Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (25 page)

My mamaw once told me that coal was a curse. That's pretty revolutionary, for this older woman from Floyd County, Kentucky, to say. But most people in my family just don't say anything about it. They don't get mad at me for speaking out against it, but they don't really say anything one way or the other.

I want to have that experience again, to go back into the mines after being in a liberal arts college for the past several months. I need that reality to get back to. But I also need to get my business
started here in Eastern Kentucky. At this point I'm thinking of biodiesel or some kind of small-scale agriculture. If that works I won't have much reason to go back into the mines, but if everything I do falls flat and I become hopeless about starting a business, then I'll go back in the mines, if I can't find any other way to make a living.

Appalachia is one of the most beautiful and unique places in the world, and what MTR does to it can never be changed. Even if it can be reclaimed, they're still altering the topography, they're still altering things that we won't fully see the effect on for years, the watershed, aquatic life, all these things that are altered. This is too important of a place from an environmental and cultural perspective to not stop it. We grew up seeing mountains, not plateaus, and that has a real damaging effect on the psyche.

We can fight this, though. One way to fight it is to live conscientiously. If you're someone in the region where this is happening, the main thing you need to do is organize as quick as you can, before a mountaintop removal site pops up close to you. The sooner you can organize, the better. There is a lot you can do to protect yourself. File a Lands Unsuitable for Mining petition. Spread information.

The less demand there is for something, the less supply, that's just the way the market works. We have to be more conscious of how we use energy. I always think, “What if I didn't have this coal? What did people do 150 years ago?” That kind of thinking—it can get a little bit tedious, with every little thing you do—but we should think about the ramifications of our actions. Eventually you just get to where you live conscientiously; you don't even have to think about it.

London, Kentucky, August 15, 2007

Holy Ground

Oh this is holy ground
To me it's holy ground
And nothing but the hand of God
Shall ever tear it down
Take your dozers and your dynamite
And head on back to town
Get off of my land cause where you stand
Is holy ground.

           —Jessie Lynne Keltner, “Holy Ground”

It is high summer, and the sisters are picking blackberries on the homeplace.

They amble along this place of their youth, the land that has been in their family for more than a hundred years. In fact, this land is a
part
of their family. They move over it the way someone might run their thumb over the knuckles of their mother in her old age. Although these women walk with determination and purpose, they seem to tread lightly on this holy ground, not so much walking on it as floating just above it, careful not to harm anything that lies in their path.

“Now this here is the proper way to spend a Sunday morning,” the elder sister, Anne Shelby, says.

“Picking berries and singing hymns,” says Jessie Lynne Keltner, completing Shelby's thought.

They call the old mountain farm “the homeplace.” Shelby even wrote a popular children's book entitled
Homeplace
, which details one family's connection to a farm over a century. Keltner has written many songs wherein the farm shows up as well, and it is one of her favorite photographic subjects.

Jessie Lynne Keltner and Anne Shelby, Teges Creek, Kentucky. Photo by Silas House.

Often when friends speak about Shelby and Keltner, they become one unified force: folks often refer to them as “the Gabbard Sisters.” They bill themselves that way when they sing together at libraries, festivals, and the like around central Appalachia. Here, at the homeplace, they are certainly one entity, unconscious of how they match one another's stride.

The homeplace is in Clay County, Kentucky, near the small town of Oneida. The farm is about seventy acres of rolling hills and a couple of steep mountains. There is the house itself, which is really a collection of houses pieced together. First is the original cabin with dogtrot, which was built sometime around the Civil War. Then there is the house that their grandparents built over that in 1940, “when they added onto the back of the house, closed in the dogtrot, and raised the roofline, all with pine from the hillside,” according to Shelby. In the mid-1990s Shelby and her husband, Edmund Shelby (general manager and editor of the
Beattyville Enterprise
), built on another log structure that contains a new kitchen, a bathroom, an office, and “some badly needed closet space.” This was also done with timber cut from the farm. The house has been lived in by the sisters, their mother, their uncle, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. It has been continuously occupied since the Civil War, with someone in their immediate family inhabiting it since around 1900.

“Our grandparents and great-grandparents had a working farm here. They had cattle and tobacco, they grew a lot of corn and big gardens, lots of chickens. And hogs,” Shelby throws her finger out onto the air, pointing to what is now the backyard of the house, decorated by several of the dozen or so stray dogs that the Shelbys have collected over the last few years. “There was a hog pen right out there. It was a real lively place, not like now, where all you see is yard dogs.”

