I Drove You Around the Town to the Hell Again and Back

Nosotros are built-in to leave here. The scriptures has told united states of america that everybody won't slumber in the grave, that there can come up a time for a change. How many of yous have read about the rapture of the church? How many of you have read that story over at Offset Thessalonians Chapter Four where it says the Lord himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the vocalization of the archangel and the trumpet of God? And the expressionless in Christ shall rise when? FIRST! Amen? Then those of the states which are alive and remain shall be called upwardly how? TOGETHER! If the Lord were to come up back and the rapture of the church were to take place right at present the graaaaaves would Bust OPEN! I truly believe that. I might could be a nut but I believe information technology. Amen? I BELIEVE THE GRAVES Volition Bosom Open AND THE BODIES THAT DIED IN THE LORD WILL Come up FORTH!

In the background a tambourine jangled and a few murmurs of agreement bubbled across the airwaves. These hyperventilating Pentecostal preachers e'er put my heed in a literary fashion. Everything becomes a symbol for something else. I've left my dwelling house in Pike County and am driving southwest. The common cold exposed stone of the mountains blasted away for the Hal Rogers Parkway sweats in the sunday and the coal seams polish like obsidian. Information technology makes me feel like Moses departing the Crimson Sea to scroll between them, and I imagine them crashing together behind me, drowning my enemies. I am invincible, after all, says the preacher. Even when I die a part of me, the real me, volition continue. "You are somebody somewhere forever," is how he puts it. Which is much amend. Then he screams some primal language put into him past the Holy Ghost that almost jars me into oncoming traffic. "AAAHSHAMAYA! EDJEEIT! SHAHKANAHNAHAHNA!!"

And later that he disappears, but sort of fades away into a commercial for the Gary C. Johnson Law Office.

There goes Empty-headed Tire. The Goose egg Zone. Clipper'due south Liquors. The metal roofs of old Wheelwright. In that location goes Softshell, Dove Roost, Dwarf, Rowdy and Dice.

It was a Sunday if y'all couldn't tell.

I figured if I was going to a identify called Hell For Certain, I might also go on the sabbath.

My nearest bespeak of reference was Hyden, the seat of Leslie County and information technology's largest city. Population circa 350. Information technology's the "Redbud Capital of the World" and visitors are always intrigued by the psychedelic Victorian style of the Bluish Castle Café. But information technology's more often than not known as the home of Uk quarterback Tim Burrow, the Hurricane Creek mine explosion, and the place where Nixon made his first public voice communication after resigning from the presidency.

Hell for Certain, or sometimes Hell-Fer-Sartin, is a few miles north of Hyden along the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River. The most common story for how information technology got its proper name involves a missionary who took a trip to the area long ago. When asked where he'd been he said something to the upshot of, "I don't know, but it was Hell for certain!"

The sign past the river said Victory Mount Grace Brethren Chapel and in rearrangeable letters it relayed the results of the most recent Leslie County High Schoolhouse football game game.

EAGLES ARE vii-1

THEY ALMOST BEAT SHELBY V.

34-37 EXCITING GAME

Up on the hill, beside the church'southward red doors, was a plaque that dated the place to 1952. And in a higher place the entryway was painted, "The greatest people in the world walk through these doors every Lord's day".

I walked effectually the grounds. A lamentable and dilapidated playground called "Teddy's Playland" sat lifeless on the south side, a forgotten El Camino rusted under a leaning carport. A pronounced bear theme revealed itself. There were bear sculptures and references all over the place. It didn't make much sense to me until a woman in a long denim skirt eating a handful of Doritos materialized from somewhere to a higher place and introduced herself equally Betty Baer, the married woman of the church's pastor. I told her what I was up to.

I could tell that she wasn't from Kentucky, much less Hell For Sure, and I dragged a few facts out of her. She was a Pennsylvanian who'd moved here in 1979 as role of her churchly duties. That was a long time ago, merely Hell For Certain is the kind of place you could live a hundred years and never belong. You have to be born there to get information technology. Your parents and your grandparents have to have been born there. Otherwise you're like me. A spectator.

Betty agreed. She wasn't the source I was looking for. But she knew just where to have me. And later a quick phone call I was following her upward the steep and dingy gravel drive of Sally Jane Begley who, at 93, is the oldest living resident of Hell For Certain, Kentucky.

