I sat on the front porch of the rickety white shack watching the paint peel in thin white sheets. The sound of the Big Coal River echoed in my ear drums like the splash of water on cracking ice. I could feel the sweat of my beer can begin to drip on my knuckles. The evening sun began to fade, and the conversation on the front porch of the campaign house grew vibrant as the smell of potato soup poured from the kitchen. The air was still, but refreshing nonetheless. I grinned softly with thoughts of my afternoon adventures drifting through my mind.
It was my seventh straight day in West Virginia. I departed on Friday, May 23rd with my buddy Shad to run a twenty four hour adventure race. The race in itself was a unique experience, the descriptions of which I will save for a separate piece. After the race ended on Sunday, I once again began work on my new documentary on mountain top removal coal mining. One of my student’s, Shannon Morgan, approached me several months ago, inquiring if a project on mountain top removal would interest me, as he was intent on doing a documentary on it for his senior project. I had thought about doing a film on it before, and was excited to see he was interested in taking on such an ambitious endeavor… of course, was the only response that entered my mind.
We traveled to West Virginia in mid-May to begin filming and were utterly shocked at what we experienced. We drove to the top of Tony’s Fork Road near Clear Creek, and saw our first example of ‘reclaimed’ land, grassy hillsides pockmarked with small locust trees and a type of shrub the locals identify as ‘bear bush’, a landscape a mere whisper of its former magnificence. We headed to Sharon and Sam Bailey’s house, a local couple with a large valley fill directly behind their house. At that point we barely knew what a valley fill was, and we certainly had yet to see one. Sharon and Sam were our first big interview of the project. We were excited to jump in and begin to unravel the mysteries of the local mountains. We had no idea how much our lives would change one short hour into the future.
After sitting on their front porch and listening to horrifying tales, of threats, contaminated water, and near catastrophic landslides, we ventured into their backyard to hop on one of their all terrain vehicles. They were splendidly open folks, very willing to tell their tale and show us a part of their lives. We roared up an old fire road. It took me a few awkward shifts to get used to the clutch, but we were quickly running smooth up the mountainside. It was a beautiful day, a deep blue sky and cotton white clouds, with fiercely green country bathed in vibrant gold sunlight. We rounded a bend and came to an abrupt stop. I stepped off the four-wheeler and stared and a treeless expanse of a steep green hillside with a giant cement culvert running straight down the middle. This was my first glimpse of a valley fill. My jaw dropped.
The valley fill behind Sharon and Sam’s house was already beginning to show signs of natural erosion. They explained the state had already been to the site several times to repair sections that slumped after heavy rainfall. The Bailey’s were trapped inside their homes several times for days on end, because the loose mud and rock comprising the valley fill gave way during heavy rains and covered the road on both sides of their home up to twelve feet deep. Their lives are in constant danger, and they are one large rainstorm away from being entirely wiped out.
We continued up the mountain, rounding one sharp curve where one week before a photographer was almost crushed by his four-wheeler after sliding off trail. Sam saved his life by holding the four-wheeler still just long enough for the back wheels to gain some traction and get back on the trail. I rounded the turn cautiously and without incident. Shannon hopped back on, and we were moving.
The Bailey’s led us to the top of the mountain, where for as far as the eye could see, lay a vast expanse of rubble, open coal seems, and patchy sheets of painted hydro-seed, (the grass seed they use to ‘reclaim’ sites, which harbors little to no nutritional value for wildlife). We stopped beneath a large powder keg, where trucks come to obtain the dynamite they need to blow up the mountain piece by piece. They drill holes to varying depths, depending on the geology, and fill them with the explosive powder.
We left the Bailey’s home and headed toward our next destination in Edwight. Rick and Sylvia Bradford spent most of their lives in a small town called Hazy at the top of the mountain above Edwight. Hazy no longer exists, long since demolished in the wake of a nation hungry for coal fired electricity. Sylvia greeted us with a stout smile and a unique curve in the way she presented herself. “I bet you boys have never seen a woman old as me,” she exclaimed. She went on to tell us about how coal use to be, and what it meant to the people of the valley. Her memories of coal, painted a picture of a tiny black rock that folks gathered from the hills to burn for heat in the winter and to help cook supper. It was a memory in full contrast to the current situation. The Bradfords can no longer enter the mountain lands they once wandered gathering ginseng, black cohosh, and other mountain plants that supplemented their diet, provided extra income, and helped treat a wide variety of ailments from the common cold to a stomach ache.