The dogs have been stifled by the heat. It is not even noon but the heat bugs are already screaming this Sunday morning.

On the last rise above the creek the two women reach a knot of blackberry brambles fairly dripping with shiny fruit. The pair drop huge, grape-sized blackberries into their plastic buckets while they harmonize as only two sisters can do:

Pure waters of life there are flowing
And all who will drink may be free
Rare jewels of splendor are glowing
How beautiful heaven must be.

They sway in rhythm just a bit, their movement barely noticeable, their hands dipping into the vines, able fingers plucking the berries away from their roosts like quick birds. These are hands that are used to berry-picking. The Gabbard Sisters use their hands quickly in every matter: using a pencil to jot down a thought, knocking aside a strand of hair that has fallen into their eyes, wiping at their brows with the red kerchief Shelby keeps handy.

“Lord, children, it's gotten plumb hot,” Keltner says.

“We ought to go down to the creek, sister,” Shelby offers.

All of the land slopes down to Teges Creek,
¹
which empties into the South Fork of the Kentucky River a couple of miles away and runs through the property like a slender, winding ribbon. This day, in the middle of the worst drought anyone can remember, Teges Creek is shallow, but it still holds slow-moving water, which is becoming littered with small golden leaves that are falling, apparently from heat exhaustion.

Stepping into the woods feels like stepping into a cave. The temperature is instantly cooler and fresher. Here is the smell of green leaves and mossy rocks and Teges Creek, which flows silently just beyond a gathering of rocks that look as if they have fallen from a giant hand into a neat pile. Shelby pulls herself up on the biggest rock and looks down at the creek, dotting her forehead
with the kerchief again. Keltner does not hesitate before wading right out into the creek, however. She rolls her pant legs up to her knees and splashes handfuls of water onto the back of her neck. Sunlight falls in patterns through the still leaves, causing glints of light to speckle Keltner's face.

“I used to love to bring a book to this rock and read,” Shelby says. She has produced a hair-tie from somewhere and is pulling her hair up into a ponytail. She takes a deep breath and leans back on the palms of her hands. There is nothing but birdcall here. A redbird: “Birdie birdie birdie.” A thin breeze, no stronger than a sigh, moves along the top of the water, breathing coolness that causes a few of the golden leaves to shiver down out of the trees. Several of them light on Shelby's head like a blessing. One falls perfectly onto her hand, which she has been holding palm up. “Oh,” she says, startled and delighted to find the weightless leaf there. She holds it up to the light, turns it over. One side of the leaf is as white as a piece of typing paper. “Look at that,” Shelby marvels.

Keltner is bent close to the surface of the water, peering at the creek bottom. “I wonder where all the crawdads are?” she says.

“Back in the coldest places,” Shelby whispers, perhaps not completely conscious of replying to her sister while she continues to study the leaf.

By way of reply, Keltner cups her hand, dips it into the creek, and takes a drink. She wipes her mouth on the back of her arm. Teges Creek is part of her now. But it always has been.

Shelby and Keltner have devoted their lives to preserving Appalachian culture. Shelby is known as the writing sister who can sing and Keltner is known as the singing sister who can write. Both are renaissance women: they do a little bit of everything.

Shelby has written children's books, poetry, essays, newspaper columns, and songs. She has published six books for children, among them
Potluck, The Someday House, What to Do about Pollution, We Keep a Store, Homeplace
, and, to be published in 2009,
The Man Who Lived in a Hollow Tree. The Adventures of Molly Whuppie
, a collection of folktales inspired by stories she collected over several years, was published in 2008. Her work has been honored by being named School Library Journal Best Book and American Bookseller Pick. Her book of poetry,
Appalachian Studies
, and
Can a Democrat Get into Heaven?
, a collection of newspaper columns, were both finalists for Appalachian Book of the Year in 2007, the first time a single author has been nominated for two books in a single year. She has not only written the plays
The Lone Pilgrim: Songs and Stories of Aunt Molly Jackson
and
Passing Through the Garden: The Work of Belinda Mason
, but has also acted in those and other productions throughout the region.

