Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (29 page)

The phone calls started immediately after Bush testified at a town hall meeting in Wytheville that had been hosted by Governor Kaine. Bush was quoted in the paper as urging the governor to stop supporting the power plant. The first caller left a message on Bush's answering machine: “Yes, I was going to see who your husband thinks he is, like Mr. Larry Bush telling our governor he needs to change his mind about the power plant. He also told the Board of Supervisors to resign. Is this fuckin' man stupid or what?” The second call was answered by Bush's grown daughter Lorrie Stidham. A transcript of the exchange was published in the
Bristol Herald Courier:

“Hey, you tree-planting bitches.”

“What?”

“Hey, you tree-planting bitches.”

“Who is this?”

“If it was up your ass, you would know who it is. Where's your old man?”

The caller cursed a couple more times, prompting Stidham to hang up on him. He called back within ten minutes; this time the phone was answered by Bush's other adult daughter, Missy Bush: “I want to talk to your tree-huggin' old man.”

“He's not my old man; he happens to be my dad.”

“Well, let me talk to your tree-huggin', son-of-a-bitch daddy, sweetheart.”

“You are big and bad, aren't you, calling here and won't tell who you are. You're some kind of a man.”

“I'll show you big and bad. Where's that tree-huggin' son of a bitch?”

About this time, while Missy was still on the phone, Bush arrived home, but when his daughter handed him the phone, the caller hung up. His number, however, had shown up on Caller ID, so Bush called him right back. A shouting match ensued, but Bush never did find out who was calling.

When the Bushes reported the calls to the Wise County Sheriff's Office, a deputy told them they could file a report if they got the callers' identities from Alltel, their local phone provider. But then Alltel said they were only allowed to report such information to law enforcement. When writing his report on the matter,
Bristol Herald Courier
investigative reporter J. Todd Foster called both numbers that had been recorded on Bush's Caller ID. The second caller never answered, but the first caller did respond to a voice-mail message left by Foster. The caller identified himself as a miner for A&G Coal Corporation and said that he was working on a mine near the Bush home. He claimed that he had every right to voice his opinion, just as Bush did. “We're working our asses off up here to feed our families, and this guy is trying to take our jobs away,” the man told Foster.
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Bush points out that he was a coal miner for twelve years and a mine inspector for longer than that, so it's not like he can't relate to the miners. And while he understands people need to feed their
families, he'd rather go hungry than work on something that imposes such devastation on the earth and its inhabitants.

“Nobody in my family or my wife's family has ever worked any kind of strip mines,” Bush says. “They'd quit work altogether before they'd work on one of these jobs. There are a couple guys in our organization who actually have quit because they couldn't stand doing that kind of destruction.”

Still, he understands that the Appalachian economy has people in a corner. “Coal has been the mainstay of this economy. These coal companies work to keep other industries out of here. Regardless of what people think, they're out to keep ye dependent on them,” he says. Bush is not optimistic about the future. “There's not even fifteen years of coal left in Wise County—it's either been raped or is under permit to be raped. They'll fight you tooth or nail to preserve their jobs—and I don't blame them for wanting to provide for their families—but it's so short-term. It's just like this oil thing. How better to get people to holler, ‘Drill anywhere!' than to raise the price of oil? ‘Let's drill anywhere, save me a dollar.' That's today. But people have to start thinking, ‘Damn, what's left for me and my grandkids if we rape it all today?' How we've become a nation of greedy, petty people I don't know.”

Bush believes that mountaintop removal is destroying not only the environment and culture of Appalachia, but also the heritage of coal mining. “It's an insult to call these mountaintop removal workers coal miners,” Bush says, taking off his baseball hat once again. He rustles around his hair, replaces the cap. “That's not coal mining in any sense of the word. That's just total rape of the earth. Strip mining, even back in the early seventies—which was just bench and auger, when you'd cut a little road and go in and auger it and above and below it nothing was disturbed and they're grown up and you can't even see them any more—was way better. But this, this is just rape. And it's raping it not only for the people living today, but for my grandchildren.”

