Saving Wonder

by Mary Knight

  “Down deep, though?” Papaw sits with his pipe resting on his knee, staring off at the mountain. “I was keeping it from you for another reason, one I’m not very proud of.”

  “What was that, Papaw?”

  “Curley, my boy, I was plumb tired—worn out from grief and the thought of raising a boy to manhood. I’m ashamed to say it, but in some ways, I just caved in.”

  This latest revelation jolts me more than all of the preceding news combined. I can’t imagine my papaw caving in or being ashamed of anything.

  He taps down the smoldering tobacco in his pipe with the tip of his finger. “My old friend, your teacher, the irascible Mr. Amons, was quick to judge me on that. Oh, man. He and I had many a lively discussion, if you can call them that, on this very porch at night after you’d gone to bed.”

  “He wanted you to sue the pants off Big Coal?” That part isn’t hard to guess, Mr. A being an old hippie and all.

  “Of course he did. Said they had it coming. Said it was my civic duty. Heck, he said it was my sacred duty, to God and country and all that.” Papaw snaps another match. It flares and he gets the bowl of tobacco glowing again.

  “What did you say to that, Papaw?” I’m imagining Mr. A sitting on this very swing attacking the porch railing with his yardstick. Thwack. Thwack.

  “I told him I had a familial duty above all others.”

  “Familial?”

  “Duty to family. Duty to you.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “I recall it was something I’d rather not repeat.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh.” Papaw laughs, spewing smoke in all directions. “That ornery ol’ coot doesn’t mince words. I’ve got to admit, though, his verdict still rings in my ears.” He hangs his head, chin to chest, like he’s listening to Mr. A all over again. “After all is said and done, maybe I lacked the hutzpah to fight.”

  This last bit makes my skin crawl. I hate seeing Papaw like this, so I try to steer the conversation to a place where we can shut the door on it.

  “What happens now, Papaw? Now that Mr. Tiverton has taken over?”

  “Ah, there’s the rub. My agreement was with Barkley Coal, you see. And since we settled it all with a handshake, there’s nothing that says the new company has to honor it. Barkley’s been mining these mountains for over fifty years. I never thought about them leaving. When Antsy came to tell me about the sale, I didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in heck that Tiverton would keep the payments up. That is, until you told me about that little exchange you had with him yesterday.”

  My thoughts shoot back to that moment by the door, how Mr. Tiverton seemed to know something about me, how before that he had said he was sorry for my daddy’s death. Surely he knows about Ma and little Zeb, too. Maybe I helped put a face to all that pain.

  “I wish this conversation could have waited until after I talk with him.” Papaw stood up from his rocker and stretched. “I don’t want you to fret about it, you hear? No matter what, you and I are going to come out shining, like the sun when it climbs over Red Hawk Mountain.”

  As if on cue, the whole holler lights up. A blinding light glistens off the morning dew. I think about Papaw and all he’s been holding, keeping all of this coal business to himself for the longest time. Maybe that c in front of chutzpah stands for courage, silent like a mountain.

  “One more thing, Curley.” Papaw reaches for my hand to help me out of the swing. “Part of my agreement with Barkley—and I’m sure it would be the same with Tiverton, too—was never to speak out against them. That would extend to you.”

  I think about JD’s dad in his Indiana sweatshirt getting ready to watch a basketball game, and I feel my hate for Big Coal losing its edge now that it has a face. Papaw hangs his arm over my shoulder as we take one last look at our mountain before going in.

  “No problem,” I say.

  Hutzpah (from the Hebrew, chutzpah)—noun

  : bravery, often in the face of tremendous odds; boldness; audacity

  “Hey, y’all. Whitney Calhoun here, but you can call me Ranger Whit. You must be the Tiverton party. Welcome aboard!”

  It’s 6:30 on a cold and rainy Saturday morning when Jules, JD, and I pile into a rickety, converted school bus to join the elk tour. The ranger’s voice is so cheerful it hurts.

