Hollowed Ground
A student moves to West Virginia, where mountains and politics turn inside out.
By Sierra Crane Murdoch ’10
Photography by Angela Evancie ’09
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2010 issue.
On a humid night along the Big Coal River, in a restaurant just north of Upper Big Branch Mine, Carrie Lou Jarrell counted her steps to a wailing country beat. Eight matronly women followed. They rocked, shuffled, and turned with unlikely grace. They scuffed their heels and toes along the floor, stomping at the end of each beat. An old man pressed his nose to the window and moved on unnoticed. When the dance ended, Carrie Lou sat at a table pushed against the wall and rested her elbow on a napkin dispenser. “Keeps me healthy,” she said, breathing heavily. She drew a cigarette from her pocket and offered me a seat.
Carrie Lou, 65, has wide sassy eyes and a mouth pinched to a frown. Dancing was her idea 15 years ago when she gathered the first “swinging grandmas” in a dingy basement and had a friend teach them the steps. She only missed a few nights since, when Virgil, her husband, fell sick and when she was bedridden herself. Carrie Lou had a tough few years. First the coal dust got so thick in town she could barely breathe. She had the aneurysm; Virgil’s lungs gave out. They lost money when they closed their restaurant. And then the mine explosion: she had known miners to die, but never that many at once.
If you followed the news, you know the story. On April 5 this year, a fiery ball of methane gas killed 29 men in Upper Big Branch, a Massey Energy Company mine set between Montcoal and Whitesville, West Virginia. Rescuers hoped that a few missing men were still alive, but anyone who had worked in the mines knew it was impossible — the miners had died instantly. Reporters camped out along the Big Coal River for weeks as they dug for the best story. Had the company disabled the methane detectors on mining machinery? If the mine had been unionized, would this have happened? Was Don Blankenship, Massey’s CEO, responsible? Many locals cursed Blankenship long before the explosion. He’s a classic villain: dark eyes, a handlebar mustache, shrewd business sense, and indifference to the law. The man could make any story interesting.
It was the explosion that drew me back to the Coal River Valley this April. The last camera crew left by the third week, the articles slipped off the front pages of the national newspapers, and I, knowing the story went deeper than the incident itself, decided to return to the place I had lived and visit the people I had come to know. I had first moved to the Valley in early 2009 to stay several months in Rock Creek, a town missing from most maps, set 10 miles south of Whitesville. At first, I was hesitant to move. In my last semester at Middlebury, a professor had encouraged me to coordinate a project called Power Past Coal, a national effort among communities and organizations to transition away from coal. “Why not live in the coalfields while you work?” he had said.
So I called a friend in West Virginia to ask where I should live. I was looking for something cheap. “Can’t get much cheaper than the Coal River Valley,” she said, and that’s where I ended up.
It’s hard to measure the cost of living in a place like the Valley. Even before the explosion at Upper Big Branch, the region ached with loss. Casualties are commonplace in the mines: roof bolts give way to collapse, off-gassing feeds fires, and sparks from machinery turn rock dust into gunpowder. By the time a miner’s retired, he’s likely to have black lung. And the industry’s changed, making it hard to find a job. Many mines closed in the nineties, sending able workers to Cleveland and forcing old miners to retire. The company that reopened the mines — Massey Energy — hired many miners from out of town to keep the union from reorganizing. Now the union has all but disappeared.
In 50 years, West Virginia has lost over 80 percent of its mining jobs while coal production continues to increase. Machines have replaced men, and to reach the thin, shallow seams of coal that underground mining often can’t, peaks are exploded and the coal scraped out through a method called mountaintop removal. To clear land for the mines, Massey buys up houses — sometimes, whole towns. The company saves money and speeds production by dumping mine waste into the valleys and streams, leaking arsenic, selenium, and heavy metals into people’s wells. Cancer and disease rates have spiked — the last nail in the Valley’s coffin, emptying towns that were never meant to exist without coal.
But somehow, people like Carrie Lou Jarrell have held on. In a town riddled with ghosts, she and her line dancers are among the few signs of life. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t find a parking spot in Whitesville on a Friday night,” I’ve heard her say. Now she owns one of the last open buildings in town, though she hasn’t kept a business more than a few years. When I first came dancing two winters before, she had just closed her restaurant, the Country Corner. The walls were tacked with Coca-Cola signs and yellowing Elvis photos clipped from newspapers. The deep fryers shone like mirrors, and the coolers still had a few warm cokes. Now there’s Nuttin’ Fancy, serving the same greasy corn bread and sweet pork beans. The new owners replaced Carrie Lou’s cutouts with nylon flowers and cheap, nostalgic paintings of pastoral valleys and bustling city streets.
