Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (24 page)

Seemed like the only option to make decent money and be in the area where I wanted to be was to go into the mines. And I hadn't really figured out what I wanted to do with myself in the long term. I had some ideas, but it seemed to me that I could work in the mines, make pretty good money, make anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars an hour without any kind of specialized training or educational background. I figured I could move back to Eastern Kentucky, work in the mines, make good money, figure
out what I wanted to do, be saving up for what I wanted to do, and also get some interesting stories and some good training—mechanical, electrical—along the way.

My family thought it was a pretty bad idea because it was dangerous. My papaw was real upset over it, said it was about as smart as sticking my finger in a light socket. Made my mamaw worry quite a bit. My dad didn't think it was a bad idea, but my mom didn't like it. But at that point I had already made up my mind, and it took a long time to get a job. Before you can work in the mines, you have to get what's called a green card, an inexperienced miner's card. You have to go to forty hours of state training on safety and everything. It's kind of a joke, really. You mostly sat around and watched videos from the seventies, so blurry you couldn't hardly understand them. I think the instructors cared, but there's only so much they can do in the classroom, you just have to start working to get the right experience.

I got my green card in early September 2005, I guess, and in about two months I applied everywhere I could. I went to the unemployment office, the newspaper, but I figured out that I had to ask miners where the jobs were. I wasn't very connected to all that, so eventually I had to move to Western Kentucky to get some experience. A friend's uncle owned a deep mine out there, and I worked until I had my time in. You have to work either forty days or 360 working hours to get your experienced miner's card, and that's what I was wanting.

I don't think I could work on a strip job, I was always so against it. I've been against it for years. I knew that underground mining wasn't perfect, environmentally, since it causes a lot of water problems and so on, but as someone from the area who was environmentally conscious, I felt like deep mining was my best choice if I wanted to stay in the area and hopefully make things better in the area.

To be realistic in the matter, there's no way this country could just stop using coal. It'd take a long time to get to that point, and the way I looked at it, if I was going to say that we needed to stop
strip mining and mountaintop removal mining, then I had to be able to say that we should do more deep mining, so I decided to be a deep miner. That's part of why I decided to go into the underground mines.

The work conditions, in my opinion, are worse on a strip job than underground. You're exposed to the weather conditions no matter what, whether it's freezing or burning up. Underground it's the same temp year-round, and in most places they have pretty good ventilation. I'd rather work underground just because of the working conditions, myself.

It was pretty bizarre, going in the mines for the first time. I was kind of thrilled. It's unlike anything else, it's almost like a roller coaster at Dollywood or going through a movie set, except it was a working environment. It was kind of surreal. Interesting, but at the same time you're having to do some real manual labor.

There was one time when I thought there might be a belt fire. Those belts can cause so much friction that it can develop into a mine fire. You can tell when they're about to happen, the air gets really smoky and it smells terrible. I thought we were going to have a mine fire, but the foreman had been through that plenty times and put it out. There's a lot of times I was put in dangerous situations, but I never really felt like my life was threatened. I never thought there'd be a big explosion. I've seen big rock falls within ten or twenty feet of me, but that was always under an unsupported roof, and I knew better than to go where there were unsupported roofs.

I set timbers in the mines, which they don't do much anymore. That's where you take a four-by-four or a four-by-six and you wedge it in between the roof and floor. Shoveled belts a lot, mostly in the places where the belts changed directions; the belts have to change with whichever direction the coal seam goes. A lot of coal will come off the belt and get built up so you have to shovel those out every day. People think you shovel rocks underground, but you're shoveling mud—coal dust mixed with water—so thick you just about have to wipe it off. You get soaked doing it because
there's usually water on the floor. I've built brattices—concrete block walls—it regulates the air flow; you have to have intake and return so that you can have good air movement. I've slung rock dust, I've hung cables for people working on the section, brought roof bolters their bolts. I got my shot-firing card—they actually sent me for my training for this. There's different kinds of mining. Most mines have continuous miners nowadays; that's a machine with a rotating drum with offset teeth that breaks the coal up. Other mines you have to tap dynamite in. I was a backup guy for that.

At one point, I felt like I had found my niche. I felt like well, okay, I'm going to do this for several years and that'll be okay. I've had a lot of manual labor jobs before—many of them nearly as physically intensive as underground mining—but there was never the kind of relationships that I had with other miners. At other jobs people just kept to themselves. In the mines you depend on your coworkers for your safety, and that creates a bond. I think a lot of it is that it's just such unique working conditions and nowadays relatively few people are willing to do it. When you're an underground miner, there's nothing else like it. There's a camaraderie to it. Of course there's smart-asses and people who get on your nerves, but for the most part, if you show up on time, if you work hard, if you don't smart off, then everyone gets along.

I met the most interesting characters of my life working underground. The most hilarious, the most good-hearted people I ever met, just really intelligent and interesting people. I mean, you have to be smart to be a miner, have to be on your toes, alert, to take in everything they need to.

Just about any job I've ever had I've felt an environmental conflict. I worked as a Stanley Steemer carpet cleaner for a while and I'd always think about all the gas we'd be running out to clean people's carpet, and how crazy that was. Almost any job there's that conflict if you're environmentally minded, and I really kept it to myself when I was working in the mines, but every now and then a miner would say something to me that would really surprise
me. I've had people joke around or be sarcastic about global warming, but some of those miners were against what mountaintop removal was doing to this area.

