Water
The majority of my childhood revolved around water. I mean a certain kind of water. A certain kind of freedom that felt like a vacation, but wasn’t a trip to the beach or the lake. Instead, it was the kind of place that was both tragic and beautiful. Follow a dirt road that had seen years of abuse toward places where salt-of-the-earth men who worked long hours for somebody else to get rich had long since gone. Some people call it mountain top removal or surface mining. I’ve known them as strip jobs my whole life.
No matter what you call it, it is a disgrace. Moving and shifting, freezing and thawing, it took millions of years to create the ecological marvel that is central Appalachia. Which humans managed to destroy in a hundred years’ time. Gone are our mountaintops, which we will never see in their original form again. I’ve spent my fair share of time on strip jobs and can say that even with all the destruction, you can’t deny the feeling of freedom and sense of wonder when you reach that flat expanse.
Hollers can feel suffocating especially when you’re a kid. On top of these mountains I could breathe, feel a breeze, look out over the beauty that is the Appalachian Mountains. The valleys looked different from up there. It made me proud of where I was from.
Sheffel’s debut memoir, “The Nature of Pain: Roots, Recovery, and Redemption Amid the Opioid Crisis,” will be published on 7 October 2025.
I don’t know how my dad felt about it because he never said. I suspect he was up there to evade the law and any woman that frowned on his drinking all day. He’d take Eric and me up there to swim. Every strip mine around here is littered with ponds. Those ponds can be dark, soupy, or just the right shade of chocolate. At times I’ve seen them Bahamas blue to the bottom. Something should have told us it wasn’t natural to swim in a pond you could see right to the bottom of on top of some mountain in eastern Kentucky, but we might not have listened. This was our retreat, even if these ponds were built to catch runoff or wash coal. In the mountains, we tend to make the best of every situation, and for us, this was like Heaven, driving some dusty old road in the back of a pickup truck looking for this liquid oasis. I guess we never realized there was any other way.
Daddy would back his truck right up to the edge of the water, and we’d all get out. He’d crank up John Prine and throw his tailgate down. A cigarette hanging on his bottom lip like it was holding on for dear life. Digging around the cooler, the ice so cold it hurt my hands to reach inside. Budweiser can with water dripping off the edge. His legs would dangle, his shirtless back and chest already brown from years in the sun. He would laugh and throw his head back.
I know he had things that weighed on his mind. He had to. At the time, he seemed like he didn’t have a care in the world. Eric and I would ease our way into the crystal blue water. The bottom would be thick with clay and whatever else had settled out. I loved when we covered our faces with this grey conglomerate like soldiers on a secret mission. Other times we would see how far we could venture out before the water crept over our heads. We didn’t go far before the bottom slopped to at least ten or twelve feet.
It was not an ideal swimming hole for a couple of kids. Eric still couldn’t swim at eleven, so I never pushed the issue, but I longed to swim past the point of safety. Swim out to where I might never come back. At the same time, I wanted him to be safe. I knew he’d follow me. If growing up had been like swimming where we knew right away when we were over our heads, maybe we wouldn’t have gone so far.
Pond water was everywhere we went. Anytime I was near water, it seemed to quiet all the voices churning around. It gave me an inner peace. My favorite was probably the one that sat directly behind our Uncle David’s house at the head of Snow Lane in Caney. He lived on a piece of property that his family had mined, and what remained was a beautiful piece of flat land and a rock wall that rose fifty feet or better with a pond at the bottom. David’s place was somewhere everyone was welcome. Doors open, Bob Seger blaring, a dark green single-wide trailer, a P.O.W flag whipping in the wind. Granny B would get up and dance with my daddy. He would twirl her around. They existed in their very own ballroom. We all existed in our own fantasy at Uncle David’s.
The pond was there, and saw it all: every fish we caught, the poor water dogs we caged, and the nights we stayed awake when all the rest of the world was asleep. It was our go-to form of entertainment for years. It sucked in adults just the same as children. On summer days when the heat was unbearable, we would squeal with delight when David would jump in to cool off, even for a moment.
More often than they tried out our hobbies, though, we would participate in theirs. Like us sneaking beer out of the refrigerator in potato chip bags to run outside and drink. David built a floating platform, giant pieces of Styrofoam with a plywood deck nailed to the top that he named the pontoon. We could paddle it all around the pond for fishing and swimming. We never cared that it wasn’t motorized.
Eric and I never could keep up with anything from one year to the next. My dad would buy us a new fishing pole and tackle box at the beginning of every summer. He’d spend all day floating around the pond at David’s, teaching us how to fish. Letting us try sips of beer. Eric wore a ball cap with a gold fish hook clipped on the bill, like you see sometimes at a gas station. Right by the register. Both my dad and Uncle David filled in for Eric’s dad, who never was around. I didn’t mind sharing my dad. There were times when I thought he needed him more than me. They were his heroes. Flawed as they were, worn out as that spot of land might have seemed, we found what we needed and never knew to want any different.
