19

Squatter on a Gold Mine

At a fork in the mountain road up Kayford, I took a right and realized I’d gone wrong somewhere when the road ended at a fence and a guard post. I drove up and rolled down my window.

“I’m looking for Larry Gibson and a folk festival.” I noticed the company name on the guardhouse and realized I was on the property of Massey Energy. I flashed a wide smile to diffuse some of the tension, and a grin crept out the corner of the guard’s stiff lips. The result was a grimace.

“I don’t know where it is, but you could try taking a left at the fork in the road,” he conceded.

The man-made, barren lands of West Virginia can typically only be viewed and photographed from the air. Despite the fact that so many coal company executives and representatives assert this is what the good Lord intended for West Virginia, they are reluctant to let anybody view the product of their good works. These grand canyons of industrial manifest destiny are blocked from the public by company owned roads. Kayford Mountain is an exception. Here Larry Gibson holds fort against the encroachment of the Arch Coal and Massey Energy on his ancestral land and family graveyard.

Due to a number of wrong turns, I was late and the gathering was beginning to dissipate. Groups of older folks sat around picnic tables, and under a pavilion thirty people watched a country band—the audience was a combination of locals from the surrounding mountains and environmentalists. A group of young dissidents, dressed in T-shirts and sporting scraggly hair, sat on blankets on the grass. Here in West Virginia, at least MTR provides the impetus for a healthy teen counterculture.

I have been to peace protests and other sorts of demonstrations in my years of living near the nation’s capital. Every time I march or hold up a sign (once a peace dove made out of a white sheet), I understand the relative futility of the gesture. I know I could be better educated in international policy, and that there may be a more effective way of expressing my discontent. I will go home, and will have little affected the world, but given myself an opportunity to vent on the National Mall in the view of the news helicopters overhead—an opportunity to say, “You suck,” and “Why can’t we all get along?”

In contrast, this group gathered on Kayford Mountain was a highly specialized resistance movement. Every person I talked to had a personal lean and an area of advocacy. These were not abstract objectors, but people who had witnessed the effects of MTR in their lives and in the lives of their neighbors. Appalachian Voices, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the Coal River Mountain Watch, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition—there were representatives from each of these West Virginia organizations, formed by community members and environmentalists to combat the destruction of their natural landscape and their towns. Chuck was there from Sylvester. Regina Hendrix, a member of the Sierra Club in West Virginia, was focused on garnering support for the historical preservation efforts on Blair Mountain. Regina’s particular area of focus was underground sludging, an alternative to sludge lagoons, where sludge is pumped into the tunnels of old mines. Seemingly, this solution is kinder to the environment and to area residents, but in actuality it poisons the groundwater. In West Virginia, half a million people of a population of two million get their drinking water from wells, and the state’s cancer rates are increasing exponentially.

Glenda Smith, a woman with shoulder length hair, dressed like a typical suburban mom, lived near me in northern Virginia. She drove out to the rally because she felt as though the coal companies were robbing the locals of their dignity. Where Massey now stripmines, her grandparents owned the land and the houses. They paid eleven dollars a month for water, but much of their food was grown on their land. They had their own fruit trees, made their own soap, and ground their own meal. Anything they couldn’t make, they would walk down the road by the “Coal River” and buy at the company store. Her father worked in the mine off and on until he abandoned his wife and six children when Glenda was twelve. Glenda’s mother told her that she wouldn’t be able to go to college, so she took shorthand in high school. When the civil service needed secretaries, she packed her things in a cardboard suitcase and left three days after she graduated. After she got married and raised children, she wanted to show her kids where she grew up, but it no longer exists: a town called Carbon.

I spotted Larry Gibson in a fluorescent yellow shirt that read:

We are the keepers of

The mountains

Love them or

Leave them

Just don’t destroy them

If you dare to be one too

1-304-542-1134

1-304-533-0246

This text was printed on both sides in bold black lettering. I was sure Larry had made it himself. There was no logo, no ceremony, just a message Larry was intent on blazing across the continent. I had seen him already in a number of news reports on mountaintop removal and was surprised that he was nothing over five feet tall—a small man with a mustache and a paunch. At 5’9”, I towered over him. I greeted him while he was taking to Chuck.

“Maybe this isn’t the time to do it because they’re all juiced up. As muscular as they are, they’re scared, and scared people make dangerous people.” He gestured to me, “Maybe we should sic ‘er on ‘em.”

