Basket Balls and Holy Bells: Emilie's Re-Poem-Port

Installment 1: A Re-poem-Port inspired by the Sisters of St. Benedict of Ferdinand, Indiana

Imagine sitting in a huge vaulted marble room, bells, harp and organ slipping around the columns and over the pews like the black and grey seams passing through the white marble. The faith and the marble come from Italy. The hand cut wood pews, with their swirling vegetation come from Germany. An Amen and silence, except for the sound of 15 rubber basketballs reverberating through the crypt, shaking down the silk knee-highs of a little old nun at the noon day prayer. “We would be praying and you’d hear all these balls bouncing.” A high school for girls was located in the crypt below the church. The basketball court was inserted in 4 sections between the stone ground in 8’ sections of 2” shiny wooded floorboards. The black game circles were worn through by the rubber tennis shoes. The girls are gone.

I particularly loved the way the crypt recorded time. The walls were thick at the bottom of the basilica to bare the weight of this religion. Huge cave windows of smooth plaster were cut into the walls, portals into the day and the changing light. The daylight revealed a stratum of memory, first the crypt was a storage space for holy relics, then a basketball court and theater, then a chapel, while the church was being restored, then an art gallery…soon I think a burial ground.

Kate and I frequent gas stations these days. Gas stations are good place to wake up, drink coffee, watch the birds play games on the telephone wires, get directions to places we’ve never been. I love the bright colors, particular the two shades of green used for the BP logo. Gas stations produce allot of disposable energy like candy wrappers, gasoline and Styrofoam cups. We’ve been to stations in Virginia, Kentucky, Indian, Illinois and Missouri. Are these florescent oasis’s non-places? They don’t record memories like the crypt in the church of St. Benedict. They will be bulldozed and flattened, bulldozed and flattened—leaving behind a soda can, trash or artifact? I wonder if people become streamlined like gas stations, hotels, highways, sub-divisions.

We sat in the church during the noon day prayer. All I could hear was the fountain between the almost whispered choruses of nuns chanting the psalms. The sound of a fountain, cool and contained added to the mellow drone. I saw hundreds of rows of pearly white and gold teeth opening and closing. Do not let the enemy in. The wind is blowing, shut all your doors!—open your heart to God…

I was imagining the way the church looked before it was restored in 2005. The Nave peaked in a spine of parachuting canvas and lopsided boards blooming into an upside down forest of horse hair. We would be sitting beneath the great underbelly of a wooly mammoth. I remembered…

…a walk with Will through Gaudi’s still unfinished la Sagrada Familia. The columns like thick milk thistle holding up the sky, creating a space of buoyancy somewhere between gravity and weightlessness. We played hide and seek in this massive fossil, but never found each other because we were always looking up. Later that night, we stumbled down a paved stone alley into a church that held the sound of the wind like a conque shell. Thousands of porticoes, some with wrought iron gates, were flickering little movies. Paintings of weeping women and dying men were glowing above mounds of smoldering red candles. I reached my hand into the smoke, dropping a coin, and lighting a wick for Papa. My grandfather was shipwrecked, on a raft for 48 days. Each day, he lay in the sun and salt eating chocolate, until it ran out. He ate condensed milk, until it ran out. He ate his own daydreams and then he was found. I am looking for milk thistle; it is supposed to remedy the gallbladder.

Kate and I are on our bicycles. We need to make it to Kansas City by Saturday at 2pm for the unveiling of a clay head that looks like my papa--Nathan Stark. Busts have gone out of fashion. It will be strange to look into this new face, especially because my grandfather was always a good four feet taller than me. Yes, it will be strange to look directly into his eyes, a head on top of a pedestal.

The hill was steep. The rain was unrelenting. Agnes Maria Dauby, Assistant director of Vocation Ministries led us through arcades, halls and courtyards to the Monastery’s Swap shop a small room filled with neat rows of pastel shirts, underwear, bras and slacks. Everything was soft and dry. We were quickly transformed and spent the next hour chatting over hot chocolate and glazed cinnamon cake.

“I don’t see how people can make it through life without God.” She was wearing a flower button down blouse. “My parents installed the faith in us.” Agnes Maria’s father worked at an army ammunition plant, driving a forklift. Her mom worked at a plastic factory where they made canisters for bubbles. I’m Imagining a whole factory filled with rotating gears, boiling plastic, and billions of bubbles. She grew up in a house, whose walls were covered in holy pictures. My grandmother on my Dad’s side had a hologram of Jesus’ face outside the bathroom. You’d look at your own face in the mirror, and then open the door and see Jesus. Depending on your point of view sometimes he had a halo and sometimes he had a crown of thorns and blood drops.

