This Land

by Dan Barry

“They was good peaches, too,” says Mr. Richmond.

  “I like peaches,” says his mother.

  Would Lindytown have died anyway? Would it have died even without the removal of its surrounding mountaintops? These are the questions that Bill Raney, the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, raises. Sometimes, he says, depopulation is part of the natural order of things. People move to be closer to hospitals, or restaurants, or the Walmart. There is also that West Virginia truism, he adds:

  “When the coal’s gone, you go to where the next coal seam is.”

  Of course, in the case of Lindytown, the coal is still here; it’s the people who are mostly gone. Now, when darkness comes to this particular hollow, you can see a small light shining from the kitchen window of a solitary, yellow house—and, sometimes, a face, peering out.

  EPILOGUE

  The small West Virginia place called Lindytown is barely a memory.

  The mining operation is idle, the surrounding roads are not maintained—making the family cemeteries nestled in the hills nearly impossible to reach—and the surrounding mountains “have been blown into dust,” according to the environmental activist Maria Gunnoe.

  Quinnie Richmond, one of Lindytown’s last residents, died in 2017; she was 92. But her son Richard continues to live in the family home, in the shortened shadows of the diminished hills.

  Losing Everything, Except What Really Matters

  COTTONDALE, ALA.—MAY 1, 2011

  As the flight to Birmingham began its descent, the passenger in 8B, a barrel of a man wearing a camouflage baseball cap, peered out the window at the disfigured sprawl of Tuscaloosa below. There, he said, pointing: that light brown scar marks the tornado’s path.

  After studying it in silence, he snapped a few photographs with a cellphone that had in its memory another photograph, sent to him just hours earlier, of a one-story brick house that had been all but destroyed by that same tornado.

  His house.

  His name is Corey Soper, and he is 33. He lives just outside Tuscaloosa, but works as a welder on a pipeline in Nevada, because that is where the work is. Now, after a heart-pounding day of worrying from a distance for the safety of his wife and two young children, he was coming home to a broken house, clutching a blue luggage ticket that represented the only clothes he had left.

  And yet he considered himself lucky, so very lucky. His family is safe, he said, his voice tight.

  “And now we can build new memories.”

  For days now, those not in the path of the dozens of tornadoes that spun mayhem and death across several states on Wednesday have mostly experienced it through aerial photographs and film footage that tend to blend into one dispassionate tableau of destruction: stripped foundations, upside-down cars, bits of wood and brick that once were homes. Imagining the roar of freight trains and bee swarms, you can almost fool yourself into believing you were there. Almost.

  But if you were able to zoom in, as though with a click of a newly updated version of Google Earth, you might come in closer, closer, closer, to one house on Rifle Range Road in Cottondale, where the roof has been swept away, bits of insulation cling to the grass like artificial snow and an eight-foot tree branch pierces the living room wall. This is the home of a very fortunate man.

  He is fortunate because his wife, Alicia, 31, grew up with tornadoes and knows enough not to test them. When she was about 8, a tornado destroyed her home; when she was 12, another tornado destroyed her home. Now she is all weather all the time, listening to her hero, a local meteorologist named James Spann, and following reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

  So, when reports came on Wednesday of a “bruiser” of a storm, she chose not to use the storm cellar installed on their property, at her insistence, shortly after they bought their home in 2006. “Something told me, ‘You have to leave here,’” she said.

  Ms. Soper gathered the two children—Tommy, 10, and Gracelynn, 8—and drove her black S.U.V. to the DCH Regional Medical Center, a Tuscaloosa fortress, where her sister Michelle works as a scheduling clerk.

  Meanwhile, her husband was in Nevada with his heart in Alabama. Mr. Soper watched the Weather Channel while talking to his wife, until their cellphone connection died. As he frantically tried to get back in touch, the tornado passed by the medical center, changing the air pressure so drastically that the ears of his family were popping.

  Ms. Soper sent him a text message: “Its bad baby the tornadoe is headed straight for us dr. McKenzie brought us to the doctors lounge.”

  Then another text: “in the middle of the hospital.” Mr. Soper texted back: “I lost you—call me.”