No miners I know are all gung-ho. None of them are “Woohoo, let's tear stuff up!” Most of them are just trying to make a living, to feed their families. They just think, “This is my job, this is how I buy food, this is how I make my car payment.”

The majority of blue-collar jobs are environmentally destructive. I think the majority of people don't want that. I know people on strip jobs who don't like what they're doing to the land, but they needed a job, they had their surface card, and they took the job. I was always kind of thinking of those things while I was working. I was a grunt, I did the low-level stuff that wasn't even production-related, usually. I was getting paid somewhat for it, not as much as people with experience. I just kept thinking I'm going to do this for four or five years and then I'll start a business that's environmentally friendly, so what I'm doing during this time is working toward that.

I think there is a real complacency among a lot of Eastern Kentuckians. A lot of it has to do with the fact that people just want to live their lives, don't necessarily want to start a commotion or be considered radicals or activists. They just want to be friendly to people, have people be friendly back, and not have life be a constant struggle.

Just about everybody knows somebody or is related to somebody who works on a surface mining job, so it can be tough for people to feel like they can speak out when it might upset friends or family. It impacts us all, but we won't know for a long time how badly it's impacting us, and I think that's real hard for people to latch onto.

I always think about the civil rights movement and how it was easier to get people involved because it was so direct and in their face. I mean, people would say, “You cannot sit here,” or “You can't eat here,” so there was no denying it in that case. Here it's more subtle. The rocks aren't usually flying into your house so
you don't think about it. They're not just taking your land, so you don't think about it, so it sneaks in. You have some real outspoken people who are really aware of the long-term effects, but the majority of the people are on the fence. They have a feeling that it's bad, but all those politicians are telling us that it's good for economic development.

So many people have been complacent for so long that I don't really know at this point how to get people to be against that and to really stand up. It's been beaten into our heads for the past hundred years or so that we don't have any choice but to exploit the land and ourselves, because the country needs the resources. There's a lot of complications, a lot of gray areas. People have been told for a long time that there's big business and there's big government and you just have to go along with it whether you like it or not. They're told, “Listen, things are better now than they were fifty years ago,” so they're convinced that it has to be this way. So many people just want to exist comfortably.

I think lots of people have similar opinions to me, but they're afraid to speak out. I think a lot of people are afraid of seeming different, like that person who is the crazy environmentalist or something. Most people want to blend in. It's easier. If that's what your friends and neighbors are saying, it's easier to just agree, to be a part of the status quo.

And the coal industry has convinced people that mountaintop removal is good for the economy. But if you look at all the thousands of acres of land that have been stripped, a fraction of a percent of that land actually has something economically productive on it.

A lot of the seams they're getting at by mountaintop removal are so small that I just don't think they're worth all the environmental devastation. We have to start thinking about the costs versus the benefits. It's obvious that in the long term the costs are going to carry a lot more weight. When you consider how much coal those big machines can move at once, well, it's obvious that it's taking jobs away. Even deep mining is more mechanized now,
but still, you have to have more miners down there than you do on a mountaintop removal site, to get the coal out, to maintain equipment, et cetera.

I quit the mines last year. I got talked into going back to college by family members who didn't want me working in the mines.

My plan from the get-go was to get a college degree and start some kind of business that could be sustainable, that could provide some kind of alternative for environmental and economic development in the mountains. I got convinced that if I went back to college I'd be in a better position to do that. I do feel a little more at liberty to do those kinds of things, to be in the public eye, to speak out. I do feel more at liberty to do that kind of thing now that I don't work underground; it'd be a little strange to get noticed as somebody who was speaking out in public and be working with people who might not be so happy with me. A lot of people, even if they don't completely disagree with you but they perceive you as being some kind of threat to their economic stability, they're not going to be too happy about that.

I'm really working toward doing something to promote alternative economic development. That ought to be one of the key elements to doing something about the devastation happening in Eastern Kentucky.

I want to create a solution.

So many of the people who are part of this anti-MTR movement want to just talk about the negatives, and we need to be talking about the positives, too. We need to be talking about the solutions. I'm not trying to be a full-time activist or anything, I just want to make a difference somehow.

The movement to stop mountaintop removal involves a lot of people who are not from the affected area, who are against it from an ideological sense just because they're against anything that's bad for the environment or sometimes because this happens to be the hot environmental thing of the moment. In the worst-case scenarios, what happens is that a handful of local token mountain
people are put on display and taken around to everything to supply sound bites, but that's not a very good way to build a strong grassroots movement of people from the affected area.

In a lot of ways I think it's really alienating to people from the affected area because they really see this whole movement as being an outsider movement, an “activist” movement, and that's hard for them to identify with. I mean, a lot of mountain people who would sit outside with a shotgun to make sure their land didn't get mined would still never identify themselves as environmental activists. For the most part, a lot of these activists don't know how to interact with country people, and they just perpetuate this sense of confusion…it's much like a circus, to me, most of the time.

I wouldn't even say it's their fault, but almost everybody comes to Appalachia with some kind of stereotype in mind. It might be the humble, hardworking, old-fashioned version of what people think America used to be like, or it could be the dumb, lazy hillbilly from TV. The reality is a lot more complicated and nuanced, and I think sometimes outsiders don't realize that.

There are a lot of people who really want to do something good and their hearts are in the right place, they work hard on it, but I don't know how effective they can be if they don't understand this place or have a background here. I just don't really think there is a solution to that. As long as it's a movement that's based on outsiders, then it will always be weak. This has to be a movement that is led by people from within the area. That's what makes it a true grassroots movement, a real effective and important movement.