Wherein I Rise to New Economic Promises for Private Property

At the grocery store today, I could not help but think about the proposed Bluegrass Pipeline project proposed to go straight through my old Kentucky soul.

Why think “hazards liquids” then and there, you ask? It's all economics. New, improved economics.

Well, for one thing, the company says they want to keep things cozy. They like to talk in terms of kitchen-table conversations, so food just follows from that sense, I guess. I‘m just going by what they say, just what I read in the papers. Plus, they like to talk in terms of job creation and jobs are good, and the grocery store has both food and jobs. It’s a business, a private business. In this, it’s a little like the pipeline company except the grocery's probably not an limited liability corporation. There’s a lot of responsibility with food.

But back to the cozy-kitchen atmosphere.

I like to bake bread. So, while I was at the grocery, I looked over the store’s ovens and thought they’d work quite well for what I’d like to do. You see, I have lots of flour and yeast and my hens (situated on that farm that the pipeline company was eyeing like a chicken buzzard in the sky!) are laying eggs like crazy. I’d like to channel these goods to another market---maybe even export! I'd like to be a private company, growing big in exciting times of big opportunity and fortunes to be had. Heaven knows, America needs jobs---and bread! Let's not forget the basics.

But I get ahead of myself. Mostly, I'm just a farm wife and wanted to learn more about private enterprise and how it's really supposed to work in the context of patriotic liberty and by principles of American free enterprise. Never mind that hazards thing. Life is full of hazards. We can't mind them all. Can we? So, set that aside---

You see, if I could convince the grocery store to let me use their nice big ovens, say, one day a week (they would still own the ovens!) for a price I’d offer, then I could take my flour and yeast and eggs and put them through the grocery ovens, into bread and then out to other markets; there’s a growing need for bread. So there's a growing need for me to use those ovens. That much is clear.

But wait! The grocery owns the ovens, you suggest. And I do not? It’s up to the grocery store to decide who puts what and when into their ovens? But I need the ovens more and have big plans, and please don’t forget that they’d still own the ovens. That's such a plus. So, that's where eminent domain comes in. I survey the ovens, tell the government my plans and if my plans are big enough, no store can stop me. But they still own the ovens. We can't lose sight of that.

And think of the jobs! I have business to conduct, and a precious product to convey from A to B. What could be more patriotic than bread---and exports? I’d just come through one day a week, but I’d be creating jobs! Meanwhile, I’d be just like their neighbor. I’d never go away. And when I’m not right there, in the store, monitoring those ovens (that the store still owns!)  I’d be monitoring the baking process from my house off in another county. I’m so very proud of my baking safety record.

But what of the jobs I took away, on that day a week the grocery bakery workers had once claimed?

But …I don’t understand…..you see, I have a farm and land, and I work 7 days a week, as is, but along comes the pipeline company to take my land (Because that’s the only way they’ll get it. I guess I’m just “backward” in that way, just like our governor suggested!) so they can create jobs and energy and things for export. And cars. And plastics, all eternal. Nothing as short-lived as a loaf of bread.

I still don't understand that acres to cars conversion, but I'm sure it's big, bigger than the sunrise or my use of land for helping my hens make their daily clutch of eggs!  I just thought I’d try to join the workforce vision Gov. Beshear had spoke of in his State of the Commonwealth Address. I'd find myself a bit of private property, someone who has something I would like and go and get it by a series of unrelenting kitchen-table conversations---or just take it if some politician would be kind enough to help me create some jobs with my precious product.

There’s so much bread to bake, and so few ovens that I own.

The eggs, the flour, the yeast---it all has to go somewhere, doesn't it?

Isn’t that how it’s all supposed to work?  

We Wait

                                     "How else but through a broken heart can Lord Christ enter in?"
                                                                                                           ~ Oscar Wilde


A Winter's Dawn here on this central Kentucky farm finds me waiting. That's often what Old Souls do, and Kentucky's soul is very old and full with waiting; always waiting for deliverance.

See this road? A land agent for a company called Bluegrass Pipeline Partners, LLC came up this very road into my farm back in autumn. The colors were so vibrant then, the sky a vivid blue that any kid with crayons would agree with sure assent was blue. We try to hold that time all winter here, but we can't. Somehow, it always seems to slip away.