A nun in a sparkly gold top gave us a tour of the church. I can’t remember her name. I am trying to remember all the names of the people we have met on this journey. The one that sticks with me right now is AriAnA. She is nine and an expert lemonade entrepreneur. We didn’t actually meet. Her father told us about how he loved her name. “It has three A’s! When you right it out, the A’s become the mountain peaks. You can draw clouds swirling around the peaks.” Kate drew the clouds. We left the drawing on the kitchen counter in a town we might never see again.

Into Missouri and Kate's First Sermon:

Who would have thought that there's a two-hundred and twenty-five mile bike trail running through the middle of America? It's called the Katy Trail, and runs east-west through Missouri along what used to be railroad tracks. There is a freckling of little towns along the Katy trail, most of which seem in varying states of decrepitude and historification. Many were first river towns before a major flood re-routed the Missouri and the railroad came in giving new life to these majestic rural communities. The railroad service stopped in this area in 1986, plans for the trail began shortly after.

On our first day in Missouri we rode west into the headwinds that nearly stopped us in our tracks. The day before on our way to meet our lunch-date at the Lone-Star Steak House, (these men had seen us two days in a row in two different towns and asked us out for lunch West of where we saw them,) we had timed ourselves at 19 mph, but this wind brought us back to maybe 5 mph. We hadn't had breakfast and were expecting an easy 15 mile ride before meeting the head of the trail, but an easy 15 miles turned into a blusterily-tedious 30-plus miles before breakfast. By the time we got to St. Charles we were exhausted and hungry. We ate a full meal, took a nap, played music on the grass and had cannoli and espresso at a little Sicilian bakery in St. Charles before jumping on the trail. We rode beside the river for a while before snaking into a canopy of black walnut, burr oak and long, sturdy vines draping over the limbs of smaller trees. The ride was a nice change from the highways that had brought us from Louisville to the outskirts of St. Louis.

We have been riding since Evansville, IN with a broken camera. We got rained on and somehow, despite the Ziploc bags, it got wet. So bear with our wordy posts while we search for a replacement.

Every place we've been since Virginia the rivers have been low, algae ridden or totally dry, and the city water as a result tastes like algae or sulfur. We met a real nice guy, Dion Peek, who let us sleep in his antique shop, all creaky and dusty and incredibly comfortable, rode a bit the next morning to find breakfast and were turned away from the only place open in town. Stopped outside of a house with a sign that said "Think Peace" to adjust Emilie's tire, and were offered a breakfast of homegrown eggs and whole grain toast. Mmmm. (We'll talk more about that in the Think Peace post). A little later we got our fifth flat tire of the trip and met some nice people who took our picture, and convinced us to spend the night in Herman where we celebrated our almost half-way across the USA, over a glass of wine and some Schnitzel.

Not in Missouri, at least not along the Katy Trail, but everywhere before it seems like people like to burn their trash as much as they like to make biscuits. Seems like every ten miles I smell one or the other, biscuits, trash, biscuits...

Being on the road you have a lot of time to think. I would say that more than anything I think about my country. I think about how dissatisfied I am with the connection between people and their government, and how I want to see that change. The people of this country are as good and generous and kind as it gets, but the government of this country is as aggressive and power-hungry as it gets. I am riding along through this fantastic landscape and thinking to myself, what happened? When did America become a power-hungry, fear infested nation? When did CEO's and the Military become the leaders of our nation? Why has privatization been allowed to transform this generous nation into a wealth-building corporation? We can look back at the transformation- the rape of the land and native people, the settlement of Europeans and the development of Democracy- a great idea with bloody hands shaking guiltless at the signings- the unbridled development of capitalism, the creation of American billionaires and the eventual change. It's quite clear how our country has come to a place of paranoid preemptive terrorism. But we stand at an intersection with two clear paths before us. We can continue, as citizens of this nation, to let the machine of destructive militarism to search and conquer until we are hated and feared by all the nations that were once our allies, or we can create change, massive restructuring of the goals of our government. We can stand-up and refuse this war-hungry administration. I personally accept that I have not done my part in the cause of peace. I have not gone to the marches on Washington, I have not written letters to the president. I have not put aside my personal desire for comfort and safety in order to stand up for what I know is absolutely right.

