This Land

by Dan Barry

  But as I traveled the country for a decade, from 2007 to 2017, politics rarely entered my mind. With no campaign events to attend, no polling data to interpret, I lingered and listened, following the advice of Tom Heslin, a good friend and my editor long ago at the Providence Journal, who told me once:

  Slow it down.

  The men and women I encountered were not numbers to be tallied in yet another political survey; they were individuals, trying to get through another day in America. By slowing it down, I witnessed their wills being tested by crime, by fates, by natural disaster. I watched them struggle and tumble, laugh and cry, pause to take a breath or whisper a prayer. To echo Faulkner, I saw them endure. And that is what, I think, this volume of columns and stories conveys: the American endurance that transcends politics, and is ever-present no matter the presidential era.

  If a tornado tears through our city, we clean up. If a new highway bypasses our town, we erect a roadside monument to declare our defiant continuance. If society mistakenly relegates us to sheltered workshops and group homes, we learn to drive. If the Mississippi threatens once again to overflow its banks, we work side-by-side to erect a sandbag wall. And if racists burn down our church, we rebuild.

  For me, it all goes back to that first visit for that first column—to Logan, West Virginia.

  After Franco and I had taken our maiden walk down the streets of this distressed coal town—after we had dodged the coal train and reflected before that anthracite Jesus—we went in search of a late lunch or early dinner. We slid into a booth in a narrow, downtown diner and studied what was left of the daily specials.

  The waitress, smiling through her late-day weariness, pulled out her pad, poised her pen in anticipation, and asked the eternal question:

  “Are we ready yet, children?”

  PART ONE

  Change

  After the ball is over, after the break of dawn

  A Way of Life, Seen Through Coal-Tinted Glasses

  LOGAN, W.VA.—JANUARY 14, 2007

  That daily reminder of coal’s dominion courses again through this small town of a city, stopping traffic, giving pause. It is a coal train, maybe 90 open cars long, creaking and groaning and coating the old brick buildings hard against the tracks with a fine, black dust.

  And as a cold dusk settles like more dust on Logan’s tired streets, Chuck Gunnoe sits in an unheated launderette and explains how coal runs through veins beyond those in the surrounding hills. He is a coal miner seeking work, and he yearns to have his boots muddied, his face blackened—to be swallowed again by the Appalachian earth.

  The mines received him two days after he turned 18. Now 24, and between mines, he takes pride in doing the same crazy-dangerous work that his grandfather did. But the primary draw has always been the money, and with his girlfriend two months pregnant, he says he needs the $20 an hour he can earn by toiling miles removed from natural light.

  “It’s the best-paying job in this state,” says Mr. Gunnoe, who hours earlier filled out an application with a local mine. “Unless you’re college-educated.”

  And yes, he knows, the burly man says softly. He knows what happened to the two miners in the Aracoma coal mine not five miles down the road. Who here doesn’t.

  Downtown Logan has changed a lot, its people say, for so many reasons: the mechanization of mining, leading to fewer jobs; many young people seeking opportunity elsewhere; a Walmart replacing a nearby mountaintop. A walk down once-bustling Stratton Street, past the closed Capitol movie theater, the closed City Florist, the closed G. C. Murphy dime store, can be a walk through stillness.

  But in certain profound ways, Logan has not changed at all, and not just because warm apple pies sell for $5.99 at the Nu-Era Bakery, or because the waitress at Yesterday’s Diner refills coffee cups with maternal affection. (“Are we ready yet, children?”)

  For one, the city of 1,600 remains the West Virginia template for public corruption, with election fraud a local specialty. Not long ago, investigators caught the former mayor in some wrongdoing, and soon he was wearing a wire; down went the police chief, the county sheriff and the county clerk, among others. Now the former mayor sits behind the large glass window of his law office on Stratton Street, disbarred, on probation, on display.