In case you didn't realize, LLC stands for limited liability corporation, an entity which forms up and births itself like some mythological creature that cannot know defeat and, in this legal process, confers upon itself a form of absolution known not even to the sweetest saint. As one friend put it well, "Their exit strategy was already put in place." All I know is that the day that ole boy came up that road, he broke my heart. Ever since, all I have thought about is how to make him leave.

The so-called Bluegrass Pipeline project is a two foot in diameter sludge drain that would carry toxins from the Fracking fields up in the northeast to plastics factories near the Gulf of Mexico, to boats there, loaded with butane and ethane and chemicals I can't pronounce but which I know have no place in our lives here. Sometimes, it feels best that they remain those things we cannot speak of, for speech is blessing.

The geological structure of our central Kentucky land is blessed with streams and fingering creeks that flow and tickle the hills with the force passion of a lover come springtime. At their tips, at their touch, the hills turn a green so vivid, so fused with life, you can only stop and long graze as horses do. These lands and livestock were made for one another, as if when they had to leave Eden, God gave them Kentucky as consolation prize. Only the eye can drink it in. Anything that enters this messaging system of the seasons at one point will visit every hill and hollow, every neighbor, every cow who takes a drink to make the milk further downstream. It bubbles up out of forgotten sink holes and caves and like a traveler offering a ride to friendly hitch hikers, it will sing along with stones it picks up miles back. There is no creek side, no spring hole of singularity. Not here. What you do upstream will, of necessity, either please and bless or curse your neighbor downstream.

But isn't that ever the case? That's why we're dealing with this downstream tide of fracking wastes.

When that good ole boy came up the road, he lied to me. He either lied, or didn't know which way was which, and that may be possible as he pointed to the south and said they'd be bringing natural gas through our farm, then pointed to the north and said it was all headed for the Gulf of Mexico. Well, one, it wasn't natural gas (turned out) and two, I showed him the road so he could know just how to get himself back out the way he'd come in, uninvited!

Since then, there's been a lot of flow of information and misinformation. Those of the LLC have hired the best of everything by way of PR and advertising and---some say---politicians even as The People of this land have fought back for all we're worth and often more than we realized we had in us. Legislation awaits its struggling journey through the state house as I write, and we wait for it, though some say it will be watered down. I cannot help but find that phrase ironic. But then again, the Pipeline LLC has one poor old man's brain flow so twisted around he said he'd rather have protections for the plastic milk jug than the milk that comes in it!

Only time will tell. Only God can turn this tide. Only God can strike back at something that won't own up to its own mess. That much, I've seen. All of a sudden, ever since that bright leaf day last autumn when our whole world turned toward winter, I've felt that need for swords and righteousness and divine deliverance of old that the exploited peoples of the world have ever felt. And it has come. Not always in time, not always in the way expected, but it has come.

 And so, we wait.

Oh yes, we lobby and we write. We phone. We use social media. But mostly? We wait. Ever since the LLC started its limitations on us, we have held our breath in one collective gasp. We are in dire need of release.

Some here are activists by nature and they have their committees and their lobbying and other outlets for the gurgling, choking anger we all feel. Me, I don't understand all the chemistry, geology, the law and ---God forbid--the politics of it all. I just don't want to. I'm an artist, writer, farm wife, dog mom and all that's a load I cannot tote and do the rest. It would obscure my vision when I look up that road in any season.

I know how to form a prayer and a poem better than I do a protest sign, and I do understand this land, I think, though it surprises me each day. I know I am wedded to it after a long, long search for it, and most of a life spent here greeting dawn and dusk marked on its horizons.

I now better realize the pain that people have always felt when Exploitation walked up their roads one day. At least I think I do. At least I know until that circus hawker lets himself come up your road with some false announcement for your supposed betterment, you never really knew that pain at all.

Too often the accounts of "what happened to them back then" were written just that way--- in third person, and usually past tense. This time, along with forming prayers and brushing collie dogs, planting gardens, gathering eggs and baking bread, and all the things that farm wives everywhere have always done, any exploitation will be noted and held to account, here, first person, present, and yes, for now, with broken hearts, quite tense.