I want to make this world a less violent place. I want to make this country an admirable place again. It is important to vote. It's important to vote for what you BELIEVE in. We met a man in the bakery in Herman, MO who had fought in the Korean war. He was talking about the newspaper and the History Channel and how the History Channel tells the story as it actually happened, and the newspaper is just politics. He said he was ready for a Third Party. I think that I'm ready for the abolition of the party system. I'm ready to see people declassified, government for the people by the people. Officials who run for the ideas that they stand for, not for a Democratic or Republican modification of such. I'm sick of appeasement. Everyone so eager to please, to feed the cycle. I don't want to see the first woman president of the USA doing the same crooked shit that everyone before her has done. Enough with politics! Can we get our priorities straight? Our country is in a state of financial and spiritual crisis. We don't need God, and we don't need War and we don't need Propaganda and we don't need Credit. What we need is Community. We need each other. We need to restructure our resources. We need to keep our taxes in our homeland and stop paying people to kill other people in countries across the ocean.

In short...we need to stop our government from aggressive actions.
We need to follow our hearts and do what we FEEL is right.
We need to take responsibility for our Nation and the people who run it in our name.
We need to reclaim America and save it from the falls of empire.

Between Berea, KY and Jeffersonville, IN

Uranium Glass in an antique shop near Berea, KY...also found a monkey clanging a pair of cymbals, a set of unusually sized wood checkers, and a couple of blackened saws that didn't quite resonate.


Tobacco Drying. Most of the barns we've seen tobacco in are painted black--possibly to absorb the sun, creating a hot house for drying.

Dried up riverbed--Kentucky is living through the largest drought in its history.


Lancaster, KY Church and water tower. Lancaster...City of the Golden Lion!

A typical stone wall that walled in the pastures on the way to Perryville KY, the Civil war battlefield where we slept.




Log Cabin for my Dad (Paul Menneg)

Modernist Building in front of the Queen of America steamer ship. We tried unsuccessfully to sing our way on.

Terry's beautiful Victorian house, which he has been restoring for the last 20 years.

Louisville, KY and on...

It's hard to decide to stay or go. We find ourselves rolling into a nice town, big newly renovated library, eat some good hot food, and the rain starts pouring down and we wonder... stay? go?

For a moment we will stay and see if the rain will at least slowdown. There is a little girl wearing a headband with a battery pack and her grandmother is tugging her around by the arm like she was a sock monkey. Gracey-Joe is 3 and doesn't talk much but she likes dancing with us.

We decided to take a break from the rural bible belt and head north to Louisville, KY for a little urban revival...We called our first Warm Showers contact, Zach, and stayed for two nights in a lovely part of town, with music and good pizza. Katie, Zach's partner, gave us back rubs- AMAZING- and Emilie finally slept, pretty well. I made a huge batch of granola with oats, sesame, raw pumpkin and flax seeds, raisins, almonds, turmeric, cinnamon, cayenne, ginger, and nutritional yeast. We sent a bunch of it ahead to Kansas City which is where we hope to be in ten days to meet up with Emilie's mom and a bust of her late grand-daddy. We are trying to convince Blake to come out and join us, but he is reluctant, thinks that he'll throw off our gender issues.

This morning we woke, beside a man made waterfall and a high levee with railroad on top to find that we had been sleeping in poison ivy. The train rolled through all night long and Emilie was excited, like waving her arms and jumping out of bed every time. I cut my hair some more. It's almost there...almost gone...

So we tried to catch a ride on the river boat Queen, a fancy schmancy steam boat that was paddling on to St. Louis and we were nearly accepted as deck-hands but they chickened out at the last minute, protocol. So we went across the river and state line to Jeffersonville, IN where we met this wonderful man Terry who directed us to the American Barge Company where we were directed to the Vice-President who told us that we couldn't ride on a barge due to liability. Protocol. Liability. Everywhere we go we run into people who follow. But every now and again, the systems break open and you can collect a bunch of chestnuts under a tree, meet a sweet man with a mind for soliloquy and nearly convince him to leave behind his normal routine for a few days and head west with two young women as happy and full of life as himself. That's Terry. He lives in a great Victorian home with a pool house, carriage house and herb garden. He's a mason and has been fixing up this old place for the past 20 years. It is a really beautiful house, with a player piano and a baby grand, lots of windows and space. His family grew up and moved out and now he lives in two of the nine or more rooms. We drank energy drink and super greens and headed out to see the fossil beds of the Falls of the Ohio. We swam in the warm river waters and had our brains eaten out by diving vultures.

