Song of the Cicada

I was under a shade tree outside the Lincoln Memorial University library around this time last year when I noticed a Cicada singing somewhere above my head. It was a perfect mid-summer day, heavy and hot, almost foggy with humidity, so thickly green you can taste it, the sort of mountain day that feels strangely off without these insects in the backdrop. It was in the branches above me, filling my ears with its sustained droning, singing full out then winding down for a rest. Another one joined in across the parking lot with another in the distance up near the Arboretum trailhead. By the time those were done, the one over my head was at it again, so close and loud I could feel its vibrating sound raining down to me like a forest voice.

This year’s chorus is upon us again. It was a week ago and I was standing on the front porch resting from laboring in the yard and the container garden. It was another hot day, wonderfully humid, perfected only with the sudden invisible call from out in the dense trees, a welcomed and unexpected reminder saying, we’re back, to sing summer in, if you’ll listen. Will you sing with us?

These first few re-acquaintences each year make summer real for me, like catching a subtle first hint of fall in the air and knowing its undeniability. But Cicadas are anything but subtle. We’re so used to hearing them. The daily mundane often drags us into that calloused place where we do little more than notice the noise and go on about our business, perhaps wishing they’d just hush up. A bunch of them can be deafening. But their calls can slow us down and snap us back into the real of moment-to-moment living, if we listen and let them.

I was raised hearing them called three things - Cicadas, Jar Flies, and Katydids. I went for years as a child without really knowing what one looked like, believing these mysterious forest creatures to be sizable given such a racket. I would happen upon their discarded skins clinging in apparent sleep to tree bark, just paper-thin ghostly afterthoughts looking perfectly real, yet doubt the connection between such small things and such commanding sounds.

On this occasion with the insect so close, I tried following the sound with my eyes in hopes catching it singing, something I’d never managed. They just seem so intent on blending in and keeping their distance, like they’re shy about their voices. I've seen them perched quietly on limbs or tree trunks, let them hitch a ride on my shoulder for a while. They’re calm and friendly, apt to scale around on your arms and shoulders as long as you’ll have them and they don’t have somewhere else to be.

After finally spotted him (only males make the noise) I could see the its abdomen vibrating, the sound saturating the tree’s mass with its call to mate. Again, as when I was a child, I wondered how something so small could make such incredible sound. It's the expanding and contracting of an abdominal membrane that makes the loud clicking. Witnessing the animal in mid-singing, and so close, only heightened my appreciation and curiosity.

On another occasion, I was camping outside Sevierville and found I wasn’t as appreciative of their little concerts. As the sun was setting, dozens, if not hundreds, cranked up an impressive hour-long demonstration of decibel that nearly drove me from the field. It was the loudest I've ever heard, never quieting. On the other hand, it might have been normal. Perhaps I was simply hearing differently in that undistracted calm. It wasn't an upsetting noise, but, impossible to ignore, to filter out. When I got it in perspective, just me and the ground, the cicadas and the tree line, all of it spread out along the canvas of cleared field, I was better able to hear it as sound rather than “noise,” listening to what I was saying about myself inside, driven by their invisible conversation beyond my sight.

These few but powerful brushes with Cicada medicine continue gifting me a deeper appreciation for the animals. Something along the line of lessons I needed just when they happened, when I was ready to see and hear.

As with most animal medicine, lessons are evident in the metaphors they suggest in everyday life. From an approach of size and sound, we can easily liken the tiny Cicada, with its uncanny ability of being heard, to our community’s various struggles for educating others to truth concerning Appalachian life. We occasionally feel we have little real impact as individuals and small groups on important concerns of society. That our voices – as single sounds – make little dent in all the challenges swirling around us begging for voice. But a single voice can be very effective, loud and impacting. One intentioned person has the potential to put in motion massive ripples of change with one sustained, confident voice. This is like the song of the Cicada, an inordinately loud sound from a seemingly small, vulnerable animal. Combining multiple voices, organized in the intent of informing and changing, only increases the volume of a message and its impossibility of being ignored. Some voices are louder than others, not by volume, but by reach and effectiveness. Some project their opinions out to larger audiences, sounding off in unique ways whether through the voice, the written word, art, or performance. Some voices fall on uninterested, too-comfortable ears. Some send out the vibration of voice and action with the intention of only causing pain and discomfort, poisoned with blind negativity and intolerance. Our combined voices must be louder than these, every day.