  An hour later, Mr. Soper managed to regain cellphone contact with his wife. They were fine. He was lucky.

  Sometime after that, a neighbor sent Ms. Soper a text: “Your house took a hit.”

  All day Thursday, while her husband caught flights from Las Vegas to Houston to Birmingham, a numbed Ms. Soper sat on the smashed porch of her broken house and wept. Around her lay water-stained family photographs, and pieces of family bric-a-brac, and the three brick pillars that once supported the porch roof, still missing. She could find no strength.

  “I lost it,” she said. “My neighbor held me while I cried.”

  But once her Corey showed up Thursday evening, as the sun was setting and a coolness was coming to the pine-scented air, she found her strength again. He had driven through his devastated neighborhood, past the smashed cars and the downed power lines and the piece of metal wrapped in a bow in the trees, and he was home.

  Mr. Soper looked around. It was not as it had appeared in that cellphone photograph. It was real.

  The tornado had pried off the roof, collected some of the family mementos stored in the attic and distributed Soper photographs and Soper memories among the neighborhood’s oak and sour-gum trees. It had exposed both the kitchen and the master bedroom to the sky. It had spackled the Whirlpool oven and the Kenmore dishwasher with green vegetation. It had possibly damaged the foundation, buckled what remained of the ceiling and blessed all Soper belongings with water.

  Sunlight after the tornado

  At the same time, it had not disturbed the four Holiday Barbies from their perches of honor in Gracelynn’s bedroom, nor rearranged any of the Alabama Crimson Tide posters in Tommy’s bedroom. Even Ms. Soper’s silver hoop earrings, weightless things, sat where she had last placed them on the counter in the ruined bathroom. A consolation prize, it seemed.

  After spending Thursday night with Ms. Soper’s grandmother in Brookwood, the Soper family returned to Rifle Range Road early Friday morning to face the inevitable question:

  Could their home be salvaged? The home where every birthday was celebrated? Where Ms. Soper’s extended family gathered every Christmas Day? Where you could sit on the porch and hear Roger across the street, a good neighbor, strumming his banjo to celebrate another Alabama night?

  It remained to be seen. But the family had its strength back.

  Ms. Soper drove to Home Depot, where the employees were so nice she almost cried, and to John Deere, to collect water and garbage bags and a new power saw. As soon as she returned, she sat down again on the broken porch, only this time with resolve: to order a storage container in which to protect all the valuables—the baby clothes, the wedding album, the Soper things.

  “O.K.,” she said into her pink cellphone, responding to a sales representative’s pitch. “O.K. O.K. O.K. O.K….”

  Mr. Soper, meanwhile, led a small army of power-saw-toting relatives and friends in clearing the jumble of fallen trees from his two-acre lot. If a tornado’s call sounds like freight trains and bees, humankind’s response sounds like growling, determined power saws.

  He worked through the warm day, not a cloud in the sky, and into dusk, well aware that others in this state were mourning their dead. Sweat-stained and flecked with sawdust, he occasionally looked up to see his wife and his two children in their altered yard, working, ma
king new memories.

  His house nearly destroyed, he felt blessed.

  Ready, Aim, Fireworks!

  TERRE HAUTE, IND.—OCTOBER 27, 2011

  Her Cadillac glides slowly through the rain-glossed streets of this traumatized city, her gat within reach. The ominous evening sky has yet to turn black, but it will. Oh, it will.

  Her name is Joy Sacopulos. She is 72, bespectacled, and so small in her boat of a Deville that she seems at eye level with the wheel. But don’t let her play you for a sap. By day she might be the civic do-gooder, planting dogwoods in the park; by night she is the dame packing pyrotechnic heat, intent on keeping the city’s streets—and cars, and benches—clean.

  Crows. That’s right. Crows.

  Ms. Sacopulos, of the Terre Haute Crow Patrol, eases over to 12th and Chestnut, a known hangout. Bingo. Hundreds of perps are getting all comfy in the treetops, cawing in mirthful defiance, unaware that they have just made her day.

