Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (13 page)

As he walked the perimeter of the Capitol grounds, slowing to take in the sweet smell of the cherry blossoms in full bloom, Shoupe was encouraged by the turnout and enthusiasm of his fellow lobbyists.

“It's a good group this year,” he smiled. “People from all over coming together. It shows that we can win this—eventually. We've just got to get some more of these knotheads up here to support us. Now, buddy, that's a hard job.”

Back at the group's headquarters, located just behind the Supreme Court in the basement of the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, excited organizers rang a bell each time a group returned to report a new co-sponsor. You could hear their whoops and hollers all the way out onto East Capitol Street.

Shoupe joined in each time, shaking hands and hugging necks. But unlike some of the younger activists, there was a slight reticence to his celebration, and for good reason. He has seen enough in his life to know that to create change, one must be willing to pay a great price. It's one that his family and others like them have paid down through the years in the mountains, time and time again, their willingness forged in the coke ovens of East Tennessee, on the picket line at Crummies Creek, in the Number 32 Mine in Harlan County.

“I believe it'll come down to laying down in front of bulldozers,” Shoupe says with sadness. “I really do. Unless the coal companies start to talk to people, start being part of the dialogue. I'm not against a good fight.”

Back in Benham, as he looks beyond the statue of the coal miner, his eyes rest on the slab of black granite that bears the names of miners killed in the line of duty. And his jaw clenches.

Carl Shoupe talking…

I'm a third-generation coal miner, and I've lived in Harlan County all my life, with the exception of five years. This is my home. This is my culture. This is my life. I love these mountains, and so do a lot of other people in this area. I guess I'm just one of the ones who might be a little more outspoken about the situation. I'm proud that I can stand up for what I believe in.

My family has been in Harlan County, Kentucky, at least a hundred years. Originally my ancestors migrated in here from Germany. My grandmother was a Cherokee woman. My grandfather worked down around Lafollette, Tennessee, working on the coke ovens, and he come up here when they started mining in Harlan, over on Wallins Creek. My dad was involved in the union activities back in the thirties. Matter of fact, on April 2, 1940, he was shot on the picket line at Crummies Creek, Kentucky. He never did tell me, but I'm assuming he got a gun shot out of his hand. I'm just assuming that.

The union was very much a part of our life. My mother, uncles, dad, grandfather. We've been a union family all of my life. I grew up in a captive coal-mining town, Lynch, Kentucky. U.S. Steel owned the town of Lynch. Just to be frank about it, we were blessed because we had a lot of the necessities of life right there in Lynch. We had our own hospital, our own school, our own movie theatre. We even had outhouses that had septic systems, cisterns. U.S. Steel kept them good and clean.

Back when I grew up, ye made ye own fun. I had a wonderful childhood. We played in the mountains. We swung on grapevines, dammed up springs. We'd go skinny-dipping in the swimming holes. Just fun, buddy. Just anywhere you wanted you could get a drink from the springs or eat the berries from the mountains.

My dad was a hard-working man, a union man. My dad—now I ain't bragging—but he took nothing off no man. He was a mean man, he was. He had to be, back then. He was very well respected in this community. A lot of the old people, still living,
they'll tell you that. Back then they paid in scrip. I remember Dad taking me with him to get his pay. He'd take me with him. He'd get into heated arguments right there in line, arguing about the union, him standing up to company people. A saying he always had, he told me this a lot: “You know, son, I don't want to drive a Cadillac. But I'd like to have me a little Chevrolet every three years or so.” And what he meant by that, what I took from it, was that he did a honest day's work and he wanted honest pay for it. He worked hard, and he wanted what he deserved.

I graduated high school in 1964, that's about when things was starting to gear up about Vietnam. What it was back then, being a poor coal-miner's son from Eastern Kentucky, either you joined up and got what you wanted in the service, or you got drafted. No other way around it. So, old dumb me, I signed up for the Marine Corps. I served four years. Thirteen months and nine days of that I served in country, in Vietnam. I-Corp, around Da Nang, Marble Mountain, Hue Phu Bai, around in there. Then I returned back to the States. I went back for a year and spent that in Okinawa.