On the next occasion you notice the Cicadas blaring their music from the trees at you and your busy life, slow down and ask yourself how loud and strong your song is and could be, how far it reaches, who hears it, and, as importantly, who sings with you.

MTR Coal Connection / Letter to big coal

One argument used by the pro-MTR coal side concerns how those arguing against MTR are often simultaneously utilizing coal in the process of our protest. This computer I’m using tonight, for example, is using electricity no doubt generated by valley fill harvested coal, trucked to a coal-fired plant, and wired to my house in some magical way that keeps my lights on, my fridge running, the washing machine spinning, and this computer computing. We acknowledge this parasitical relationship begrudgingly, resenting our seeming need for at least some electricity and big coal’s need for customers with no other choice. We fire back by demanding state legislators swear off MTR coal (as some are doing), for research and the implementation of renewable forms, and swear we’ll decrease our personal energy consumption until this happens. Trying to find a tangible way to make a direct impact on this macro-scaled relationship can leave us feeling a bit helpless. We need something real to do in order to feel more in control of our lives and our choices. Something that combined with others brings the monster down.

We depend on those smarter than ourselves to come up with figures that inform us that around 50% of the nation’s energy is generated from coal. That’s all forms of coal mining. While many protesting coal-related issues have opinions ranging from the total elimination of coal usage to the targeting of differing forms of destructive surface mining, many of us are concentrating the majority of our outrage against the MTR method and big coal’s direct and indirect oppression of mountain communities and culture. Figures also tell us that somewhere between six and seven percent of the nation’s coal energy originates from MTR. This is what I want to talk about here.

If, in fact, I am a part of the problem by having that connection to MTR coal, I must do something about it that eliminates my link. A constant effort at looking more deeply into the products I buy and use gets me straight to the heart of the relationship. Not doing this puts money in the opposition’s pocket, funds their lobbyists and attorneys, encourages them to keeping smiling behind my back, even if I’m at a protest screaming how much I can’t stand them.

This is what I say to them in hopes of helping wipe that smile of their face:

Dear Big Coal,

I’m a Kentuckian living in the middle of coal country, but I condemn your destructive, short-sighted practice of valley fill mining. You know this. You see our various forms of protest against it weekly in the news and try turning a blind eye to what you know will ultimately force you to halt this practice. Ironically, I’m also personally dependent on a certain amount of this coal to live in today’s world for I haven’t the means now to self-provide my power. This angers me since it puts you at a perceived advantage. As a Kentuckian, as a citizen of the United States, somewhere between six and seven percent of the coal energy I consume is from mountaintop removal coal. It’s probably much more than that.

So until you are forced at the state and federal level to do what you know you must, I must make changes to counteract your monetary and political advantage. I am further reducing my consumption of electricity by 10%, the thing you fear most. This will lessen my addiction to the supply flow you control. This will be a difficult undertaking, requiring the sacrifice of additional comforts. I will better understand products and services and companies that also use your coal and decrease my need upon them as well.

Though I am only one person, the two others I convince to do the same strengthen that effect. The others they influence, and so on, increase that rippling sentiment, and when it reaches you it will indeed effect your situation. Imagine a complete 10% or more decrease in our need of your product. Everyone in your supply line will feel it. They will be discomforted. Expect their increasing pressure on you, added to increased state and federal scrutiny that will regulate you out of business. It will not be a comfortable position to find yourself. And no increased production will outrun that inevitability.

You will say that with less consumption there is the risk of price inflation. Perhaps that’s true. It might trickle around like that but I’m pretty sure you do what you want. Most of us are not economists. We’re enlightened consumers in a world quickly destroying itself who realize that personal sacrifice must be made to counter-balance your stranglehold on commonsense.

You know all the efforts I can make that decrease my consumption already, don’t you? I’ll add this decrease to what I’m already conserving. And when I get accustomed to that I’ll decrease further, rendering you and your system as helpless as I used to feel.

A Little Litter Goes A Long Way

Every little scrap of litter along our roads has a story. Every little bit of junk, left behind by someone along the sidewalk, has some reason it's there. Each layer of an illegal dump belonged to someone before it made its contribution to a roadside polluting distraction and usually into a river. What’s more, it doesn’t take much litter to mess with a place. A little litter goes a long way, unfortunately. Wouldn’t it be great if litter could talk?

