Living in Harlan County is like being in an Ingmar Bergman film. If Ingmar Bergman had directed the show Green Acres. Or maybe a hillbilly version of those Calvin Klein commercials from the 80's where everyone looks really serious and talks in sentence fragments. In Harlan County you can stand there and pick up sentence fragments that not only make no sense, but it's impossible or even frightening to try to imagine them in context, like when you hear a 90 year old in a wheelchair saying "Daddy always made us eat biscuits on Thursday" or the hairy guy at the Subway, mumbling to no one in particular, "Don't know nothing about no insurance."

 

In Harlan County, all the off-duty sheriff's deputies work part-time security at the liquor stores, and they seem to know about 80% of the clientele by their first names. Which is convenient, because it's the same folks they'll be seeing in the drunk tank the next morning.

 

Three year olds with mullets run up and down the aisles of the Wal Mart begging their parents to use the change from their food stamps to get more Mountain Dew, and play naked in the cul-de-sac in ninety degree heat while their mothers scream from the doorway, "You'd best put your diaper on, Little Earl!" and "I said get that damn diaper back on!" and "I swear to God, if you don't get that diaper back on right now, well I just don't know what I'll do!"

 

On my way to work, I drive past this one big house with one of those typically Southern porches that wraps all the way around the house, with two old leather recliners outside by the door. There are three or four 800-pound guys out on the porch at any time of day, and while they do wave and smile every time I drive past, I'm starting to wonder if they're really that friendly or if they're just wondering what I would taste like breaded and deep-fried. Not for the first time, I note the irony of living in a country where poor people struggle with obesity while rich people waste away with eating disorders, which is the exacr opposite of every other country in the world or in history.

 

There's an old man down the street who wears overalls and is out on his hands and knees cutting his grass with a pair of scissors. Is he that anal about the length of his grass? Or is it that he can't afford a lawnmower and this seems to be the best alternative?

 

There's a woman in a sundress with a pasty complexion who stands in her yard holding a big stick while 20 kids run screaming around her yard, playing a bizarre version of tag whose only rule seems to be to yell and argue at the top of your lungs about who's "it". She just stands there, smiling vacantly, glassy-eyed. Is she those kids' mom? I kind of hope she is, because I can't imagine anyone paying her to watch those kids. But up here, you just never know.

 

Up here, everything I've ever known is backwards. Up is down. Right is wrong. Stupid is....Well, it's still stupid.