WE DECIDED TO FORM a club at school. Ashley argued that it was committing social suicide, but I convinced her otherwise.
“Clubs are for losers!” Ashley said. “We’re just beginning our dating lives and you want to do this? Form an effin club? Goodbye, boyfriends. You might as well just sign us up for the nunnery. The only guy we’re ever going to snag is Jesus.”
But it had to be done. After all, a crusade of two is totally pathetic.
We decided to form a club with Mr. Cooper as our advisor. Every club had to have a teacher as a sponsor. It was another lame school requirement.
We hadn’t asked Mr. Cooper yet. But he had to say yes. He just had to.
“We have to have a club name,” Ashley said.
“Duh!” I said. “Something catchy. Something cool. Something that will get kids stoked to come to a meeting and join the Great Mount Tom Children’s Crusade.”
These were the possibilities we came up with:
“I don’t know,” I said to Ashley. “Maybe we should go with something a little more normal. A little less weird. Something not quite so out there.”
Eventually, after six diet cokes and two enormous bags of Cheetos, we decided on KABOOM—Kids Against Blowing Off Our Mountaintops.
We were pleased with ourselves. It was actually pretty witty.
We stayed after school on Monday to pitch our idea to Mr. Cooper.
“A club?” he said. “I thought that was social suicide?”
Ashley poked me.
“KABOOM,” I said.
“KABOOM,” Coop replied. “Interesting.” He took out his flosser and twirled it around in his fingers. He left the comb in the top left pocket of his shirt. Ashley and I looked at each other nervously. The flosser without the comb. We couldn’t quite figure out whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing. We had yet to find a method to his madness. If there was, in fact, a method to be found.
“And you want to form this club, why again?” Mr. Cooper asked.
We had already explained what we had in mind. How we wanted to save Mount Tom. How we thought that getting kids involved would be a good thing. How maybe we could make a difference.
Ashley and I had spent hours surfing the ’Net on mountaintop removal. Now I launched into the spiel that Ashley and I had practiced fifty times the night before.
“Mountaintop removal is evil,” I began. “It just is. It will destroy the mountain. Obviously. And it’s a beautiful forest up there. And it’ll be gone. Wiped out. Obliterated. Along with all the animals that live there. No trees. No animals. No nothing. What’s our state motto again, Ashley?”
“Montani Semper Liberi,” Ashley said, puffing out her chest.
There she went with that Latin again. I had to smile. She was so proud of herself.
“It means ‘Mountaineers Are Always Free,’” I explained. “It’s pretty hard to be a mountaineer, free or not, without any mountains, Mr. Cooper.”
Coop let the flosser dangle in his mouth. It was just hanging there, half in and half out. He looked at Ashley in amazement.
“And you know the stream that comes down off the mountain?” I continued. “The one that joins up with the Green River? The one that runs right through our town? Right in the back of our school, for crying out loud! Once they blow up the mountain they’ll dump tons of rubble and toxic waste into it. It’ll be totally polluted. Heavy metals like cadmium and selenium.”
“And don’t forget arsenic!” Ashley shouted. “There’s arsenic, too!”
Ashley and I didn’t have a clue as to what exactly cadmium and selenium and arsenic were, but the Internet said they were nothing to mess with.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bad stuff, Mr. Cooper. People get really sick from those things.”
“Tell him about the air pollution,” Ashley said. “Don’t forget about the air pollution.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That too. While they’re doing all of their evil up there, it’ll pollute the air that we breathe. I mean totally screw it up. People who live around mountaintop removal sites are much more likely to get birth defects, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. They’re twice as likely to get cancer. My mother died of cancer, Mr. Cooper. Believe me, it’s not a pretty picture.”
Mr. Cooper took the flosser out of his mouth and started furiously combing his hair. Ashley and I hardly noticed. We were on a roll.
“And it’s not like we’re going to get any richer,” I said. “American will take the money and run. Yeah, there’ll be jobs, but not for miners. Just for the blower-uppers and the truckers. Not many and not for long. And they’ll leave us with a blown-up moonscape and a bunch of toxic waste that will last forever. The rich will get richer and we’ll stay sick and poor!”
