Moonshining is as much a part of the national folklore as the covered wagon Although "moonshiner" originally meant Englishmen who ran brandy and gin along the North Sea coast toward the end of the 18th century, it came to have special application in America to the men who made illegal whisky—quite literally by the light of the moon. While their ranks have been decimated, a few moonshiners still ply their illicit trade in the deep recesses of Appalachia. Feeling rather like David Livingstone in search of the Nile's source. Correspondent William Friedman was blindfolded and led through the labyrinthine Eastern Kentucky hills to meet one of the last of those who brew "white lightning" in hidden caves. His report:
THE battered old sedan wound its way along a narrow ribbon of dirt road in Clay County's back country. On the way, the former sheriff who had agreed to produce an authentic moonshiner spoke with real pride of the man's wares. "His whisky's good stuff—crystal clear," he said. "Stinks to high heaven, but if you can get past the smell, it'll set you on your head or butt faster 'n he'd blow your innards out for smiling courtin'-like at his daughters. When I was high sheriff, I put the ax to at least 300 stills, but I never did his, he bein' my kin. One time he and his old woman had a fallin' out, and she come down to get a warrant. See, he gets to drinkin' his own likker and comes home and beats on her, and she gets all hot and comes down and tells the law where he's got his still hid. So I said I'd go get him, but I never did."
In the moonshiner's community, coal smoke rises in thin gray wisps from stovepipes that jut through corrugated roofs. The houses are mostly unpainted clapboard decorated with weathered old Camel and Chesterfield signs; many are on stilts. The yards are strewn with empty cans, bottles, cartons, boxes. Chickens peck around them and in the meager patches of corn and tobacco plants. At the moonshiner's cabin, the approaching car sent two barefoot girls scurrying to their mother, who in turn summoned her husband. His face was a study in seams and his hands were encrusted with years of grit. He wore a green plaid coat, bib overalls tucked into high rubber boots and a John Deere cap. He was immediately suspicious, but loosened up when the sheriff told him, with a perfectly straight face, that the visitor was a distant relative from Chicago.
"I'm 68 years old now," the moonshiner said as he scratched a hound's ear. "Lived on this knob all my life." His mother still lives there too, but his father died a heroic moonshiner's death in 1951. "My daddy made his own likker," he explained, "and died at 64 on a big drunk. Stayed drunk for 13 days on his own bottles; stuff was so strong must've burned his insides out."