeping this geographically vague, so that I won’t be recognized, and so I won’t get beaten up at my local Family Dollar.)

I was always convinced that I wouldn’t have acne if I hadn’t been forced to grow up in a lower middle class household in the rural south. Maybe living here has given me some good stories — and since I live here, I’m absolutely going to write about living here.

I’ve learned a lot of important stuff while living here. It’s actually been a blessing to grow up as a leftist in a conservative area, because I’ve learned that progress is possible, that we can outgrow (and not tolerate) closed-mindedness, that we can wear gumboots from Dollar General and play banjos and still be progressive.

But living here has also given me acne. I’m sure it hasn’t helped my skin look clearer, or made my hair less frizzy, or made my life any easier. Life for a young woman in this area is … far, far away from the lifestyle of a fairytale princess.

Once upon a time, I saw a ranking of the best and the worst states to live in. Kentucky was ranked 41 out of 50. Instead of making me want to roll over and die, it actually made me feel better about my life.

I realized that girls in California — the girls in Calabasas, not the rural towns and the urban centers — and the girls in Connecticut would lay down and die if they saw my neighbors’ motorcycles, ATVs, kudzu-coated single-wides, peeling-paint Camaros, noisy crotch rockets, and other trailer-trash chariots and domiciles.

(Most people here, by the way, are what you’d call house poor and car rich. It’s not unusual to see four or five cars in one driveway. And — contrary to the negative stereotypes associated hillbillies and rednecks — most of these vehicles aren’t up on blocks. Most of us take great pride in making sure our Mustangs and Dodge Rams are in good shape.)

The apocryphal girls from California — back to them. They wouldn’t know how to handle too-tall grass, roly-pollies in the mud, humidity, visible cracks, drug addicts passed out in front of the gas station, suicides and overdoses in the Dollar General parking lot.

It is a bleak, depressing place. The ditches are full of flies and mosquitoes. Mascara runs and hair frizzes in the near-constant humidity. And — in spite of all this liquid — the grass is often yellow or brown.

We also have another problem: wealthy(ish) people who cosplay as poor people. These people grew up in middle class homes, but turned to illicit-slash-criminal activity not out of desperation — which is understandable — but because they “wanted to have fun.”

From there, a demon called downward mobility grips a family and doesn’t let go — not until it’s drained them of money, time, happiness, and all of that. Dozens of riches-to-rags stories in every county.

There are good things here, too. There are lakes, rivers, deer, dew-covered cobwebs, tomato-and-mayo sandwiches — and family. Family is probably the number-one thing keeping most of us tethered to this miserable place.

I’ll be posting more as it comes to me — this is just an introductory post, you know? But I want to take you on a tour of the worst place that I know: my hometown.

An important note from your tour guide: This isn’t about a town on the northern/eastern side of the state. This is about a town that’s just a stone’s throw away from Tennessee. And I would know, because plenty of Tennesseans have tried to throw stones at me.

I also want to say that, for all of the faults that this place has, there are people here who want to make this place livable. They should be recognized as good folks, folks who want to do good.

It’s not my intention to mock or belittle my neighbors and my family and my peers. For every awful person I’ve met or known, there are two or three others who are good-hearted. People with good intentions, or people who are just trying to get by, are the people who deserve recognition instead of ridicule. So I’m not here to knock them. At the end of the day, no matter where we all go, this is our homeplace. And we — the people — are the ones who make (or break) this place we call home.