by Anne Trubek
Ultimately, the groups did meet, talk, and unionize. The red bandannas they wore, originally produced in Scotland with designs taken from Hungarian and Persian traditional patterns, are a tribute to that blending. They were worn like a uniform, a simple way to tell who was on their side. One origin of the word “redneck” derives from these bandannas: the term, which is now used with some amount of xenophobia to refer to small-minded people who typically live in rural Southern areas, in this sense is actually a nod to diversity and working together for a common good. In a photo of the burial of Sid Hatfield, funeral attendees can be seen wearing patterns found in the bandannas, as well as Scottish kilts, lace, and other formal attire brought along during long boat rides to America.
“Today,” Steele sighs, her gaze extending into the rich green forest just beyond her porch, “without the unions bringing people together, there is more bigotry. Just how they’ve always wanted it, keeping workers apart instead of fighting together.” Steele’s husband, Terry, a retired mine worker and member of the United Mine Workers Association (UMWA) union, agrees. The way he sees it, today’s workers are paid good wages and when they are let go, it’s blamed on the increasing government regulations that cost King Coal money in upkeep. But the regulations are necessary for the people to live, because they affect their own drinking water and air quality, their own children’s welfare.
Unions are a contentious topic in Mingo County, with no active miners among the 850 members of the UMWA; many miners blame the union and the government for the hard times miners are facing as interest in coal diminishes. From the union perspective, the main reason people are losing their jobs is because the mine owners—including Blankenship—didn’t want to lose money by keeping up with regulations when they could afford it. Meanwhile, some people hate the unions because the unions are getting paid through tax dollars. “But that’s only because the mine company didn’t pay into the pensions when they had the money and now that they aren’t doing as well, they certainly don’t want to pay,” Terry says.
Indeed, some in King Coal country are doing worse than others. Although Blankenship now lives in Tennessee, he maintained his home in Mingo County until retirement (though once his actions at Massey polluted the water, he did have special plumbing installed to source clean water from outside the county7—a luxury not available to his workers and neighbors). Since the Upper Big Branch disaster, critics of Blankenship seem to have no difficulty seeing evil in his beady eyes and villainous mustache. Certainly, they’ve been given little reason to see anything else. Maybe it’s her art-teacher openheartedness, or her love for her fellow West Virginians, but Steele is the first to comment on the complexity of Blankenship: He’s not quite evil, and that’s perhaps even more dangerous.
“He’s the kind of person who really listens to people, really tries to figure out who they are,” she says. “When we were in school, he was a nice guy, I mean a really nice person. Everyone liked him. And if somebody didn’t, well, they were the jerk, and that was generally known.” When asked what happened to make Blankenship grow up to be the type of person who would care so little for his fellows, she could only shrug: “Coal got him.” When he originally came to Massey as an office manager, she says, he could have cleaned up a lot of King Coal’s practices. Instead, he became known as the leading force against the UMWA. When the victims from the Upper Big Branch explosion were autopsied, it was revealed that 71 percent of them suffered from black lung, the deadly coal dust disease. The industry average is 3.2 percent.
Blankenship has visited the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, presumably curious as to what version of history the museum might tell, and how far back and forward along Mingo County’s coal lineage it dared tread. Elijah Hooker, now a board member who was stationed at the museum’s front desk during two of Blankenship visits and who spoke with him at length, dismisses any notion of malicious intent. “The mere fact that a young man was working for a museum that is essentially the antithesis to everything in which Blankenship’s creed, or system of beliefs, has stood in opposition towards, most likely left him in a state of curiosity,” says Hooker via email, in explanation of what interest Blankenship may have had in talking with him. “[He] came to the museum out of genuine motives. After all, Matewan is his home; this museum does impart the history of [his community]. While it may take a particular stance, nevertheless, our attempt is to reconstruct the history of an area deemed to be a forgotten land of no significance to the greater development of America’s past; thus, I feel that there was genuine intrigue involved with Don’s visit to our museum, one in which no ulterior motives were attached—simply curiosity as to what was going on in the area he considers to be home.” Hooker, on his part, does not believe Blankenship is necessarily the monster he’s portrayed to be, one who had specific intentions of killing twenty-nine workers, but rather is someone who made some gross errors in judgment during his time as CEO. Perhaps he just saw the dollars and cents of business much more clearly than the people who were hidden in the mines, the ones who put that money in the Massey account.
Still, the tension between King Coal and those preserving its true history is palpable. “He went through the museum and spent over an hour there [during one visit], and it’s a very small place. He took pictures, read all the texts,” says Dr. Chuck Keeney, museum board member and history professor at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College. “Then after, he and I spoke for a bit. He and I of course have a different heritage, his background being a union-buster, and I have union leaders in my heritage. So we’re on opposite sides.” This opposition is a point of conflict for the museum, daring to tell the history of unions in an area whose union members currently are largely retired miners.
