California, Meet Kentucky

On Roald Dahl, the climate crisis, and a burning mattress

Melina Walling, Boyd’s Station, Mary Withers Rural Writing Fellow 2021

My first night in rural Kentucky, we had a bonfire. Tall orange flames lapped around the burn pile: cardboard and old furniture, a mattress that tore up from the box springs in glowing scraps that turned to white ash against the black sky.

I had never been to such a bonfire. As I sipped my beer, I tried not to think about the cloud of smoke. I had seen the devastation wrought by wildfires in the West, and the blaze invoked foul memories of a charcoal feeling in the back of my throat. The memories of that feeling overwhelmed me. The thrill of cave-woman joy I felt in the warmth of the conflagration shriveled with shame.

It was my first night in rural Kentucky, and I was already part of the problem.

While attending college in California, I was a green menace. I took full advantage of the compost bins on every corner and relished using the disposable forks that were labeled, impossibly, as being made of corn. I was overjoyed by the ready availability of vegan sushi and Impossible burgers. Most of all, I appreciated the seemingly universal acknowledgment that the world was on fire, the collective hand-wringing and the embrace of adorable merchandise—metal straws, Swedish dish towels—that promised an end to the apocalypse. 

Though I am not alone in my pursuit of absolution from the climate crisis, I am sure that it made me slightly intolerable. I held in my heart a seed of hatred for anyone who would just throw out a plastic water bottle, for any reason. Why would you buy that in the first place? And then why would you just send it to a landfill? Isn’t that unconscionable when the world is burning and flooding and burning again, right before our eyes?

Even though intellectually I knew that just 100 companies are responsible for 75% of all carbon emissions, I couldn’t help but try to cut back. Because the climate crisis is pretty much always on my mind, almost every facet of modern life—grocery shopping, eating, filling up gas, buying clothes, purchasing airline tickets—feels like a tiny sucker punch to the gut. Much has been said about how good your life has to be to feel that sucker punch. That means you have a reliable income, food on the table, a roof over your head, probably health insurance.

Even so, when I arrived in rural Kentucky, I did my best to hide my disappointment in the continued existence of styrofoam takeout containers. I washed and reused plastic forks whenever possible. I was shocked to see litter everywhere, on the sides of highways, in cornfields. I collected beer bottles on the floor by the sink in a county that doesn’t recycle glass, in the hopes that someday I would find someone with a glasscutter who could turn them into drinking cups.

I have been well trained by BP, who invented the concept of the carbon footprint to trick individuals into blaming themselves for the harms created by fossil fuel companies. That’s why I make mental calculations about my impact on the planet, even when I don’t want to. Like when I’m at a bonfire in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. 

But I didn’t expect for those calculations to be overcome by an unexpected wave of affection. I was having fun. Surrounded by braying cows and fireflies, I loved every second of the cool rain coming down around our lawn chairs, set against the warm cast of the fire. 

Then I wondered whether I had any right to love it at all.

***

My life continued. I grew more accustomed to living in a rural place. Thirty-minute drives became normal. I started buying takeout and throwing out my styrofoam containers like everyone else. The restaurant next door to work had good food, and I couldn’t live on homemade PB&J. 

Well, I suppose I could. But I chose not to. Eventually, my built-in carbon counter stopped sounding its alarms. Or I just got used to them.

We had another bonfire. As I watched my Amazon boxes return to the sky, it occurred to me that in this part of the world, hauling a mattress or any other waste out to a landfill takes carbon, too. Specifically, you’d have to get some kind of truck, and you’d have to drive it over an hour away to the nearest landfill, and then you’d have to drive back. The burn pile, after all, is just a miniature, makeshift landfill, out in the middle of the farm.

By this point, I had seen how the rules are different in this rural community. There isn’t a ton of recycling, but most people are not flying across the country for every holiday like I did while I was in college. Out here, there are wind chimes made of Coke cans and backyard chicken coops that produce more eggs than one person could ever eat in a week. In Silicon Valley, you’d put your banana peel in a Ziplock and keep it in your backpack until you finished the hike. Here, you throw it out the passenger side window for the buzzards.

