Nine

Almost Level

Jesse pulled our compact silver car into a parking space at the West Virginia Welcome Center near the town of Princeton. It was a cloudless Saturday morning in late May, one week since my trip to the Lewis Wetzel Wildlife Management Area. Earlier this morning, Jesse and I had loaded up our dog, Mr. Bones, and our camping gear and headed back to West Virginia’s mountains. Jesse had been working long hours in the veterinary teaching hospital, and this was his first weekend without a patient in the Intensive Care Unit. This would be our first camping and birding trip together this spring, and our last for at least a few weeks; Jesse would be spending his next three-week rotation at a wildlife disease laboratory in Georgia, and I would be staying at home in Virginia.

After buying a Best of the Mountain Stage CD at the Welcome Center, we merged onto Interstate 77. Our destination was the Kanawha State Forest, located just seven miles south of Charleston, West Virginia’s state capital and largest metropolitan area. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Cerulean Warbler Atlas Project, the Kanawha State Forest harbored the second-highest density of breeding cerulean warblers in the state, just behind the New River Gorge’s Garden Mountain Area and tied with Guyandotte Mountain and vicinity. Like the Lewis Wetzel Wildlife Management Area (which held the third-place spot, according to the Atlas), the Kanawha State Forest provided critical cerulean habitat in the heart of their core breeding range. After my experience in Lewis Wetzel, I felt confident that I knew how to find ceruleans, and I looked forward to showing off my new skills; Jesse and I had something of a healthy birding rivalry between us, and he usually emerged victorious. Perhaps this time things would be different.

After passing the exits for Ghent and Flattop Mountain (areas notorious for ice and blowing snow in the wintertime), we pulled off the interstate near the town of Pax in Fayette County. My great-great-grandfather William Hosey, an immigrant from Ireland, settled in the town of Dothan, about ten miles from here, in 1911 or 1912, to work in one of the region’s many coal mines. He moved here after his first wife, Julia, had tragically died in a kitchen fire. Shortly after arriving in Dothan, William married a local woman, Angeline Hurt, and the two lived in coal-company housing along the Lick Fork of Paint Creek. According to our map, this smaller road—County Route 5—followed the Toney Fork of Paint Creek, and would lead us through some of southern West Virginia’s most notorious coalfields and near several mountaintop removal mines. Mountaintop removal represented one of the biggest threats to cerulean breeding habitat, and this was the part of West Virginia where it was most widespread. We planned to follow Toney Fork Road until it met Clear Fork Road (County Route 1) in the town of Clear Creek. Then, near Whitesville, we’d turn onto the larger Coal River Road, which we’d follow through Boone County until it met Highway 94. We’d head north, and just before Hernshaw we’d take a left up County Route 42 to the back entrance of the Kanawha State Forest.

Six months earlier, in October, I’d toured mountaintop removal sites in southern West Virginia. The tour, sponsored by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, began with a visit to Kayford Mountain—a massive mine site about thirty-five miles from Charleston. Afterward, I flew over the area in a small four-seat airplane operated by a pilot from the nonprofit organization South Wings. The secondary roads Jesse and I would take to get to the Kanawha State Forest wound through the areas I had flown over. From the air, it looked as if bombs had been dropped on southern West Virginia; from the copilot’s seat of the plane, I had looked down on massive brown ditches; flattened, grass-covered “reclaimed” mountaintops; and ominous black lakes of coal slurry. It was horrifying and far more pervasive than I had realized. I was curious to find out how mountaintop removal looked from this different perspective—from the public roads and nearby towns.

