Blasting off to Hooch Planet
A global journey to explore our connection with land, community, and booze
Launch date: September 6 2023
I grew up going to a clandestine moonshine bar called Fort Marx that was tucked around the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was the kind of place where you had to know someone who knew where it was to get there.
A double-wide trailer perched on a hill at the end of miles of winding mountain roads, they served your typical beer and cheap cocktails, and on some nights, you could walk up to the bar and order a shot of moonshine. But sometimes if you wanted white lightning it required a furtive transaction behind the kitchen with mason jars exchanged in plastic Wal-Mart bags. It all depended on how recently they had been raided by the cops.
It wasn’t until I left home to go to college in the Pacific Northwest that it occurred to me that there were probably a lot of layers to the story of Fort Marx. From college I eventually found my way to a graduate program in Rural Sociology at Cornell University in upstate New York, where I decided to dig into that story.
When I went home to do research for my master’s thesis, I was chasing the answer to a question that had been plaguing me for a decade at that point, and still does today: what do we make of Appalachia as a place, a people? What do we make of the stereotypes we see on TV, and the fact that outsiders seem to think that they are true? How do we reconcile centuries of extraction and economic exploitation with the resilient communities that survive despite the slow- and fast-moving disasters (like the opioid epidemic, like coal ash retention pond failures) that seem to come in waves?
Moonshine was a lens for me because it symbolized both grit and resilience in the face of an openly hostile federal government, and the kind of depraved criminality that is fabled to run in the creeks of the Appalachian mountains.
As I was doing my work, my grad school friends were doing research all over the world. When I talked to them about my moonshine project, they would invariably regale me with stories of getting hammered on the local hooch in the course of their fieldwork in Thailand or Ghana or Eastern Europe or…literally anywhere and everywhere.
It occurred to me that making booze out of whatever comes to hand, freely given from the ecological base, is pretty much a universal human pursuit. It made me wonder whether the complicated and contradictory legacy of moonshining in Tennessee had any resonances in these other places. Is it important as a medium of exchange in rural economies where cash may be scarce (as it is in Appalachia)? Is it an important way for families to pass down cultural traditions (as it is in Appalachia)? Is it a symbolic act of resistance against a state that has at best ignored and at worst victimized rural people for hundreds of years (as it is in Appalachia)?
It took me 20 years to finally set out on this journey to answer these questions. So here I go, launching myself into space to find folks around the world who make their own booze and to find out why.
I’m going to be writing here about what I’m learning as I go, and reflecting on what “rural” means in 2023. Because while this project is about homemade distilled spirits, it’s also about how rural people survive and how they make meaning in the process. I may be dropping some academic jargon here and there (you can take the professor out of the university…) but my real goal is to tell stories about how people live, how they connect to the land they steward, how they connect to the other folks in their community, for better or worse. In that way, booze is just a lens on these bigger questions about rurality in the modern world. But booze in its own right is also fascinating, complicated, and as we all know, can lead to some very surprising places.
So, I hope you will follow me on this journey. First stop: the Transilvania region of Romania. I’ll be in Eastern Europe for about 3 months, and I look forward to sharing my stories along the way. If you make your own booze or you know someone who does, drop me a line. I definitely want to talk to you.
—Emelie
Great writing Emelie! Really looking forward to vicariously following your sabbatical journey.
Nice stuff - I look forward to more