I was expecting a bedridden invalid. What I got, however, was a woman and then spry and sharp she could easily laissez passer for 75.

"I hope yous'll excuse this floor," she said. "A buncha greenhorns did it."

And then, settled into a custom wooden rocking chair with the words "Emerge Jane" written across the height track, she began to speak of her life in this place in sentences plain merely poetic. Like Shaker article of furniture. There were hints of coalfield Kentucky in her oddly brainy accent, but mostly what I heard was the purity of the land we all stand up on. It was not generic. It was timeless.

Her parents were Perry Countians, she said. They moved to Hell For Certain in a wagon earlier she was born. Her father and his best friend were tired of the mines. They bought adjoining property forth the creek with the vision of raising their respective families and growing old on their own terms. For a short while, everything went according to plan.

Merely it wasn't long earlier the remoteness of the area and a string of bad luck put the family in a tough spot.

"Information technology was so difficult. Living was difficult dorsum then. My female parent didn't like it. She had to practise everything. But every bit a kid I loved information technology and I yet exercise. Information technology was just a paradise for a child. I…I tin't describe information technology. I loved it so. At that place weren't whatsoever mod conveniences, so I approximate I tin can understand why mother didn't like it. And so we moved back to the camps. I never did like coal camps."

However, Emerge Jane was quick to ally a boyfriend named Ted who had himself been forced to leave school in the sixth grade to help his mother heighten his eight junior siblings when his begetter died in the mines.

"In those days if y'all got hurt in the mines it was merely your luck. Yous didn't have anything coming to yous."

She also remembers the frequent flooding of the river and therefore the creek. Information technology caused some inconveniences just, like those of the Nile, the floods were considered part of the natural order of things. They were a blessing, a rejuvenating force essential to agriculture. But others didn't meet it that way.

"They made you sell your property to them," says Sheila. "They didn't requite you hardly anything. The authorities just said, 'We're building a damn. You got to move. And nosotros're giving you this amount for your belongings.'"

"It wasn't a matter of what you wanted to do," says Sally. "Information technology was a matter of what you lot had to exercise."

She's the last of her generation effectually hither. The few others that are left are in their 60s and 70s. Everyone younger than that is long gone. They're doing what they can to keep the erstwhile ways going.

When her hubby Ted was downward sick for over a year afterward a stroke she put a infirmary bed in the living room for him so he could lookout man the squirrels. His mind was able. And he'd pine for Sally Jane with the few sounds he could muster whenever she left his side, which was rarely and mostly to become blackberry picking. "I couldn't let him go to a home. I wanted to keep him here. He was a proficient human being. He worked difficult. He was a foreman with the Department of Transportation. He helped build these dainty roads effectually here. He left me expert insurance."

Ted left his Earthly body in the summer. He is somebody somewhere I'm certain.

"I don't know what I'thousand going to exercise with this monstrosity. It's mine now I guess. I'1000 saddled with it." And and then she kind of stares into the void like people exercise when they dream about hitting the lottery. Except she doesn't say anything about yachts or cars or vacations. Instead she says,

"I swear, I'd requite anything to have that onetime house on Hell For Certain again."

I say thank you and I go out.

I function the Red Sea again and go back from whence I came. Past Dwarf and Rowdy and all the rest. By onetime Wheelwright and onto the Patty Loveless stretch of the Country Music Highway that lulls me dwelling to Pikeville where local regime is working difficult to make me happy. There's a Hobby Lobby now. A Marshall'southward, an Ulta and a Ross Dress for Less, too. More are coming. All on some of the finest bottomland you lot've e'er seen.

I'thousand told it's a footstep closer to Heaven. Simply I'm not so certain.

Words and photos by Coleman Larkin.

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Inspired by Coleman's journeying, nosotros thought the time was right to gloat one of Kentucky's most mysteriously named cities, Hell for Certain, KY. We partnered with type wizard Tim Jones to create a t-shirt fit for any Kentuckian venturing out into witching hour this ghoulish flavor.

Designed by Tim Jones of Olive Hill, printed on Tri-blend t-shirts by The Giant Robot Co in Lexington, KY.

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Source: https://kyforky.com/blogs/journal/hell-for-certain-kentucky

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