“And that’s not even the worst of it!” Ashley said. “There’s climate change! Global warming!” She was standing up and pacing the room, with a fire in her eyes.
“We’ve heard you go off on it, Mr. Cooper. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels and scarier storms and less food. The whole point of American blowing up the mountain is to get at the coal. They’ll dig up the coal and they’ll burn it to produce electricity and they’ll make the planet even hotter. You know what I read, Mr. Cooper? I read that the coal they get from blowing the top off of a mountain is enough energy to last the United States for one hour! One effin hour! Is that worth it? I mean, if they were going to blow the top off of a mountain and do something good it might be one thing. But for one hour’s worth of energy they’re going to blow the top off Mount Tom and fry the planet. Fry the effin planet! Talk about a clustermuck! What could possibly be worse than that?”
Ashley collapsed on the chair next to me. She was trembling. She reached out and I held her hand.
Mr. Cooper looked stunned. Dazed and confused. We knew that he knew all of this stuff, but I don’t think he had seen this coming from Ashley and me.
“But here’s the good news, Mr. Cooper,” I said. We were near the end, wrapping up our rant.
“There’s good news?” Coop asked.
“There is. There really is. It’s not all gloom and doom. It’s not all hopeless. We don’t have to destroy the earth to get what we want! We don’t have to blow the tops off of mountains to get what we need! We just don’t! There’s all sorts of cool ways to make electricity that won’t screw over the planet!”
“Tell him about wind!” Ashley said, popping out of her chair again.
“Like wind energy. Windmills make electricity, Mr. Cooper! There are big ones going up everywhere! They’re putting them out in the ocean and on people’s farms and all sorts of places!”
“And solar,” Ashley said. “Don’t forget about solar!”
“And solar!” I said. “We can make electricity from the sun! We could put up solar panels at school and make our own electricity! Think of it, Mr. Cooper! I mean, which would you rather have? A blown-up moonscape of a mountain or a bunch of solar thingies on the roof? Is that awesome or what?”
“Super-awesome!” Ashley said. “And here’s the best news of all, Mr. Cooper!”
“There’s even better news?” Coop asked.
“There is!” Ashley said. “Just think of it, Coop—I mean Mr. Cooper: you could be part of something big here. You can be part of something huge. You can be . . .”
“The club advisor!” we both shouted out.
“The club advisor?” Mr. Cooper asked.
“Exactly!”
Mr. Cooper went all quiet on us. He bowed his head and he rubbed his eyes and he took long, deep breaths. He had forgotten about the comb and it was now dangling from the top of his head, twisted around one of his gray hairs, just hanging there. He looked ridiculous, but we didn’t care.
“KABOOM?” he asked.
“KABOOM,” I replied. “You don’t have to do anything. Like extra work. We’ll do it all. Seriously. You just have to let us use your room and, like, I don’t know, give us the okay and all. It’ll be fun.”
“KABOOM,” Mr. Cooper said again. “And it will be fun?”
“Super-fun!” Ashley said. “And we’ll clean up after ourselves.”
“Unlike the mine owners,” I said.
“God, as if I’m not in enough trouble with the administration,” he mumbled. “And now I’m going to be the advisor to an anti-coal club in a coal-mining town? That’s going to go down really well.”
“You mean you’ll do it?” Ashley and I both shouted out at the same time.
“Girls, do you know what John Muir once said?”
John Muir was Mr. Cooper’s favorite dead environmentalist. His go-to guy.
“No,” we replied. “What did John Muir say?”
Mr. Cooper rose up on his tiptoes, plucked the comb from his hair and flung it into the trash can. “John Muir said, ‘God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools!’” Mr. Cooper’s voice boomed and he pounded the desk with his fist.
Still holding hands, Ashley and I waited for the punch line.
“And you know what I say?” Mr. Cooper asked, his voice rolling like thunder. “God may not be able to save the trees but you two girls just might. God only knows, but you girls just might.”
We sprang out of our seats and gave Mr. Cooper a great big tree-hugging hug.
KABOOM!