Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (7 page)

My mother learned how to drive just so she could take us to church, since my dad had no interest in it. I always took church seriously, and I took the Bible seriously when it said that we should take care of the earth. My mom had a lot to do with teaching me about the environment and how that had a connection to our spiritual life. We weren't allowed to litter and things like that. She always made it clear that was wrong. I guess I extrapolated from that that if it was wrong to throw your pop bottle out then it was
also wrong to dump coal just wherever you wanted. I just assumed that was wrong. I thought of it as a “do unto others” thing.

I grew up in the Methodist church. I always got a sense from my mother, and from my Sunday school teachers, that, again, you're supposed to take ethics seriously. You're supposed to take care of each other and the earth and care about what happens to others. Jesus stood up, and he expected you to do the same thing. That was always the model for me; even though it wasn't real political in that little Methodist church, I always felt like it should be. And just watching the evening news, just seeing people like Martin Luther King. During that time period, that kind of stuff soaked in. Nowadays it's Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right who get all the exposure but back then there was a Religious Left that got exposure, too. I think I soaked up that.

My mom had the most impact on me during that time. Her name was Leona. She was from Grapevine, in Pike County, Kentucky. My mom just was always outspoken about a lot of things. The first act of speaking out or being defiant that I remember most had nothing to do with coal mining, but it did have to do with her. She had the first integrated Brownie troop in the state of West Virginia. She wasn't trying to make a big statement, she was just starting a Brownie troop and she thought everyone should be able to be in it—black kids, too—so she just invited everybody. I actually talked about this at her funeral; she died two years ago. We had our picture taken and she sent it to the state headquarters, here in Charleston, and they apparently went through the roof when they saw that picture. I was only seven at the time, so I only remember it vaguely. They told her she couldn't have black children in the troop and she was like, “Well, why not?” and there was a big rigmarole about it. She didn't back down. So finally they told her she could keep the troop if she would destroy all the pictures because they said if the
Charleston Gazette
got ahold of them it would be all over the state and then everybody might want to integrate a troop. And they didn't want that, of course. She said okay, but she didn't destroy the picture, so I showed it at her funeral.

She was just real feisty. She didn't like being pushed around. She was that first generation of young women who had all kinds of experiences. She was a nurse, she joined the U.S. Army and went to the Philippines during the war. She had all these experiences rather than just being in Pike County all her life. She got out and saw the world, and she never shut up after that. She stayed independent.

When I was a child there wasn't much going on in my county to do with protesting coal or anything like that. But I think I internalized a lot of stuff when I was a kid. I remember not only the creek and the pollution, but lots of injustice. I went to junior high at Gary, which was a U.S. Steel town.
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They had a big sign, a big archway, over the road that said “Man Hours Lost to Accidents” and it had some kind of slogan about being safe, but they also had like a scoreboard that kept track of the hours had been lost. It wasn't keeping track of how many people had died or anything like that. It was all about the hours. And I remember, as a little kid, that really angered me. It seemed so crass and cruel, and I was aware and angry. But I internalized it. I think I was already a writer then. I didn't write it down, but I told stories in my head. And I was always observing.

I don't come from a long line of coal miners who led strikes and things like that. My Italian grandfather was a coal miner, but he wasn't particularly militant, I don't think. On my mom's side, one of my uncles was a coal operator, and my grandfather worked for a little while as a mine guard, which I was always real embarrassed about. He also ran a company store for a while. He was sort of on that side of things.

On my dad's side, my grandfather was a union miner and my uncle was a union miner who died of black lung, and he was probably the most militant and pro-union miner I knew. He was always involved in the union. My mom had an aunt, my great-aunt Carrie, who had three sons, and one of them was president of the local union in Pike County.

My paternal grandfather was from Sicily and my dad was born
here, but they went back. I learned in my family that it's a myth that everybody was just dying to get over here and be Americans. They really came because they were desperate, but they were so homesick they went back, to Sicily. They lived there seven or eight years before coming back here again. So my dad went there as a babe in arms and grew up there, but they were so desperate that they came back to find work. He didn't speak English, so he was put into a first-grade class even though he was nine years old. His teacher used him as the classroom policeman because he was so much bigger. If they got rowdy, his teacher would say, “Dennis!” and he'd stand up and look mean at the other kids and threaten to beat them up or something. So he was more or less a first- generation American.

There were a whole lot of different ethnicities in the coal camp where I grew up. There were Eastern Europeans, Italians, Hungarians, Russians, about a third black, about a third native Appalachians.

I've tried to live other places, but it never works out for very long. Sometimes I wish I had because I'll look at things that happen here and I think, Lord, it might just be easier to not know about what all happens. But I keep getting drawn back. I went away to school, I went to seminary up in D.C., altogether about five years. I lived for a couple years in inner-city D.C. I lived at the Sojourners' Fellowship, which was a commune sort of thing back in those days, run by the people who do
Sojourners
magazine.
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It was a real experience, but I eventually got homesick. The straw that broke the camel's back was that I had some friends from Mississippi who acted like Appalachians. They were like us, they even talked like us. But then they moved back to Mississippi, and I started thinking about coming home then. There was a writing workshop starting up, with Mary Lee Settle and George Garrett, and I wanted to take part in that because I had started my first book. Even when I was in D.C., I was starting to get involved in the Appalachian social movements. I used to travel a lot from
D.C. to the Highlander Center. That was when the land ownership survey was starting up, and I took part in that.
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When I moved back, I was in Charleston a couple years. I was finishing up my novel
Storming Heaven
, and I wanted to live in a coal camp again. I wanted to have that feeling of being in a coal camp while writing those books, so I moved to David, Kentucky. Once there I made friends with lots of people from KFTC, like Joe Szakos
⁹
and Terry Keleher. I also wanted to reconnect with my own heritage, since my mother was from Eastern Kentucky, and those new friends were there, so I moved to David, in Floyd County, for several years.