Shortly after veering away from the interstate, County Route 5 narrowed to a one-lane dirt road curving between modular homes and well-kept trailers. West Virginia’s state flower, the rhododendron, bloomed around many front porches, its round globes of purple blossoms and waxy, dark-green leaves brightening the roadsides. An elderly man pushed a lawnmower over the spring grass of his fenced-in yard. After only a mile or so, the road turned sharply and began to climb the mountain. Jesse downshifted, and as our small, fiberglass, manual-transmission car skidded on the road’s dry dirt, I began to wish we’d brought the Jeep instead. The road continued to climb and switch-backed again; the forest thickened and tree branches stretched above us. Jesse stopped the car often (more often than I liked) to stick his head out the window and listen to birdsong. No matter how many times I asked him to please not stop the car in the dead center of the steep, winding, narrow road, he refused, and accused me of being too careful, warning me that I’d miss out on things if I didn’t take chances now and then. I reminded him of the distinct difference between “taking chances” and plain stupidity.

When the road finally leveled out a bit, we arrived at a four-way intersection, which was curious because our map didn’t show any adjoining roads. We pulled over to the side this time (instead of just stopping in the middle) to investigate. One of the dirt roads led up the mountain to our left; a sign near this road announced Island Fork Construction, LTD, Mt. Top 4 Mine, and listed three permit numbers—one for a surface mine, one for a haul road, and the third from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Another sign instructed all persons entering the property to first check in at the mine office. Across the intersection, near the other dirt road, stood a sign for Pioneer Fuel Corporation’s Simmons Fork Mining, Inc. This sign listed permit numbers, too—two of the permit numbers corresponded to the Ewing Fork Number 1 and Number 2 Surface Mines. Certainly I could have seen these mines from the air, but from where we stood at the intersection, we could only see dirt roads leading into the forest. A Northern flicker swooped in front of us and disappeared into the trees. How far could that bird fly before reaching the edge of a surface mine? Jesse and I climbed back in the car and continued on County Route 5, which wound down the other side of the mountain. We crossed into Raleigh County and turned onto Clear Fork Road. Just a few miles to the south and west was Raleigh County’s most famous public school—Marsh Fork Elementary.

During my flyover of this area, the pilot had circled Marsh Fork Elementary several times so I could appreciate the danger that faced the more than two hundred children who attend school there. The school sits in a hollow along the Marsh Fork of the Big Coal River, next door to a Massey Energy coal processing plant, where recently mined coal is washed and separated from rocks and dust. The plant’s coal loading silo looms just 225 feet from the school’s playground, where children climb across monkey bars, swoosh down sliding boards, and chase each other during recess. After the coal is ground up and washed at the processing plant, the resulting liquid waste—toxic black “slurry”—is stored behind a dam of compacted dirt, rocks, and soil constructed in a valley just 400 yards from the school. While its exact components can vary, some coal slurry contains mercury, selenium, arsenic, and other potentially harmful chemicals.

Earthen dams like the one near Marsh Fork Elementary sometimes fail. A tragic example occurred in nearby Logan County, West Virginia, in 1972; dams near the town of Buffalo Creek—holding back 132 million gallons of coal slurry—collapsed after heavy rains. In just three minutes, 125 people were killed, more than a thousand injured, and 4,000 left homeless. According to Shirley Stewart Burns’s important book Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities, “more than one hundred similar impoundments exist all over West Virginia.” Burns reports that, since the 1972 disaster, at least eighty miles of streams in the state have been compromised by slurry spills. She states that one slurry impoundment here in Raleigh County “is more than nine hundred feet tall. That is more than two hundred feet higher than the Hoover Dam.”

The earthen dam behind Marsh Fork Elementary holds back as many as three billion gallons of coal slurry—twenty-two times more slurry than the amount that deluged Buffalo Creek. Behind Marsh Fork’s slurry lake is an active mountaintop removal mine. I cannot claim to be a mining engineer or expert on mine design; however, common sense dictates that blasting apart a mountain a few hundred yards behind an earthen dam is a bad idea. Could explosions on the mountain destabilize the dam? If that dam broke, how quickly would three billion gallons of coal slurry engulf the elementary school, drowning all those little children? Parents and relatives of the students protested and petitioned their elected officials for help, and they have been promised a new school three miles from its existing location; construction should be completed by 2012.

