appalachian adventures.

For the past week I’ve been all over the Appalachian region of North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia assisting in repairing and tuning church organs. It’s not that I have any expertise. A friend of mine on MySpace I’d never met, Asher, repeatedly asked me to visit him over the past few years and finally made an offer I couldn’t refuse: that I could work as his assistant and he’d pay for my flight out here. His job pays for all our food and lodging. After another week here, I’m visiting my father and driving to Kansas with him. He and I still have an agreement that he pays for my visiting him, despite his being broke—he didn’t pay his taxes for the past seven years / my brother bought his house so he could afford to stay in it—I’ve been financially independent from him for two years. Thus, the entirety of these three weeks in the South, New Mexico and Kansas is completely free, plus I’m working, plus I sublet my room to Tod for the whole three weeks. Been badly needing a detox from my LA life, and thankfully I am earning money in the process.

We spent most of the first week in Bristol, on the TN/VA border. “A good place to live,” a twenty-foot tall sign loomed overhead as we’d drive downtown to sift through the few non-chain restaurant options. The sign originally said “Push / That's Bristol.” Since being out here, life has been centered around meals. Asher’s employer covers everything we eat, so I see no harm ordering the nicer food items at restaurants: I’ve had a lot of milkshakes, smoothies and freshwater fish. Hoki, salmon, catfish. No matter how local or chainy or trendy or family-owned, every meal in Bristol comes with two sides. Fried okra wasn’t pleasant, at least not the stale ones I tried. “Corn nuggets” had the appearance of a chicken nugget, but were creamed corn-filled. Also enjoyed: beer-battered chips, Mountaineer Pale Ale, grits, hushpuppies (I’d never heard of them), sweet potato fries, oatmeal cooked in whole milk and butter. At the end of the meal, they bring us our “TEEket” and we thank them kindly and we’re on our way.

At a Perkin’s we sat near an old woman with Dolly Parton hair. Her companion had a photo of her in his wallet—I could see it as he was paying for their breakfasts—her hair and face holding the exact same pose and expression as the real her, as though the photo was just taken, as though she never wanted to look any different.

Asher is 24. His computer password is a fake Celtic-sounding name he came up with for himself. Asher’s grandfather and his siblings were named Tom, Dick and Harry, in that order. When Asher met me in person, he expected me to act more masculine than I do. Whenever I do, he’ll get excited and tell me so. When I ordered a strawberry milkshake, he asked why I chose a pink drink. When we went into a bar in downtown Bristol, he was worried we’d get gay bashed. As soon as we sat down, a lady sat down next to me and said I looked familiar. She asked through a thick accent if I was Brandon from her high school. I didn’t know what to say; she receded back to her table in a rush. Asher referred to me as “hedgehog boy” to his friend on the phone. He moves his lips involuntarily when he plays “flöte” on the organ. At first I worried someone flying me across the country might expect “repayment,” but that wasn't the case.

We worked sixty hours last week, almost entirely at the same church, where we dissembled electro-pneumatic couplers, changed the leaking rubber cloth to sheepskin, then reglued the couplers with fish glue. Everywhere else we’ve just been tuning and making minor repairs. Tuning consists of me hunched over in front of the organ holding down notes with one hand and John D’Agata’s book in the other, and Asher in the organ chambers tapping delicately at the tuning collars and wires that change the pitch. Or using tuning cones, which would make a fancy meat thermometer.

On Saturday night we spent a few hours on one pipe in particular, which Asher said sounded like “the guy who sings ‘Old Man River’ garglin’,” and rattled more than any pipe he’d ever heard. He opened it up while the organ was on, and maggots flew in his face. Then we went to the nearby Wal-Mart and he bought a vacuum cleaner, garbage bags, a water hose, a spray nozzle, bleach, nitrile gloves, fume masks and a pipe brush. The hose proved most useful, as Asher used water to unstick the clog. The pipe filled up to the clog, sounding like an extra in-tune glass of water being poured, then the clog popped free, and the water trickled and resonated down the pipe, and then out with a splash came a dead bird, thudding onto the pristine church sidewalk. Maggots inched desperately across the asphalt blindly towards a churchgoer's car. I held a maggot on my finger and then put him back with his friends.

It's funny how each restaurant plays music that furthers their image: Perkin’s had oldies, Kaffe Blue had adult contemporary, The Pepperjack Grill played 90s grunge. I rarely hear country. There hasn't been much other music on this trip. I didn’t bring any music with me, so I’ve been repeatedly singing the same three songs for over a week: Dolly Parton “Tennessee Homesick Blues,” Patty Loveless “After All” and Jerry Reed “East Bound and Down.” It’s fun and maybe annoying.

At a Walgreens I picked up a road atlas to look at America, while Asher bought organ supplies. The minute I was left alone, two ladies working there both rushed up to me from opposite directions and accidentally spoke at the exact same time—they were so eager to find out where I was from. And then one of them told me how her husband used to be a truck driver and how she once rode with him in semi-trucks through New Mexico and Los Angeles, describing it like she had journeyed to the moon. “My son refused to get out of the truck in New Mexico, even when he had to pee!” Her husband stopped being a truck driver after an accident driving a 40-ton truckload of some kind of quarried rock—a car stopped in front of him on a winding road, and he went tumbling down the side of an Appalachian mountain.

