Strange as This Weather Has Been (45 page)

I saw I’d have to move over onto the fill, and then I did feel a twitch of fear, but I just picked my self up. Carried my self even further away. No sooner did I step onto the fill than it did go loose under me, I couldn’t get any ground, everything sifting out from under my feet, and the day of the blast avalanche came back to me, and, again, I got scared, but I just picked my self up. And again moved away. I swam dirt fast enough to outrun the landslide, and finally I had my arms on a big rock where I figured I could rest before the very last piece, and I pulled at the rock, and it seemed to be setting steady, so I climbed on up.

I was about a body length and a half from the very top of the fill. I was sweating, my lungs tearing after air, and I spat out the Yellowroot dirt in my mouth. I saw how I’d ripped the knee of my jeans, how I’d scraped the underneath of my bare arms, all without feeling it. One thumbnail torn in a nasty way. I looked to the bottom of the fill where
so often I’d stood looking up, but I couldn’t any longer remember me there. I strained my eyes through the trees and brush left in the lower part of the hollow, trying to see the house. But from up here, it looked like in Yellowroot Hollow, there wasn’t nobody living at all.

Then I looked above me. Earlier, I’d started to see the fill really had two tops.You couldn’t tell for certain from the bottom, but now, from my rock shelf, I saw for sure. The valley fill I’d climbed didn’t come directly off the mine. There was another fill, another top, behind this one. Which meant there was something between the two.

I did the final part on my hands and knees, just threw myself onto that dry quicksand and scrabbled quick enough to stay ahead of the suck. When I reached the rim, it right away crumbled under me, but, still crouching, I shifted, and it settled to where I could squat and not fall. Then I saw.

Lace had been wrong. And Lace had been right.

A smaller, fresher fill rose up behind my fill. Between the two fills lay a kind of bowl, big enough to hold three houses the size of Uncle Mogey’s. But even big as that bowl was, I was almost sure it was too small for a slurry impoundment. I couldn’t tell for sure, though, because I couldn’t see its bottom. All I could see were the trees.

That bowl was jumbled solid with dead trees. Bulldozed trees, hundreds of them, still holding their branches, their root balls, their crowns, some still clung to with brown leaves, those trees colored like the trees in the fill, dull colors that had nothing to do with the woods. A tree slaughter maybe fifteen feet deep, and because the top of the fill I’d climbed was lower than the top of the second fill, the highest part of the logjam was almost flush with the rim of the fill where I squatted. I duckwalked a ways along the sinking rim, looking for a place to see bottom. And finally, I thought I saw, through all that layered mess, a little sunlight flashing off water.

I eased my body down the inside of the fill. Gentle as I could, I
crawled out on the top skein of logs. The moment I touched them, they shifted, groaning and knocking, and I held my breath, crouched low and light, until they reshuffled and seemed to catch. I shimmied down into them. Waited. They held. I dropped a little further. Waited. They held. Then I was threading limb, trunk, root, like being inside some muck-caked woven basket, the odor of dried mud not like mud should smell and their bad grit all over me. Then I saw clearly a pond below me, and I seized tight inside, but one more time, I pushed me away. I bellied over the top of the pond to a log that led to the ground, and I crawled that one with my feet and hands. Then I dropped to the firmest ground I’d felt since I’d left the hollow. Although I knew this, too, wasn’t real ground.

I saw that there were at least four good-sized sediment ponds under the logjam. Bigger than any of the ones in the hollow.You couldn’t see into these ponds any better than you could see into the ones down below, so I reached over my head for a stick to check how deep they were. But the branch wouldn’t snap from the tree, I had to twist the branch until it tore off, and then, sudden, it came to me how green those trees were, and that put a hurt in me. A hurt for those pitiful trees, how short they’d been dead.Then that hurt started pulling after it the other ones. They started, I felt my self coming back to me, and I inbreathed quick and deep, bit my lip, and back-stepped my self away. I thrust my stick in that poison pond. Didn’t hit any bottom
all those lessons in losing, Bant, how good you are getting, practice makes perfect and be sure to start young.
I pushed down deeper, stirring, poking, and, still, I felt nothing solid
first Pap, then Grandma, then woods mountains places, then Corey, and now today, how many lessons in let-go?
Don’t care. I leaned over the pond as far as I dared, stretched my arm as far as it would go.
Then why didn’t you go with Jimmy Make, you don’t care?
Still no bottom. I understood.

