From the Publisher: “Appalachia North is the first book-length treatment of the cultural position of northern Appalachia —roughly the portion of the official Appalachian Regional Commission zone that lies above the Mason-Dixon line. For Matthew Ferrence this region fits into a tight space of not-quite: not quite ‘regular’ America and yet not quite Appalachia.
Ferrence’s sense of geographic ambiguity is compounded when he learns that his birthplace in western Pennsylvania is technically not a mountain but, instead, a dissected plateau shaped by the slow, deep cuts of erosion. That discovery is followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumor, setting Ferrence on a journey that is part memoir, part exploration of geology and place. Appalachia North is an investigation of how the labels of Appalachia have been drawn and written, and also a reckoning with how a body always in recovery can, like a region viewed always as a site of extraction, find new territories of growth.”
About the Author: Matthew Ferrence teaches creative writing at Allegheny College, where he lives and writes at the confluence of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. He and his family divide their time between northwestern Pennsylvania and Prince Edward Island, Canada.
“Too often, Appalachian identity gets treated like it’s (a) Southern and (b) the same for everyone. Matthew Ferrence’s insightful, thoughtful essays show us a more refreshing complexity than either of these stereotypes allows. This is a must-read for anyone looking for deeper meaning about Appalachia and life within it.” —Amanda Hayes, author of The Politics of Appalachian Rhetoric
This is Not a Mountain
Nine months before I knew anything at all about the brain tumor, I drove through the slowly arriving spring of Prince Edward Island National Park. Winter had been rough that year in Atlantic Canada, socked hard by late heavy snows. Even in early May, the shady banks of the coast road still held massive snowbanks, cold and deep with surfaces crusted over and pocked with dirt and twigs. To my right, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence spread across the horizon, gray-blue and nearly as cold as the snowbanks. Lobster buoys dotted the surface, the fleet having finally been able to set traps after several delays to the season, the harbor ice melted and hacked out enough to get going. The ferry had just resumed running from Nova Scotia across the warmer Strait of Northumberland, which was also beset by ice. Coastal shrubs still waited to bloom, their limbs dulled and winterized. Everything about the landscape seemed to be in suspension, everything on pause. New growth came slowly, and though spring carried its usual insinuation of relief and hope, this too seemed measured, cautious.
I steered around a bend, and there in the middle of the road was a fox, one of the many that call the island home. He was a typical red, but even from a distance, I could tell his pelt was mottled and frayed. This could have been a sign of spring, the molting of a heavy winter coat in anticipation of summer. But I also knew enough about the foxes of my western Pennsylvania childhood to think about disease, about the slow death of mange, relentless mites causing an animal to turn its teeth on itself. Invisible pain drives afflicted animals mad, resulting in the tearing of fur and opening of flesh, false relief that leads often to infection and demise.
The mottled fox waited, curious. I slowed my car, then stopped, and we watched each other. I then noticed his eye, the glaucous, blind, all-seeing whitened magical dead eye, his right. Eventually, he moved out of the road, and I crawled forward. He watched from his good eye as I drove past him along the coast road, and I watched in the rearview mirror until he disappeared from my view. …
And so I come to this, the lede I have been burying for many pages in this book that is about Appalachia, yes, and particularly about Northern Appalachia, but also defined wholly and completely and unavoidably by February 15, 2016, a Monday morning when I logged in to our local hospital’s internet patient portal, clicked on the latest report uploaded early that day, a radiologist’s read from an MRI that had been ordered just in case. There, I first saw the words “intensely enhancing mass” and “the principal concern is that of a tiny meningioma.”
So this is a book about the moment I felt my life fall into the pit of my belly. I didn’t know what meningioma meant at the time, but I was conversant enough in Latin suffixes to understand that very few words that end in -oma are good, just as enhancing mass isn’t a label you want to have applied to anything in your body, let alone your brain.
I remember the immediate stun of reading those words, of carrying my iPad to the kitchen where my wife was preparing breakfast for our two boys and showing her the report, the mix of confusion and immediate terror and forced, it will be fine I’m sure that one or both of us uttered in some way.
Soon I listened over the phone to my ophthalmologist refer to the lesion on the meningeal lining of my optic nerve and tried to answer his question about which Pittsburgh hospital system I’d prefer for the neurosurgical appointment he’d make for me as soon as we hung up. I was surprisingly calm on the telephone, learning about all of this with supernatural evenness that might be described as shock. This is the moment when the vague physical symptoms of my recent history got a name, when I found myself personally unhinged from the body I’d known, and when definitions of myself would change toward a life permanently defined as recovered, or damaged, or God knows what.