  For another, Logan remains the coal-field capital. This means that a figurine made of coal in a pawnshop window depicts Jesus comforting a miner. It means that schoolchildren learn about the 1921 armed uprising called the Battle of Blair Mountain, when more than 10,000 miners wanting to unionize squared off against state and federal troops. That you are a friend of coal, or you are not. That miners die.

  Almost exactly a year ago, a fire broke out in that nonunion mine down the road, the Aracoma Alma Mine No. 1, owned by the state’s dominant coal company, Massey Energy. Every employee escaped, save two: Don Israel Bragg, 33, and Elvis Hatfield, 46.

  Months later, two reports—one by the state’s mining-regulatory office, the other by J. Davitt McAteer, a veteran mine-safety consultant—shed light on what had happened in the Aracoma darkness. In Mr. McAteer’s words, the evidence suggested that the fire had “erupted at the lethal intersection of human error and negligent mining practices.”

  A misaligned conveyor belt ignited and spilled coal that should not have been there. A fire hose contained no water. A missing ventilation wall allowed smoke to seep into a primary escapeway meant to provide fresh air to miners.

  A crew of a dozen escaping miners hit that smoke and began to panic. In blinding, nauseating clouds of black, they grabbed one another’s shirts and tried to feel their way to a door leading to fresh air. Ten made it to the other side; two did not.

  One more thing, the reports said: the maps of the mazelike mine given to the would-be rescuers were inaccurate—a cardinal sin in the land of coal.

  The deaths of Mr. Bragg and Mr. Hatfield provided an unnecessary reminder of how dangerous coal mining can be. In all, 24 miners died on the job in West Virginia last year, with this year’s first fatalities coming on Saturday, when two miners died in a partial tunnel collapse inside a mine about 75 miles south of here.

  Massey Energy, which employs more than 4,000 in West Virginia, has declined detailed comment about the two reports, other than to say that some conditions in the mine had not met its standards, and that “deficiencies were not fully recognized by mine personnel or by state or federal inspectors.”

  Chuck Gunnoe

  Few in Logan criticize Massey publicly. The closest they come is to say that the widows have sued, and to smile when recalling how the company’s president, Don L. Blankenship, spent more than $3 million trying to wrest control of the Legislature from Democrats last year. He called it his “And for the Sake of the Kids” campaign, and he lost.

  Instead, people like the mayor, Claude Ellis, known as Big Daddy, point out that Massey gives a big employee party in the center of the city every summer, attracting tens of thousands. Last year people had to wear a company-issued T-shirt to hear Hank Williams Jr. and other entertainers sing. Mr. Ellis says the company gave him 100 or so of those shirts.

  “Without coal, we’d be in a bad state,” Mr. Ellis explains, as if to concede that coal is the true Big Daddy.

  Back in the cold of that launderette, Mr. Gunnoe proudly displays photographs of himself in the mines: on his knees, unable to stand, soot-covered, one with coal. In one photo, he and other miners are hunched around pizza boxes. Christmas present from the boss, he explains.

  A Teenage Soldier’s Goodbyes on the Road to Over There

  MOHAVE VALLEY, ARIZ.—MARCH 4, 2007

  It is time. The fresh young soldier has a plane to catch.

  People file out of the dimness of V.F.W. Post 404 and into the morning light. They chat and smoke and mill about on the parking lot gravel, then come together to form a ragged circle of support.

  The dozen motorcyclists among them finalize plans to escort the soldier for most of the two-hour ride to the airport in Las Vegas. Just bef
ore raising voices and fists to a recording of the country-western anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.,” the crowd bows its collective head and asks God for another favor: to keep safe this soldier, just 10 months removed from her senior prom.

  That night she wore a gown the color of valentines; this morning she wears fatigues the color of mud. The uniform has a name patch, KANE, for Pvt. Resha Kane. Eighteen years old and five feet tall. Of Needles High School, Class of 2006, and, lately, of the United States Army, Fourth Infantry Division.

  Earlier this morning, Private Kane walked out of her family home in Needles, a small railroad city in California just across the Colorado River. Before her, the family van, packed with two Army duffel bags. Behind her, a living room decorated with family portraits and a large mock check from her current employer.

