What About Kentucky?

Associations are funny things, the often irrational way two things glom together like two slightly sticky pages. When I traveled in China bourbon and chicken were always the first things people mentioned when they found out I come from Kentucky.  Hell, even when I've traveled inside of the U.S. I've gotten some assumptions about toothlessness, shoelessness, and thoroughbred horse racing. 

What do people in New Zealand think?  

So far I’ve gotten: 

•  Tornados (it's funny to think about people who live in a place with major earthquakes being scared of doom that comes from the sky)
•  Daniel Boone and his coonskin caps (as well as a discussion of his disappearance from the landscape as a cultural icon, and how NZ has few folk heroes of that ilk, though James Mackenzie the sheep rustler--and his talented sheepdog--is a good example, a kind of tall tale legend of a man who was ballad-worthy after a few jailbreaks and many stolen sheep). 
•  Ugly possums (as opposed to the admittedly cute brushtail possum which is reviled as a pest in New Zealand so people respond towards them with vehement violence. yet they have protected status in Australia where they are native) 

Compare these darlings to the North American opossum.  One of these you could snuggle and introduce to your grandparents.  The other one could tell you where to buy drugs and good places to scream.

Photo credit: Lisa Wright

•   The Appalachian trail, and Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods 
• “The east coast.” I’m not going to diss anybody’s geography, most people here are better at it than I am, and most people have had a rough idea of where Kentucky is. 
•  “There aren’t any bears there.” That one made me think there may be a binary in this person’s mind of bears/no bears. I wonder if alligators count as bears… 
•  Bluegrass (now that I consider this one I’m actually not sure if they meant the plant or the style of music). 
•  “The Colonel” (Sanders, of course, but this person shocked me by omitting any mention of fried chicken or fast food).

Nobody has mentioned tobacco or emus.  I have brought up people smoking in grocery stores when I was a kid, and the state government's tobacco subsidies, I need everyone to know that they paid farmers to grow tobacco and that when the subsidies dried up and blew away, tumbleweed-style, some Kentuckians turned to emu farming.  What a bizarre attempt at fixing the problem of small farm agriculture, and the legacy of the addictive properties of nicotine.  When I still lived on my parent's farm we had a fugitive emu who showed up as a stray one summer, so some of those emu farms were in a bird's equivalent of walking distance.  The idea of farmers transitioning from a plant crop to an animal from Australia is fascinating.  These birds have no reason to be living in the woods of Kentucky and the farmers hadn't been given tools and resources for how to raise a gigantic bird with a disagreeable temper.  Build Fencing, and Have a Viable Market for Emu Meat were clearly well beyond step one: Obtain Emu.  We found an emu skull in the woods the following fall, the stark white of bone showing up starkly against the leaf litter. The emu's escape was short, and I suppose you could consider it ill-fated. But if the alternative was to become an emu meatball maybe just differently-fated. I have this idea that remains murky in my mind that the emu farming was officially encouraged by the state as a primary replacement for tobacco. corn, soybeans, hemp? Nah, how about a giant bird that makes a sound like a drum, and as birdfact.com assures me "while they’re certainly known to attack humans most attacks only result in superficial wounds."

 So, that’s what I’m perpetuating about Kentucky down here, working hard to make those associations weirder.