Bush pauses, taking a deep breath. The interview is over, so he
ventures on out to his truck, alongside the curb on Main Street, which lies still and silent on this Sunday evening. Down the hill a train, pulling dozens of gondolas filled with piles of glistening black coal, labors by in surges and jolts, its wheels crying out with each jolt. Just over the top of the building with the staring mannequin can be seen a mountaintop, past the railroad tracks and the river, off toward Big Stone Gap. The overcast day makes dusk appear earlier than usual, and now it seems a gray quilt is being pulled up over the town, darkening Bush's face.

The air is charged by the distant storm, and the sky seeps out the clean, sharp smell of ozone. Before getting into his truck, Bush considers the brewing clouds and draws in the scent. “Looks like it may storm yet,” he says.

Larry Bush talking…

I was in Vietnam in '67 and '68. I was with the Ninth Infantry Division, Eleventh Armored Calvary, Black Horse Regiment. In Vietnam I learned survival, just trying to survive, and it's the same thing here, just trying to survive, just fighting to stay alive. They're poisoning our air, our water, destroying our mountains and our whole way of life.

I'll not quit fighting 'em. I can't stand the thoughts of having died and not having done something to try to protect my grandkids—and their kids—from this devastation. Fighting 'em, dammit, until I die.

When I got out of the military I come right back here. Didn't want to go anywhere else but here. I've lived here all my life except for when I was in the military.

I was born in Big Stone Gap, and from the time I was born, my dad worked in the mines, and everybody in my family has worked in the mines. My father-in-law worked forty-four year underground, my dad worked twenty-two years before a roof fall got him and disabled him for the rest of his life. We lived in coal camps all during my childhood. Roda and Keokee. When I was
young the coke ovens was still going over here. I can barely remember them, but they's going full blast over in Keokee. It was all underground mining, though. There was none of this rape happening, this rape of the earth. But, you know, coal has been a part of this part of the country for more than a hundred years. They came through here in the 1890s and bought up all the mineral rights for a quarter an acre. So coal has been the mainstay for this part of the country—still is, to an extent. But it's got to a point where the extraction process is destructive to all life; not just people, but every living organism is affected by MTR-type coal mining. I never saw it, and I worked as an inspector for the federal government. I saw strip mining, but I never saw this, for them to go in and destroy whole mountain ranges. It's the most sickening thing you can look at, and you've seen it if you come down Black Mountain on our side.

My dad bought me a little .22 Remington rifle when I was six years old—and I still have it—and took me in the mountains from the time I was big enough to walk. He used to hunt ginseng all the time, and he'd take me and my brothers in the mountains all the time. I started squirrel hunting and stuff like that with him. I've been in these mountains, hiking and hunting and everything, since I was six years old. These mountains are a part of us, and to see them destroyed is extremely hard to take. When I leave my home in the morning, coming downtown, I look at a high wall above my house, and that's the most sickening thing, to see what they're doing, for what? For a lump of coal, when there's 120-foot coal seams out west. They can move seven foot of dirt out in Montana and the Dakotas and Utah and places, and get 122 foot of coal. I know this from talking to people at meetings. They do that there, but then they come in here and blast away centuries-old mountains to get at a little seam of coal. Why would you do that? These greed-driven—I just don't understand how they justify doing it. I told some of them in a conference the other night, “I don't see how you get up and look at your kids in the morning, knowing what you're doing to this place.” I mean, it's
gone
.

I've stood up to them since the eighties, on clear-cutting the forests; that's when I got started on this environmental movement, if you want to call it that. People have been relying on coal for so long it's hard to get anybody to stand up, and the ones who have have been dogged out for doing it. “You're speaking out against coal?” they'll say. “This is all we've got around here.”

Nobody likes mountaintop removal. You go to Roda, Stonega, Dunbar, anywhere you want to go, nobody likes what they're doing to these mountains, but if you try to get people to stand up and say, “Stop this,” they won't, because people are so beat down, so hopeless, they keep being told that there's nothing you can do. But we're working on it, we're hoping to save something here. I've been three-quarters of the way around this world, but I've never wanted to be anywhere else but here. We live here because we want to. I want to be with mountain people.