One of the men responsible for the new school is Ed Wiley, a former West Virginia coal miner whose granddaughter attended Marsh Fork Elementary. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Wiley at an event sponsored by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. Tall, fit, and wearing a camouflage hat advertising a turkey hunting organization, he recounted picking up his granddaughter (whom he affectionately called “Possum”) from school because she frequently became nauseous and lightheaded. When he realized that other children often went home sick from Marsh Fork Elementary, Wiley started asking questions about the nearby coal processing plant and slurry impoundment. He quit mining coal, met with West Virginia’s governor and other elected officials, and in 2006 he walked 455 miles from Charleston to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness about Marsh Fork Elementary School. When Mr. Wiley tearfully said that, “The first ones to get it will be our little children,” he made me cry, too, and his frustration was contagious.

Unfortunately, the health problems of coalfield residents don’t stop with nausea and lightheadedness. A recent study analyzed medical data gathered from West Virginia University, the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, and the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that in West Virginia “as coal production [in an area] increased, health status worsened, and rates of cardiopulmonary disease, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and kidney disease increased.” People in the coalfields have a 70 percent increased risk for kidney disease, have a 64 percent increased risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and are 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure. What permanent health risks do growing children face by attending school next to a coal processing plant?

I do not believe that a situation like the one at Marsh Fork Elementary could occur in another part of the country. In addition to consistently finishing near the bottom of state-by-state comparisons economically, West Virginians are forced to combat stereotypes at every turn. While prejudice affects everyone at some point, it seems that mainstream American culture has exempted West Virginia and the rest of Appalachia from equality and political correctness; for some reason, hillbilly jokes are not generally considered offensive, and twenty-first century Appalachian poverty is laughable. Movies like Wrong Turn, The Descent, and of course Deliverance depict the region’s residents as disfigured, dangerous inbreds who rape, murder, and sometimes even eat unfortunate tourists. Dehumanizing people makes it easier to ignore them, even when they’re in dire need of help—like Possum and the other innocent children who attend Marsh Fork Elementary, who risk their lives everyday for our nation’s “cheap” electricity.

This vast hole used to be part of Kayford Mountain.

Jesse continued to drive along Clear Fork Road, past small farms surrounded by pink peonies in full bloom. We approached the town of Dorothy, population 300. According to our map, Kayford Mountain was just to our north, on the right side of the road as we drove west through a valley. Amazingly—but not surprisingly—no signs of mountaintop removal coal mining were visible from the road. Folks sat on porches, mowed lawns, and tended gardens. The mountain that rose to our right, above the peaceful homes, looked forested and stable. But this was a lie, an illusion.

I will never forget standing at the wooded edge of local resident Larry Gibson’s property last fall, and staring down into a vast hole that used to be part of Kayford Mountain. Far below me, massive earth-moving machines had rumbled across a barren, grayish-brown expanse. The mine site looked like a freakish amphitheater roughly carved by a colossal ice cream scoop. Behind me, red maples had quivered in the October breeze as their leaves floated down around my shoulders. A blanket of tiny white asters bravely grew close to the rocky edge, clinging to ground that in a few months would probably be gone. I remembered hearing a small flock of cedar waxwings behind me; they flew beyond the treetops, into the empty air above the barren hole, and, seeming shocked, quickly turned and headed back for the tree line. I knew how they felt. Seeing Kayford Mountain up close made me realize that the term “mountaintop removal” is far too gentle; it reminds me of “pest removal” or “unwanted hair removal.” Not only is the mountain removed, but everything on, in, and around it: forests, birds, bears, deer, homes, cemeteries, flowers, butterflies, streams. Mountaintop removal coal mining is like using a baseball bat to remove a tooth—it may be cheaper and quicker than the dentist, but it can leave behind quite a mess.

