by Brian Adams
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
Of course, what’s a road trip without getting totally and completely lost. We had pulled off the interstate and could not for the life of us figure out which way to go. Kevin was sure it was to the right; I was convinced it was to the left. No one in the back seat had been paying any attention at all.
“Let Mister Wiggins decide!” Britt said.
Just then we saw this old-timer walking down the road.
He was a picture-perfect hillbilly, straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. He had his hillbilly swag on: patched overalls, crazy-ass hat, and a beard that exploded out of his face. And, for the love of God, he was carrying a jug. A jug! It was like we had gone back in time a hundred years ago to the good ol’ moonshining days and here, walking among us, was the chief moonshiner himself.
Kevin stopped the car and rolled down the window. “Excuse me, sir?” he asked. “Do you know how to get to Old County Road?”
The reek of a lifetime of frequent drinking and infrequent bathing drifted into the car. I stifled back a gag.
’Billy scratched his beard, picked his nose, and thought for a moment.
“Turn your car around, take a left at that barn over there, and go three sees,” he said. “At the third see take another left. One more see and that’s Old County.”
Kevin looked confused.
“I’m sorry?” Kevin said. “Can you say that again?”
“Turn your car around, take a left at that barn over there, and go three sees. At the third see take another left. One more see and that’s Old County.”
“Three C’s?” Britt whispered. “Cars, condoms, and curfews? How are those even directions?”
“Shhh!” I shushed, both to Britt and to Ashley. Ashley had her fist in her mouth, biting back giggles.
“Ummm,” Kevin said. “What exactly is a ‘see’?”
The old-timer sighed and looked longingly at his jug.
“Turn your car around, take a left at the barn over there and go as far as you can see. Then go as far as you can see again. Do it one more time and take another left. One more see and that’s Old County.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kevin said. “Have a great day.”
So that was it! Three sees! And we thought we needed a GPS!
Just lucky it wasn’t nighttime.
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
And Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
Finally, hoarse voices and all, we pulled into the parking lot to meet the tour group, barely on time. We would have been there an hour earlier but Ashley had to stop to pee every thirty seconds.
“Are you pregnant?” Britt asked her.
“Shut up, Britt,” I told her.
“I’m not pregnant,” Ashley said.
“When you’re pregnant you pee a lot,” Britt said.
“I said shut up, Britt. She’s not pregnant.”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“Don’t say anything!”
“I’m not pregnant,” Ashley said. “I just drank, like, five gallons of coffee before we started this morning. Sorry.”
“I guess when you’re pregnant,” Britt continued, clearly not getting the keep-your-mouth-closed memo, “the baby, like, kicks you in the bladder all of the time, which makes you have to ...”
I whacked Britt in the arm. “What part of zip it don’t you get! Earth to Britt: you’re twelve years old! You do know that you have to have sex to get pregnant!”
I turned to the back seat for confirmation from Ashley.
“I’m not pregnant, Britt,” Ashley said, giving me a look that I had never seen before. A look that moved mountains. Marc turned away, his blush a beet red. “I’m on the pill. Unless you’re like, totally unlucky, you don’t get pregnant when you’re on the pill.”
•
We were walking down an old dirt logging road heading toward Hell’s Gate, the entrance to Kayford Mountain. There were fifteen of us in the tour group. Nine of us from KABOOM, Britt, a couple of old hippies from Massachusetts, two stoners with dreadlocks, and our tour guide, a local activist from the group Keeper of the Mountains.
I had had no idea that there were so many groups fighting mountaintop removal in Appalachia. When Ashley and I first started KABOOM we thought we were the only ones. That no one cared but us.
Come to find out there was a swarm of like-minded groups fighting the good fight. We were not alone!
As we walked, Elise, the activist, gave us her talk about mountaintop removal. She had lived here all of her life. Born and bred in the holler the next town over.
“They are blowing the mountains out of the mountains,” she said, her wonderful West Virginia drawl making her words come alive. “They are destroying the most diverse forest in the United States. When I was a little girl there were more species of plants and animals here than you could shake a stick at. And now they’re gone. Gone! I thought the mountains would be here forever, but I was wrong. They’re gone and they aren’t coming back.”
Ashley was walking a step behind me and I felt her tap me on my shoulder.
“Don’t be mad,” Ashley whispered. “I was going to tell you.”
“Shhh!” I shushed. There was a time and a place to talk about losing your virginity, and this was neither.
“They dump the debris into the hollers, and it destroys the headwaters of the streams,” Elise continued, walking backwards, tour guide–style, while she continued to talk. “You can’t begin to believe how polluted the water is. It makes a skunk smell sweet.”
“Wednesday night was the first time,” Ashley whispered. “Oh my God. It was unreal!”
“Shhh!”