Most restaurants and churches we went to were overly air conditioned to compensate for the humidity. I’d have to bring my hoodie with me not to freeze to death. Asher would tell me everyone dining must be looking at me funny for wearing a jacket. Asher drives a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible, which, when converted, alleviates the sticky of our backs and thighs and armpits. He has a bumper sticker in gothic font saying “Frodo failed, the Republicans have The Ring.” When he first pointed it out, I pretended I didn’t get it.

One time on the way back to the church from eating, a car followed us through several lights and turns and stop signs. At one intersection, Asher took notice that the same car was still behind us on the opposite side of town. We finally got a good look at the driver when we were about to turn in to the church. Staring back at us was a middle-aged woman with big glasses and an even bigger grin across her face. When we parked at the church she jumped out of her car and over to Asher’s door where she stood real close and anxiously tapped at the glass. Asher was perturbed and hesitantly put his finger on the button to roll down the window. “I’ve been following you for blocks. That bumper sticker is great! It’s such a great thing! I wanna know where you got it from.

On Saturday we set out to find the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, also sometimes confusingly signed as the Mountain Music Museum. After looping around the Bristol Mall a few times, we stumbled upon a sign in a KFC parking lot saying the museum was actually inside the mall. The mall was packed. After we pushed through the tinted mall doors, all at once emerging into view were squinty leering eyes in rows and rows pecked into the faces of fat yokel-types sitting on fold-out chairs all facing the same direction of our entrance. We finally found the museum modestly hiding behind an escalator. It was more like a CD store than anything else, but had a few autographed instruments on display. I considered buying Heehaw on DVD, but the price told me better. I put coins into a machine to get the Bristol logo pressed onto a penny. The old couple running the place was eager to make conversation. When they asked where I was from, I asked how they could tell I wasn’t from around there. The man said, “well… … well…” And then silence. They seemed impressed and horrified when I mentioned LA. The lady said of their one brief drive through New York City, “I don’t think there’s anything I left behind there that I need to go back for.”

Since my flight landed, it’s never really felt like we left Atlanta. It’s partly in my head and partly not.(Faux-) politically speaking, the Southwest was getting called “the new South” due to its recent (semi-temporary) staunch red-state-ness. I think it’s backwards actually; the South is the new Southwest. Just like the internet and cell phones have made it much easier for urban sprawl to explode Las Vegas and show up in sudden chunks in southern Utah or northern Arizona, the same appears to be happening in the Appalachians. Supersized Home Depot-Bed Bath & Beyond-Chili’s mini-malls will find you when you were wanting old bumpkin shops on the most removed Smoky Mountain roads. Thanks to the Appalachian Regional Commission, the region got a head start in the 60s in erasing its isolated local uniqueness in favor of copious freeways and chain commerce. That money could have been used better in this region than to invite everyone else and their businesses in. These communities wouldn’t be dragging their feet on globalism or a competitive economy. There’s no reason in invading those Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints communes or taking in the few remaining uncontacted tribes in Brazil and Peru. There might still be households or villages in the South who speak with a Shakespearean accent. It’d be redundant here to have to explain why local color and obscure cultures should be preserved.

On Sunday we finally left Bristol and went down to Asheville, North Carolina to meet up with another online friend, Sebastian. His house was cute and modest. He must have had every book Gertrude Stein wrote; I borrowed one. He brought me with him and some other friends to go tubing on the Green River. We drove out of Asheville, below the Blue Ridge Parkway, almost to the South Carolina border. He and his friends reminded me of myself and my friends back in LA except a decade older. His friend Heather works for two weeks every fall (when the cranberries are ripe) at an OceanSpray factory in Massachusetts. Janelle organized an arts event in Asheville for this coming weekend concerning sustainable living. One fellow wearing nicely-fit plaid pants as a swimsuit—he talked me out of the Unclaimed Baggage Center, saying it was disappointing, small and expensive. “But I’m a thrift store snob,” he warned me. They all know each other through the Short Mountain Sanctuary, where I’m hoping to go this weekend. Sebastian wore a bicycle shorts-resemblant swimsuit; he said my long loose swim-shorts looked “very California.” When we got to the river, most of his friends' swimsuits were a similar style.

Even if I got the chance to photograph the Green River, it wouldn’t have done the experience any justice. When the current got faster, Sebastian's friends wouldn't think twice to grab my hand, even before we had been introduced, to take on the rapids together. The lot of us floated and scattered at different speeds: Janelle topless, Sebastian attempting to stand on his tube and then plunging face first into the water, Hunter and Jason holding each other and kissing as they straddle between their tubes, Heather using her flip-flops to paddle by. I lay back and watched the Smoky Mountain fog wander past, whiffing the planty sweetness of pollen and ferns, reaching out at thick fuzzy vines drooping from mossy branches, the air sitting heavy on the water like it could be swam through, huge dragonflies soaring past. I could feel fish mouths nipping at my toes if I kept my feet submerged, or so the thrift store snob recommended. Yokel locals drifted by, one entangled couple constantly frowning with cigarettes hanging out. I couldn’t help but smile back, feeling some kind of bond with them in the moment.