I’d grown so used to the performative art of canvas tote bags and sticker-covered designer water bottles that I’d never really wondered whether a one-size-fits-all approach made sense. 

Scientifically speaking, could this whole bonfire thing actually be better for the environment?

So I wrote to a professor at Berkeley who created one of those carbon footprint calculators.

He wrote back within a day.

In other words: bonfires were better than the trash. My worldview was upended by a single email. And that’s when I started to wonder just how much of a hypocrite I really was.

***

Another thing I’ve noticed about rural Kentucky: it’s full of paradoxes.

In an area dominated by leafy green fields of corn and tobacco plants, fresh vegetables are surprisingly hard to find. Some people can beans and tomatoes from their gardens, but you have to buy most fresh things at Wal-Mart, many of which have been shipped across the country from farms in California or across the border from Mexico. The dominant political ideology suggests a revulsion to even the mention of socialism, yet people work each other’s farms and coexist in a far more tightly knit community than any other I’ve seen.

A deep love of country and Confederate flags. A deep love of freedom and slave shackles buried in the basement. In some cases, Southern hospitality and xenophobia. 

Environmental issues are no different. One of the things that most shocked me was how much cattle farmers here care for their cows. The cows have names, personalities. Every calf and its mother, how many calves she’s raised. But these are beef cattle, raised to be sent to the slaughterhouse.

There’s a Roald Dahl quote I can’t stop thinking about:

The bonfires, of course, appeared ugly at first but were good on the inside. Much of industrial-scale farming appears idyllic on the surface—gorgeous rows of corn, rolling hills of hay—but is terrible for the soil, sapping it of nutrients and exposing it to erosion. People can be nice on the surface but full of hatred beneath, or they can seem prickly on the outside and exploding with warmth on the inside.

The longer I stayed in Kentucky, the more complicated the calculus got. For instance, when I climbed up into the beams of a tobacco barn, I was sweating so much I was afraid my slippery hands would send me falling to my death. And I wasn’t even the one hauling forty-pound stakes speared through the tobacco crop up into the rafters. When the guys on the ground asked me if I wanted a plastic water bottle, I took it without hesitation. I gulped greedy sips. I felt no remorse when I threw the empty plastic down to the ground.

***

The systems that perpetuate environmental destruction give us the false sense that our choices matter, when in reality, they are rarely choices at all. But what’s worse, when they are choices, sometimes we make the bad ones anyway.

Given the choice between water and no water, I’d take the plastic bottle. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that time and again, I have chosen fun over principle. Back home, I’ve bought six-inch platform heels covered in rhinestones that were both terribly impractical and manufactured entirely out of synthetic materials, just to have fun. Out in Kentucky, I found myself looking forward to the next bonfire, perhaps more than I should have. My dread gave way to anticipatory glee as I added to our ever-growing pile of cardboard.

For whatever reason, enjoyment seems to have an override switch that sustainability and even practicality do not. But the fact that I didn’t have the willpower to resist that override weighed on my conscience. So I decided to get a second opinion. Maybe the first guy had been wrong, and these bonfires shouldn’t exist at all. That way I could go back to thinking of them as a guilty pleasure, and when I left Kentucky at the end of the summer, I could try my best to forget my own culpability in their smoke-blowing disgrace.

My second opinion was a retired professor named Dick. His full name is Richard Levine, and he’s an 82-year-old pioneer of sustainable architecture who lives in a completely carbon-neutral house powered by solar panels. I met him on my first trip to Lexington and came back having been treated to a detailed tour of his sustainably engineered heating and cooling system and as the proud recipient of a plant from his thriving greenhouse.

I called Dick one day and told him about how the nearest landfill was an hour away, the pickup truck, the whole thing. I expected him to ask me what kind of things we’d burned.