“The conflict over coal has become over the years to be a conflict of memory. King Coal is not going to disappear. It’s still a powerful force, and a powerful social force,” Keeney says, and in this memory and storytelling lies the burden and joy of opening up an independent museum. “We were able to include quotes and facts that a state-sponsored museum wouldn’t be able to do. It’s quite enjoyable, to not have to be politically correct, to not have to pander to donors who have their own agendas or are concerned about image.”
Ultimately, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum tells the story of a time when coal was everything, and of a future when it might not be. That’s certainly the case for Blankenship. Sid Hatfield probably never dreamed of the day when something like a mine explosion would put the company boss on trial, and maybe there is a future for citizens of West Virginia in which mine explosions themselves are an archaic story relegated to Plexiglas displays. In the meantime, we can study our past, celebrate it, and learn from it.
MARTHA BAYNE
Seed or Weed?
ON THE EVOLUTION OF CHICAGO’S BLOOMINGDALE TRAIL
DOWN THE STREET FROM MY apartment there’s a community garden on a vacant lot owned by my landlord—although, of course, it’s not actually “vacant” at all. It’s home to a dozen raised beds of flowers and vegetables. There are hoses and a rain barrel and two rotating compost bins and a mess of stakes and tomato cages under the porch of the house next door. In the spring, mushrooms push up through the dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace along the fence.
In the first warm weeks of May I sowed buttercrunch lettuce and mesclun and red romaine, along with beets and chard and kale and carrots in the plots I’d claimed as my own. I had the best intentions. I had carefully ordered an array of exotics from the heirloom seed catalog—Chantenay red cored carrots; bull’s blood and golden beets. I amended the soil with compost and an extravagant layer of topsoil. I even drew a map in a little spiral notebook. But, perhaps dizzy with the sudden onset of spring, when I got down in the dirt itself I quickly abandoned any attempt to impose structure on nature and began sprinkling seeds with abandon. I figured I’d thin them out once they’d germinated, after I saw what stuck.
One month later the lettuces were coming up thick in nice s
traight rows. But the bok choy and the chard looked sketchy, their sprouts emerging from the soil in curves and clumps, if at all. Only four of dozens of beet seeds had germinated, and cilantro had invaded the carrot patch. Samaras from the maple towering to the east rained down on the garden, blanketing it with little brown propellers, and every morning this summer I crouched over the beds, contemplating new clusters of inch-high shoots, wondering, Are you kale or crabgrass? Are you seed or are you weed?
* * *
I live half a block north of this garden, on Humboldt Boulevard in Chicago, practically on top of the Bloomingdale Trail. That’s the colloquial name given to the elevated tracks stretching 2.7 miles west across the city from Ashland all the way to Ridgeway, along Bloomingdale Avenue, about midway between Armitage and North. Once it was a spur line for the Canadian Pacific Railway, but regular transit stopped on the line in 2001, and in the years that followed the tracks were reclaimed by fast-growing plants. Bull thistles and pokeweed grew thick along the railings while pineapple weed choked the tracks—as did broken glass, beer cans, dead rats, abandoned shoes, needles, condoms, and yards upon yards of VHS tape, scenes from Ghostbusters unspooling on the breeze. Catalpa and gingko stretched their branches overhead. Wildflowers rioted in July.
From the ground the trail didn’t look like much—a few miles of dank, crumbling cement held together by graffiti. But from above it was a magic highway. A thin strip of rough, scrubby green easily accessed at strategic points along a poorly maintained fence line, the Bloomingdale Trail gave sanctuary to drinkers, dog walkers, joggers, junkies, and anyone seeking shelter from the streets below. It was an interstitial wilderness, opportunistic plants holding tight to rocky soil, and for much of this century’s first decade, it was Chicago’s best-kept open secret.
* * *
These days the weeds are gone. In August 2013 the city broke ground on construction of a long-planned network of parks and trails along the railway that’s now called the 606—after the three numbers all Chicago zip codes share in common. Said name change—enacted after much focus-grouping and brand consultation by the consortium of agencies charged with developing the park—seems to have succeeded in offending few, and pleasing fewer, but on the street it doesn’t matter. Everyone still calls it the Bloomingdale Trail anyway.
No matter what you call it, it’s set to open in its first phase in 2015, after more than ten years of grassroots organizing and prep. Now that the city’s taken charge the project is moving full steam ahead. BUILDING A NEW CHICAGO, declare the signs dangling from its bridges, and I’ve watched over the last nine months as small trucks and front-end loaders zip back and forth along the viaduct past my second-story windows. On the ground, the bright murals that marked the passage from Humboldt Park to Logan Square—whose neighborhood boundary the trail passively polices—have been sandblasted away in the name of lead abatement. The quiet man who lived underneath the overpass all last summer has moved on. If you trespass on the tracks these days you’ll get a ticket.
* * *
In 1995 I was homeless in Chicago, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s loft at Grand and Wood. I spent hours each day, those first weeks, adrift in a strange town, drinking coffee at the old Wishbone on Grand and poring over the Reader classifieds looking for a job, an apartment, a map, a clue.
In the afternoons I walked the streets of greater Wicker Park—Grand to North; Ashland to Western—building a muscle memory of Chicago’s geography with every step. I didn’t go west of Western on my own back then. Back then, to a newbie, west of Western was the wild unknown, best approached only with a trusted guide.