“Life is what you make out of it,” said Carrie Lou. She rested her burning cigarette on the ashtray and winked at me through the smoke. “I could sit here and bitch and complain and bellyache, but it doesn’t accomplish anything. So why do that? Turn the music on and dance a little.” She clapped her hands and rose for the next song — “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll.”
The road at night from Whitesville to Rock Creek braids the river and the rails through quiet, dim towns. There’s an eerie sense of abandonment for most of the way, and then you reach Montcoal, lighting up the sky like an empty, industrial city. A large pipeline crosses over the road, leading to a maze of more pipes, beltlines, and silos, all held high in the air on rusted scaffolding and lit every few feet. These lead to the tipple — where coal is crushed, sorted, and loaded into trucks and trains — a towering mass of corrugated metal, roughly soldered at its corners.
I tried to imagine the place on the day of the explosion. A friend, Chuck Nelson, described it to me clearly: at four in the afternoon, ambulances raced past his house, and he knew something was wrong. He took his car toward Whitesville and stopped at the north entrance to the mine. Police closed off the area as he arrived, so he watched from the road. He had three friends in Upper Big Branch. One he had seen just that morning at a funeral — he worked with the man in a union mine for 15 years, before they both found jobs with Massey. Chuck quit to speak out against the company’s mining practices. (“Your job is the most important thing,” he remembers hearing on the first day of work. “You mine coal. The company will take care of the rest.”) His friend kept working and made it out of the mine alive after the explosion. The other two showed up dead within a few days.
In the following weeks, Chuck’s phone rang constantly with calls from reporters. They needed names of miners who would tell the truth about working conditions at Upper Big Branch. But Chuck refused. “I’ve worked for Massey, and I know how they operate,” he said. “If a miner talks, he’ll lose his job. Then you’ve got your story, and he ain’t got nothing.” Chuck knew better than anyone: whistleblowing was a big risk for a miner with kids to feed. The company, at times, offered compensation for its errors — three million dollars to each family that lost a husband or son in the explosion — but otherwise, it pinched pennies. It was the way things worked in the Valley. And little had changed, it seemed, in the year I had been away.
When I first came to Rock Creek in the winter of 2009, the snow turned to rain each day and refroze overnight. The house was small for six people — it would’ve been small for four — with a kitchen, a bathroom, two bunkrooms, and a living room that fit a couch and a loveseat. I slept with a wool hat pulled down over my eyes; the house was not insulated, and the plastic taped over the cracked windowpanes did little to keep out the draft. Once awake, I’d make my way to the woodstove, a rusted, flimsy box in the center of the living room, connected to a pipe protruding from a crudely cut hole in the ceiling.
My housemates and I spent most of the winter beside the stove, bent toward the fire over our laptops. We were all activists of some sort: one a videographer for the documentary Coal Country; another, a liberal arts graduate with a degree in physics who stayed up nights engineering roadblocks and banner drops along the stripped ridges. One boy, Glen, had left home at 14 and found his way to Appalachia from New York, via New Orleans. He did whatever needed doing. Julia, like myself, had just arrived as an Americorps Vista, certain she’d live in the Valley the rest of her life. Noerpel had been in Rock Creek enough years to tell me anything about the Valley — the hollows to explore and those to avoid, the height of the mountain’s coal seams, the wind potential along the highest ridges, the reasons creeks ran orange and wells turned black, and the name of every person who passed through our door.
We had a few visitors those first, cold weeks: Officer Smith, a cordial man who had arrested two of my housemates for locking themselves to mining machinery, and Charles Ballard, who came, on average, twice a day. Ballard would drive his spitting blue Sidekick across the bridge, pass the house as though he didn’t intend to stop, and then abruptly accelerate in reverse to halt beside the stoop. If we noticed and came to the door, Ballard would crane his neck out the window, a cigarette propped between his thin curled lips, and yell, “Where’s everybody at?” Otherwise he’d skulk in and see if we noticed. Sometimes when I was washing dishes, I would turn to find Ballard behind me, holding a handful of my hair to his knife blade. He would pull back and cackle, his mouth suddenly gaping, teeth lost to chewing tobacco and the mine foreman who punched them out years ago. Then he would mutter something I couldn’t hear, and I would respond routinely: “No smoking in the house, Charles,” or “Where have you been?”
When the wood smoke got nauseatingly thick, I’d venture out — sometimes to Lloyd’s, the convenience store across the bridge, or up the narrow road through Rock Creek Hollow, or down the street to visit Ed Wiley. He lived at the road’s dead end, where the river bowed against a steep, rocky cliff.
