Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

Oh, yeah, this place was a-booming.

You couldn't get through this town down there,

but it's dead now.

We had eight or ten coal mines shut down at one time.

Come on, everybody in here! Have a seat! Let's go!

It's the same halftime speech every single week.

There's so much negativity surrounding this place

that no one ever focuses on the positive.

They see us as ignorant or hillbillies.

Overdose capital of the East Coast.

There's really more here than just poverty

and illiteracy and drugs.

There's a lot of good people here.

When you walk on this field, you better have tunnel vision.

Don't look left. Don't look right.

You look at that scoreboard,

and that shit burn in your heart, you understand me?

We got some ground to make up,

but once we make that ground up, we'll take off.

Let's go!

New York City, where I live.

And it's easy to think,

having lived here nearly all my life,

that this what America looks like, thinks like,

that the things that are important to me

are important to everybody.

That anyplace else is "out there."

Unthinkable.

Maybe even unknowable.

600 miles away from Midtown Manhattan

is McDowell County, West Virginia.

Another America.

In the mind of many of my fellow New Yorkers,

the heart of God, guns and Trump country.

The existential enemy.

My daddy always told me, you know,

those tornados and hurricanes, they can't get to us.

We're way down in these mountains, down in the holler,

and these mountains protect us.

Here, if you gonna see the sky, you got to look up.

To think about, much less emphasize,

with somebody who comes from

five generations of coal miners

in a place that looks like this

is, to our enduring shame, unthinkable.

Why can't these coal miners get retrained?

Maybe put up solar panels for a living.

Why would these conservative, deeply religious people

vote for a thrice married billionaire New Yorker?

Well, I went to West Virginia and, you know what, screw you.

Here, in the heart of every belief system

I've ever mocked or fought against,

I was welcomed with open arms by everyone.

I found a place both heartbreaking and beautiful,

a place that symbolizes and contains everything wrong

and everything wonderful and hopeful about America.

The town of Welch,

known in its glory days as little New York.

Welch is a very rural area.

I mean, it's an hour away from Walmart,

I mean, if that tells you anything.

It's a real old, historic town built in the 1800s.

The American dream in miniature.

A place where generations of immigrants and dreamers

could work and lift up their family.

The town of Welch, when it was booming,

the sidewalks were so crowded

there would be traffic backed up, like, a mile.

You couldn't find a place to park.

We had three hospitals, had the taxicab stand,

had, like, three jewelry stores.

It was just a wonderful place.

The rest of the country took a lot of money

out of these hills over the decades,

billions and billions of dollars,

and when it became cheaper or more convenient

to pull the coal we needed to power our electrical grids

and to make our steel elsewhere,

this is what was left behind.

But this is not a poverty porn show.

Do not pity the people here,

who, despite what you may think,

are not unrealistic about a return

to the glory days of coal and better times.

I drank coffee from the time I could walk.

They put coffee in your bottle, coffee or wine.

Linda McKinney is a true daughter of Appalachia.

She raised her children here.

Linda's husband, Bob McKinney,

is a longtime mine safety inspector.

Now, your family's originally from Naples?

Is that right? Naples area? Yes. Yes.

Came here in 1923

trying to strike it rich in the coal mines.

My mother died when I was five,

so we went to live with my nonna,

and the first day I was there,

she pulled me up to a cook stove.

This is the dish that my nonna cooked

during hunting season with squirrels.

These aren't squirrels. This is chicken.

Dinner is a not untypical expression

of hardscrabble Appalachian practicality...

Now, I don't measure anything,

so nothing has a recipe here.

- And Neapolitan roots. - Basil.

Home kitchen gardens, hunting, and gathering.

This my dad would call piselles; it's peas.

Ooh, making mama dance.

Now, this is what I'm famous for in these parts.

Have you ever had spaghetti pizza?

- Wow. - No, you haven't.

Don't say you have.

The tomato sauce was made

with Joel's tomatoes at the food bank.

We harvested those yesterday,

and I made spaghetti sauce. Wow.

Nearby, Joel runs an organic

hydroponic farm that supplies the local school system.

The people here are very good.

They'd give you the shirt off their back,

come together in times of tragedy or anything.

Christian values mean something here.

They're practiced on the street and in the home.

Most of you have all got your potatoes, right?

Linda runs Five Loaves and Two Fishes,

a food bank that holds many of the lives here

together during tough times.

16,000 people walk through these doors annually

in a county of 20,000.

Gracious God, we just thank you for this day

that we're able to give food out again.

This is not a regular give out.

Watch over us. Protect us.

Help us to keep cool heads.

Father, we pray over the food we're about to eat

for the nourishment of our body.

Just bless it in the name of Christ.

- Amen. - Amen.

This is our home. We love it here.

We're very close to our church.

Everybody knows everybody.

They're all dying now,

but we're still hanging on, aren't we, honey?

Yeah.

Was there any sizable

Italian-American community here at some time?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

A lot of immigrants from different countries came here.

- Still? How large? - No.

We've gone from what, 100,000 to 10,000.

100,000 down to about 10,000-12,000.

In the county itself, as of the last census, so.

Those are some grim statistics.

Yes, yes.

The coal that came out of this area built America, right?

Yes.

McDowell County alone was called

a billion-dollar coal field,

and the people that were in charge at the time

didn't take advantage of all that money

in case something did happen to the coal mine.

The cool thing is that West Virginia's developing

a strong entrepreneur movement

that a lot of people don't know about.

Like with Joe, he started a hydroponic growing.

I mean, not blaming others for their problems,

just trying to solve their own.

A lot of people that's really doing a lot of good

that we don't hear about.

This is our pumpkin pie cake.

Have you ever had a pumpkin pie cake?

You probably won't like it, so we'll take your spot.

We got spoiled. The last coal mines I worked at, I made-

base salary was $94,000 a year.

I also taught vocational school,

and most of the kids that I had said,

"Well, I don't need this.

I'm gonna go in the coal mines."

There's just an education piece there

now that we're trying to instill in some of the people

that still have that mentality that coal was king,

and, you know, we don't doubt that,

but we try to think outside the box and look at some other...

Some other opportunities that might be there.

The job that I have right now

is probably one of the best jobs around here

other than the few guys that works at the coal mines.

I operate this school bus.

I mentioned God, and guns, and Trump.

Get more physical!

Let's go. Run!