  True to his word, Mr. Tiverton has prearranged our meet-up with the tour at an abandoned gas station several miles outside the state park. He even drove us here in his Cadillac SUV. I don’t mean to put on airs or anything, but leaving his Caddy for this drafty old bus? I get the feeling I’ll be longing for heated seats by the end of the day.

  As we file past him, Ranger Whit turns and addresses the rest of his passengers, a sea of mostly gray and balding heads. “Hey, everybody, meet Kentucky’s future park rangers!”

  I hear JD mutter, “Over your dead body,” as he follows me and Jules up the narrow center aisle. To counter the moodiness of his late arrivals or perhaps to embarrass us further, Ranger Whit says, “Hey, you guys can earn a ranger badge today if you stay alert!”

  As the three of us squeeze into the last remaining seat at the back of the bus, our tour guide crunches the bus into gear and pulls out of the abandoned parking lot. Soon we’re bouncing our way to what he’s calling an “active and reclaimed mining site” about fifteen miles or so into the hills to get a good look at a local elk herd. I say “bouncing” because our location over the rear wheel well has us riding every bump, hump, and pothole like we’re roped to a bucking bronco. Add to that the noxious smell of exhaust leaking in from some rusty hole somewhere, and my morning grits are lumping up in my gut something awful.

  By some miracle of fate, I’m sitting between Jules and JD, who, I might as well tell you, have become a hot item at school. Some days it makes me sicker than others to see them holding hands in the hall or JD leaning into Jules at her locker, but I’m starting to take the long view with Papaw’s help. I already know that JD wants out of Kentucky something fierce; he’s told me as much when we’re working on our project during study hall and Jules is in French. He says not to tell Jules because she hates to hear him talking about it. I want to tell her, but I don’t. I figure I’m staying in these mountains forever, so I can wait JD out.

  Still, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this day, feeling like a tagalong and all. Add to that the miserable weather and I’d much rather be home helping Papaw in his shop or playing harmonica up in my room. Sitting in the middle like this, though, has me thinking. Maybe they’re not tied at the hip like I thought. Maybe Jules is having second thoughts already. Maybe, just maybe, Jules would rather be sitting by me, us being lifelong friends and all.

  JD pulls out his cell phone, which has a skull and crossbones on the back cover. He’s wearing a pair of thin black gloves cut off at the tips so he can text. I swear his thumbs are faster than greased lightning. He taps SEND, spits out some swear words, and then taps again harder.

  Jules lets out a big huff and leans over me. “Give it up, JD. How many times do I have to tell you, there’s no coverage out here?”

  He glares back at her. A black leather band tooled with silver studs slips down his wrist. He shakes it back over the cuff of his leather jacket and keeps on tapping.

  “He’s obsessed with getting in touch with his buddies back in Indiana,” she says. “Like they’re his lifeline or something, like he’s going to die without them.”

  That’s when it hits me like a truckload of manure. They’re having their first tiff. A low-grade current of dark energy is streaming between them, and I’m smack-dab in the middle of it. Great.

  I decide to back out of their little drama, seeing how I’m not even supposed to be in it. Besides, I know better than to make a comment, for or against, when Jules is in a funk like this, so I lean back and pretend to catch some shut-eye. I hear JD shove his phone back into his pack and sigh. About fifteen minutes later, Ranger Whit comes on the intercom to fill us in on wh
at we’re about to see.

  “A little way up this hill here, we’re going to turn onto a mining road as we enter property owned by the Tiverton Coal Corporation. This site recently changed hands, so it’s kind of a big deal that the park service still has permission to drive over their land.”

  I nudge JD, expecting him to be proud of his pa for his generosity and all, but he just smirks. I’m hoping Mr. Tiverton shows that same generosity to Papaw and me when Papaw goes to talk to him next week.

  “Keep your eyes open, y’all. Elk like to hang out on mountaintop removal sites such as the one we’re about to see, where the land has been reclaimed. The mining company is responsible for resurfacing the mining site after it’s been stripped of coal, filling in some of the valleys with the leftover rock and debris and then planting new vegetation. Turns out, elk love these new grassy plateaus, so you’ll often see them congregating there.”

