A Bittersweet Farewell To King Coal
I owe many of my best childhood memories to King Coal.
The lamp I snuck under my blankets to read all night burned bright because of the electricity from a coal-fired power plant.
I can still feel the weight of the dull black stones dug from the coal chest, as I carried them on the end of a shovel to my grandparents’ furnace, which kept me warm on many a chilly summer night.
And the best burger I will ever have was cooked right on the surface of my grandmother’s coal stove, no pan needed.
That’s why I, for one, will bid farewell to King Coal with mixed feelings.
Despite the Trump Administration’s bizarre attempts to resuscitate the dirty and uneconomical coal industry, the patient is clearly on its last legs.
Domestic consumption continues to decline. And after decades of abiding its health and environmental problems, a majority of the public has soured on coal power. A new poll finds that 58 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat support phasing out coal power plants, while only 34 percent strongly or somewhat are against it. Even in coal-mining states, 50 percent more people support a phase-out than oppose it.
I grew up in and around coal country in northeast Pennsylvania.
I know first hand the good things that coal can provide. But, even as a child, I had no illusions about the bad stuff that outsiders never sensed.
I could see it in the sad boom-and-bust towns off roads like State Highway 93, bearing the names used by the long-gone Native Americans to describe their home grounds or of the European immigrants who transformed them.
Tamaqua (“Little Beaver Stream”). McAdoo. Wapwallopen (“Where The White Hemp Grows”). Hazleton. Shickshinny (“Five Mountains”). Milnesville.
I could taste it when I drove past the towering heaps of coal slag along the side of US 309, wind-driven soot wafting through the car windows, painting the nearby houses, churches, and saloons pitch black.
I could hear it in the horrifying, hacking coughs of the retired miners — those blessed enough to live that long — who came to my grandfather’s home by Lily Lake for osteopathic treatment or just for peaceful hours of fishing from a canoe, going nowhere in particular.
And I knew that the Edenic countryside where I spent much of my summers could be ruined in a matter of months, if the coal company that owned the mountain across the lake — the one where I had taken my first hike, shot my first rifle, and lit my first campfire — decided to “scrape” it.
So, despite some nostalgia, no, I don’t regret having helped kill King Coal.
I’m now more concerned about the future — both physically and psychologically — of my childhood haunts and places like it in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming. As I recently drove up roads I could navigate blindfolded, that future seemed very murky.
On the positive side, the once-blackened cupola of the Ukrainian Catholic church in McAdoo is now a glorious white.
The town once known as Mauch Chunk (“Bear Place”) — the seat of Carbon County — now markets itself as the “Switzerland of America,” boasting the best whitewater rafting, mountain biking, and hiking in the Northeast.
A wind farm now generates clean energy near where I first went to camp. A nature conservancy now owns the once-threatened mountain across Lily Lake.
And Hazleton, where my father was born, has leveraged its prime location at the intersection of Interstates 80 and 81 to lure Fortune 500 companies’ distribution and manufacturing facilities. Its poverty rate is now half of the state average.
But some of the coal slag heaps are still there, still uncovered. Coal fires still smolder underground.
The coal-fired power plants have been replaced in part by an aging nuclear plant along the Susquehanna River. The nuclear plant may not spew soot into the sky. But its emergency sirens dot the narrow roads leading to my grandparents’ home, serving as a reminder that, if there’s a nuclear accident, there’s no good way out.
And many of the people who have never left the region have pivoted from hope and change to bitterness and desperation. Luzerne County, home of Lily Lake, has been described as the best answer to the question of “Why Did Donald Trump Win?” The county backed Barack Obama by 5 percentage points in 2012 and Donald Trump by 20 points four years later.
So, farewell to King Coal.
You had your plusses, you had your minuses. But your day, thankfully, is done.
Now, we have the opportunity to apply the lessons of your rise and fall to make my daughter’s (and all of her generation’s) childhood memories — and future — cleaner and healthier.