An empty soda can rolling down the road, dodging traffic could scream out, “I just flew out of John Doe’s red Ford pickup! He didn’t mean to lose me – he was aiming for the bed of the truck!” A candy wrapper, with bits of melting chocolate in the summer sun, could look innocently up from the hot sidewalk and whisper, “Psst…Suzie went that way…tell her to come back and get me.” That refrigerator on the riverbed could hold up a sign: “Take me home! I miss Jane Doe’s kitchen!”

In other words, the history of pieces of litter. This is a fascination of mine – how stuff gets from point A to point B. Found items can be interesting and revolting at the same time. In the end, however, it’s not so much the item of litter itself that holds the key to understanding the problem, but the story of how and who got it there in the first place. Why would a person, knowing good and well that their conscious choice to litter screams wrongness in so many ways, go ahead and litter?

Though so much of our area is clean most of the time, small amounts stand out that much more – on sidewalks, along roadsides, at illegal dumps, or blowing in the wind trying to find a place to land. It’s like bad news getting all the attention when good news is happening most of the time.

I could spend this space on other things, I suppose, but litter seems to be a common denominator in too many of the continuing woes upon which we invest time and money and energy. Litter (along with graffiti and buildings falling in on themselves) is an ingredient in the cycle of community frustration that, though the majority may not cause it, affects every single person in the community. It only takes a few to effect the whole. It’s time for the majority to more convincingly demand change.

Litter influences the potential business investor (with jobs to bring), who has only a few days to get some first impressions of our area. It influences the potential first-time homebuyers as they drive around on a Sunday afternoon dreaming of where they might buy. Ask them if they’d rather purchase the house they love on the constantly littered street or whether they’ll settle for that second choice where it seems a well kept neighborhood.

I'm convinced that if we could just spend as much time on figuring out the original causes of litter, rather than spending all our time on looking at it and using resources to clean it up once it becomes litter, we'd all have a better chance at preventing it in the first place. This is the difference in prevention and reaction. Reacting to something like litter calls up all sorts of ugly emotional things – frustration, frowns, confusion, and distraction. It’s already happened. It’s done. And the only thing you can do at that point is take time and walk over to pick up that bag of junk of the middle of the parking lot yourself or pass it up for someone to get around to since “it’s their job.”

Any way you go on that path the cumulative damage is done – to the overall community appearance, to the person’s conscious that chose to leave it in the first place, and to your attitude when you see it callously junking up your town.

On the other hand, prevention is a lot less concrete and more intimidating. It’s hard to see it working, hard to see what isn’t there that might have been.

My hope continues to be this: that the act of having to pick up litter around out home will disappear when more people refuse to litter. My sincere dream is that you will no longer have spend your valuable energy on clean-up days and that city, county, and state money once spent on cleaning up dumps and litter will be spent on more positive items like community centers, the arts, downtown revitalization, and new tourism endeavors.

So here’s the challenge. In an effort to better understand why litter persists in our community in some places I want to hear back from some litterbugs. There are obviously some out there, so let’s hear about what makes littering so fun and exciting in your hometown and region, a place where the vast majority of us want a 100% clean community.

E-mail me at: www.mountainfocusart@gmail.com with your adventurous littering stories and the rest of us will try to understand why you find it so thrilling.

Kentucky mining area exodus

Kentucky state officials announced plans today for the evacuation of all residents of at least six undisclosed counties in the southeast and eastern coal regions. Partially funded by both federal and state grants and coordinated by the Office of Mineral Needs, the first phase of the mandatory mass exodus is scheduled for early August and should be completed by the end of the year.

The names of the counties in question are being withheld temporarily over concerns of overburdening offices that are preparing to take applications. Residents are instructed to make applications for a one time relocation allowance at the nearest Office of Surface Disturbance. The payments are only for moving expenses, officials emphasized, not the fair market value of the property they are vacating. West Virginia is considering a similar plan, however, the legislation is bogged down in committee.

“It’s time we did the right thing,” project manager Stephen Harbinger said. “We’ve come to the realization that people living near surface mining sites isn’t a good mix. We’ll solve years of problems with this program by simply relocating them to surrounding counties. This will be good for those benefiting economies.”