They were discussing Chuck’s cousin. Massey decided to throw a pig roast at the same time that Larry was holding his festival. The day before, Chuck’s cousin had organized a group of Massey employees to beat up some of the young people—the environmentalists and the dissidents—and Larry had taken one young man to the hospital. The conflict represented West Virginia’s mining dilemma: there is enormous grassroots support for outlawing mountaintop removal, but this would also destroy one of the area’s only sources of bread and butter.

“They have young people here that works for the coal company on the other end of my property and they’re tellin’ them that I settin’ on ten to twelve more years of work and I won’ let them have it. They’ve got people here within my own family that will call the coal company when I have a meetin’. This ground is worth $450 million for the industry. Now how much do you think my life is worth now? Do you think it’s worth a dang? At any time it could be snuffed away because somebody thinks they have ten years of work here.”

Larry lives on Kayford Mountain. After moving down into the city, he returned when the coal companies were threatening to destroy his family’s graveyard and the last of his ancestral land. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-one years. When I started I was as tall as this fellow here,” he pointed to Chuck, “and all this has worn me down.”

We cleaned up after the festival was over, and then Larry took me on a tour of what remained of his mountain, telling me his story as he walked. Larry knew that telling his story might or might not make a difference. He’s told his story to CNN, to the BBC, to National Geographic, and to every major news station and publication in America. Just to be fair, before the interview and tour I admitted that I was unaffiliated with any news company. He told me anyway, and explained his plans to tour the country telling his story to anybody who would listen.

In 1955, the Stanley family found out that they no longer owned some of the acreage and the mineral rights of their land. Sometime between 1906 and 1909, the coal company KG Blaine bought the deed for one dollar; a transaction that the family never knew had taken place because they were illiterate. From then until the mid-fifties, the Stanley family worked land that was no longer completely theirs. Coal mines surrounded the area, so they went to Massey to talk about boundaries.

Despite the power lines running over the mountains for the coal camps, the sixty families (some with eighteen to twenty kids) that lived on the Stanley’s ancestral land in the 1950s still didn’t have electricity. Their only wealth was the land, and they farmed five hundred acres of it. Larry chuckled as he explained: “The major crop was moonshine. I’m not ashamed of our culture. Aside from that, honey, butter, milk, and corn.” Only the company stores had canned goods, and like Glenda’s folks, the Stanley family would trade their crops for clothes and tools.

Larry lives in a home that is primitive by modern standards. He pointed at a bathtub down the hill next to his garden. A trail was worn down the slope leading to it. “That’s where I get my water.” In 2001 he installed a cistern, but the “dynamiting blew it out.” Larry has no indoor plumbing and no electricity aside from a solar panel. The winters are harsh, but Larry asserted: “We chose to be here. We haven’t been displaced here. We don’t need help to get off the mountains; we need help to stay on ‘em. This is my people’s choice for the last two to three hundred years.” This was what he wanted me to write, even if I didn’t write anything else.

We walked along a path in the forest until Larry stopped and pointed down. The earth had begun to gape, opening up to an intricate beehive of tunnels in the ground below. Larry estimated it went down six hundred feet: “It may go one hundred feet that way, forty feet that way, and meanders about.” When he first found it, the mine crack was five inches wide. By the time of our interview, it had pulled apart to a foot and a half across. “Don’t linger there,” Larry cautioned. The opening was still not large enough for a person to fall through, but standing at the edge was both terrifying and mesmerizing. The light that passed through highlighted the curve of a tunnel here, an intersection there. The ground was falling beneath our feet. And no wonder.

Erin Thomas, 2007

Mine crack at Kayford Mountain

Kayford Mountain had been mined by fifteen companies over the past 130 years, and coal waste had been pumped into the abandoned mine shafts. Larry’s friends gathered half a million dollars to install in a windmill at his place, but the ground is too unstable.

At the edge of Larry’s property, the ground dropped off. The mountain ended, and a company sign nailed to a tree warned onlookers: private property—a last, desperate attempt to prevent me from seeing. Having grown up in a desert, I am accustomed to emptiness and distance, but not such sudden emptiness, a gouge taken out of greenness. Directly below, a field of reclaimed land sprouted pale, scrubby grass, the only foliage likely to accumulate without trees to develop topsoil. Under the thin spread of dirt, lay only bedrock. Massey had buried all the clear cut forest capable of providing fodder beneath hundreds of feet of rock and debris. Beyond the field stretched a terraced wasteland of tawny colored dirt with dark black stripes running through it. In such great emptiness, the mega-machinery used to excavate this coal appeared like miniature toy trucks in a sandbox, adding a surreal aura to the reality of such irreversible destruction.