The runoff from the mine site, miles and miles of compacted dirt,
no soak to it, and when it rained hard enough—it would split off slick as water on tin. Gush full these sediment ponds, then overflow, and this huge raft of trees would lift. The trees would lift, swirl a little bit, butt and jostle, crammed tight like they were. Start to surge and ram against that crumbly dirt lip where I’d just been squatting, until pretty soon, the lip would blow.

The lip explodes. The fill buckles under itself, collapses, water and logs and rock and dirt, sluicing down the face of the fill. Sucking up more stuff as they go. Biggening, swelling, fill turning half water, water turning half fill, the whole monster slamming into the hollow and the blocked-up sediment ponds there, the flood inhaling into itself what the lower ponds hold, too—more water, muck, and poisons, more trees and trash—until finally all of it crashes the gate and roars right down Yellowroot Road. Our house would be the first to go.

I dropped my branch in the dirty water. I sidled along the pond to the back of the bowl, climbed through the dead trees there, and crawled up the smaller fill to the mine.

I hadn’t seen the site in daylight since the day of the snake ditches with Corey, over three months ago. Now Yellowroot was completely gone. I’d figured that’s how it would be. But for some reason, I hadn’t let myself think how if Yellowroot was finished, they’d be taking Cherryboy next. And they were. They’d made their first big blast into Cherryboy. They’d sheared part of it away to leave a tall flat naked face. I looked at it. I looked at the dead man-made cliff, and at first I felt nothing for that cut on Cherryboy. Then I felt nothing except I had to get into the woods.

The machines were running between me and them, but I wasn’t scared. Not of the men, not of the equipment, not of a blast. I stayed to the edge of the site, and I didn’t watch them working, watched only that raw bone edge of Cherryboy. It was a long ways I had to walk, and eventually, the men did see me, I heard at least one of the machines
cut off and then some shouting. I didn’t care. By then, I was almost to the woods, and I broke into a jog. I ran, feeling the men at my back, but not caring, hearing the crunch of dead ground, and
I don’t care
. I heard myself say it out loud this time. I ran faster, stumbled, caught myself in mid-fall and pushed on, it was hard to get air, until, finally, under my feet there came softness. Overhead, there came shade.

Then I was moving the way I used to in the woods, before the distance came between me and it, the way I moved in woods and woods only. All the clumsy I felt around people, and buildings and pavement and flat, it used to fall away from me in the woods, and it fell away now. I could feel what was nearby, its size, its closeness, its give, beech, poplar, oak, holly hickory hemlock laurel, touching nothing, tripping nowhere, what Mogey always said about the hum. October smell in my head, and me and Grandma, sassafras and pawpaw and beechnut, like sunflower seeds under your feet, I pushed myself harder,
don’t care,
and yellowroot, too, after the sap went down
Some folks, they use yellowroot for just about everything.
They brought me up here before I was born, and I do remember, smell of November wetter-leaved than October smell
don’t care
me and Lace and Sheila in the little room, me and Lace in the little bed, yellow linoleum floors. Grandma showing me what to chew for the good taste in it
Now that was our chewing gum,
me carrying my little sack, head weed-high,
Close to the ground like you are, Bant, you can see stuff bettern me. Red berries is what you’re looking for.
Senging. Sanging. Sing, sang, sung,
You can live off these mountains. Put you in a little garden, and you can live off these here.

It caught my eye. Strange that it did, fast as I was moving. But there it was, just off the path I’d started following, I had to turn back to go to it. A fresh-dug spot. The yellow-red dirt bared, and then I saw how the dead leaves had been turned up and cleared away, and I knew it was very recent.

I drew in closer. Somebody had placed around the filled hole’s edge little rocks, sparkling with quartz, careful chosen and neat. Making like a little grave. I stood there for some time, quieting my breathing.

At first I used a stick, but fresh and loose as that dirt was, I ended up just using my hands. The hole was shallow, and I hit metal fast, and I recognized it as soon as I saw the orange. Lace’s old lunchbox from grade school. Then I knew it was Dane.

I pulled it out of the hole, and when I shook it to clear the dirt, it gave a loose rattle. I sat back on my heels and brushed it off. The soothing pictures, I’d forgotten—the boy riding his friendly bear.The father bandaging a deer’s leg. In the background, the smiling mother with a broom. I thumbed open the buckle.