When asked whether the program was optional, upcoming congressional candidate Willy Waitnsee commented that it was, in fact, not optional.

“All residents of these counties must move. It’s the patriotic thing to do. The only waivers we anticipate will be for the miners themselves who we will provide work camps for as they continue the coal extraction. They should appreciate the opportunity. They’ll be given the right to continue enjoying their home area while providing our much needed coal. After all, what other options besides coal are there?”

“I just don’t know how we can sit back and let people continue living in areas we’ve destroyed and will continue destroying beyond recovery,” Harbinger told reporters at a press conference at the capital on Tuesday. “It is with a clearer conscious we offer this program to those families who have issues with buffer zone rules, clean well water, and all that environmentalist distraction.”

The plan was not met with community support as 256 protesters were arrested and detained during a demonstration on the capitol steps after the announcement, many having to be shipped to neighboring county detention facilities. “If you think this is a lot of people to arrest, just wait!” a protester yelled to reporters as he was tazed and carried away.

In response an anticipated increases in demonstrations, officials also unveiled plans for special detention facilities especially designed for the influx of mining protest arrests. These facilities should be completed by the middle of August in conjunction with the removal.

“It is our sincere plan to utilize these new public lands in a manner people who grew up here and call it home can appreciate from a distance. Perhaps visit in time. We anticipate at least 750 miles of new ATV trails as well as new four-lane highways established from mining sites to major arteries to speed up the coal extraction process. This should be simpler now with no one living there and with the continued flattening of adjacent lands. The twenty or so years of coal we have left should be taken care of in a quarter of that time with this plan. When it’s gone, it is our sincere hope people can return and will be free to reclaim the land left by the companies in a manner of their choosing. It’s a no-brainer, really,” he said.

For further information, go to: http://www.welldowhateverthehellwewant.com/.

NaNoWriMo Strikes

We sometimes require a truly unique tool to help us birth a project. You know, someone to stand by shouting we can do it as we flail around in creative confusion with all the organization of a disturbed anthill. NaNoWriMo 2008 was recently that unexpected, newly adopted kick in the mental pants I needed for sitting down semi-calmly and actually thumping out the novel I'd been struggling with only in my head for half a year (thank you Chasia). The story is a hybrid of interests, including the paranormal, mysticism, folklore, the mountaintop removal issue, murder, Appalachia, loss, love, cultural disconnection, soul relocation. At least that's what it looked like disconnected and dropped on my mind's canvas back then.

If you're unfamiliar with Nanowrimo - or, National Novel Writing Month - 2008 was the 10th year people from all over the world braved the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel (or, at least, 50K's start of one) ONLY in the month of November. Sound challenging? Impossible? Masochistic for you. Sadistic for your loved ones? Probably all the above. What fun!

Here's what NaNo's website says about it the whole spectacle: "Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved...the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks...By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel."

I liked that. The Great Frantic Novel. It sounded healthy in a weird way. There's a time for logical caution, a time for anal-retentive hesitancy, a time for reckless abandon, seasons for supernovas of pure creative bliss (on a schedule of no less than 1,666 words or more per day). I threw the safety and flipped my brain over to auto for that month, assuring myself that if I could only survive what I had no idea what I was getting into, I'd sure have in the end more than I started with. The story in my head would be more than just an obsessive passing thought. I'd perhaps be completing some framework of the whole story by December, be editing like mad come the first of the year. Twenty-five days into November I had the 50K and more of Black Mountain Light, continuing to write until the midnight on the last day of the month.

It's now eight months later. It's taken seven long, sporadic additional months to write just over that amount again, so something about NaNoWriMo worked. The story is a mere half chapter from completion and I'm craving another kick in the pants to finish this thing, this friend, this constant distraction, these people I've met out of the blue.

A week from now, maybe less, and I'll be in serious editing mode if I can only commit to ending it. I've never been here before. Never tackled fiction like this, or had fiction tackle me like this.

Wish me luck - I'm going back in.

