Downstream: A Wandering Essay on Kentucky SB 89
And family cemeteries, and tributaries, and trash walks
Thank you to Kristi Maxwell for the workshop prompt of the braided essay — this is certainly not a finished draft, but it felt urgent enough to share now. I wander through personal and historical landscapes to get to where I’m going, but I’ve decided that these too are worth sharing.
Thank you to Lexie, my proofreader forever.
Note - this essay has been updated after the KY legislative cycle on 3/29/25.
“You sleepwalk for centuries and don't look around At the progress of man, determined and bound We live in the ruins of another life's dream Oh, but nobody told us that we all live downstream” - Bonnie Prince Billy, “Downstream”
There was an old section and a new section of the Sparks Family Cemetery. The old was larger and built up on a hill which then curved back down with more graves on the other side so that whichever direction you started mowing from, you were moving uphill. These graves were moss-covered and impossible to read, at that point only blocks of vaguely carved stones that marked something long gone.
A lineage of names is something I have never felt connected to, but to me these graves became as knowable as a family member. This one stood up like a Ten Commandments tablet, this one with the eagle engraving always remained in the shade, and this one was made of a dark red stone that had rough edges surrounding its weather-smoothed front. I always stopped to take a break at the one line of graves sitting on completely flat ground, treading lightly and superstitiously so as to not knock over their red, white, and blue flowers.
The new side of the cemetery, with its still-shining metal fence, required less maneuvering — it was not as full yet. I knew all of these names, which may be why I always saved it for last. Here, you could use the riding mower and get it over quickly. Besides, there was more shade on the older side, where the tree-line encroached and covered the early morning sunrise.
I remember most the feeling I got around 3:00 pm after we had finished mowing the cemetery, my buzzing hands still electric from the weed-eater, grass-stained blue jeans and sweat-stained t-shirt cooling my back from the by then oppressive afternoon sun. I would ride back down the hill in the bed of my dad’s truck and let the breeze dry me under the shade of the forest as we entered back into its dense cover. This was the feeling that made it worth the doing — that, and lunch from the gas station (Deb’s Kountry Korner — an obscene amount of K’s). It’s possible that we may have only gone once, but this meal still inhabits my memory of mowing grass (a pizza sub and a Coke, and the way my hands still buzzed against the warm bread).
From my perch in the back of the truck, even though the creek was made blurry by our speed, I could always point out the trash. Trash is more evident in the holler than in the city streets among other bright colors. Down my road, it snarled its Mountain Dew Code Red face at you, it heckled you with its Copenhagen logo, and even the cheery Hardees star stuck out in the worst way possible when everything else around it was deep brown leaves and creek floor.
We used to go on trash walks as a family, hauling garbage bags down the road empty and bringing them back heavy with plastic milk cartons, tin pop cans, and if we were lucky, sometimes a mottled plastic toy. To us, it was just as much an opportunity to walk as it was to clean. We took turns holding the trash grabbers and leaning over the water to get a shiny piece of something in the early evening, the shadowy bends of the holler already feeling like midnight.
I remember being appalled that our neighbors (mostly our family) would toss so much trash out of their windows before I realized there was a probably a reason the detritus ended up in the creek and not just the side of the road — likely, it had flowed down from a larger stream, maybe even the Big Sandy itself. All that vacationing material, making its way miles down unfamiliar waters into our holler.
This reminds me of the annual lake cleanup sponsored by the Corps of Engineers that occurred in early spring each year, which involved walking alongside pick-up trucks down winding hollers I’d never been to, trekking down through the trees to the lake’s edge so that we could wedge a loose tire from the mud. It seems like such a singular experience that I’m now scouring the internet for any proof of its continued existence, but I only find the home page for Johnson County’s solid waste management site. It hasn’t been updated since 2021, but it is still littered with images that are familiar to me — a clearing filled with corroded cans (whole kernel corn, cream of mushroom, a vintage Pepsi bottle) captioned “slam dunk the junk.” A Route 40 sign framed by trees captioned, “You think we like picking up after you?”