Inside lay an acorn, a tiny hoof from a toy horse, a scrap of magazine paper. And the chamois rag.

My heart heaved once in my chest. I felt it roll. I turned over on my side in the leaves.

Was it worse to lose the mountain or the feelings that you had for it? Now that I’d lost this much, I realized that to not care wasn’t to save yourself at all. It was only another loss.Then I remembered something Uncle Mogey told me, back when things were just starting to get truly bad. It was right after Grandma’s funeral, and people were all over the house and the yard, visiting and eating chicken and coleslaw off paper plates. I was sitting on a cable spool a distance away, mad at them for eating at such a time, mad at the quiet laughs. Mogey walked over to me, but I didn’t even want Uncle Mogey near. And Mogey, he sensed that, the way he had of knowing such things, and he stayed only a second, didn’t squat down. He said just one thing. Standing over and a little behind me, so I saw mostly his narrow Sunday shoes looking wrong on his feet, and he said it like he didn’t want to be pushy, like maybe it wasn’t worth saying at all.

He said, “Bant, I’ve learned something about times like these. In
times like these, you have to grow big enough inside to hold both the loss and the hope.”

It had meant little to me then, which was why I’d forgotten it. But now I saw. It was what Lace already knew.What Grandma knew.What a lot of people around here had to have known for a very long time.

I reburied Dane’s box. I set back careful each glittery rock. I stood up and wiped my hands on my jeans, pushed my hair away from my face. Then I headed towards home to tell Lace what I’d found.

This book was born from interviews and conversations with people in the southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields. Some of them are living in the middle of mountaintop removal, others are fighting it, and many are doing both. I wouldn’t have written a word without the stories, passion, grief, terror, and courage of the following people: Gayla, Ray, Dustin, and Johnny Aliff; Joe and Judy Barnett; Teri Blanton; Julia Bonds; Moss Burgess; Pauline Canterberry; Dave Cooper; Gail Ferrell; Michael Foley; Laura Forman; Denise Giardina; Larry Gibson; Maria Gunnoe; Donna Halstead; Joann Hammond; Lavoris Harris; John Holston; Willard Kelly; Lenny Kohm; Bryan McNeill; Mary Miller; Denver Mitchell; Carlene Mowery; Janice Nease; Jimmy Prater; Bill and Donna Price; Cindy Rank; Jewel Rohrer; Patty and Butch Seebok; Vivian Stockman; Bertie Vance; and Freeda Williams. Special thanks to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Coal River Mountain Watch.

William Maxie and Rick Eades contributed valuable factual information. I am also indebted to the outstanding articles on contemporary mining by Ken Ward of the
Charleston Gazette
. Details about the
Buffalo Creek disaster came from Kai T. Erikson’s
Everything In Its Path,
and Gerald M. Stern’s
The Buffalo Disaster.
Richard Fauss of the West Virginia State Archives was tirelessly helpful. Jackson Connor, Frankie and Lori McDonald, and James Pancake provided necessary material not related to mining. Paula Clendenin always had a room when I needed one. Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller assiduously collected newspaper articles for me and kept me abreast of new developments after I left West Virginia. To all of you, my heartfelt thanks.

I am inexpressibly grateful to those who read the manuscript in earlier versions and offered their feedback and, perhaps even more important, their encouragement: Caitlin Sullivan, Jackson Connor, Wendy Somerson, Phil Terman, Judith Kitchen, Anneliese Truame, traci oberg-connor, Mark Guarino, Diana Hume George, Philip Sullivan, Steve Snyder, and Emily Forland. Roxanna Aliaga and Trish Hoard are the kind of editors I didn’t think existed anymore. I still can’t believe my good fortune in finding them. I thank Jack Shoemaker, my publisher, for his vision and his commitment to my book.

My deep appreciation to the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, the Washington State Artist Trust, the Whiting Foundation, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation for their financial support during my writing of this novel.

I want to thank my sister, Catherine Pancake, without whom I wouldn’t have started the book and with whom I discovered many of the seeds for it. My parents, Joe S. Pancake and Robbie Pancake, made me aware of the environmental costs of strip mining by the time I was six years old. Finally, my greatest gratitude to Caitlin Sullivan, for her wisdom, her patience, and her uncompromising faith in me and this project.