It's ironic, it's weird, because where I was stationed at, I was up in the mountains, and it reminded me of home. It's strange to think, but it looked a lot like home. We'd take sniper fire, all kinds of fire in that jungle up there. You couldn't see the enemy a lot of the time. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was up in there. So they came up with this Agent Orange and they'd spray it on the mountains and—it's a little exaggeration, but not much—the next day you'd wake up, and poof! The mountain would be bare. I'd get sad, seeing that. I imagined how strange that would be, to see home looking thataway. And lo and behold, I tell ye, now, this mountaintop removal they're doing now, it's not that different from what that Agent Orange did in Vietnam. God forbid, but that toxic stuff in that Agent Orange…well, since I've been involved in this fight, I've found out more about the chemicals and the toxins these companies are using on mountaintop removal sites and well, it's a no-brainer, now: they're killing us. They are killing us.

Seeing what I saw in Vietnam, I didn't realize it at the time
because I was nineteen years old and I thought I was invincible, but looking back on it now, I see that it was just like it is today. Looking back I can see that there was that wealth. That capitalistic wealth. Five or six percent making all the money off the war. Back in Vietnam, it's the same like it is over there in Iraq today. We were out there getting sixty dollars a month, hazardous-duty pay, getting shot at, mortared, everything else, and then the civilians were back on base, in Da Nang, driving the bulldozers and building the airports and all that, they were making all the money and we were protecting them, more or less. That's when I learned that the poor man is going to fight the wars and the rich man is going to prosper. And the poor men are expendable.

It's just like in the coal mines. If an accident happens, the company, the industry, had much rather for a miner to get killed than to get maimed up. If they get killed they pay you a certain amount, your family is screwed. If you get maimed, they have more expenses.

I got out of the Marine Corps in August of 1968 and come back and I'll be very honest with ye, I laid drunk for about a month. Just laid drunk. A lot of my buddies was getting back from Vietnam around the same time. One of my buddies—he didn't have to go to Vietnam—came back from Germany and we all laid drunk about a month. Big bunch of us. Seven of us. We all decided we'd go to Louisville, Kentucky, and make our fortune. Back in that day, you could get a job anywhere in Louisville. GE. The railroad. Paramount Pickles. You could walk out of one job and get another'n.

But then, about that time in history, the coal started picking back up. The workforce here was getting old, and they needed more miners, so I come back here and started aggravating them until they gave me a job. It made it easier to get a job because they all knowed my dad. So they hired me on the third shift. This would have been May of '69 when I went to work for U.S. Steel. Then I met my wife, and we got married in August of '69.

Back in those days, buddy, working in the mines was hump
and grunt. It wasn't any of these buggies taking supplies in. Back then it was all done by belt. All ye timbers and tools and everything came in by belt. I was a roof-bolter. I thought I knew everything about coal mining. Eventually I went to work on the second shift.

On March 10, 1970, I was pinning top at the 32 Mine and the world fell in on me. The roof fell in on me. Just by the grace of God am I setting here talking to ye. I stayed in the hospital right at a year. It busted my back up, tore my chin off, mashed my arm up, mashed my leg. Oh man, I was just lucky that it didn't mash my head. It mashed 'bout everything else. I's the only one hurt. It was a freak accident. They estimated that it weighed about three tons.

At that time I got a lot better outlook on the companies. U.S. Steel was a good company to work for. They really were. They respected the union, the union respected them. You can go check the records, they was always good production, good union relations, when U.S. Steel run the mines up in here. I was under constant care. My mother and wife would come and help me eat, see to me. And U.S. Steel, the personnel man told my mother and wife to keep their receipts for their gas and eats and all, and they reimbursed them. That's unheard of, really. They was just a good company to work for, and that's why I have a lot of problems with these companies nowadays. You can't respect them anymore. They're renegades. They don't care nothing 'bout nobody, 'bout nothing but a dollar.

I never did go back in the mines. As I was rehabilitating myself, I went to college. Around this time the union got into some turmoil. Yablonski and all that.
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And I guess because of my upbringing, I got involved in that. I started working on the election of Arnold Miller in the UMW.
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I had my two-year degree, and there was some openings in the union, so they hired me. I worked out of the main office in D.C. I worked up there almost exactly one year before the Brookside strikes started. I begged President Miller to let me come home, and he let me. I worked quite a bit
on the Brookside strike as a union organizer. I'm in the movie, but never named or anything. It's just a flash, but I'm there. My dad's in there, too.