Ironically, I always did like picking up after someone else. Anyone responsible for me on these walks would always caution me about using my gloves, being careful what I picked up, that I used the grabbers when I could, but none of this ever negated the joy I got from finding a retro label or some oddball trinket. (“It must have been sitting in this spot for ages — how did they miss this before?” I’d think.) The strangest part about litter is that, although inanimate, it is ultimate proof of life. This came from someone. Someone you didn’t know before, but now you feel that you do.
Farther down in the Google search results is an article on a Whitney Lewis, a featured article from Spectrum News in 2023 titled, “Nicholasville resident travels around Kentucky to pick up trash.” Just like the litter she finds in lakes and streams, Whitney is a traveler. When diagnosed with an immune disorder, she turned to the outdoors — to her, she says, nature is “literally healing.”
She’s not a trash pessimist, though. I was delighted to find that she shares this feeling with me: to her, the litter is “almost like treasure,” she’s “attracted to [it].” Why do we love the things that are not where they’re supposed to be? I imagine her kayaking around a lake, snatching up trash in her Dollar General bag with the satisfaction of a pimple popper. This is something I can change. I pick up a molded coffee container and allow the dam of debris to break — humanity reversing what humanity made.
Perhaps it is that need to preserve the familiar. The road I lived on was secluded enough that I knew when a car didn’t belong there. Mostly when we passed strangers, we would pull aside and wave as they passed us by on the narrow road. But I still remember the strange feeling I got every time there was a pickup I’d never seen before cruising the road at night. “What are they even here for?” I would ask my parents. In hindsight, this was a protective question. What I was really asking is, what are they going to do now that they’re here? Are they the ones that left all that trash down the road?
When you are the person that takes care of something for a while, you start to become protective. Not only that, you start to become obsessive. It was several years after I had left for college that I was back in the new section of our family cemetery, holding a guitar (a less blunt instrument than a weed eater but nonetheless dangerous) and leaning my iPad lit up with chord charts on a nearby grave. I couldn’t help but look at the height of the grass, notice the dead flowers and the tattered flags, feel the need to grab a leaf blower and knock off some of the foliage, even though it wasn’t my job anymore. Really, I started to realize, it was never just my job, as the funeral crowd began to congregate, strangers and family alike plodding over the grave plots and surrounding the tent.
Everyone who had come to the graveside service had gotten stuck coming up that steep gravel hill. Because of the loose gravel and the incline, you really just have to keep your wheels spinning or else you’re done for — a lesson I’d learned from watching my dad do it first, lawn mower in tow. Even he got stuck every now and then, especially if it had just rained. The day of my mamaw’s funeral, I remember jogging back down the hill to help folks push their cars as they spun out — they were nearly to the top of the hill, they just had to keep going. Why didn’t they just keep going?
It’s this defensiveness I had to reckon with inside myself, as I started to realize that everyone who grew up between two mountains was protective of the limited space they had. Best not to tread on it.
My idea of what a college is began to take shape in a classroom that looked out to a block-wide park at Big Sandy Community and Technical College, Paintsville campus. The namesake of the college is a branch of the Ohio River which divides at Fort Gay and Louisa into the Levisa and Tug Forks. The Levisa Fork runs directly through the town of Paintsville and on down through Prestonsburg and Pikeville (so really, Big Sandy CTC might have been more appropriately named Levisa Fork CTC) while the Tug Fork continues the Big Sandy’s work of dividing Kentucky and West Virginia.
Big Sandy, though, is still an appropriate name — I can’t remember a time in which the branch was not a light dirty brown. I used to drive every day along the road that followed the Levisa Fork from my high school to the college campus, an experience I shared with the fifteen-or-so other students of the “Early College Academy.” We came from all over, Paintsville, Johnson County, Martin County, and many of us lived farther away from our high school allegiances (Prestonsburg, Flat Gap, Inez, I could go on with a litany of Appalachian townships).