Rick told us tales of Massey Energy’s unlawful practices, numerous violations, and the greed of corporate executive officer, Don Blankenship. Rick even wore a shirt with a warped picture of Blankenship appearing as a large pig titled, ‘Massey Sucks’. His demeanor was deflated, as he spoke fondly of days gone by, how good things used to be, and what a wonderful life he used to live in the valley. He solemnly stated, “It’s like we don’t even have a dream anymore…”
That evening, we spent a solemn hour in the car on the way back to Fayetteville. We met up with a few of my kayaking buddies and grabbed some dinner. The next morning we were scheduled for a flyover, but the forecast called for rain and high winds. We decided to get a jump start on the drive home and headed to Lexington. Shannon slept in the front seat of the Jeep, and I slept on top of our bikes in the back. We got a solid six hours before waking up and finishing the drive.
Reentry is always tough after time spent in West Virginia. It is difficult to become reacquainted with beltway traffic, the high degree of cultural narcissism, and the homogenous vanilla drawl of the suburbs. I was already thinking about the next trip, when I would get the chance to rediscover my own soul, the one persistently numbed by the banal details of modern life. Things that folks deem important here, do not matter in the hills of Appalachia. The beltway culture is disenfranchised with nature and disconnected from life. Energy comes from the light switch, food comes from Kraft, and we live in a world of fictitious boxes with fictitious rules. In Appalachia you dig out the coal and pay with your lungs, you shoot a bear and make a stew for supper with potatoes and beans you grew in your garden, and most importantly you live in a world of circles, where life and death are both equally accepted, respected, and revered. In Appalachia lies the truth, the crude and beautiful nature of actual life, not one sold to you through television advertisements. It is a place where I would like to rest my bones.
So on my second journey to the coal fields of southern West Virginia, on my seventh straight day, as I sat on the front porch of the campaign house, watching the paint peal, I realized that I was no longer the same. I could no longer go back to the person I was before I journeyed into the heart of coal country to discover the dirty truth and look into the eyes of the people suffering from oppression and exploitation. In the coal fields of Appalachia history unfolds before your eyes, as each successive mountain peak toppled represents one more step in the wrong direction. Each pile of rubble another testament to the shortsighted ignorance of man, ultimately driven be greed and power. I sat on the front porch and wondered, what if every person asked how they could make the world a better place, how they could improve their own surroundings, how they could enhance the life of someone else, instead of, how can I build my 401k and prepare for a rich retirement. How different would the world be?
Mountaintop removal is much larger than coal. It is much more than a war about the mountains. It represents a war of ideology, a bitter struggle between those who want to redefine the paradigms around which we have chosen to shape modern life, and those who place their stubborn faith in the shortsighted rewards of modern notions of growth and progress. I thought about Ed Wiley and the children at Marsh Fork Elementary School. I met Ed Wiley earlier in the week, one of the most inspirational men I have ever met. He walked from Charleston, West Virginia to the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. to raise money and awareness about a three billion gallon toxic coal sludge impoundment a mere three hundreds yards behind the elementary school. After his long walk, he spent a month in New York City, waking up at three in the morning to make his way to the Today Show to fight his way to the front of the crowd and hold up his sign to save the children of Marsh Fork. He only got a few hours of sleep a night for the entire month. When you look into Ed’s eyes, you can see he will never tire; he will never rest, until the children of Marsh Fork are safe, until his granddaughter Kayla no longer has tears streaming down her face, until the coal companies are no longer making the children sick. He is resourceful and clever, has a hearty spirit and exuberant soul. Ed is a powerful figure. He represents the change. He grows most of his own food in his garden in the summer months, cans for the winter, and supplements his diet by hunting natural game. He gathers fiddlehead ferns to sell at upscale restaurants, and lives a simple life in a modern house he built mostly with his own two hands. Ironically, the change society needs to shift towards, is the same life Ed has always lived, pure and simple.