“Logging is one thing. When you log, trees come back. When you blow the top off a mountain, there is no place for them to come back to. Without trees to hold in the water, when it rains it does more than pour. We all live downstream. The river rises and people’s homes get flooded. Businesses close. It is an absolute nightmare. People watch the weather channel and pray to God for sunshine.”
“He was so gentle,” Ashley whispered. “So nice.”
“Ashley, please, not now!”
“When they set off the explosions,” Elise said, “it was like living in a war zone. You’d have thought you were in Baghdad or Gaza. It cracked the foundation of my mama’s house. It brought the chimney down at my auntie’s.”
Ashley just couldn’t contain herself. “I thought it would hurt a lot. You know, the first time and all, but it didn’t that much. It really didn’t.”
I tried the ignore routine.
Elise continued, “I don’t know a single family where people haven’t gotten sick. I am so, so tired of going to visit people in the hospital. Seems as though the only businesses booming around here are the florists and the funeral homes.”
“Are you listening to me?” Ashley whispered.
“No!” I said, a little too loudly. The group stopped and looked at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just getting a little emotional.”
“Not to worry, darling,” Elise said, coming over and putting her hand gently on my shoulder. “That’s what we need around here. A little more emotion!”
I glared at Ashley.
This was totally crazy! Here we were walking towards Armageddon and Ashley couldn’t stop talking about doing it for the first time. It was more than a little weird.
“This whole mountaintop removal business has taken the coal miner right o
ut of mining,” Elise continued. “Instead of going under the mountain they just blow it up. It’s one big job suck. What took a whole union to do now takes a single machine. And the guys they brought in to do the dirty work were all from out of town. Not a single soul from Kayford.”
“Don’t be mad!” Ashley whispered again. “I was going to tell you!”
“So it’s not like the buck stops here,” Elise went on. “Amazing as it is, people still buy the coal company lies. About jobs and economic growth and the good times to come. The truth is that the companies take the money and run. Extracting the greatest wealth from one of the most impoverished places in our country. Leaving us even poorer than before, and with a shattered moonscape of a mountain.”
Elise stopped talking and we walked in silence for the last few minutes. Finally we rounded the last bend, looked ahead, and stopped dead in our tracks. Immobilized. Stunned.
Hell’s Gate.
There wasn’t a place on Earth more appropriately named.
The work of the devil in all his infinite horror stretched out before us. An absolute nightmare. The mother of all shitshows. Hell on Earth.
The YouTube videos were nothing compared to this.
Even Ashley was speechless.
There was not a living thing in sight. Nothing. Just a desolate, dug up, blown-up, alien shitscape stretching on and on, see after see after see. What used to be the height of nature’s glory, the pinnacle of creation, was now reduced to ruin. An absence of color: no green in sight. Just the dull, endless monotony of flattened, gray, dusty, pulverized rock.
It was like before there was life on the planet, when everything was nothing and the world was desolate and raw and scary and formless. It was like after the apocalypse, when the world has gone crazy and beauty has turned ugly and good is evil and none of it makes any sense. It was like another planet, absent of the beauty, the joy, the miracle of life. It was like an alternate universe where a sickly gray was the only color.
They say seeing is believing, but I could not believe what I saw. I just couldn’t. I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I closed and opened, closed and opened. But the topless mountain, the ghostly grave of Kayford, would not go away.
The haunting words of John Muir that Coop had quoted came roaring back to me:
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought,
disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling
tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools!
If this was not the work of fools then there was no such thing as foolishness.
John Prine’s “Paradise” was still locked in my brain:
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
Progress? If this was “progress,” then . . .
Britt started crying and held my hand. I started crying and held Kevin’s hand. Kevin looked like he was ready to kill someone. Ashley had turned away into Marc’s arms and Frank had closed his eyes as if in prayer. Next to seeing my mother dead, next to seeing her lovely body withered and lifeless and spent in the hospital room, this was the worst moment of my life. The absolute worst.
No one said anything. There was nothing that could be said. Words would only screw it up even more.
So we just stared and cried and cried and stared and then, when we couldn’t take it anymore, we turned and walked away.
48
WE WERE BACK IN OUR MINI-MINE, Ashley and me, just the two of us. It was the day after our road trip to Kayford and I was still in recovery from the nightmare we had witnessed. The morning had been chilly and the leaves had turned. One final fling of color and then boom, down they went. Just like that.
“Sometimes I wish I were a tree,” I said to Ashley. “Life would be so much simpler.”
“Until some yahoo with a chainsaw comes and knocks you on your ass.”
“Hmmm . . .” I said. “Good point.”
“Anyway, if you were a tree you wouldn’t get to have sex,” Ashley added.
“Trees have sex.”
“They do not.”
“They do, too,” I said. “It’s just not like people sex. You know, they use the bees and the wind and stuff like that.”