I had heard of Wiley before I came to Rock Creek. In 2004, his granddaughter started coming home from Marsh Fork Elementary School with respiratory problems, and he immediately knew why. The school sits across the river from a preparation plant where coal is washed and loaded into eastbound trains. Dust from coal trucks floats into the hallways, settling on lockers, desks, and lunch plates. Above the school is the Marsh Fork Impoundment, a 2.8 billion-gallon lake containing sludge — the mixture of chemicals, water, and sediments left after washing the coal. While lakes like these have been known to break, Massey plans to blast within 100 feet of the precarious impoundment. Wiley appealed to the state to move the school, and when the state didn’t listen, he walked to Washington, D.C. But it took the mine explosion, nearly three years after his visit to Congress, to draw the Annenberg Foundation to the area. Donors noticed the school’s proximity to the coal facility and offered $2.5 million as long as the state and Massey paid the rest.
I went to visit Wiley one evening when my housemates had gone out. He was laid out on the couch when I came in, watching The Last Samurai. He pushed himself upright and waved for me to sit down. Wiley had a youthful physique despite all the years he had worked in the mines. But that night he looked tired, his sharp eyes sunken.
“Good movie,” he said, and I sat down to watch Tom Cruise fend off four armed ninjas. We both were quiet the rest of the film. When it ended, I stood to go.
“How’s Marsh Fork?” I said.
“The same, I reckon,” said Wiley. He went into the kitchen, and I could hear him rustling around in the freezer. He came out holding a white grocery bag, heavy with bear meat. “You kids cook this up,” he said.
I thanked him, slipped on my boots, and headed down the dark road, past a boy who raced his four-wheeler alone, and into the house.
Spring, like many things in the Coal River Valley, is a lesson in patience. The mountains’ steep spines cast shadows over the hollows and delay the season’s early growth. Buds sprout along the ridges first, inking their way toward the peaks. May apples emerge, and the beeches and maples open their leaves, thin and limp, to fill the spaces between the evergreens — hemlock, low, prickly holly, and the rhododendron that crowd the mountain’s base. Then edibles push through the leaf layer: fiddleheads, quick to uncurl into ferns; morel mushrooms the locals call “molly moochers”; ginseng root, dug later in the season and sold to Chinese retailers for a high price; and ramps, pungent onions gleaned by the thousands and fried up for community gatherings — the Appalachian version of spaghetti dinners.
I learned all this from locals like Chuck Nelson and Wiley, who, since the day they could shoot a gun, followed their fathers into the woods to track deer or wild turkey. Like most of the people I met in the Valley, they prided themselves on knowing the woods, and they loved the land for what it gave them. They had lived in the Valley their whole lives, as had many generations before, tracing back to the escaped indentured servants who settled the region. They seemed to cling to their ancestry like many first-generation Americans — or anyone, for that matter, who feared their roots could be forgotten or misunderstood.
There was a good deal of truth to their fears. On Sundays, when the mines were closed, my housemates and I would take four-wheelers up onto Coal River Mountain to visit some of the strip sites. The way up was narrow and rocky, edged on both sides by briars and old-growth trees. At the confluence of two ridges, we’d turn south, past an abandoned log home, and emerge into a clear-cut forest and then the craterous mine. Hundred-foot walls of rock rimmed the basin above us, layered with foot-high seams of coal. The mine had left a coarse, gravel surface, sprouting with boulders and dry grass. Below us, the ground dropped off into another walled basin, filled with sludge and dammed at its end by a loose, rock embankment. Whatever had been there before — trees, topsoil, homesteads, cemeteries — wouldn’t grow back for a very long time.
I’ve walked out onto many more strip mines since this one, and each time I do, I think of a remark my friend made when she came to visit me in Appalachia. This place, she told me, looked war torn, as if artillery had erased the stories once embedded in the land. I had lived in other places similarly stripped of their cultural and ecological memory; even in Vermont, 19th-century settlers had leveled the woodlands once inhabited by the Abenaki to build and heat their homes, opening the sparse land to grazing and erosion. On the topsoil that remained, the woods grew back, a little unhealthy, scattered with new artifacts — saw blades, wall stones, oxen yolks, maple taps, plow teeth — the kinds of souvenirs hung over mantels and propped among flower beds.
Some argue the Southern Appalachians will recover just as well. Companies, by federal law, must put back the mountain to its “approximate original contour.” But that’s after they’ve buried the topsoil under the bedrock. It’s like felling a tree, plucking off the buds, carving out the core, and nailing it back to the stump. It’s the sort of work that can’t be undone.