Erin Thomas, 2007

Strip mining at Kayford Mountain

Historian and mine enthusiast Richard V. Francaviglia states that open pit mines are topological features that “appeal and repel simultaneously,” and that in their development, we, within our lifetimes, can witness the sort of change of characteristic of geological time. These landscapes contain “powerful and conflicting symbolism” and do “not compare favorably with ideal landscapes because they seem unfinished, crude, imperfect, perhaps too honest a depiction of how we have treated the environment and each other.” He ends by asserting: “It is in the hard places that the dirtiest work occurs to sustain our ever-demanding technology and culture.”

Staring over the edge of the mountaintop removal site, I couldn’t experience this landscape with Francaviglia’s intellectual and historical perspective. My response came from the gut, the sort I experienced in the dark of Big Pit in Wales when I thought of five-year-old Evan. My sensibilities jerked into my chest with an almost passionate violence, and my eyes stung in anger. People don’t do this, I argued. Such should not be done.

In the center of the terraces of brown earth stood an oasis, a platform of green: the Stanley family graveyard. No longer owned by the Stanley family because it was part of the land sold off a century ago, it is the high point now on Kayford Mountain. In years past, it was the low point, from which people would gaze at the mountain above. It is illegal to destroy a cemetery, so the company was mining under it. One tunnel was bored so wide, they could drive a coal truck through it. “They don’ have respect for the dead,” Larry said, almost spitting, “an’ don’ have no respect for the living.”

Greg Smith, 2007

Author interviewing Larry Gibson at Kayford Mountain

“They had a sayin’ out here,” Larry explained. “Strong back, weak mind.” In the 1920s and 30s, Massey started trading truckloads of beer for loads of coal. The theory was that if you could control them, people were like machinery. Instead of using the profits from the coal mine to promote education, the company used them to get people drunk. Larry asserts that they still do.

Standing on the edge of his forest, Larry told me his personal story, and I started to cry. It was the only response that I had for him and the gutted landscape stretched out before me. He had a family once, but his wife and daughter finally moved out, tired of the threatening messages left on the answering machine. He believes the coal company shot his dog, and that they’ve shot at him before. He was sure they would get him one day, too: “I’m scared. I can’t tell you that I’m not concerned, but I’m more mad that they think they can intimidate people. You have to stand up in harm’s way. The hardest damn thing you’re going to do is convince people to stand in harm’s way. They’ve been oppressed their whole lives and don’t know what a person is. I’m out of the box. I learned as a young man that my voice counted. You know who the president was when I was five years old an’ we didn’t have electricity? The president was John L. Lewis, the United Mine Workers’ president. We were coal miners’ kids, and we knew about union activities. We knew about Blair Mountain. It was a family fight. We lost family members in that battle.”

Larry has been arrested about eight times. He’s been arrested at the Capitol. He’s been arrested at Marsh Fork Elementary School. A few months before our interview, he was arrested again, and the policemen dislocated his shoulder. We returned back to the festival grounds, and Larry handed me a bright yellow T-shirt, identical to his own, from a box in his van. He handed me a video and then another one. I don’t know that he felt any more encouraged by all his speech giving or handing out, but he did it because I came to Kayford Mountain and I was one more person that had seen mountain top removal for myself. I was a witness, and he was sending me off into the world prepared.

Larry stopped suddenly as we were walking back to my car and looked me level in the eye, even though eye contact required him to tilt his head considerably upward. “It’s not so much about the fight for it. It’s the fact that I’m right. If I give my rights up, they have everything else. If I give my rights up, they win. That’s what keeps me going, the fact that I’m right. I don’t have to convince myself. I go to bed knowin’ that I’m right, I wake up confident that I’m right.”

I wandered up the dirt road to the cemetery and browsed through the generations of so many Stanleys. Larry makes regular visits to the resting place of his ancestors to clean out the rocks that land there from the blasting. A ring of trees around the edge barred any view of the mountaintop removal surrounding it, and it was almost possible to believe the graveyard was set in the clearing of a grove instead of a carved edge and a sheer fall to mounds of upturned earth. With artificial flowers poking up from the ground at the foot of some graves and bows tied over others, there was a sense of remembrance. The late afternoon light filtering through the trees heightened the sense of the sacred. But it is only a matter of time before the ground cracks and the coffins fall into a maze of mining tunnels, until the earth gapes wide, and Massey will reluctantly have to give it up for lost and bulldoze the graveyard through.