  We turn onto the gravel mining road. NO TRESPASSING signs are posted everywhere. The intercom clicks on again as Ranger Whit continues his lecture. I should probably be taking notes, but the drone of the bus engine is making me sleepy.

  “As some of you probably know, elk disappeared from Kentucky around the time of the Civil War, mostly due to overhunting. Starting in 1997, however, just over fifteen hundred elk from out west were transplanted to eastern Kentucky over a five-year period. With no natural predators and a ninety percent breeding rate, those first elk herds have grown to over ten thousand. Isn’t that something?”

  “Wow,” JD says under his breath as he elbows me. “That’s a lot of you-know-what.” And I just about bust a gut trying not to laugh. Jules rolls her eyes at both of us.

  “Male elk grow to about eight hundred and fifty pounds. Females reach about six fifty,” the ranger rambles on. “With our mild winters and plentiful vegetation, these Kentucky elk are already outweighing their western cousins. All that chomping is kind of a headache for the coal company, though, since the elk can be kind of rough on the grass and shrubs. You’ll see what I mean here in a few minutes, if we’re lucky and the herd is where I saw it yesterday.”

  Ranger Whit starts to put the microphone back in its stand, but thinks better of it. “Now, I know some of you out-of-state folks might not think too kindly about coal mining, but these elk are proof positive there’s a lot of good that comes from it, too. Besides that, here in Kentucky, coal puts food on our tables—mine, for instance, when I was growing up.”

  JD snickers. “I wonder how much my old man pays him to say that.”

  My thoughts flash on Ma and little Zeb drowning in a river of sludge because of all that helpful coal, and then just as quick, a memory of fishing with my daddy on a mountain lake pops into my mind. I remember him showing me how to hold a rod and “tease a fish.” I can still feel the warmth of his rugged hand over mine.

  “Ranger Whit?” My voice cracks as I try to make myself heard over the whining of the bus’s engine pulling us up the mountain. He looks up and nods at me through the oversized rearview mirror. “Is there a lake near here … where people fish?”

  “Are you talking about Crystal Lake?” he asks.

  “Maybe. There was a pier. They kept the lake well stocked.” I remember the first fish I ever caught, a speckled trout that was too small to keep. Daddy made me throw it back and I cried.

  “Yeah, that was a great place. It’s just about a mile from here. Can’t fish it anymore, though.” Ranger Whit is pretty much yelling his answers back to me as the bus continues to grind its way up the hill. “Things kind of died off.”

  “How come?” We pass a gigantic coal truck parked on the side of the road—each tire the size of a car, its coal bed as deep as a swimming pool.

  “Not sure.” He shakes his head. “Could have had something to do with runoff from the local mine.”

  “Another benefit of coal?” I blurt out before I can catch myself.

  Ranger Whit shrugs his shoulders up to his ears like it baffles him, too, and I feel bad for making that smart-alecky comment. I’m sure he’s not any happier about the fate of that lake than I am. I’m starting to feel sorry for myself—I mean, even my good memories are becoming tainted by the likes of coal—when JD raises his fist.

  “Dude. That was awesome.”

  I’m surprised by his praise, but I bump his fist anyway, which makes me feel kind of cool, maybe for the first time in my life. Even Jules is grinning like I passed some kind of test.

  Eventually, the road levels out and a vast, lunar-like landscape opens up before us—solid, gray rock and hard-packed dirt as far as the eye can see. There are mountains in the distance, hinting green, but the stony wound in front of us is so wide and gaping that it looks like God Himself swiped away the mountaintop with one mighty claw—if He had one, that is, and I’m not saying He does.

  Ranger Whit opens the bus’s folding door and we all pile out, approximately twenty-five senior citizens, three scruffy kids, and a park ranger who’s trying his best to see the good in everything.

  “Over there.” Ranger Whit points east, where a red sun is starting to cut through the rainy mist. I think maybe he’s pointing at some elk, so I raise Papaw’s binoculars up to my eyes and squint. No elk. Just a skyscraper-tall crane and a whole lot of rock.

