Bill Robinson
Kentuckians, especially the people of Eastern Kentucky, identify themselves by county. While that tends to separate and localize residents of the Bluegrass State, the Kentucky River should binds us together, according to Gurney Norman, the state’s poet laureate.
Norman offered that perspective Monday night as he addressed a group of about 30 artists at Eastern Kentucky University’s Appalachian Center who are spending most of this week getting a new perspective of the river.
The Appalachian Center, the Kentucky Riverkeeper and the Kentucky Foundation for Women has invited the artists — poets, painters, dancers, singers, songwriters and storytellers — to be part of the Riverkeeper’s Shaped by Water program.
It seeks to educate the public, through a variety of media, about the river’s importance as well as threats to its well-being, said Pat Banks, a Madison County painter who heads the Riverkeeper.
Norman, 72, grew up in Perry County and joined the University of Kentucky’s English faculty in 1979. He told the artists Monday night that the river had been on his mind all of his life.
“My family lived on the banks of the Kentucky River in Perry County,” he said. “Sixty-five years ago, when I was a boy, the river was clean enough that it was used for recreation all the time.”
World War II was under way, he said, and coal was being mined in Eastern Kentucky at rates not seen before or since.
The river’s great decline has occurred in the past half century, Norman said, as strip mining replaced deep mining as the preferred means of extracting coal from the mountains.
The Kentucky River’s source is 172 miles from its confluence with the Ohio River, but meanders some 420 miles to reach it. The river forms the northern border of Madison County, separating it from Clark, Fayette and Jessamine counties.
The river and its watershed, which covers about 7,000 square miles, is larger than the nation of Belgium, Norman said. While political boundaries divide us, the river should unite us, he said.
Not only is the Kentucky River the primary source of water for many people in Central and Eastern Kentucky, “The river shapes the landscape,” said Banks, “and people organize their lives around the land.”
This week’s Shaped by Water activities were to include a boat tour of the river near the East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s generating plant at Ford in Clark County and a flyover from the Hazard airport in Perry County. Both were scheduled for Tuesday, but inclement weather forced cancellation of the flyover, which was to focus on mountaintop removal mining.
The artists were taken by the Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative’s Dale generating plant at Ford in Clark County, where they viewed the sludge pond into which the plant’s coal waste is discharged.
The sludge pond is similar to one which broke loose at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant near Kingston, Tenn., and polluted a large swath of the Tennessee River, Banks said.
Today, the artists were to visit a reclaimed strip mine.
All three tours were designed to show “how disorderly our use of the land and water has been,” Banks said.
The Riverkeeper’s mission is to educate, agitate and litigate to protect the river, she said.
Banks told the artists their media were instruments of power they could use to educate the public and help save the river, “one drop at a time.”
Norman said, “I’m a storyteller, so I guess that makes me sort of an artist.”
The stories Norman told Monday night included two times the river nearly claimed his life. One occurred when he was five, as he waded into a “stepoff” and the river’s surface was over his head.
His mother who was nearby “saved me,” he said. Later, when his family’s church served communion, and the preacher said all who had been “saved” could partake, he did so.
He managed to eat the bread, but before when he reached for the small glass of communion wine, someone grabbed his shoulder from behind and said, “That’s not for you.”
Many years later, as Norman took part in a Kentucky Educational Television documentary about the river, he was filmed paddling a canoe downstream.
After he rounded a bend and lost sight of the film crew, his canoe was upended by driftwood. Norman said his arms were exhausted by the time he swam to the canoe that was being carried downstream by the current.
Unable to pull himself into the canoe, he held onto its side until it came near the shore after going around another bend and becoming lodged in a collection of floating trash.
Banks said the week’s activities will result in a traveling show of original art, teaching materials for kindergarten through 12th grade, a book of poetry, essays and stories, and a compact disc of music stories and narration.
Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 624-6622.