Even in town, the roads followed the water. You knew it had rained that week if the soccer fields flooded, although sometimes they flooded even if it hadn’t rained, and you were left to wonder why. This road - Route 321 - was called, by everyone I knew, the “Old Lowe’s Road,” although it was before I was born that the Lowe’s in town categorized that space. It was really only dead-end roads branching off from 321. At one point, a pharmacy school renovated an old factory building there, but they left the following year.
The Old Lowe’s Road emptied into the grid of downtown Paintsville, where the park outside of the community college was constantly being reshaped. To begin with, there was a two-story building containing the mechanic’s garage on the first floor and STEM classrooms on the second. It was positioned directly behind the park, which was made up of mostly green space framed by a singular gazebo, a swinging bench framed by two stocky trees, and peripheral rows of flowers. No doubt the designers had hoped students would camp out here, find a place to sit and eat lunch in the freshly sown grass, but perhaps it looked too perfect to trespass on because I can’t recall us ever taking that chance.
Then, I remember the day that a bright blue computer-graphic sign went up across the windows of the classroom building behind it with kitschy science-y font that said “INNOVATION @ Big Sandy” — I thought at the time that it ruined the perfectly pleasant beige classroom buildings, like the college was asserting some sort of progress on the only green space here (which of course had also been constructed to seem natural).
Could you blame me, though, for wanting consistency? At that time, and I imagine still, Eastern Kentuckians trained defensiveness. Every sports pep rally, an administrator with a suit-and-tie would proclaim that the rival school thought we were all hicks, that they all thought we couldn’t do it, that we were too poor, too dumb, but that we would prove them wrong. That things were made different in the mountains, that there was something in the water.
I remember lounging back in my seat between classes in our designated room, looking out onto the park while some of my classmates who had driven over from Martin County were talking about some awful street name based on a racial slur, some long-forgotten history of violence. I’m trying now to find this road on a map and corroborate my memory, but the official street listing isn’t yielding any results. I consign myself to believing, hopefully, that they or their parents made it up.
If you know the name Martin County, it’s likely because of the the clean water quality and access issues that have been percolating there for decades now. My wife spent many formative years there, and we still visit her family in Inez as often as we can. Her father’s house is positioned near in the center of town, directly across from the combination KFC and Taco Bell. His recent cancer diagnosis has required a retirement from his contract work on construction crews, so he’s taken on the role of town watchdog, counting at any time how many cars have lined up at the chicken house drive-thru, waving to the ones he knows, and keeping close tabs on the folks who come to dispose of their trash in the post office dumpster.
We were sitting in his house on one of these visits — he was scrolling through YouTube on his TV and started to play a documentary called “Sludge” because he recognized a face on the title card. So, we watched.
The troubles did not start with the coal slurry spill of 2000, but it was certainly a tipping point when approximately 306 million gallons of coal slurry ran down Tug Fork flooding houses, yards, and roads as well as leaving a chemical mess that continues to affect the county and its water supply. In this 2005 documentary produced by Appalshop, filmmaker Robert Salyer interviews individuals from the community and documents everything from sites of flooding to town hall meetings. The people are angry, they yell at the energy company representatives, they ask how an infrastructure flaw like this could have been passed over for so many years. The lawyers don’t have answers for them, the energy execs don’t have them either.
Still in Martin County, water rates are some of the highest in Kentucky, and in 2020 the Guardian published an article titled “‘It smells bad, it tastes bad’: how Americans stopped trusting their water,” focused on Martin County residents. At first, I have issues with this generalizing of Appalachians as ‘Americans,’ since this is truly an issue central to the systems of power and inequity created by a history of wealthy coal companies in Eastern Kentucky. Thankfully, Nina Lakhani, the article’s author, doesn’t shy away from this fact in the content. Residents are depicted as “angry that local officials have authorized construction of an ostentatious government building” while the “algae-ridden reservoir is littered with empty liquor bottles and used syringes.”