As we go on I start to wonder about this country, how people got to think the way they do. Like we're living in some dangerous, drug infested, wild human-eating animal place? Everywhere we've been people have showered us with kindness and hospitality, and still they say how dangerous it is to be travelling "alone" in this country. First of all, its funny that two women together= alone. Simple math friends, Emilie + Kate = not alone. I like challenging this notion that women are weak and can't take care of themselves, and I like challenging the idea that we need to be afraid. Where is this fear from? Do these people know other people that they fear as much as the people that they imagine that we should fear? And how much does this fear debilitate the people who behold it?

We are working on a new theatre piece dealing with the Constitution of the United States of America, checkers, and cake. I found an accordion in Berea and have been learning to play it as well as learning to juggle coal from the mountain top removal site. Emilie is getting notes on her saw now, and we're heading west to find an Abby that we heard about, 45 mile on our way. The rain has calmed down and we're off! Thanks for reading, Kate

Every Mine Has a Dog

“Coal is a curse…mining is the most dangerous job in the world.” --Jim Webb

“Reclamation is like putting lipstick on a corpse.” Harry Caudill

CAM (Central Appalachia Mining) 3 Mile Job
Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining (MRCM)

We ride our bicycles up a steep rocky road next to a river bed. Eventually we are in the middle of a dry canyon surrounded by dense conifer trees. A lone Pepsi vending machine is perched on an outcropping, bright blue and red against the sandstone.

A white truck covered in hardened cracked mud plows down the road. When the dust settles, we ask Johnny Sexton if we could go up over the flattened hilltops to look at the mine. Unfortunately we can't because everyday at 4:30 the mine is scheduled to blast. It is 4:15. A series of hefty trucks appear on the horizon of the hill, tearing towards us like a herd of spooked cattle. “You see everyone is leaving for the blast…we had a guy killed here last week, rock came out of the sky landed on the other side of the ridge-line; hit him on the head. It was terrible. Nothing like that has happened in five years.” Johnny cracks the door, and spits at the ground, a black puddle of tobacco sludge. “Just terrible, I was called to a supina, had to testify in court, was held responsible for a freak accident...I’ve seen a lot of people die, in Vietnam in car crashes... I am an emergency technician, when this guy went down, I grabbed my bag and ran towards him, but it was too late.”

Johnny concedes that mountaintop removal damages the ecosystem. “How could it not? Here we are busting up solid rock. It messes up the entire water table.” He says that because of increased levels of toxins and sulfur in the ground water most small towns in Kentucky that had previously run off of well water are now on a city reviser. On the other hand, he loves the adrenaline rush. “You think you get high when you get speed...try blowing up a mountain! We work all day, set up, make sure every things in place and then I get to push the button. We’ve got systems now where you can be a mile away and still cause the blast."

Sirens blare over the intercom in his truck. It’s hot and I can smell gasoline burning—I’m thinking about what it’s like to blow up an ancient mountain. “Siren means, all clear, set to blast in one minute.” He turns the engine of his car off and we wait in the silence for the sound. Kate says "It’s like waiting for the world to end." All three of us hold our breaths. But we hear nothing. “Well, that’s it. I bet you girls can head up and get a look around."

Every mine has a dog. CAM 3 Mile Job has two dogs. A brown and white dog called Killer Bobby, and a fierce looking black dog named Susie. We met Greg, the night shift foreman who’s worked at this mine for 16 years. He, like the majority of miners we’ve talked to, has been in the business for 30. He works 4--14 hour shifts a week on a yearly salary. Although he's been in the industry for over half of his life, he still does not have the power to decide what gets blasted. He said a lot of big businesses like Wexford Holding Company in NJ own and operate these mines deep in Kentucky.

He wanted to be an accountant, but his wife had to have a hysterectomy at 28 and options changed. He drives us up the mountains, deeper into the mine. Over his intercom we hear something about "copperhead and pigtails," a statement undoubtedly referring to the two of us girlies riding in his truck. We laugh and tease him about how lucky he is to be showing us around. He says he'll probably get a lot of shit for it tonight.