As I started
The Unquiet Earth
I felt just the opposite: I wanted to get away. I wanted to feel homesick, for one thing. That book is about loss. Again, many of my friends had left. I decided to go to Durham, North Carolina. I still felt the pull of the mountains. I was so homesick again. I really liked being down there, I liked how many writers there were down there and the way the local media supported them. It would've been better for my career, probably, if I had stayed down there, but it just felt like I needed to be home. I felt like I could have more of an impact here, somehow. I think it's important to be here. And I missed the mountains. So I got a post as a writer-in-residence at Appalshop, and I went to Whitesburg, Kentucky. I thought, well, I can make up my mind if I miss West Virginia or Durham worse, and of course it turned out that I missed West Virginia the worst, so I came back here and have been here ever since.

My dad was very pro-company until he retired and then allowed himself to look at what was going on. He worked for the company who first did mountaintop removal in West Virginia: Cannelton Coal. I remember him in high school, coming home and talking about it. He was all enthused about it, saying how they were going to flatten the mountain and move the whole town of Montgomery up there. It's where the penitentiary is now. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. I asked why they'd do such a stupid thing. The town was already in a place,
so why move it? But I don't remember hearing much more about mountaintop removal until the mid-seventies. That's when Ken Hechler
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was fighting it in Congress and trying to get SMCRA
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to be passed. From 1972 to '76 I grew more and more aware and more upset about it. I was aware of the broad-form deed, and I was involved with Highlander. That was also around the time the big flood hit Mingo County, in 1977, because everybody knew that strip mining had caused that flood. They were being surrounded by mountaintop removal at that point.

I went to seminary in 1976 and graduated in '79. Once I got out of college, I started being more aware, more active. I wasn't aware of much while in college. I was a very dull college student. Didn't party, didn't protest. I studied all the time, was too responsible. I was still a Republican at that time. My dad was a Republican, so I sort of followed in his footsteps for a while. Actually, I think the church radicalized me.

There was a place in Mingo County, up on Marrowbone Creek, where these nuns lived up on top of the mountain. You went to Kermit, then you went up a holler—Marrowbone Creek—and at the head of it you had to take a four-wheel drive, and you could see lots of mountaintop removal from there. I remember being just appalled by that. Once I moved to Kentucky I saw a lot more of it. It was during the broad-form deed fight that I became really exposed to more mountaintop removal sites. And I've been up to Larry Gibson's a lot.
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It's right in your face, it's right there.

As a Christian, I believe God created all of this and made us stewards over it, which to me means we should take care of it. I think it's the environmental counterpoint to the Holocaust. It's the landscape, to the earth, what the Holocaust was to destroying people. These are some of the oldest mountains in the world, so whether you believe that the earth is 6,000 years old or several million, they are still among the first mountains He made, so mountaintop removal is a violation of everything I believe in, both religiously and in terms of how I think people should be treated, too.

The landscape is inside of me.

I remember the first time I left the mountains for a length of time, I went to England during a semester of college. I missed the mountains so bad. We flew into the airport here, in Charleston, and I could see them, the landscape, the contours. I started crying, realizing how much I'd missed them.

You grow up here and it's comforting. I go to someplace flat and I feel naked.

I remember the first time I went to Michigan, looking out at that flatness, and I thought, “How do people figure out where to put their houses?” I mean, really, how do you figure out where to put a town? I'm used to a place where the mountains make you put the town or the house where it wants them. I like a place that dictates that. I remember being little and seeing a tornado on the news and being scared, asking my parents if that was going to happen to us, and they'd say, “Naw, naw, the mountains'll keep you safe.”

When I went off to college, I went to West Virginia Wesleyan, a church school. I had some faculty members there who had a big effect on me. My religion professor, for example. This is a totally different issue, but I was a freshman when Kent State happened.
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There was this professor who made this really strong, religious-based statement against what happened, and the class stood and applauded. That kind of thing really affected me. When I came back here in 1974, I was thinking about leaving the Methodist church for a variety of reasons, and I was really drawn to the Church of England, so I got involved in the Episcopal church. I had always thought of it as a rich people's church—and it used to be—but it's pretty much not anymore. There was a new minister here, Jim Lewis, who, next to my mother, has had the biggest impact on my life. He's very outspoken, very politically engaged on a variety of issues. He and his wife are two of my best friends. He gave me books to read, introduced me to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
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He really got into my reading and my thinking. That's when I switched from a Republican to a Democrat. I went from thinking
of myself as a fairly conservative person to thinking of myself as a radical. It was like a 360-degree turn in just a period of about two or three years.

We're a religious bunch, Appalachians. And so a lot of people in the mountains have adopted this attitude of: “Ain't no use worrying about the environment because Jesus is going to come anyway!”

It's very frustrating to me. I've seen letters from operators and miners about mountaintop removal saying, “This is our coal and God give us this coal and when Jesus comes back he'll fix it.” Jesus is going to come back and kick your butt for the mess you're making, that's what I think. I go back to the old Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”

We're fatalists in the mountains. “It's all up to the good Lord.” “If it's your time to go, it's just your time.” We're people who had families who went into those mines not knowing if the roof was going to fall or not, but leaving it in the Lord's hands. And some people think: the good Lord is going to come back soon and he's going to fix it so it don't matter if we break it. People pray and get saved and wait for the Lord to fix everything. I think that attitude grows out of powerlessness. That's a good word for what we all feel: powerless.