Tuesday, May 27, 2008
This is what my photographic retreat with the American Diversity Project in Pikeville, Ky., boils down to. I spent most of the week in Island Creek, a hollow just outside of Pikeville. With the right turn after the Holiday Inn I went off the Interstate and down a winding road that always seemed too narrow to wrap my head around but wide enough to share with coal trucks that came thundering down from mines in the mountains. In this wondrous microcosm of family cohesion, ingrained traditions, wealth and poverty, 14-hour work days and unemployment, childhood dreams and drug abuse, I was welcomed into a world so different from my own. I was humbled and touched by the fragments of life I saw and the people I met. They say time trickles in their neck of the woods. It was deliciously easy to get caught up in the romantic aspects of horse shoeing, chats at the community general store, gardening until the sunlight fades, the sound of rain in the trees and a rooster in the distance. Just as often I was shaken by the little many people had to get by and the incredibly hard work they did. It made me appreciate. Not what I have or don't have. But rather all of us finding together as humans.