I picked the Allegheny Health Network, for what it’s worth, named after the river that cuts southward through the western half of the state and after the ancient plateau remnant of the Appalachian Mountains, and which was also the same hospital where my grandmother learned of her terminal lung cancer twenty years earlier. That commonality didn’t strike me until my wife and I drove down for the first appointment and I saw the fluted aluminum facade of the newer portions of the hospital, now old and disheveled. In some way, the metallic scallops of that facade echo the profile of the steep hillsides of Pittsburgh, the bulges and rolls also akin to the tiered recovery excavation I’d grown up seeing on mountainsides cut open to liberate coal. I had remembered that aluminum as shiny, but in the gray late winter of 2016 I was startled by its dullness, by the grime that had accumulated on the surface.
It would be both obvious and an understatement to declare that my life changed on the February Monday when I learned of my brain tumor, but of course that’s the reality of what happened. I spoke on the phone that afternoon with one of my best friends since high school, now a family-practice doctor in North Carolina, who talked me through the details of this first arc of care and also patiently corrected my consistent mispronunciation of the tumor: ma nin gee oma, not manine guy oma. In learning to pronounce this word, I began to pronounce the life I now lived. The story I’d known my life to be altered in a way that could not be taken back.
I have since spoken with many doctors who use medical language to understate the seriousness of what has been described to me as the brain tumor you want if you have to have a brain tumor and a not-so-bad tumor in a really bad place. I still often hear the words of one oncology nurse echo in my brain, a middle-aged woman filling in at the cancer center where I did radiation. She reviewed my history, thinking no doubt about the relatively young man in the room with her, my profile being a couple of decades younger than the average patient coming in for zapping. She asked about my brain tumor, and I said the now-familiar word meningioma, and she said, without any pause, praise Jesus.
In the Appalachia of my birth, you drive often among hills carrying the unmistakable shape of strip mining reclamation. The contour lines are smoothed off such hills, the angles planed into more uniform grades than the typical eroded topography of this part of the country. There are Christmas trees planted alongside grass, pine, fir, and spruce, making a decent crop in soil that’s too steep and depleted for much else. They call hills like this “returned to contour,” a legal requirement for the reclamation of land after strip mining. The idea is that the external signs of great gouging shovel work are removed: the term is a lie intended to suggest that strip mining is a benign act, that the land can be returned to what it was before, that it hasn’t been altered by the destructive forces of extractive moving.…
In this context, reclamation strikes me as a violent term, even if it’s the best we have. Reclamation implies a continued cycle of domination, very little change to the conditions of power that led to problems in the past. Indeed, such cycles are the unbroken history of Appalachia, where impaired relationships find new ways to hold onto old grudges. The landscape suffers, always, even while it obstinately continues to exist. Instead of reclamation, I desire the wisdom of repair. That begins with the act of recognition, self-recognition most of all, since change that gestures only outward without settling first inward is doomed.
And I recognize this: the new contour of reclaimed hills is awkward and jagged. Eons of geological uplift, natural erosion, gathered silt, and pathways of deer and people are razed, then dug through, then rebuilt with a dozer. The contour line is a best-fit line—I mean this in the sense of math again—the natural chaos of erratic dots are replaced by the smoothness of simplicity, by what a human being can do in a week in contrast to what an ecosystem can do in millions of lifetimes. I might also describe looking at reclaimed hills as akin to viewing an eight-bit video game version of the landscape, everything pixelated and blocky, without nuance. The technology wasn’t there, in those old video games of my childhood, to make the scenery look real. That’s a reclaimed mountain too. If there’s a ledge, it’s tiered, limited in our infinite landscape, just as if there were sprite problems and processing limitations.
Such a rise is no longer a mountain, but we have no word for it, no new category to define the new thing that has been created. It fits our paradigm of a mountain, so we call it a mountain, pretending that what it was is what it has become again. But the past is irretrievable. We should all know that by now. Words are funny, and how we speak the world into existence is strange, imprecise, and ultimately not as useful or stable as we might think.
Excerpted from Appalachia North: A Memoir. Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Ferrence. Reprinted with permission from the author and West Virginia University Press. All rights reserved.
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