Instead, he asked: “Did you have fun?”

The question took the breath out of me. “I mean, yeah.”

“Well, that has to factor into the equation,” said Dick.

*** 

What the bonfires taught me is that, unlike Roald Dahl, nothing is ever just good or bad for the environment at face value. Sometimes things that look ugly can be beautiful: ashes raining from bonfire smoke, the glint of sunlight off a solar panel. And things that look beautiful can be ugly: gentle cows silently farting methane all across America, amber waves of grain that turn the ground bone-tired over the decades. But most of the time, everything is both: ugly and beautiful, treasured traditions and the promise of innovation, all wrapped up in one big, complicated world we’re just trying to live in. And to do that, I had found a strategy.

Instead of denying myself the pleasures that make my life worth living, I had decided that others’ pleasures were less justified than my own, and judged them, rather than myself, to fleetingly escape the feeling of shame.

***

The thing is, all humans having fun has consequences. The rhinestone shoes twist ankles. The beer bottles are not recycled or made into drinking glasses but instead end up floating on waves saturated by microplastics. The relentless pumping of carbon into the atmosphere warms the world, changes weather patterns, causes conflict and mass migration. Kills people.

But maybe the sneakier thing is that all of us see the world through a different set of eyes, so we all have different things we can’t live without. After the bonfires, after balancing on a wooden beam, parched, I could see how certain things were absolutely indispensable. They were the fabric of the culture here, a way of life. 

Perhaps if we lived in a cultural tower of Babel, where we all valued the same things, individual action could do something to fight climate change. But with all of our values divided—sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity or inertia or human nature or by big companies and governments—we’re fighting a war on many fronts. And that creates a dangerous trap of channeling desperation into judgment, creating a tribalism that pits rural against urban and fosters complacency on both sides.

Whether this war is doomed to be lost, I am not sure. But in the meantime, nothing has changed. The fossil fuel companies continue their work. So have I. I’ve driven my car back and forth into town dozens of times, accelerating through the curves without too much thought about what’s coming out of my tailpipe. 

One day, though, when I felt down, I called Dick again.

        “You’ve been doing this whole ‘sustainability’ thing for a while. How do you handle it?” I asked. “Sometimes I just feel like we’re running out of time, to figure all this out.”

        “Well, all we have is time,” Dick answered. 

Time: years and years extending forward, the years our children and grandchildren will inhabit, if we last that long. But also the immediate future. My life. Enough time for me to try to make a difference—but also time for me to enjoy the spontaneous, surprising, wild world of the 21st century.

People fail at their New Year’s Resolutions because they think it’s all or nothing. If you miss one day at the gym, you might as well never go back. But that’s not how it works. The little things add up over time, but one candy bar, one moment of joy, isn’t make-or-break. 

If sustainability is balancing the needs of the present with the needs of the future, then perhaps we must balance those needs within ourselves, too.

***

By my third bonfire I was an old pro, ready to burn. On my way out of the house, I looked at the old coffee pot we never used, which had been growing a terrifying kind of white mold on its bottom, and considered it. I knew burning plastic wouldn’t be great. It would probably produce some toxic fumes. 

But I also knew there was no saving the thing. The mold had extended its reaches too far, and there was no way we could recycle it. Besides, it would be incredibly satisfying to watch, as it contorted and bubbled into a black goo. It would probably produce some beautiful popping noises, maybe even a tiny explosion, if we were lucky. 

More importantly, it would connect me to this place, to the people around me, to a culture and way of life I had grown to love and appreciate.

I also knew that even if I did burn it, I would still probably wash plastic utensils and carry around my tote bags. More importantly, I would keep thinking about the climate crisis, and writing about it, and questioning things that seem green on their face, and pushing for better. For the future.

So I picked up the coffee pot, put it under my arm, and walked out to the burn pile with my friends. Then I chucked it into the flames.