I thought about Larry Gibson. His family made their home on Kayford Mountain for three hundred years. Fifty acres remain, an island in the middle of a smoldering pile of dust, rock, and the thundering drone of machines carting away millennia of evolutionary and geologic brilliance, and rearranging the fate of a small man with the heart of a lion. Larry walked us through his people’s property, cousins, uncles, aunts, and other distant relatives, all with small camps on the mountain, weekend hideaways, brief reprieves from the hard knocks of life. We walked straight through the gates of hell and stood on the edge of a great precipice, overlooking a devilish garden. In a brief moment the clamor of machinery stopped, and we were soon shook by a violent explosion ripping the mountain into pieces. We watched in awe as pieces of rock crashed back to earth, bathed in the blood of generations yet to come. The evening sun painted the black seams of coal in a radiant orange glow, and for a moment the surreptitious acts of violence fell silent. I felt the tears slide down my cheek.
We walked back through the gates, leaving the burning wealth of a nation behind us. I took one last glimpse over my shoulder, and stared at the tiny shimmering particles of dust that would ultimately settle in the valleys and towns below, leaving the people to breathe their own early death. We took a few photographs with Larry to commemorate the experience and wandered back down the mountain, passing a massive clear cut slated for new power lines.
I sat on that rickety front porch and thought about Pauline Canterberry, a woman who spent most of her life in the small town of Sylvester, West Virginia. She remembers Sylvester as a magnificent place to raise a family, with strong friendships and good community values. Times changed when Massey Energy decided to build a large coal processing plant in her town. Now, when the wind blows the air fills with a fine black dust that collects on everything, houses, plants, cars. People in the community are forced to wash their houses on a regular basis to keep the dust at bay. Pauline represents strength. She and close friend, Mary Miller, were one of the first success stories in the battle against big coal. They won a lawsuit that ultimately required Massey to build a large dome over one of the coal piles to keep the dust down. I will never forget reading a brief from a law office working for one of the coal companies, a brief that decried progressive government in West Virginia and clearly delineated a plan to systematically depopulate Appalachia. Many residents of the coal fields are filled with fear and do not even realize the full extent of their oppression, the totalitarian dictatorships of coal barrens under which they reside.
I walked through the streets of Whitesville, a coal community in the valley. The two main employers in the town are a small Chevy dealership and the local funeral parlor. I wore my ‘Friends of Coal’ hat, compliments of Bill Raney of the West Virginia Coal Association. I worried folks might not talk to me if they figured I was one more tree hugger intruding on their business. I passed a man who gave me a suspicious look, and I asked, “Are you friends of Coal?” His response was the opposite of what I expected, and he was willing to go on the record to tell his tale. He worked for the rails for most of his life and told story after story of countless environmental violations and corporate abuse by Massey Energy. “No one needs to tell me the truth,” he said. “I lived it.” The response was much the same from the three other residents I interviewed in my brief journey through town.
The people fighting Mountain Top Removal in the Coal River Valley are not against coal mining. They just want the mountains, trees, and soil that sustained their families for generations left for their children and grandchildren. The people in the Coal River Valley currently pay for all of the negative externalities associated with mountain top removal, while the coal companies take the profits and leave town. There is a coal severance tax in West Virginia, but the money is apportioned among municipalities according to population. This means that the places receiving the most money are usually the furthest from the actual mine sites, and those receiving the least are the ones with cracked foundations from the three million pounds of explosives used on a weekly basis in the rape of Appalachia. When you watch the story of coal unfold before your eyes, you soon realize how deep the ideological battle runs. It is not merely as simple as coal versus some alternative fuel source, but much more complicated. These are questions of morality, questions of ethical orientation, questions of whether or not our current systems of government and economic models are equipped to deal with the challenges of the future and the environmental limits people around the world are coming to face. When you travel to the coal fields, you realize how quickly things need to change and that change, is in fact imperative, no longer a whimsical or fantastic aberration of thought by some band of stoner hippies in Birkenstocks. We are likely closer to a revolution than most people imagine, and many people will be completely blindsided. Change or be left behind, or perhaps worse, face an untimely death in the face of abject scarcity.
The situation in the Coal River Valley by no means has an easy solution. Defenders of corporate coal will often tell you that no one has come up with viable alternatives. Even if this is true, that it may be difficult to change, that it may be difficult to come up with alternatives to raping and pillaging the very lands that ultimately sustain us, can we honestly look in the mirror, accept defeat, and allow this destruction to continue?
I sat on the porch of that rickety white shack, and realized I would never be the same.
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