My dad preached union to me from the time I was big enough to listen. I was local union president for nine years. When Westmoreland was here I worked union and preached union. I was on the state compact political action committee as a state chairman and county chairman. I've been involved with the union; even when I was working with the government I was vice-president of the union, when I was an inspector.

Strikes. Picket lines. I've lived through it. I've been arrested, my wife's been arrested, thrown in jail because she was out there with us. That was during the '77 strikes, when everybody come out, the whole union, the UMWA, everybody.

Growing up union taught me to respect people's rights. When my dad started, they'd just throw you out in the streets. I've worked three organizing drives with the international UMWA, and it's just about fairness for workers, give 'em a fair share of what you're making. If a company is making $50 billion in profit and you're paying a CEO $120 million, why can't the workers get a part of that? Some of them is still making minimum wage.

Nowadays there's a lack of the union presence here, and it was a well-organized effort. Penn Virginia is the biggest enemy
southwest Virginia has ever had, but they sit back like they're the good ol' boys who only do good. They're the landowners here, they're the ones who lease it out to these coal operators, who destroy it. Their headquarters is in Philadelphia. When people way back sold their mineral rights to them for a quarter an acre, they couldn't imagine continuous miners blasting away the earth. If they had, they wouldn't have sold it. Mountain people wouldn't have sold it. People today won't sell it to them.

If I could sit down with [UMWA president] Cecil Roberts I'd tell him that the union needs to be out in full force, fighting this. John L. Lewis would have been in Congress, screaming to high hell about it.
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He's one of my heroes. There's other mining systems besides blowing these mountains up. There's thin-seam systems; Westmoreland used one here for years before they pulled out of here, they went in on old existing benches that had been augered before, and they went in there. They had twenty-five miles of existing benches they didn't have to do anything with. Deforesting and killing every organism on these mountains—there's other ways to do it.

And this power plant. It's going to make everything worse. The air, and look at all the mining that is going to have to be done to fit that need. I'm against this power plant because it will create more pollution. Go up to the Carbo plant and look at the suffering they've already gone through.
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We went up there to a meeting in Cleveland, Virginia, and in one week's time, three of their residents were dead of cancer. The air and the water and everything is so dirty from this one power plant. And this one's going to continue to operate and they're going to add on to that with this new plant. One of the specifications on this new plant is that they have to use Virginia coal, two million tons a year, on top of what's being done now. The only result that can come about from that is more of blasting away of our mountains.

Generations. It's affecting generations. There was a feller got up and said, “Mountains can heal from this.” Nothing can heal from this, when it's blasted to gravel. I truly believe that our state
and federal government have deemed local people expendable. They think they've lived with coal for a hundred years, so just blast 'em away. Let them live with coal or die. That's maybe a harsh statement but, dammit, it's true. They've pretty much written us off; southwest Virginia will eventually be one big waste dump, maybe. I have lost all—
all
—respect that I ever had for any of these politicians.

I've always been for people. You might call that liberal, I don't know, but I've always been for the common man, for working families, as much as possible an advocate for that. I don't consider myself conservative or liberal, I consider myself someone who cares about the earth, the people. We're good people here, and we shouldn't be written off just to satisfy the dollar for a coal operator.

Like Jeremy Davidson and the way they got out of all of that.

Terry Kilgore came down here and represented Jeremy Davidson's parents.
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He was sent down here for damage control. There ain't a doubt in my mind that A&G and the other coal companies paid him to come down here.
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And he did, he silenced it. There could have been a whole lot of stink over that. A lot could have been changed. All them renewed laws, that was nothing but a scam, not one thing they rewrote in those laws benefited anybody.
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If they'd actually wanted to do something, they'd kept them from working half a mile from people's homes. All kinds of things they could've done. The state representatives are bought and paid for by the companies. They're killing us.