I worked for the union a long time, and I got burnt out. I retired in 1986, and I became a drunk. I'll just be honest about it. I got fed up with life or whatever, and I laid drunk for about fifteen years. I didn't care what the companies did.

Looking back on it now, I know that my drinking was a result of having gone to Vietnam. There was no history of alcoholism in my family. It's hard to explain how that messes with ye mind. I was nineteen years old, thought I was invincible. You see things, you do things yourself, that you wouldn't do no way in the world…you block it out by drinking alcohol. By numbing yeself. Now that I'm sober, it comes back some.

Finally I got back to myself, found the Lord, and I got to looking around again and I thought, “Man, I've laid drunk all this time and look what's happened.”

I am a Christian, first and foremost, and the way I read the Bible is that God don't want us to let his planet, his earth, to be destroyed. I'm not trying to make this a Christian issue, either. This is a human rights issue. If we choose to be mountain people, we have to protect our watershed, our mountains, our animals, our way of life. I know the companies own the land and the coal, but it's the simple fact that this is a deep-mining culture. They're taking that culture and destroying it, too.

This is Appalachia. I'm proud to be Appalachian. It's a way of life. We are a unique people. It's hard to explain. I've been around the world three times and shook hands with everybody twice and I can tell you that there's nobody that talks like us, or eats the food we eat, or acts like us. You can be your own person. It's just a different outlook on life.

This is a culture that this mountaintop removal is destroying. I've got eight grandchildren—four boys and four girls—and I'm not going to be able to take them out in the mountains and show them ginseng and yellowroot. This mining practice ain't just ruining
the land but it's ruining who we are. It's changing everything. We stay scared to death when it rains, scared the mountains will wash down on us.

I get aggravated with people in my own community who will put up with this crap. Lots of people won't fight because they think, “Well, if it ain't in my backyard, it ain't hurting me.” Right this minute, it's not affecting me directly. But I live here. I've got friends that live up there by a mountaintop removal site. He had a beautiful place, a big nice house, and then one day they turned a big pond loose on him and ruined everything. And he's been fighting them two years in court.

Some of my neighbors question my activism. I don't believe any of them have turned against me. Basically, right in this area, people know that it's wrong. It's hard to explain. They just don't want to come together and really fight it. The companies know exactly what buttons to push. The company has got these miners for sixteen hours a day. And they take their foremans to classes, how to combat a union drive, they've got the money to do all that. These coal miners are hearing this stuff, hearing this stuff, hearing this stuff from the company side. So what I'm trying to do in my own little way is to get my side out, but my side gets heard very sparsely.

I'm a progressive. I'm very proud of that fact. This is a democracy. This is majority rules. That's why I get so upset, because it's not that way anymore. Now, it's like one percent owns the rest, the ninety-nine percent. It's just like when we put that Stream Saver bill up, not one Eastern Kentucky legislator signed on, and that right there tells you that they're in the pocket of the coal industry.

Until I got involved with this a little bit I couldn't hardly spell the word “environmentalist.” And now they call me an “environmental extremist.” I personally take that as a compliment. If they want to call me that because of my love of the land that I grew up in, that's a compliment to me.

I've tried to talk to my deep mining friends. They need to
know what's going on. The bust will happen, I try to tell them. Once the bust comes, they'll all be starving to death again because there's no other industry. The companies will be gone, the mountaintops will be gone, and here will come the floods and we'll all be flooded again.

I've got a son and a son-in-law that works in the deep mines right now. They work 'em like dogs. They work 'em sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. The poor old miners don't have time to think about what's in the future. There's no extended health benefits for them—they say you have a health policy, but if you use them too much they'll fire you. They're sure not in as good hands as I was with U.S. Steel. They took care of me, and I've got checks coming in good now. Good health benefits, but my poor little grandchildren, they're not going to have that. These companies ain't providing for the miners the way they should. I think eventually they'll try to get around deep mining completely.