What Now?

When I was in eighth grade I worshipped Patsy Rhye, my English teacher.  I wanted to write like her, I wanted to wear my watch like her, I wanted to have answers to all the questions when I grew up, just like her.  To this day I still sign both "P's" in my name with gigantic flourishes, an homage to Patsy Rhye.  I still wear a silver watch.

And I still don't have the answers.

Yesterday people I know were arrested in front of the White House.  People I have studied with, people I have read with, people I have laughed with.  They gathered in Washington with all the energy they could muster in a last gasp effort to stop the destruction of our state, of their home and of ours.

I don't have the answer to mountaintop removal.  I don't have the answer to our country's parasitic dependence on energy, or to my own abuse of our limited natural resources.  What I do have is this:

Pleasant View Mine, Hopkins County KY

This is where I grew up, where I stood in eighth grade English doing a report on Lisa, Bright and Dark.  Not on a mountain, but in the gently rolling countryside of western Kentucky.    I have my own lifelong memories of coal mine destruction,  of acre upon acre of 'reclaimed' scrub land, acid-filled water, and dead trees.

And I have stories.  Stories of the miners' children with whom I went to school.  Stories of my own family member who goes into those mines every single week doing jobs that require sensitive, complicated engineering.

I have the story of the first time I laid eyes on Big Bertha, a strip mining shovel so big you can't ever get your mind around it.  And of the chasm it dug into the earth.

I have the story of a community's economy built on coal and left to founder when coal moved on.

And I have questions that have no easy answer.  We can't paint the enemies in this battle with a simple, one-color brush.  There are good, responsible, caring people who work in coal, just as there are self-centered, irresponsible, unreliable miners.  There are rabid environmentalists who would gladly live by kerosene every day of their lives, and there are selfish people like me, who burn every light in the house and hit the thermostat whenever they have a hot flash.

Somewhere in the middle of all these extremes, maybe there is an answer.

But until we can find that middle, we will just have more of this:

Read Something's Rising by Silas House and Jason Howard for searing portraits of our fellow Kentuckians, and how all our lives are being affected by mountaintop removal.  Read West Virginia author Ann Pancake's fictionalized account of a very real family's struggles in Strange as this Weather Has Been

Read, Think, Ask.

I sure am.