On Details In Harrison County

Photo & Story by melina walling

Originally Published in the cynthiana democrat

My first impression after a week in Harrison County: this place brims with details, a richness I never could have imagined.

The bright flicker of a bluebird as it flashes across the road. Fields dappled with purple flowers. The dark grunts of cattle, twin shadows of buzzards overhead. Cigarette smoke and lingering scents of beer and bourbon. At night, screams of insects and bullfrogs. Raindrops smudging my notebook and beating sun baking into my shoulders. The white moth dying slowly in my shower.

My name is Melina, and I am this summer’s Mary Withers Rural Writing Fellow at Boyd’s Station, a nonprofit focused on documenting the people and places of Harrison County. This fellowship represents a new experience for me; all my life, I have lived in the suburbs. Big cities and farms are equally unfamiliar to me. I step off the subway in New York City and mistake the Chrysler Building for the Empire State. I drive too slowly on winding country roads.

Before the pandemic, when we needed something fun to do, my mom and I would drive down the road to the second-largest mall in America and browse racks and racks of clothing that stretch on for over a mile. When the pandemic hit, we did even less. We walked the same five cul-de-sacs over and over. We watched TV, hours and hours of it (an entire season of America’s Next Top Model in two days).

Scholar Marc Augé calls suburbs “non-places.” After a year spent in the suburbs, I felt that his description was more applicable than ever. I wanted to leave the hollowness of non-places behind. I wanted to come to Harrison County because I craved a connection to place.

I found that connection almost immediately. Here, every day, my body meets the land in ways it never could before. When I walk through the fields, I use all my senses. I train my eyes on the ground to dodge cow pies and let my nose alert me to the presence of skunks. I feel the stickiness of sunscreen and bug spray and hear the rustling of small creatures in the bushes.

I’ve done more new things in the last two weeks than I have in the last year. I learned how to cast a fishing line, how to drink beer under the smoke of a bonfire. I’ve watched people work with practiced hands at skills that were once completely invisible to me: changing the twine in a hay baler, throwing corn out to the cows. And I’d never understood how big cows are—how drool drips out of their mouths as they shake their heads, how they vie for a place at the fence near the feed bucket.

The people, too, wear their details on their sleeves, and share them with a warmth I have rarely experienced. A woman I’d just met described the yellow and purple bruises that led to her son’s leukemia diagnosis. A farmer I’d just met showed me, with a jolt that nearly threw me from the buddy seat, how the second and fourth gears of his tractor have been getting stuck. A deacon I’d just met told me about growing up here as a latchkey kid. He remembers exactly how the streets changed after the flood of 1997.

Here in Harrison County, where the details are so vivid, I hope not only to document what life is like today, but also to understand how everyday details are changing. I want to dig into Harrison County’s deep history, so unfamiliar to me as someone who has never lived in the South. I hope to gain an intimate understanding of the farmland, so vital to all of our existence, which changes every season and year. What will the farms of the future look like? How will this land, once a buffalo hunting ground and a site of historic battles, evolve over the next few decades?

I am here with an open mind, to hear stories and immerse myself in this community, because I believe these details matter. I will certainly reveal my ignorance more times than I’d like to this summer—I’ve already had to learn what “in hay” means, how big an acre even is. But I feel driven by my curiosity and desire to learn. After all, this place, where the earth is still not paved over with shopping malls and parking garages, represents a vital part of the future we are all building together.

It’s wonderful to meet you, Harrison County, land of green hillsides and orange sunsets. Or, as Boyd’s Station photo fellow James Year called it, “the land of long goodbyes.” Here, people linger to talk long after they should have left, because there is just so much to say. I am excited to hear and share your stories for the next three months. I already have a sneaking suspicion that I will want to linger in my goodbye, too.

If you see me on the street, please stop me to say hello! And if you have a story idea, contact, or lead, please reach out. My email is melzyorca@gmail.com. And you can also find me in person—I’ll be spending lots of time in the Boyd’s Station Gallery on Pike Street, along with the photography fellows Lily Thompson and James Year.

I look forward to meeting you soon.