While visiting Kayford last October, I’d collected some of the leaves that had fallen near the mine’s edge—sugar maple, tulip tree, and red oak. On the walk up to the precipice that day, I heard the Hey there, Sweetie call of a Carolina chickadee and the frantic laugh of a red-bellied woodpecker. Goldfinches flitted across the path ahead of me. Surely cerulean warblers had once lived on Kayford Mountain; I imagined their confusion when they arrived back in West Virginia after an exhausting three-thousand-mile flight, hormones revving up for the breeding season, only to find that their entire mountain, the territory they’d evolved to return to year after year, was gone. Completely and inexplicably missing.

I remember peering down into the gray pit below me at Kayford Mountain and watching the earth-moving machines at work. From the mine’s edge, hundreds of feet above the floor of the active site, they appeared small. One piece of equipment, which resembled a bulldozer, slowly crawled up a makeshift road and disappeared behind a gray hill. Oversized dump trucks rumbled in and out of the site, leaving clouds of gray dust in their wakes. Regular-sized pickup trucks, parked near a green porta-potty, looked like Matchbox toys next to the mining equipment. I remember that I toed the loose rocks and gravel at the edge of the hole with my boot and noticed that some of the stones around my feet were black; I bent down and picked up a dull chunk of coal. I rubbed its smooth, cool surface with my thumb before closing my fist around it. Below me, over the constant growl of the equipment, I heard the repeated beep of a truck in reverse. As I stared down at them that October morning, I thought about the urban legend that involved dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building; I wondered what kind of damage my lump of coal could do if thrown from there. I watched the machines creeping below me and thought of their tires, their gas tanks, their engines, and all of their breakable parts. Luckily, though, I silenced my inner Edward Abbey, and that chunk of coal from Kayford Mountain now sits on a bookshelf in my office.

As Jesse and I drove along Clear Fork Road through Dorothy, I gazed up at the seemingly intact side of the mountain. If the mine had been readily visible from the road, every out-of-towner and tree-hugger with a camera (like me) would be snapping pictures of it, which was probably why they kept it hidden. Seeing the mine everyday would also be incredibly unnerving for local residents; how scary and disheartening would it be to live at the base of a carved-out mountain? If it’s not visible, then perhaps everyone could pretend it wasn’t there. As we passed well-tended gardens and porches hung with American flags, I was reminded of the famous short story “The Lottery,” in which the fictional town’s residents happily gather to stone to death one of their own because of “tradition.” Jesse and I drove on in silence.

Not far past Dorothy, Clear Fork and Marsh Fork merge to form the Big Coal River. Clear Fork Road ends at the larger Coal River Road (State Route 3) near the rivers’ junction. Jesse and I turned north toward Whitesville, following the river into Boone County. The Big Coal flows north until it empties into the Kanawha River near Charleston; then the Kanawha flows west out of Charleston until it reaches the Ohio River, their confluence occurring near the town of Point Pleasant, made famous by the legendary “Moth Man.” According to the West Virginia Coal Association, Boone County is West Virginia’s leading coal producer from both surface and underground mines, and it holds more coal reserves than any other county in the state. Coal also employs more people in Boone than in any other county in West Virginia; in 2005, 3,063 of the county’s approximately 25,000 residents worked in its coal mines. In many ways, Boone County is capital of the coalfields.

Jesse pulled our car into the One Stop convenience store near the intersection. A large blue and white “Friends of Coal” banner hung on a chain-link fence by a dumpster nearby, and the parking lot and gas pumps were surprisingly crowded. As I slammed the car door shut, I was suddenly glad we hadn’t taken my Jeep, with its “Friends of the Mountains” sticker on one side of its back window and “For the Birds” sticker on the other. After using the store’s restrooms, Jesse selected an egg salad sandwich from a rack of plastic-bagged choices, and I bought a gooey Milky Way bar. As we got back in the car and prepared to continue on our way, I noticed some anti-George Bush graffiti spray-painted on a silver guardrail. West Virginia’s contradictions never failed to amaze me; in both 2000 and 2004, the state voted to elect a Republican president, but during those same years, it elected a Democratic governor. Many politicians in West Virginia, both Republican and Democrat, repeat the “coal is our heritage” mantra to win votes and industry endorsements, yet, according to the West Virginia Coal Association, the top three coal-producing companies in West Virginia are headquartered out of state—tops is Richmond, Virginia–based Massey Energy, followed by Pittsburgh’s CONSOL Energy and St. Louis’s Arch Coal. How long do you have to do something for it to become “heritage,” anyway? Fifty years? A hundred? Five hundred? Have non-American Indians lived in North America long enough to claim anything we’ve begun here as “heritage”?