One night we threw a party. My friends were moving out of the loft, moving on, and I needed to as well. We posted a sign in the kitchen, bold black Sharpie on butcher paper: MARTHA NEEDS A PLACE TO LIVE. It was a party with intention, at which I had to introduce myself to strangers over and over until one of them stuck. I moved into Carla’s apartment at Augusta and Damen, the perfect center of my daily wanderings, two weeks later. Was the seed of my life in Chicago planted there intentionally or by accident? It’s unclear.
* * *
For as long as there’ve been gardens, gardeners have pondered the epistemology of weeds.
Because a weed famously is defined by what it’s not. A weed is just a plant growing where it’s not wanted, right? A hardy plant with the tenacity to thrive, neglected, in inhospitable turf.
A weed competes for resources—for space, sunlight, and water—with more desirable, intentional plants. It provides shelter where pests can overwinter. Early-season weeds offer sustenance to sap-sucking aphids and other insects, enabling them to grow strong enough to attack your tomatoes when the time is right.
In the proper context a weed can be a tincture, or a tea, or the main ingredient in your pasta with wild ramp pesto. If it roots in the right place it can fix nitrogen in the soil or anchor unstable ground. In fact there’s a famous story that the first life to return to east London after the devastation of the Blitz came in the form of weeds. According to Richard Mabey, author of the book Weeds, by the end of the war, braken carpeted the nave of St. James Cathedral and ragwort scrambled up London Wall. The spread of the lowly rosebay willow herb was so thick and rapid it was welcomed with the nickname “bombweed.”
But what’s a weed on land no one cares about? In the loose taxonomy of common weeds, railway weeds are their own lowly category: tenacious, craven plants that have staked a claim to the roughest, most embattled turf around. Yarrow and curly dock. Prostrate pigweed, Russian pigweed, rough and smooth. Spotted knapweed, hoary cress, western goat’s beard, and toothed spurge. They all have names and properties, but in the ledger of urban improvement count for nothing.
* * *
Before construction started I walked the Bloomingdale Trail a lot, climbing the fence at Julia de Burgos Park over on Whipple and more often than not heading east. To the west, near where the tracks split at Ridgeway, vegetation gave way to a ground cover of small hostile rocks, and long-abandoned freight cars offered privacy for all manner of illicit human activities.
To the east, though, the path grew soft and lush, and where, from the street, the tracks seemed a dark mass of decaying concrete, from above they vibrated with the full flower of midsummer.
Accident or intention?
Seed or weed?
Which is better in the long run? Is it even possible to quantify their relative good? Intention builds bridges; accident coats them with rust. Intention drops bombs; accident turns the rubble green. Intention sows spinach; accident raises lamb’s quarters instead.
But, wait a minute. Weeds grow from seeds, same as radishes. Lamb’s quarters is just wild spinach. You can eat it, too, just as well.
* * *
My friend Amy used to live on Monticello, just south of the trail, and she swore for months that from her garden she could see trains passing by overhead. We scoffed. Those tracks haven’t been used for years! She was seeing ghosts, we teased, and Amy’s ghost train was a running refrain until, one day, I saw it, too—a freight train, real as steel, moving smoothly west.
I did some poking around and the most likely explanation is that the trains were delivering flour to a nearby industrial bakery that, though warned of the imminent redevelopment of the line, waited until the very last possible minute to make alternate shipping arrangements. The least likely, though most lovely, explanation is the story told by longtime trail neighbors, who swear that the circus used to use those tracks, sending carloads of animals toward the United Center, elephants and giraffes nodding to condo dwellers as they passed.
This, of course, is a fairy tale, though friends in the neighborhood swear to its truth. No record of the circus train exists with either the railway or the city. It turns out, in fact, that Amy’s ghost train may have been delivering neither bread nor beasts. Rather, in order for Canadian Pacific to hold on to the air rights above the tracks all these years, they were required by law to keep them in use. And
so every once in a while, for no reason, they’d run a train bearing nothing slowly by.
* * *
In April 2014 the Chicago Department of Transportation removed the old railway bridge at the Ashland Avenue end of the Bloomingdale Trail. It was taken to a work yard, scrubbed clean of rust, repainted, and then driven at dawn one mile west to Western, where it was reinstalled, and now connects the neighborhoods of Humboldt Park and Bucktown. The video of the bridge’s slow, slow transit, available online, reminds me of footage of the journey of Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” the 350-ton granite boulder Heizer—a reclusive land artist perhaps best known for his 1970 earthwork “Double Negative”—had excavated from a Southern California quarry in 2012 and trucked over ten nights, at a stately two miles per hour, to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Over those ten nights crowds of thousands gathered to marvel and clap, and others to mock and jeer. It’s just a rock, the skeptics scoffed. Why waste all this time and money staking a claim to art? But like “Double Negative”—which is basically two big gashes cut into the earth atop a remote Nevada mesa—the appeal of the big rock, which now sits suspended above a deep trench cut into the LACMA plaza, is as much about what’s not there as what is.