“Good God,” Ashley said. “Imagine that. Imagine if we had sex like trees do. We’d have to have the insect express come on over and deliver the packet of your boyfriend’s stuff right inside you. You’d be like, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, dude, not that oaf of an oak’s! Gimme that hot sugar daddy’s over there, the one twiddling his twigs at me! Come on now, buzz to it!’ It would kind of take the fun right out of it.”
“I guess,” I said.
“And think about this one,” she went on. “Imagine if trees had sex like we do.”
“Like you do,” I said.
Ashley smiled.
“Imagine Bradley Beech giving the come-on to She. ‘Hey baby, why don’t you brush that beautiful white ash of yours against my hunk trunk. Oh yeah. Feel how hard my nuts are? You know I’ll make you bark for more!’”
“Is that the line Marc used on you?” I asked, laughing.
“You mean the line I used on him,” Ashley said. “He was like, ‘No rush, we can wait, I don’t want to pressure you,’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t want to wait, let’s do it!’”
“It was good?” I asked.
“Well, it hurt a little,” Ashley said. “But I was still really into it.”
“How’d you know what to do?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a clue. It just happened. And half the fun was trying to figure it out!”
“And it wasn’t, like, awkward or anything?”
“It was totally awkward. But awkward in a really exciting way. Marc had done it before with one other girl last year, so he sort of knew what was going on. But not really. And anyway, since I’m on the pill, and he had, you know, only done it with a girl who hadn’t done it before, I wasn’t worried about getting anything so we didn’t have to fool around with one of those thingamabobs.”
“Call them ‘condoms.’ ‘Thingamabobs’ has already been taken.”
“How about ‘thingamamarc’?”
“More like ‘thingonamarc’!”
We both laughed.
“Anyway,” Ashley said. “It made it easier.”
Ashley had been on the pill ever since she had first gotten her period. Up until now it had had nothing to do with sex. Her periods had been really crampy and bloody and one big horrible yuck that would keep her home from school and in bed and full of blah. The pill had been a lifesaver for her. Thanks to it her PC’s (period crummies) had all but disappeared.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
Ashley looked at herself in the mirror hanging on the wall of coal. She twisted her bob and she wrinkled her brow.
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t. At least not yet. I like him. I really like him. But I’m not in love with him. Do you think that’s wrong?”
“Do I think what’s wrong?”
“That I’m having sex with him but I’m not in love with him.”
I paused for a moment. There was no way I would have sex without making love. I just couldn’t do it. And, as grown up as I thought I was, fifteen was still fifteen. It seemed young to be doing something that intense. But I was me and Ashley was Ashley. I wasn’t going to judge.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s wrong. Marc is an awesome guy. And I know he really likes you. I mean, you two are a couple and all.”
“We are.”
“You’re on the pill, so you’ve got that covered.”
“Thank God for the pill!”
“If it was a one-night thing, if you weren’t going out, if he was using you, if you weren’t on birth control then, yeah, I’d say it was wrong. But that’s not the
case.”
Ashley came over and hugged me.
“You know the really weird thing?” Ashley said.
“No, tell me.”
“I bet half the people in this town would have me roasting in the fires of hell for having sex, whether I was in love or not, when I’m only fifteen. Even though they probably all did it themselves. And I bet a whole bunch of those very same folks are the ones praising to high heaven the bastards who want to bomb and bury Mount Tom. Which makes about as much sense as a cow’s meow.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s just so weird. I mean, in the same week that I had sex for the first time we went and saw Kayford’s Mountain.”
“What was left of Kayford’s Mountain.”
“Between Wednesday and Saturday I witnessed the very best and the very worst of what the world has to offer. It’s enough to make my head explode!”
“I thought you said it hurt?” I asked.
“You know what I mean,” Ashley replied.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’d say you did a tad bit more than ‘witness’ the very best part.”
“Truth,” Ashley said. “But think about it: making love, or like, whatever you want to call it, versus rape. Creation versus destruction. Heaven versus hell. Pretty weird, huh?”
“Very weird. Although let’s hope you didn’t create anything.”
Ashley snuggled over and took my hands in hers.
“Are you thinking about it?” she asked.
“Thinking about what?”
“About it!”
“Duh! But I know I’m not ready yet. I’m definitely going to wait a while.”
“You should get on the pill. Or at least get a bunch of thingamakevins. Gotta be prepared.”
“It was worth it?” I asked again.
“It was sick!”
We sat there, quiet for a moment.
I thought about what a different world it was from the end of the summer. So much had changed. I had thought I’d never have a boyfriend—and I was wrong. I had thought good girls didn’t give it up at fifteen—and I was wrong. I had thought the mountains would be here forever—and I was wrong.
“You know what is really, really, really weird?” Ashley asked.
“What?”
“With all of the bad out there. With all of the evil. With all of the mountaintop destroyers and the crazies and the meth heads and the clustermucks that go on and on—even with all of that—I am so happy right now. I really am. I have Marc. I have you. We have a mountain to fight for.”