  “That’s the active mining site,” he explains. “See that contraption? That’s what they call a dragline. It’s the machine that digs into the rock to expose the coal. It weighs up to eight million pounds; it’s twenty stories tall, and its base is as big as a gymnasium. Isn’t that something?”

  Jules tugs at my elbow. “Curley, are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “Yeah, dude,” JD adds, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost or something. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen MTR before?”

  At first I think he’s talking in text, like OMG or LOL, but then I put it together. Mountaintop removal. “Sure, I’ve seen it.” I shrug like it’s no big deal. After all, I don’t want him to think I’ve lost my “cool.”

  Truth is, the closest mountaintop removal site to Wonder Gap is the one with that faulty sludge pond a couple of mountains over from us, but I’ve never seen it up close. When I was a little guy, Mama told me there were monsters up there; she didn’t want me going near it. Later, a couple years after she died, I hiked partway up, but only got as far as the company gate. I didn’t have the stomach to cross the line.

  JD pulls a camcorder out of his backpack and hands it to me. “Here, Curley, my man. It looks like you could use something to do.”

  Jules adds, “Yeah, Curley. Get some video for our project. I bet you’ll be good at that.” She touches JD on the arm as she’s smiling at me. Now that the sun is shining, I guess their little spat has evaporated along with the rain.

  JD has just finished showing me how to zoom in and out (we practice on the dragline) when Ranger Whit spins around and points. “There! Look!” Off in the distance against a hill, a bull elk and six lady elk are gingerly picking their way through a field of spindly trees and shrubs.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” an older woman about the age of my Aunt Gertie whispers, like she’s in church or something. Other folks are grabbing their binoculars or snapping pictures.

  Jules is standing on her tiptoes, something she does when she’s excited. “Curley! I think that’s our elk!”

  I can’t imagine how that could be, but I say, “Gosh, Jules, I think you’re right.” Her use of the word our has me wishing we were back in our tree.

  “See how the elk have shredded the bark off those saplings?” The ranger nods. “That’s a reclamation site, where they’ve planted vegetation after removing the coal, but I guess the elk don’t know it. They think those trees and bushes were planted just for them.”

  A man in a camouflage jacket counts the points on the bull’s rack. “Man, that would look good over my fireplace!” His wife hits him on the shoulder.

  “Well, you might be doing us a favor.” Ranger Whit scans the herd through his b
inoculars. “Since these elk were introduced to eastern Kentucky, their numbers have exploded, as I already mentioned. Fish and Wildlife now allows about one thousand hunting permits a year, but some say that’s not enough. Some locals think elk are a nuisance, invading their yards, eating up their gardens, and causing accidents on county roads.” He lets the field glasses drop to his chest. “But I think they’re beautiful. I never get tired of seeing them.”

  I’m filming now. In the viewfinder, I’ve got Ranger Whit in the foreground with the elk herd in the distance. For some reason, it’s easier to stomach the torn-up landscape when I’m viewing it from behind the lens, where the scene is squared off and small.

  “So where did these elk come from … originally, I mean?” I lean in so the microphone will pick up Ranger Whit’s answer. I’m thinking I can get most of my research done while we’re up here. I give a quick glance around for JD and Jules, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

  “Good question! These are actually mountain elk, and they come from several western states, such as Kansas and Montana. They were shipped to Kentucky in livestock vans much like you’d ship cattle.”

  “So you might say they were invited? Like out-of-town guests?”

  “Very much so. The Department of Fish and Wildlife figured elk would be good for tourism and, of course, the hunting industry. If the success of these elk tours is any indication, I’d say they were right.”

  “But now we’re hunting them down because they’ve become a nuisance, even though we invited them?” That comment would certainly earn another fist bump from JD, if only he were around to hear it. Where are those two, anyway?

  The ranger fixes his gaze on the ground, stirring the dirt with his boots. The rest of the tour folks have scattered, some to get a closer look at the elk, some to get a closer look at the mining site.

  “Well, we didn’t anticipate how quickly they’d adjust, son. Before the Eastern elk became extinct, cougars and wolves were their natural predators, as well as humans. But these elk here have no predators except for us. That’s why, when you need to control a population like this, hunting is so helpful.”