In Appalachian Lit circles, Shelby is considered an underrated writer whose work deserves to be better known. Poet and scholar Marianne Worthington has written that “what Shelby does best is remind us of all the things we need to be mindful of. Yes, quilts and tobacco barns and hardscrabble farming are here, but so is our need to preserve the environment and a culture, a call for fighting domestic abuse and drug trafficking, and the responsibility of remembering and celebrating our foundation myths, place names, Appalachian speech habits, and all of our ghostly ancestors.”
²

Keltner has been less public with her work but just as active in preserving Appalachian culture. She has written dozens of songs, has acted in plays, and writes poetry that she doesn't show to anyone. An avid collector of 78 rpm records (mostly early hillbilly music), she wants to safeguard and preserve the old music. Keltner also has a burgeoning collection of sheet music from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She works with the elderly and those with memory loss as a social worker at the Laurel Heights nursing home in London, Kentucky. There she often uses music in her work with patients, taking in her fiddle and autoharp to play songs from the past.

Both sisters are members of the singing group the Cosmic Mamaws, a quartet (with Kate Larken and George Ella Lyon) that
describes itself as a “bunch of big-mouthed, menopausal women” who sing about everything from the Bush administration to being grandmothers. They are also members of the band Public Outcry (which also includes Larken, Lyon, and the authors of this book), a group that was formed to sing out against mountaintop removal. Public Outcry has performed throughout Appalachia, primarily at colleges and universities, spreading the word about the mining practice to as many listeners as possible.

Shelby and Keltner are fighting mountaintop removal with the two things they know best: words and music. Although they are doing most of their protest together, they first encountered mountaintop removal separately.

For Shelby, it was back in April 2005 when she, along with fifteen other Kentucky writers, accepted the invitation Wendell Berry sent to practically every author in the state to take a mountaintop removal tour. On the first leg of the tour, the authors gathered on the lush mountain behind the home of Daymon Morgan on Bad Creek, in Leslie County. After showing the authors several rare and medicinal plants that grew there, Morgan took them a bit further up the ridge and pointed out an overhang that offered a view of the mountains. The drop-off had been created by bulldozers that were illegally cutting into Morgan's land for the mountaintop removal site that abutted his property.

The authors made their way up the bank with hesitation, careful not only because it was steep and slick with tiny rocks, but also because they were not quite ready for what they were about to encounter. For many it was the first time they saw mountaintop removal up close. Shelby eased her way up; once she reached the edge of the precipice, her face went pale.

Below was a scene of utter destruction. A bulldozer groaned back and forth, piling up green-leafed trees it had knocked over. Another mess of trees was slowly burning, the black smoke curling up lazily on the still spring air. There was nothing else but dirt and exposed rock for acres and acres before the site stopped abruptly at the rich, green woods in the distance. Beyond them
were blue mountains that faded away to the horizon like smudges of paint.

“Look, that's like heaven,” Shelby said that day to the person standing next to her, pointing to the far mountains. Then she brought her finger down to the mountaintop removal site. “And that's hell.”

Shelby remembers the day vividly. “I never will forget that,” she says. “Up to that point, I thought I knew what mountaintop removal was, but I didn't. I really didn't know how much damage it does. I didn't know they cut down the forest and burned up the trees. I didn't know what big areas were involved. I didn't know what a desolate landscape it left behind. No, I never will forget that,” she repeats, looking away. “Some of us who were there have tried to describe how it feels to stand on a landscape like that, but I really cannot. I have all these reasons that are very practical for opposing mountaintop removal, like sedimentation and flooding and blasting ruining people's homes and leaving nothing for the future, but none of that has anything to do with the way it feels to stand on a piece of land that has been made desolate in that way. There's a sentence in Erik Reece's book that says something like, ‘I looked around me and there was not one single living thing.'
³
It was sickening to me, to know I was in a place where nothing was living and that people had done this. To see a little piece of grass struggling, trying to come up through that shale, it just made me sick. That's what really made me want to get involved in it, that overriding feeling of ‘This
cannot
be right, not for
any
reason.'”

Keltner was driving up I-75 when she first saw a mountaintop removal site. Her car was snaking its way up Jellico Mountain—a land mass known by anyone who has traveled that stretch of highway as being a defining point between the states of Tennessee and Kentucky. Having reached the crest of Jellico Mountain a driver can see for miles on either side: hundreds of mountains, millions of trees. Up there, it is almost as if all of Appalachia is spread out below, perfect from this distance where blemishes are hidden, where all the little joys and tragedies of the people below are hidden
beneath a canopy of leaves. At the summit, Keltner noticed something she had never seen before.