No Corps of Engineers clean-up walks here — its not as simple as a pair of trash grabbers and gloves. And there are no treasures in the corporate sludge.
I always felt strangely protective for my classmates from Martin County, possibly because they were more clearly and easily excluded by others as outsiders who had traveled the longest and suffered the greatest. This is what the story was, at least, from the county whose most famous resident was Jim Booth, a coal tycoon who probably owned nearly every large house and gas station along the downtown strip if word on the street was to be believed.
I’m looking back at this time in my life and wondering why we divided identities like this, between counties and tragedies, between the rich schools and the poor ones. I’m thinking about the recent Bonnie Prince Billie song that proclaims the adage, “we all live downstream.” Is it guilt that I’m feeling about the trash I’ve surely contributed to our communal stream? Is it anger that we were given the trash in the first place? Damn you, Wal-Mart, your plastic containers and greedy owners.
The aforementioned gazebo in the Big Sandy Community and Technical College park is where I proposed to my wife 2 years later — it was the spring of 2019, I was two years out of high school. In 2015, her last year of high school, she had written a story for her Relationships class (a phenomenon to unpack another time) imagining our engagement, and I, as someone who thrives with a script, was determined to make it come true four years after. In many ways, I have been a follower of scripts, but when I think about this night, I remember primarily not knowing what to say. I was barely able to stammer through the question, asking only, “Ya wanna marry me some day?”, swept away by the gravity of the moment.
Regardless of how smoothly or not this plan was executed, one certain effect of it is that this gazebo in the park has been forever transformed from its drabness, recast into a moonlit idea. Every time I visit my hometown, I can still imagine a double of Leisl and Rolf twirling into the night singing “16 Going on 17.” It’s my own small rebellion against the bright blue-lit sign behind it.
Of course, the reality of the gazebo and the nature of public space in Paintsville is trickier — there’s always something moving beneath the water. The plan was, as we were out to dinner, that our family and friends would decorate this gazebo with pictures of my wife and I, hang string lights, and camp out in the bushes to take pictures when the time came. It was only after I had proposed and the celebration had died down a a little that I learned they had needed to run an extension cord across an entire street from the Catholic nun’s house next door in order to power the string lights. When my friend had attempted to use the outside outlets, a security guard had informed her that they cut the power at night to discourage use. Use by who, they did not say, but we might assume it was the generic boogeyman of downtown Paintsville: the homeless, the addict, the criminal.
In high school, I was enlisted to lead worship music for the local Celebrate Recovery service which had taken up residence in the former Italian restaurant, which was also a former barbecue restaurant, which was itself a former bar and grill. Replacement is a mode of being in every city, but especially in a generational small town in which memory is long and support for small businesses is short. Every space used to be something else (see: “the Old Lowe’s Road”).
Celebrate Recovery (CR) was and is still a Christian group for addicts — specifically, from their website, a “safe place to find freedom from your hurts, hang-ups, and habits.” These could be theoretically anything, but any discussion about habits not only in Eastern Kentucky but in America must include drugs and alcohol, the proliferation of which can feel often like the water we swim in.
Like most discussions about addiction in my experience, CR was both highly publicized and covered in secrets. I would show up 30 minutes before the service began, tune my guitar, and make any last-minute edits to the slides before we began. We always opened often with the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
After the music was over, I would take my guitar off, un-do the strap, and duck into the side room to slide it back into its case, leaving out the back door before anyone started sharing about their addictions in the scheduled breakout groups. It’s not that I was uncomfortable with this, or that I was a total stranger to the concept of drugs, which, again, are nearly impossible to be unfamiliar with. I have been lucky to not lose anyone in my immediate family to the crisis, but certainly relatives, friends, men on the street that we invited into our church. It’s just that, who could possibly be equipped to handle these things? To me, the concept of addiction fell under the “things I cannot change” part of the Serenity Prayer. We’ve got to turn the outlets off outside, or else they’ll use them; of course there are needles in the reservoir, why wouldn’t there be?