  She steps out. Loads her launch pistol as calmly as if she were adding milk to her tea. Leans Mannix-like on the hood. Fires, and fires again. The first shot sends a screaming firework over a housetop and into the trees. The second booms louder than the wail of the freight train passing by.

  Black bits burst into the air, but soon return to where they were moments ago, like a jigsaw puzzle of a night sky reassembling itself. Then comes that taunt again: caw-caw, caw-caw.

  Crows. So omnivorous, so opportunistic, so—like us.

  Every fall, as many as 100,000 American crows choose to winter in this pleasant city of 60,000. It is believed that they are drawn to the closeness of the Wabash River, the bright warmth of the streetlamps, the variety of the cuisine. A hearty lunch in a rustic cornfield setting, followed, perhaps, by a light dinner at one of the city’s finer Dumpsters.

  But Terre Haute would rather shed its distinction as a winter resort for discerning crows—one shared by Auburn, N.Y., and Lancaster, Pa., among other cities. That is why it has created a Crow Patrol, with a mandate to enforce a kind of avian nimbyism.

  Murders of crows, and that is the term for flocks of these birds, have mugged the quality of life here. If they roost in your trees, their mess will cover your property and their racket will disturb your evenings; you will run, not walk, from door to car.

  And if they bless your restaurant, bank, or church with their presence and droppings, money is lost, faith tested.

  Two winters ago, Union Hospital spent more than $100,000 to clean up after crows, an effort that included power-washing the parking lots. Last year, a crew shoveled 4,000 pounds of crow droppings from the roof of a building used by the Clabber Girl baking powder company. Trees have been chopped down. Recorded crow-distress calls have been played. Debates have raged between those who love all God’s creatures and those who say the only good crow is a crow that has ceased to be.

  Finally, everyone from The Tribune-Star newspaper to City Hall said enough, and a “crow committee” was formed last year to develop a comprehensive plan. As Mayor Duke Bennett explained in his 2010 State of the City address: “We can’t shoot them. We can’t poison them. We’ve got to figure out a way to transfer them someplace else.”

  A leading organizer was Ms. Sacopulos, retired schoolteacher, grandmother and bird lover known for Getting Things Done. She has championed urban forestry, worked to preserve a historic church, and led a drive to recycle electronics. Now she is focused on the crow, motivated in part by one image she can’t shake: that of a car so thoroughly coated with droppings that its driver had to steer with door open and head peering out.

  “O.K.,” she recalls saying. “We have to do something.”

  But what? Humans have tried to keep crows away since forever. They have used scarecrows to feign human presence. They have hung sulfur-dipped rags to remind crows of gunpowder. They have mounted dead crows on sticks. They have sent out hawks, banged pots, laid out strychnine, shot off guns, paid bounties. Still the crows come, as if to peck away at our sense of superiority.

  Crows are too intelligent to fall twice for most tricks. They care for their young and sick. They communicate through a vocabulary that goes well beyond “caw.” They use tools. They take note of our behavioral patterns and, even, our faces.

  “Who knows what they’ve got in terms of accumulated wisdom,” said Peter Scott, a professor of biology at Indiana State University—which, by the way, has also had crow problems.

  After several public discussions and many suggestions, including one to use the crows to feed the less fortunate, the Crow Patrol was established. Its costs would be covered by donations, collected mostly by Ms. Sacopulos, and its members would be trained in the shooting of fireworks. The intent was not to kill the birds but to launch a varied disruption so sustained that they would move to dedicated zones: an empty field, say, at city’s edge.

  All last winter, the boom of evening fireworks echoed through Terre Haute, with modest results. It turns out that crows don’t believe in zoning.

  “We were naïve, and so we’ve abandoned driving them to specified locales,” said Jim Luzar, the chairman of the crow committee and an educator with the Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service. “This year our expectations are tempered. We’re basically just trying to disrupt roosting behavior and dilute concentrations of roosting.”

  Last week, with gold flecking the trees and black flecking the skies, the Terre Haute Crow Patrol mustered once again. An hour before darkness, volunteers gathered around two “crow harassment” experts, Tim Christie and his son, Matt, as they distributed bright-orange Crow Patrol vests, launch pistols and bags of small fireworks.