I pondered these questions as Jesse and I headed north up Coal River Road, which now seemed to be called Boone Street. We soon found ourselves in the town of Sylvester, population 195, home of the “Sylvester Dustbusters.” In November 1997, Elk Run Coal Company, owned by Massey Energy, applied for a permit from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to build a coal preparation plant just outside the Sylvester town limits. Despite protests from the mayor and town council, the permit was issued, and within five months the plant began operating. The townspeople soon noticed coal dust on their windows, porches, cars, and finally, inside their homes. Trucks with coal piled high in their beds rumbled through the small town, cracking the pavement of Sylvester’s streets under their weight.

During last October’s tour I met two of the Sylvester Dustbusters, Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller. These inspiring women—both in their seventies—took the coal-dust matter into their own hands. Pauline Canterberry said, “Our ‘golden years’ have become black years.” In an effort to save their community, they began to document Sylvester’s new problems. They videotaped billowing clouds of dust, dust-covered homes, and people sweeping their sidewalks and hosing off their cars. For two years, the women went from house to house wiping coal dust from railings, porches, and windows; they even saved the dirty paper towels they used to collect this evidence. These two Dustbusters, along with the majority of the town’s residents, complained to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. After several years of complaining and presenting their evidence without satisfactory results, the people of Sylvester stepped up their efforts. They contacted national news media, joined environmental organizations, and participated in marches and public protests against Massey Energy. Then, in 2001, more than half of the town’s residents sued Massey for violating the West Virginia Surface Mining Act by not controlling the coal dust. In 2002, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection ordered Massey to construct a large nylon dome over the mounds of coal at the plant. In theory, this dome would stop the dust from billowing over Sylvester. But the dome didn’t stop the town’s problems; residents still complained about air and noise pollution from the processing plant. Finally, in 2003, a jury sided with the people of Sylvester, and ordered Massey to pay the plaintiffs almost $473,000 in damages. But the legal battles continue.

Jesse and I rolled through the picturesque town, discussing the Dustbusters, when we rounded a bend and saw it—on the left side of the road, beyond a house, the freakish white nylon dome rose above the tops of the trees that surrounded it. Our car swerved as we craned our necks to look. Jesse pulled off onto a side road and stopped the car.

“It kind of reminds me of the Biosphere,” I ventured.

“Yeah,” Jesse agreed, “the same geometric shapes.”

An American flag flapped from a telephone pole alongside the road, and the irony of that scene—a home at the base of a dome (which covered massive piles of coal) and the symbol of our nation snapping smartly in the breeze in the foreground—warranted a photograph. So after snapping a few pictures, we pulled back onto Route 3 and drove slowly north, past the infamous coal processing plant. CSX railroad cars, heaped high with coal, waited on the tracks that ran along the banks of the river. As we passed more houses and local businesses, it became obvious to me why the Dustbusters had worked so hard to try to save their town. In addition to being tucked in a river valley between beautiful mountains, I imagined that in Sylvester kids can go trick-or-treating without having to worry about razor blades in apples, and the elderly probably didn’t lock their front doors at night. I’d be willing to bet that neighbors knew each other’s names. It seemed like a nice place to live—except for its coal plant and proximity to strip mines, of course. I wondered what effect all the billowing coal dust had on the area’s non-human animals—deer, bear, and of course, cerulean warblers.