  “Reserved in the name of Resha Kane,” the check reads, $37,200 from the Army College Fund and the Montgomery G.I. Bill. It represents her partial compensation for enlisting for three years and 22 weeks. She plans to study biochemistry someday.

  At the moment, though, she stands outside this club for veterans of foreign wars, where a bar sign advertises Sunday bloody marys, a buck apiece, 10 to noon. Former soldiers tell her to keep her nose clean over there. Her father, Wesley Kane, has to leave soon for his job as a car dealership’s lot manager, but he holds her tight and asks, again and again, do you know how to clean your weapon?

  “Yes, Daddy,” she says.

  The motorcyclists, including some from a group called the Patriot Guard Riders, mount their bikes. Among them is Rich Poliska, a gray-bearded Air Force veteran who lives nearby, in Bullhead City. A Route 66 earring dangles from his left earlobe.

  Several months ago Mr. Poliska and his daughter, Heather Ching, heard about a local soldier who had returned from Iraq to no welcome home. They decided to form the Bullhead Patriots, dedicated to honoring soldiers going off to war, or returning from it. This is the group’s first deployment effort, he says. “But I’ve done six funerals and two homecomings.”

  The Bullhead Patriots had heard of Private Kane’s imminent deployment from a veteran who knows a woman who works at the Family Dollar store with the soldier’s mother, Patricia Kane. First a surprise potluck supper—the soldier left church on Sunday to find a limousine waiting to whisk her away to the V.F.W.—and now this: an escort to the airport.

  Bike engines growl, signaling that it is time. Private Kane climbs into the family van, which features rear-window decals for Jesus and for the Army (“My Daughter Is Serving”). She sits in the back, surrounded by her three younger siblings and a sister’s boyfriend. Her quiet mother takes the driver’s seat.

  Soon the caravan is crossing the Colorado River. It passes a man sitting on the back of a parked pickup, his fist raised in the air: the soldier’s father.

  This mobile honor guard continues on, heading north on Highway 95, into a desolate, arid stretch of southern Nevada. Motorcycles in front, motorcycles behind, and in the middle, a white van containing a young soldier with just-polished fingernails.

  She took care of her siblings while her parents worked, and learned to make a mean baked chicken. She graduated in the upper ranks in a class of about 60. She was honored for her grades and for her abstract artwork of flowers and butterflies. She has yet to learn to drive.

  She enlisted in April, the same month as her prom, because she saw the military as a way to further her education. Right after graduation she went through boot camp and some extra training, before coming home a couple of weeks ago to talk up the Army at her alma mater.

  “Hometown recruiting,” the Army calls it.

  “Everyone knows me there,” Private Kane says of Needles High School, home of the Mustangs.

  Now, riding in the midst of this caravan of protection and respect, she is bound for Fort Hood in Texas to await deployment—probably to Iraq, she says.

  “Nobody wants to go, but it’s our job,” she said the other day, her tone all business. “That’s what we’re trained for. We’ll go over, do our job and come back.”

  The motorcade stops briefly in the old gold-mining town of Searchlight, and a few bikers say goodbye. Then it continues on, across the nothingness, through spits of rain, before stopping again in Railroad Pass, about 20 miles south of the airport. The Bullhead Patriots say farewell to Private Kane.

  “Best of luck to you,” Mr. Poliska says.

  A lone biker continues to lead the Kanes toward Las Vegas, a large American flag flapping from the rear of his motorcycle. He rumbles into the city of gamblers, past drivers oblivious to the now-common moment of a wartime soldier leaving home.

  At the last moment the biker peels off. And the white family van follows the signs that say Departures.

  In a Town Called Bill, a Boomlet of Sorts

  BILL, WYO.—MARCH 3, 2008

  For decades this speck of a place called Bill had one, two or five residents, depending on whether you counted pets. But recent developments have increased the population to at least 11, so that now Bill is more a dot than a speck, and could be justified if one day it started to call itself William.