It never occurred to me — possibly because I grew up in this secluded town between the mountains in which it was our job to clean up the trash, our job to stay sober, our job to clean up the sludge when it comes — that these facts of life had actually been engineered and propagated by individuals at the top of their tax brackets, some of whom had never set foot on our roads, let alone waded in our trashy creeks.
Looking back at the Johnson County Solid Waste website, the most prominent pictures feature men in orange suits and neon yellow jackets. At the top of the page, two men perch on top of white pickup truck bed filled with black trash bags. Further down, they pose in a line with their jailer Steve Rose, a man with a white beard and sun hat, in front of that same truck now piled on with tires and rusted metal parts. No captions here to place the blame on anyone, but its hard not to read into these rehabilitation images a sense of restitution. Here, you littered our town — now un-litter it. Further down, the captions of road-side trash piles continue: “Put trash in its place”; “proud people don’t litter”; “Smart people agree: Litter is Stupid”.
I’m balancing the exhilarating feeling I had as a kid walking down the trash-possible creeks with my hatred for the companies that have knowingly polluted it in irreversible ways. So what, even when we pick up all the trash, even if you toss all your so-called criminals in the jail and “clean up the streets,” the creek could still run with sludge?
This month, Senate Bill 89 crashed through the Kentucky legislative cycle, defying a government veto and breaking loose a dam of pollutants into Kentucky’s waterways. We shouldn’t pretend that the politicians who sponsored this bill haven’t received donations from energy and coal companies invested in making their work easier and cheaper, which nearly always involves skirting protections for our natural resources. Madison Mooney, a Martin County resident, is quoted in a recent Sierra Club article about the rollbacks of water protections under SB 89, asking “Do we want to tell our children that we do not want them to play in the creeks and streams?…No one should be afraid of water. We actually need it to survive.”
Madison’s family, I’ve learned, owned a buffet-style fried chicken restaurant where my wife used to hang out in the back room in her early elementary years, which was coincidentally a hair salon. Thank you, Madison, for using your voice, and thank you to the waters that connect us.
I’m also balancing my authority to speak to these things as a current transplant existing (most of the time) outside of my hometown. Still, we all live downstream. I’m living in a city now that pollutes its poorest residents excessively, as in the case of the neighborhood of Rubbertown in Louisville which is home to 11 chemical plants and accounts for 42% of air emissions in the county. We all rise, or drown, with the creek.
Sitting in that classroom, looking out onto the park, surrounded by classmates who, in 2016, were already jumping behind a corrupt businessman-turned-politician in his run for president, was when I first began to form a schism between my love for a place and the harm that flowed through it. I hated my classmates for hating. I hated them for being irrationally protective of their land that, to be honest, was never theirs to begin with. Does generations of your family resting in a plot of dirt make it yours? Does caring for that plot of dirt make it so? How easily can that be taken away when a multi-conglomerate machine decides it’s no longer yours to change?
What water does even more than it sustains us is that it connects us. Pollution in the Ohio surges down the Big Sandy, floods down Tug Fork, floods down Levisa Fork, floods down your own creeks. If we aren’t connected, if we hesitate to speak with one voice for our health and safety, we risk losing it. It’s that personal, and it’s that big — family, we all live downstream from each other.
You can find more information about supporting KY’s natural resources here: https://www.sierraclub.org/kentucky
LINKS:
https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2025/03/clean-water-risk-millions-kentuckians-sb-89
https://www.johnsoncoky.com/residents/solid-waste
https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2023/06/19/trash-pick-up
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/22/martin-county-kentucky-tap-water
https://genius.com/Bonnie-prince-billy-downstream-lyrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubbertown,_Louisville