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When mountains cry

Mine are a rootless people, and I am certainly not from here. Everybody knows it. Alden has been my family name for only two generations, and it isn't common to Rowan County. I do not presume to know the first thing about coal mining, save that rising energy prices and what is explained as the uncertainty of foreign supplies have enhanced the demand for coal.

But I know one or two things about mountains. For most of the formative years that mattered, I sought solace and excitement in a small, enclosed valley in the North Cascades, surrounded by three mountains of such insignificance I can remember only that we called one Frog Mountain, that we climbed another heedless and liquored up, and that mountain goats were occasionally to be seen on the high face of the third. The North Fork of the Skykomish River ran around the edge of this valley, and sometimes (when the loggers upstream did their job poorly) spilled over the valley and flooded most of the cabins.

My best friend of that and several eras had to hike out one Thanksgiving when we both were in college, and it took a helicopter to get his mother home. Her Thunderbird didn't make it out for three or four years.

I do not miss Seattle, save for my family and the few friends who remain there. I do not miss the buildings, the places, nor even the memories the old buildings and places stir up, those few which remain. But I miss that valley, the smell of snow in the air, the silence which follows, the stark blues and greens. The peace and beauty of the place. The last time I went back the road had been moved, and though I could have worked my way back in, I no longer am welcome there, for the land is in new hands.

I tease my wife and friends that these Appalachian mountains are hardly foothills by comparison to my sweeping Cascades, but that in no way diminishes their beauty.

There is a new hell afoot in these Appalachian Mountains. The demons of industry have found something worse than strip mining. Now they just tear the whole god damn mountain off, pull the coal out, flatten it down, and hope mother nature solves the problem by some time in the next millennium.

The coal companies, of course, have another story for what is called mountaintop removal. It is said to be safer for the miners (if not for the neighbors), and, inevitably, it is said to be necessary for our national survival.

But plainly said, it is a kind of rape, and that is not a word I use lightly.

One has but to look at pictures.

Try this one: http://www.kftc.org/our-work/canary-project/campaigns/mtr/MTR-generalinfo

And so I hurried back from the Americana Music Association conference in Nashville so as to be in Morehead in time for a fund-raising event held at the family bookstore on behalf of the long-running activist group, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. (Google them; I still haven't figured out how to place a URL in here.) Which meant missing breakfast with friends and losing more sleep, and so I explained myself to almost everybody I met.

And none of them knew what I was talking about. A bright, well-informed bunch from all over the country, and they had no idea that whole mountains were being reduced to rubble, entire communities destroyed, so that coal might be extracted and the lights left on.

Maybe they care, maybe they don't, my friends from elsewhere.

Maybe, as Bob Edwards said a few months ago, Appalachia is a sacrificial zone in these United States, a place where education is modest, work is damnably hard, and the landscape is subject to destruction at the whim of landowners far, far away.

But I know to a certainty that if this treatment were proposed for my old friend, Frog Mountain, the whole of the Northwest would be up in arms. The Sierra Club would lobby fiercely. Major media would attend. High-powered lawyers would be heard speaking eloquently and stridently in the halls of Congress.

Instead we have a still, deathly silence on a subject about which nobody speaks, nobody cares. Except here, where a small coalition of writers (including Wendell Berry and Silas House), the least potent of political figures, bear witness to the devastation. Perhaps they will invite me to join them, perhaps not. I do not know what can be done.

And so I will start here: Please help. This land is being killed; it will not recover, nor will the people who hold it in trust.

Please help.

Please.

Posted by grant on September 25, 2006 7:48 PM | Permalink

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