In praise of sacrifice (and commonsense)

I was watching footage of the Massey protest and arrests last night and felt guilty not being there mixing it up with those brave and focused people. Of not being there to turn on my heels in the middle of the chaos and hand something back to the Massey supporters who know of no way of expressing themselves other than lashing out physically and verbally. Of feeling too connected to the practice, knowing the computer I was getting the information through was running off coal harvested through MTR. Of wanting to do more to make the smallest dent in this snowballing, unstoppable movement. Of needing to find a voice and words that truly express the rollercoaster of genuine inspiration and red hot anger over the abuse - seen and unseen - our people are experiencing because companies like Massey have abandoned commonsense like so many ravaged ex-mountains. Of wanting to be more than an anonymous bumper sticker rolling down the highway. Of WATCHING too much and not DOING enough.

After calming down it was clearer to me that everyone even remotely involved is contributing in unique ways. When I first ran across Mountain Justice up at Pipestem, WV, four or so years ago, I felt out of place. I’d gone there in search of Don West’s spirit. It was there alright, but in the form of Mountain Justice training. Uninformed on the issues, not feeling dreadlocked, granola, and sandaled enough to feel quite comfortable just stumbling into their happening, I did, at least, come back understanding that a struggle was taking place that needed everyone. Everyone’s unique impact.

Watching from a distance can make you feel helpless and useless sometimes. But over time we find ways of expressing our demands for commonsense. Sometimes through art. Sometimes writing. Poetry. Novels. Anthologies. Protests. Letter writing. Lobbying. Through a blog posting, like this, perhaps a few will read. In conversations that hopefully, in some small way, encourage the front-liners. You know, the ones able to consistently make it to demonstrations like at Massey. The ones, like Hansen and Hannah, telling others, “Yes, I’m going to jail today. I’m sitting here until they move me. Because the reason I’m here is bigger than the interruption in my life it might cause. Because others won’t or can’t.” While some go to jail and others speak on NPR, we have to be doing back here the best we can given our circumstances, creating a way to let the frustration of how we feel morph into words others will hear.

So then, we must do something every day. We must praise those who are giving more than we are. Praise and encourage those who can do more. This is my mantra. Do something today. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. Until news breaks that we will never again hear the sounds of war rumbling down from our mountains.

Looking for ghosts, finding mountaintop removal

Ever head out in search of one thing but along the way found something else that suddenly became just as important? Perhaps even transformed how you think? We've all had that happen. This is my story.

I've been working on the Mountain Mysteries Project on and off for most of my adult life, collecting and interpreting folkways through my own early 21st century eyes and experiences, stumbling upon fringe paranormal mountain items we often take for granted in a culture crawling with such stories.

In the early winter months of 2008 I traveled with Karin over to Wise County, Virginia (near the southwest tip of the state along Kentucky border), in search for details concerning the "Black Mountain Lights" I'd first heard of from a student back in 2002 and which was confirmed as a long-standing story by my father. Apparently, in the vicinity of Black Mountain peak – the highest point in Kentucky, by the way –strangely acting unidentified lights have been reported for decades. The student heard about them from her mother. My father grew up hearing about them and their association with mine battles in the Black Mountain Range in Harlan County, Kentucky.

We headed out for a leisurely day of what I thought would be UFO / ghost hunting, a fine Sunday afternoon in my opinion. By the end of the day, however, we returned empty handed of any stories on mountain lights but emotionally changed and "all in" on a different subject. This is the story of how UFOs further sparked my interests with the anti-Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal mining movement growing so strongly in the coalfields of Appalachia and spreading its important message at the national level.

You can get to the Black Mountain region in two ways, from the Kentucky side through Harlan County or the Virginia side through Wise County. Either way will get you there but not in a straight line. Both are every bit a two hour drive from my home in Middlesborough, Kentucky, at the Cumberland Gap. We took the Virginia way, looking at the map and following what looked like an easy enough route.

We traveled up along Highway 58 to Jonesville, to Pennington Gap, up to Big Stone, then slightly north to the small struggling coal town of Appalachia. From there we headed further north in the direction of the highest mountain tops we could see, just sort of roaming around up in the hollows, hoping we'd run into some folks to ask about the rumored mountain lights around the peaks to the north. I'd also sporadically heard about the controversy surrounding mining around Black Mountain, but that was a secondary interest on this trip having yet to see what was in store. We wandered up a few roads along hollow communities with lots of little coal dust covered matching homes along thin roads that suddenly up and quit, not because it's the head of hollow, but because a mining gate blocks your way.

