The "I Love Mountains Day" march on the state capitol building in Frankfort, KY, on February 17th, protesting mountaintop-removal coal mining. That's Ed on the left, in the red jacket.

2/24/09

Up from The WELL to Stand Up for The Mountains

My two-week dunking in the WELL is over, and I must say I had a grand time down there.  Inevitably, there were as many questions about Kesey and the Pranksters and the Grateful Dead and the 60s and the counterculture and all that as there were about my book, but I enjoyed that too.  At the very end, Scott MacFarlane, the moderator, referred to my story "Another Great Moment in Sports," and then asked whether I'd brought anything from those days with me into the present.  What follows is my final WELL posting:

*****

Boy, talk about Pranksteresque serendipity!  I'm beginning this posting at about 4pm on Tuesday, 2/17/09.  I've just walked in the door from an inspiring protest march, and here, awaiting me, is one last question from Scott regarding my story "Another Great Moment in Sports," which is about ... a protest march!  Old Man Synchronicity strikes again!

This very day in Frankfort, Kentucky, the capital of this beautiful, beloved, benighted state, several activist/environmentalist organizations, spearheaded by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth [KFTC], joined forces for the annual "I Love Mountains Day" march on the capitol building.  About a thousand demonstrators, my doddering septuagenarian self among them, marched up the hill (sometimes I wonder whether I love mountains so goddamn much after all!) and gathered on the grand stairway before this grand old building, in which so much horrid, unconscionable exploitation of our fellow Kentuckians has transpired over so many years, to protest what might be the most horrid form of exploitation yet, the hideous practice of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

There were three splendid anti-MTR speeches this afternoon:  the first by Louisville's rising young firebrand congressman John Yarmuth; the second a real barn-burner by musician/schoolteacher Randy Wilson (featuring a fine found-poem recitation of a catalog of the names of lost Kentucky mountain streams); the third a gorgeously written, gorgeously delivered speech by (be still my heart!) the oh-so-gorgeous Ashley Judd!

(Ashley, a native of Eastern Kentucky, declared herself a "proud hillbilly" and the mountain country her "spiritual home."  She was just smashing in every respect, and she even got us some coverage, at long last, in the local media; the Lexington Herald-Leader — which ignored Wendell Berry's magnificent speech at last year's rally — called Ashley's speech "passionate" and "eloquent."  Maybe Wendell just ain't quite gorgeous enough; he probably needs to get himself a new hairdresser.)

And coming up in DC on March 2nd is a civil-disobedience protest at the Capitol Power Plant, a coal-fired facility that is a heavy-duty polluter in the District, and produces not electric power but steam to warm the substantial asses of our complacent congress.  Wendell, Bill McKibben, and Terry Tempest Williams will be the point-persons (Pointsters?) in this demonstration in DC; 10,00 people are expected to be present.  Some of us will get arrested, and I fervently hope to be among that happy number.

So what did I bring to the present from the Pranksters and the counterculture and the 60s?  Or, as per David Gans's earlier posting [quoting the old Dead song "St. Stephen"], "Did it matter?  Does it now?"

Yeah, it did, and it still does--which is why we're still bothering to do it. Resistance to greed and injustice is always relevant.

*****

On Sunday (March 1st), I'll be traveling (by van) with other KFTC members to DC; on Monday many of us will get busted, and on Tuesday (assuming they haven't put us in stocks on the National Mall, to make an example of us) we'll come home.  Promises to be a long weekend, all in all, but it's a great cause.  Mountaintop-removal coal mining is a truly violent assault on the environment; it destroys not just the mountains but the streams and valleys between them, and the results of it are sickening and disgusting.  If all goes well, this demonstration will be the beginning of the end of MTR as an accepted practice.

If you're in the mood, you can read the whole WELL conversation here.

Jack The Bear

Here's a video of my daughter Annie and me singing my Kesey tribute song "Jack the Bear" at Booksmith in San Francisco, during my Fall, 2008 book tour with O the Clear Moment. The video was shot by my Prankster friend Freddy Hahne. The song appears in the book, in the story called "And Then I Wrote ... "

Un-retouched photo by Clay Gaunce of Ed McClanahan reading from "Famous People I Have Known" at a benefit show for Metropolitan Blues All*Stars bassist, Ricky Baldwin, at The Dame in Lexington, August 4, 2005.

I've been working sporadically for the last several years on a novel which I usually describe as "a sort of left-handed, latter-day sequel" to THE NATURAL MAN, titled THE RETURN OF THE SON OF NEEDMORE, in which Harry Eastep, the point-of-view character in NATURAL MAN, returns to his hometown after a career in academia on the West Coast, and finds himself on the jury in a murder trial. Readers who remember NATURAL MAN may be interested to know that much of SON OF NEEDMORE is in the form of flashbacks, in one of which the late Monk McHorning makes a cameo appearance, and that Oodles Ockerman, who has survived the intervening years, also looms large (so to speak) in the foreground of the story. Sample chapters from the book — "Harry at the Breach," "Freejack," and "Poodad" — are posted on the "Writings" page of this website.