Nor could I ignore it. My own tap water ran black on mornings after a hard rain, swirling with sediments washed into the Coal River from the mine above Rock Creek Hollow. When the air was right, I could feel the blasts. In the midst of all this, I found my neighbors’ resilience most remarkable. I went line dancing more out of a need to hear the light-hearted banter than to learn the steps. I attended public hearings on new mining permits to see Chuck Nelson and other locals make their case. Many times they were cut short by facilitators from the state environmental agency or harassed off the podium by Massey men and women.
Some days, I tried convincing myself that the Valley was like my own home, a small gravel-mining town on New York’s Rensselaer Plateau. It looked similar, anyway: twisted mountains, hardwood forests, silted streams, and defunct trailers scattered among neat, brick houses. But my relief, in the end, came from knowing I would soon return north to finish school.
The longer I stayed in Rock Creek that first spring, the more I readied to leave. I blame my despondence, in part, on my computer — there’s nothing quite like it to steal you from the present, and as my campaign neared its end, I worked 16-hour days. But a few things happened that rattled me more than anything. The first was the crash.
On a sunny morning in March, as miners headed home from the night shift, two pickup trucks collided in front of the house. I was on the porch when it happened and looked up to see a cloud of sparks and shattered windows rain down the embankment into the river. I sat still for a moment as the cloud cleared. When I could see the two trucks smoldering, I grabbed a blanket from the couch and ran out to the road. Cars had already lined up on both sides of the crash, and a man in a jumpsuit was prying open the door to one of the trucks. I helped him guide the boy out — he had a deep gash in his arm and a broken ankle, but otherwise he appeared fine. The other truck was much harder to open, and so we pulled the young, gangly miner out through the window. Blood obscured most of his face, and his ribs had been crushed against the steering wheel. We spread the blanket on the road, and laid him down. The man in the jumpsuit asked for his mother’s phone number and ordered an onlooker to make the call. A helicopter arrived, and the young miner died on the stretcher.
An old-timer had once told me, “Every time you turn on the lights, there’s blood of a miner there somewhere.” The accident, though out of the mines, made his words suddenly, disturbingly true. It seemed such an undue death — to spend every day beneath cracking roof bolts and methane pockets, losing sleep with each ton of coal shipped east, thanking God when leaving the mine alive, and then to die on the way home. It was my first interaction with a working miner, apart from the stilted hellos I exchanged with sooty-faced men in Lloyds. The miners I had come to know were the ones who had survived, bent backs and black lungs proof of their service. They were of an entirely different generation than the young miner who died in the road — they remembered when Whitesville hummed, when there were more jobs than men to fill them, when the union kept wages up and the company stayed underground.
According to Chuck Nelson, most young miners never heard this history. Massey men learned to mine coal fast, by whatever means necessary. Some miners’ commitment to the company bordered on idolization — they wore Massey T-shirts like letterman jackets, fixed flags to the backs of their motorcycles, and chanted the company name at rallies and counter protests. As anti-mountaintop removal sentiment swelled in the Valley, so did their zeal. Locals like Wiley fielded daily threats, and at the Rock Creek house, we stayed up nights to watch the bridge after rumors of arson had circulated through Lloyd’s. Then on a July afternoon, a truck full of drunken miners stormed a music festival where the Valley’s activists had gathered to celebrate another year of work. That night, I moved south to Wise County, Virginia, and didn’t return until after the mine explosion.
Before I left the Valley this April, I took the road north from Whitesville to Sylvester, turned left at a sign that read, “Pray for our miners and their families,” and stopped at Carrie Lou’s. The house was yellow and small, with a neat yard and well-lived-in rooms. She and Virgil shared the place with their niece and her two children. When I came in, Virgil was washing dishes. Plastic Tonka trucks cluttered the thick red carpet, and a baby slept in the corner room. Carrie Lou poured me a glass of ice water and sat with me at the kitchen table. She asked a question, but the phone rang. Her niece came in, set a fussy newborn on the counter, and began changing her diaper.
“You have any kids?” she asked.
“No.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” I said. She was 25.
“Good, you’re young. You should wait.”
Carrie Lou shook her head as she hung up the phone. Then she looked at me, trying to remember what she wanted to say.
“You’re going to come back soon, aren’t you?” she said, finally. “You’ve got to learn those dances.”
Sierra Crane-Murdoch ’10 was a senior at Middlebury when she wrote this story. She is currently a visiting fellow in the investigative reporting program at the University of California, Berkeley