The further north we tried snaking our way the more evidence of mining we appeared in the distance. We'd make a turn and suddenly a surprising mountain view would clear. That is, what was left of those mountains and hills. Most every mountain we saw north of town was scarred with the evidence of MTR and other forms of mining, flattened at the top, or skinned away for hundreds of feet right up to only a sorry patch of struggling trees on top, the mountains chunked off in large steps like South American pyramids, hills of terraced yellow-brown dirt drastically contrasting with beautiful undisturbed vistas filled with evergreens and snow dusted bare winter trees. Entire mountain peaks gone, flattened, shortened, deforested. Mutilated forms of a prior state now abandoned to memory. All of it within sight of communities strung along these hollow roads, a constant reminder of the threat heading their way.

Along one stretch of road in the Stonega community we noticed how abandoned about a quarter mile of it seemed. The coal dust was so thick on these structures they were encrusted in grey-black powder. There was a church, covered in dust, unused, forgotten, caution-taped off. Its windows broken like the surrounding matching houses. No one was around. Then we noticed two men and a boy chopping wood off the side the road, the only life within sight. We continued past them down the road but were stopped at yet another mining gate and turned around. On the way back out we pulled up to speak to the men. It was cold, they were working hard, chopping and filling the bed of their truck from felled trees at the bottom of a draw in the hill where just above it, signs of the encroaching mining were apparent. I asked them about the lights, but by that time we'd taken in half a day of out and out strangeness of another sort, distracted away from our primary task and growing curious to see what was really happening up on the mining sites. They'd never heard of the lights.

I asked about the abandoned houses and church up and down the road. The coal company bought it all, one of them explained. He said a lot of the people were moving out anyway since it was impossible to live there with the noise and rumble of constant coal trucks and equipment, the unbreatheable air, coal dust on everything inside and outside the homes, the blasting, the foundations of their homes cracking, their questioning whether the water was safe. The company had simply bought the street and homes up as "a favor" to these people, places they'd lived for years. It appeared as if it had been deserted for a long time. I asked how long ago the company bought it up. He responded it had only happened about half a year ago. That was stunning. This looked like years of neglect. It resembled any number of scenes from McCarthy's The Road, desolate, full up with unanswered questions, confusion, the scene of something devastating and awful no one was left to talk about.

From there we wanted to get up on the mountain as high as we could and asked how to get to a good place. They directed us up another hollow and mine site, saying, "Go ahead. People four wheel and camp up there all the time. They won't mind, especially on a Sunday." We took off up another road, in my non-four wheel drive Suzuki, heading for the distant high brown patches we might have once recognized as mountains. We entered an open gate and chose from a delta of gravel and dirt roads. The further out and up we got along the winding road of frozen mud, the more alien the scene transformed. We drove away from trees. Away from animal movement and natural sound. Away from the smooth contour of the hills. Away from commonsense.

We rumbled along to one of the highest reaches of the area, driving at least thirty minutes through what can only be described as a moonscape, a no-mans land. There were only a few scraggly trees at the top, layered in crystallized frost, a little black-stained snow in patches. It was cold and windy, the sound of four-wheelers in the distance. Though not on Black Mountain's peak we were along one of the Black Mountain ridges, now flattened, but still very high. The view across Kentucky went for miles. No description I offer here can do justice to what it looked like everywhere else around us where we stood. The earth was exposed in almost every direction, the view out across Kentucky pretty much the only visible undisturbed land. It is thousands of acres, making most of the visible world look lifelessly torn inside out. It was not reclaimed, not developed back to some semblance of its original contour. Not even an afterthought. I was taking photos when the guard pulled up and told us to leave. "What about all these other folks running around on their four wheelers, I thought it was alright to be up here?" Mostly friendly, but to the point, he responded, "You all need to go ahead and get off this private property." We'd been officially thrown off a mining sight.

Having grown up in the mountains and seeing coal-related activity all my life, having grandfathers that mined underground with picks, shovels, and mules, even secondarily benefiting from the coal industry as many in my family labored in steel fabrication at a company fed with coalfield supplied jobs, seeing small strips of mountain disappearing here and there was sort of weaved into the norm of my senses. But in my home area of Middlesboro, Kentucky, mining was, and still is, significantly removed from my everyday view, never jolting my senses the way this experience was. It was a clean ignorance of what was happening just over the ridges comfortably out of sight. Camouflaged in daylight. We are all directly impacted by MTR, but most only indirectly see its effects like this. I've never dealt with waking up to bed-shaking blasts or having to dodge coal trucks on the way to the bus stop. Witnessing the region north of Appalachia, getting shaken out of my comfort zone of ignorance, however, pushed me out of old thinking into the desire for new understanding.