  In mid-December those developments appeared like some Christmas mirage: a 112-room hotel and a 24-hour diner. Here. In Bill. Amid the swallowing nothingness of grasslands, where all that moves are the wind, the antelope, the cars speeding to someplace else—and those ever-slithering trains.

  Day and night the trains, each one well more than a mile long, rattling north with dozens of empty cars to the coal mines of the Powder River Basin, then groaning south with thousands of tons of coal. They clink and clank behind the cramped general store and shuttered post office to create the soundtrack of Bill.

  But Bill is also a crew-change station for the Union Pacific railroad company, which means that dozens of conductors, engineers and other railroaders on the coal line take their mandatory rest here. Few of them want to be in Bill, but in Bill they must stay. They are its transients, forever lugging their lanterns, gloves and gear.

  For many years the railroaders stayed in what they called, without affection, the Bill Hilton, a tired, 58-room dormitory near the rail yard with thin walls and, lately, not enough beds, as the booming coal business has increased the demand for trains. At 2 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon, bone-tired workers just off their shift would wait for a bed to open up, and then hope for sleep to come.

  Union Pacific addressed the situation by working with a hotel company called Lodging Enterprises. The company agreed to build a hotel and diner in, essentially, nowhere, and Union Pacific guaranteed most of the rooms for its weary railroaders.

  This is why, one day last August, a woman named Deloris Renteria found herself driving up desolate Highway 59, having just accepted a job as general manager of a yet-to-be-built Oak Tree Inn and Penny’s Diner in some place called Bill. But she drove right past Bill, missing it entirely. And when she turned around to face the remoteness, she had one thought:

  Oh my God. This is Bill.

  The history of Bill is recorded in age-brittled papers and newspaper articles kept behind the bar at the back of Bill’s general store. It seems that a doctor settled here during World War I, and that his wife came up with the town’s name after observing that several area men were all called Bill.

  There came a small post office, and a small store selling sandwiches to truckers, and a small school for children from surrounding ranches, and little else, except for those trains. At one point the owner of the general store established the Bill Yacht Club: no boats, no water, no costly boating accidents. He sold hats and T-shirts to tourists who felt in on the joke.

  At first Ms. Renteria thought the joke was on her. She is 50, the single mother of four adult children; seeking isolation was not her life’s goal. But she had a job to do, with a steady stream of clients, almost all of them railroaders passing through, stepping up to the counter at the diner, signing in, signing out.

  Now, she says, she likes Bill. When she steps out a back door for
a cigarette, she sees nothing but beautiful nothingness.

  The hotel in Bill—some call it the Bill Ritz-Carlton—is open to everyone, but is especially designed to accommodate these railroaders. For example, in keeping with a contractual agreement between the railroad company and the unions, it must have a break room, an exercise room and, very importantly, a card table.

  Because railroading is hardly a 9-to-5 profession, each room has window shades designed to thwart any peek of daylight and thick walls to snuff out sounds like vacuuming. The hotel also has a “guest finder” system that uses heat sensors to signal if someone is in a room, possibly resting, almost certainly uninterested in a cheery call of “Housekeeping!”

  The Ritz of Bill still has its growing pains, its clash between two cultures—hotels and railroads—as evidenced by a slightly misspelled sign on the diner’s door: “Union Pacific Guest: Please remove kleats before entering building. Automatic $50 fine for violation!!!!!! Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Providing mild counterpoint is Jarod Lessert, 35, a train engineer and one of Bill’s longtime transients, who has just checked out of the hotel. He is sipping a Diet Coke at the general store’s back bar while waiting for midnight, when he will drive a coal-loaded train the 12 hours back to South Morrill, Neb., where he lives and prefers to sleep.

  He says the new hotel is far better than the old dormitory, but adds that some of the hotel’s rules are plainly ridiculous. He also expresses shock at the prices in the diner: “Nine dollars for an omelet?”