Three mile job is extensive. First we pass through a series of partially reclaimed mountain tops. Perfectly curved flattop hills covered in native grasses and a few sections of reforested Locus. When asked if he remembers what the mountains use to look like on this site he replies, yes of course. We drive over the ridge line into an arid moonscape of pillars of cracked rock and deep craters. An army of massive trucks, with wheels twice the size of human beings, stand ready to battle the stars.

Greg believes that Surface Mining and Control Reclamation Act (SMCRA) is a good thing. After coming down a steep chute, we approach a series of artificial ponds which are used as part of SMCRA to catch the water and sediment from the mine. I asked if the ponds held toxic material and he replied that they didn't. He disagreed with Johnny saying that the MRCM did not directly destroy the drinking water in the area. He reiterated that if MRCM is done mindfully it is a safe a reliable way of extracting coal.

The explosive is comprised of 94% Ammonium Nitrate and 6% Diesel. He says that the process of clearing the shot rocks is very efficient. A front-end loader relocates all of the rock debris. The revealed seam of coal is collected and loaded onto trucks and taken to trains where it is shipped to the highest bidder, usually ending up in a power plant blast furnace. We drive on top of the newly revealed coal seam which is 6-18 inches thick. The next seam of coal below this one is an estimated 26-28 feet underground; it is a 4 foot deep seam. We examine several revealed seams, the dense black is filled with waves of a rustier color. Greg explains that the rust is sulfur, but that the coal in this job is relatively low sulfur. This coal has a high British Thermal Unite (BTU). The area that was blasted today is a typical size: 51 feet of mountaintop were blasted off in a 90' by 90' area. Before blasting, 40 holes, spaced approximately 16 ft apart, were drilled in a grid pattern across the 90' square surface. The mostly sandstone and shale shelf is drilled with a 6 ¾” or 7 7/8” diameter rotary drill all the way to the top of the desired coal seam, in this case 51 feet deep. Each of the holes is filled with 40 lb. of explosives--ANFO. The top 8 feet of the hole is filled with drill cuttings.

Greg projects another 100 years of coal in these mountains. As we ride out of the mine we all imagine that a long time ago all of these mountains were covered in seaweed at the bottom of the ocean.

Berea, KY

So it may have taken us longer than we thought, but ten days later, with two days rest and we are through the Appalachian Mountains! We slept in a barn last night, with Smokey the colt and George the calf to keep us company. Everyone has been sweet, we've been given places to stay, homemade spoonbread in jars, good hot meals, and about 200$ in donations, without ever asking for anything. The people of this countryside are sweeter than peaches. We seem to have made it out of coal country, out of the poorest county in the country- which happens to have the worst tasting water. Everyone buys water, why? The coal mines have made the wells really sulfuric- but the city water(highly chlorinated) doesn't taste any better. The streams are all running dry due to a drought, and there is an abundance of trash- both burning and not. We met nice man today who was pucking up trash from the side of the road.

Whitesburg, KY

Well who'd a thunk it. Last night we had our first run-in with a hoser- that's right, some drunk-up hill-billy riding back and forth in his car tryin to get us to pull over. Of course we payed him no mind and stopped a woman driver on the road and asked if she wouldn't mind driving behind us for a while till he left us alone. Sure enough, he took off with his tail between his legs. We ended up riding with this very nice lady and her son William all the way to the next town. We talked to her about it, she spoke with a sweet low drawl of a coutry singer, beautiful- reminded me of my mothers mother, she said, "That's my neighbor. He's got a wife and kid, it just makes sick." So we were safely delivered to the firehouse where we were told the city park'd be the best place for us to hull up. A night of false starts, waking every hours or so hoping it was daylight. When it finally came we were about to leave town and I just felt like I needed something hot in my belly. So we went over to the pharmacy where we'd had dinner the night before, and ordered two coffees and some toast. Got to talking with the lady's sittin there and they suggested we stop in at the Appalshop(appalshop.org), a non-profit recording studio/film studio/radio station. Shiela and Clea sent us off with a very nice and unexpected donation, and we stopped in 20 miles later to meet their cousin, Jim Webb. He introduced us to DJ Willard Hall who was hosting the Scuttlehole Gap Get-Together and would you believe it, he put us on the air! The radio show is a bluegrass show, and we sang the other night on top of Big A Mountain in VA at a bluegrass get together. So now when people ask us what kind of music do we make we say, Newgrass Artrock. Thank you to all who got us on the air. See you in hollywood! Kate