We left Sylvester behind us and continued to follow Route 3 north. We passed through several small towns nestled in the narrow river valley. Purple and pink rhododendron blossoms bloomed in many yards and grew wild alongside the road. Three or four coonhounds slept inside a chain-link pen next to a small house. Another house had a “Support the Troops” sign displayed in the corner of its freshly mown lawn. Large oak branches overhung the road, and the Big Coal River slugged along beside us, at times dwindling to the size of a small creek. The CSX railroad tracks ran along the river’s opposite shore.

I rested my elbow on the open car window. “I think it’s great,” I said to Jesse, “that there are environmental activists in Boone County, West Virginia.”

“Yes,” Jesse agreed. “Their experience made them environmentalists because they felt their community was in danger. And then when the company wouldn’t do anything about the pollution, that made them activists.”

The Dustbusters’ story inspired me—a few senior citizens in the rural West Virginia coalfields forced one of the nation’s largest and most powerful energy companies to address the damage its processing plant had caused the town’s residents. I smiled and tried to stretch my legs out in front of me. We didn’t have much farther to go before reaching the Kanawha State Forest, and I was anxious to get out in the woods and start looking for ceruleans.

As we passed the Boone County Dog Pound, I reached back to pet Mr. Bones, who was curled on the floor behind my seat. Every time I see an animal shelter, I’m reminded of the day—almost a decade ago—that Jesse and I adopted a beagle-mix puppy from the Marion County Dog Pound near Fairmont, West Virginia. He sat in the back of his cage in the puppy room with his littermate and yipped at us. The pound’s employee told us that someone had found a mother beagle and her pups in a box near a dumpster. We played with the two puppies and decided to take the one with the white tip on his tail. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we had adopted (in my opinion) the smartest, most handsome, most snuggly dog in the entire world.

We rounded another bend and a four-wheeler headed toward us, speeding down the double yellow line in the center of the highway. The driver wore a black hooded sweatshirt with TOOL across the front, but no helmet. We sped past church after church—the Amazing Grace Fellowship, the Healing Stream Baptist Church, the Church of Christ, the Church of God of Seth, Comfort Presbyterian Church. Another four-wheeler, this one carrying two helmet-less passengers, drove the wrong way in the highway’s left lane. We were going fifty miles an hour, and the ATV’s driver kept up with us until we finally passed them. The driver had barbed wire tattooed around one bicep. The CSX train tracks continued to run alongside the highway as we passed Food Marts, used car dealerships, a pork barbeque stand, and yard sales. Dogs barked from fenced backyards, and people weed-whacked bushes around their porches.

Jesse and I realized we’d been driving in Boone County for quite some time and still hadn’t been able to see any mountaintop removal mines from the road, but we knew they were all around us. Any user of the Internet can see satellite images of the vast mines and slurry impoundments by logging on to Google Maps and doing a bit of searching. While it may have been the original reason that communities like Sylvester and Keith sprang up, coal is a finite resource—sooner or later, it will all be gone, and what will be left of these ancient Appalachian Mountains in Boone County? Unless the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative’s efforts gain widespread acceptance and funding, Boone County could someday consist of flattened hills covered with hydro-seeded non-native grass species, polluted ground water, and diminished wildlife and natural beauty. Why—and perhaps more importantly, how—could anyone stay and make a living in a polluted, flood-prone area devoid of its supporting natural resources? If our country must mine, burn, and export coal, we should at least attempt to do it in a way that is sustainable and safe. Unless a pandemic or some other catastrophic disaster hits, the world and humans are probably going to be around for a long time. What happens when we use everything up?

“What’s going to be left,” said Jesse, downshifting as the road curved again, “is a flat, non-West Virginia kind of place, where no one can live and no one wants to visit.”

Boone County’s green mountains—imperiled and probably filled with coal—folded around us as we sped north.