There are some things you just know when you see them. Things you deeply understand as soon as you happen upon it, dwell on the event, digest it in your thinking gut, and allow it to land naturally in a part of your brain. Mountaintop Removal mining is just such a thing. I recognize it in every fabric of my makeup as simply wrong. I generally understand what it is, why it is, but especially what it does. I understand what explosions are. I understand what pushing the top of a mountain over into a valley and streams does to everything from natural animal habitat to ground water supplies in neighborhood wells. I understand what a slurry spill will do. We now know what a coal ash spill will do since the Kingston TVA plant catastrophe in December of 2008. I recognize callous greed from a distance and up close. I also understand the confusing state of helplessness so many feel about how to tackle this invasion of common sense. I understand why what few surface miners there are, with no other job resources in an area, defend their jobs. But more than any of that, I recognize a scar on the spirit of the land when I see it and, more especially, when I feel it in my soul.

If that experience wasn't enough, a few other trips were sufficient to push me over the edge further. To bring it all home. I took some weekends and sought out some sights – west of town toward Fonde and Pruden, Frakes, over to Fork Ridge and Tackett Creek. We're in a basin in Middlesborough, the remainder of a 300-million-year-old meteorite crater. We love to promote the crater. It's unique in the nation and we're all about promoting that and, of course, our sharing a boundary Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. But winter, when nature shows off what's really up underneath the veil of leaves, exposes the dominating brown swaths of scarring along the western and northwestern mountains of our basin. These increase with every year. Some would remark that these are "reclaimed." Some of these long strips of emptiness may be seeded with some foreign anti-erosion grasses that require no topsoil, but they stand out as particularly disturbing because of their treelessness. Ironically, you can much of this from the Pinnacle, the park's celebrated lookout.

I came back from these daytrips feeling like someone had sucker punched me in the gut, driving all the good air from my lungs. It was sickening, to my mind, heart, and soul. Perhaps a clichéd response, but nevertheless the only way I can describe it.

I don't know if these are strip mining, high-wall mining, contour, or pure mountaintop removal sites, or a mix, or whether there's really a difference in any of them when you get right down to it. I have a lot to learn, but I do know it's a mess, a big disastrous environmental, cultural, socio-economic, spiritual mess. A big incomplete thought and a wrongness at once so noticeable that it seems to call out between the miles. How can this happen? Apparently we're all willing shoe-lookers as the world – and our cultural fabric – is scraped from above us.My detesting of this act runs deeper than just its tangle of time consuming politics. Mountaintop Removal is a personal assault. A cultural assault, akin to someone crushing the hands of a banjo player or writer, mashing the mouth of a gospel singer, or plucking out the eyes of the artist. It's robbery. Blasting off the tops of mountains and pushing that dirt and rock into valleys is not only a destruction of the oldest mountains in the nation, it is the blatant destruction of the things making mountain people who we are. We are the mountains, physically and spiritually linked to our place. More than anything we are products of the topography surrounding us. We are culturally dependent upon the geographical position of our raising. The mountains shaped what we became as Appalachians. The creation of culture requires proper ingredients. For us, the mountains are an ingredient that, if taken away, deformed, abandoned, removes yet another portion through which to know ourselves and to continue preserving and evolving mountain culture into the 21st century. The mountains, hills, valleys, hollows, and land-shaped bodies of water that sheltered our pioneer ancestors, provided the challenging land from which our tough culture emerged, shaped the attitudes and enthusiasm of our great, grandparents, grandparents, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, are being attacked. We are the land from which our thoughts on living sprouted. And now, we stand by and let that thing – an element of our cultural sustenance – die in front of our eyes.

In the end we'd ventured out to research yet another story, a story that couldn't exist without this particular mountain area, a place we discovered is in danger of even existing down the road. How this happens, how we let such things roll on under our turn at the cultural watch, I think, will become one of the greatest mysteries I've ever tried to understand.