  Tim Christie, 62, a wildlife-management veteran who works for the patrol at a steep discount, has chased crows for many Terre Haute businesses, including the Honey Creek Mall. But in recent years there have been almost too many to handle, he said. “They keep moving back in, and moving back in.”

  The Christies tutored the volunteers once more on the proper way to load and discharge their pistols, while Ms. Sacopulos advised wearing earplugs before shooting. The leaders then divided the volunteers into teams and sent them out into the gathering darkness.

  So here was Ms. Sacopulos, prowling Terre Haute streets in her unmarked Caddy. In the back seat, her latest issue of Birds & Blooms magazine (“Beauty in Your Own Backyard”); in the front, her pistol, her ammo, her resolve. All that was missing was a police radio’s cackle.

  As Ms. Sacopulos drove, she pointed out the places where crows loiter, including St. Benedict Roman Catholic Church—her church. She reflected on how crows always seem to be watching you. She whispered that they seem to be everywhere: “It gets so that you kind of feel they’re there.”

  And they are: a murder of crows spotted in trees along Liberty Avenue. Ms. Sacopulos stepped out of her car in her vest of bright orange. She loaded her pistol, aimed and—boom! Startled crows darted into the air, while startled people darted from their homes.

  “Crow Patrol,” she explained, matter of fact.

  EPILOGUE

  The annual infestation of crows in Terre Haute continues to be, well, murder. As a result, the work of the crow patrol continues, although it is now handled by the city’s code-enforcement unit.

  Meanwhile, the indefatigable Joy Sacopulos reports that in the spring of 2012, she ended her crow patrol “tour of duty.”

  In Fuel Oil Country, Cold That Cuts to the Heart

  DIXFIELD, ME.—FEBRUARY 4, 2012

  With the darkening approach of another ice-hard Saturday night in western Maine, the man on the telephone was pleading for help, again. His tank was nearly dry, and he and his disabled wife needed precious heating oil to keep warm. Could Ike help out? Again?

  Ike Libby, the co-owner of a small oil company called Hometown Energy, ached for his customer, Robert Hartford. He knew what winter in Maine meant, especially for a retired couple living in a wood-frame house built in the 19th century.

  But he also knew that the Hartfords already ow
ed him more than $700 for two earlier deliveries.

  The oil man said he was very sorry. The customer said he understood. And each was left to grapple with a matter so mundane in Maine, and so vital: the need for heat. For the rest of the weekend, Mr. Libby agonized over his decision, while Mr. Hartford warmed his house with the heat from his electric stove’s four burners.

  “You get off the phone thinking, ‘Are these people going to be found frozen?’” Mr. Libby said. No wonder, he said, that he is prescribed medication for stress and “happy pills” for equilibrium.

  Two days later, Mr. Libby told his two office workers about his decision. Diane Carlton works the front desk while her daughter-in-law, Janis, handles accounts. But they share the job of worrying about Ike, whose heart, they say, is too big for his bantam size and, maybe, this business.

  The Hartford case “ate him,” Janis Carlton recalled. “It just ate him.”

  Mr. Libby drove off to make deliveries in his oil truck, a rolling receptacle of crumpled coffee cups and cigarette packs. Diane Carlton, the office’s mother hen, went home early. This meant that Janis Carlton was alone when their customer, Mr. Hartford, stepped in from the cold. He had something in his hand: the title to his 16-year-old Lincoln Town Car.

  Would Hometown Energy take the title as collateral for some heating oil? Please?

  Maine is in the midst of its Republican presidential caucus, the state’s wintry moment in the battle for the country’s future.

  But at this time of year, almost nothing matters here as much as basic heat.

  Ike Libby, delivering oil

  While federal officials try to wean the country from messy and expensive heating oil, Maine remains addicted. The housing stock is old, most communities are rural, and many residents cannot afford to switch to a cleaner heat source. So the tankers pull into, say, the Portland port, the trucks load up, and the likes of Ike Libby sidle up to house after house to fill oil tanks.