Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (10 page)

At Pentz's suggestion the group decides to pursue having the area declared as a land unsuitable for mining. To be approved as such, it has to be proven that an area is fragile or has historical and cultural significance, or that mining operations would affect
the area's renewable resources, such as the water or food supply, or could endanger lives or property.
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The group decides to pursue the argument of the land's natural significance after many of the residents immediately mention that there is an abundance of wildflowers on the ridges along Wilson Creek and Stephen's Branch.

This is what prompted May's trek up the mountain three times in two days. One of those days she was accompanied by a group of students from Berea College, who chose to spend their Easter holiday searching for rare plants on this mountainside.

May is thinking of these students when she reaches the High Rocks on a fine summer evening several weeks later. In particular, she recalls one of the students, who came to understand, once she got up to the High Rocks, “what it's really all about. This is what you lose when you blow up a mountain. If you know where you're from, then it's not hard to protect it. But people who haven't ever been up to the ridgetops, well, they have no idea of how amazing this forest is.” May touches one of the saplings that has sprouted up out of the rocky base of the cliffs. “It's not a hunk of rock. It's a living thing.”

May is someone who takes living things very, very seriously. As a nurse practitioner, she has a job that is in high demand, giving her the opportunity to live pretty much anywhere she would wish to. But she chose to come back to Eastern Kentucky after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1995 with a Master's in nursing.

“I feel a need to take care of my own people,” she says.

She does just that in her job as the nurse practitioner and clinical director of the Little Flower Free Clinic in nearby Hazard, which offers free medical service to the uninsured and the homeless by way of a federal grant.

“In a lot of parts of the country no doctor will take Medicaid, so they have to have clinics for people with Medicaid, for poor people. Health Care for the Homeless projects are a small piece of that funding,” May explains. “Within that funding, there's about
a hundred Health Care for the Homeless projects, all of which are in urban areas, and they're working out of store fronts and church basements and take care of people that live on the street and under bridges and stuff.”

The Little Flower Clinic is unique in that it is the first rural homeless clinic in the nation. The clinic operates on what May calls “a rural definition of homelessness,” which might not mean that a person is sleeping under a bridge or on the street, like the stereotype of a homeless person.

“But if you're sleeping in what used to be the family's chicken coop, you're homeless,” May says. “If you're sleeping in an abandoned school bus, you're homeless. If you're a family—say, a mom with three kids—and your husband's beat you and you go to your brother's so that there's five children and three adults in a two-bedroom house, you're homeless.”

May says that some in the area question the validity of the clinic because they don't think of a rural place as having homeless people. “It's just that because we're hillbillies we think, oh, your family takes care of you,” she says. “Well, they do. It's just that sometimes the family's not able to take care of you, and it puts the whole extended family into crisis.”

The clinic is also supported by several churches in the area, and is named for St. Theresa the Little Flower, a revered Carmelite nun whose religious philosophy is best epitomized by her most famous quote: “I can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

“We're down with that whole principle,” May says. “That's what we are.”

May has gotten so caught up in talking that she's refrained from going on to the top of the High Rocks, which she has been waiting to do all day. She takes in the magnificent collection of huge boulders and exposed cliff-face that look as if they have been stacked together for a giant's playhouse, accented by shoots of mountain laurel. The High Rocks are perched at the very top of the ridge, rising some sixty feet above the mountain's summit.
Their daunting size and stark beauty suggest a remarkable, open-air church, one assembled by God's own hands.

May moves up the rocks silently until she gets about halfway up. There she pauses, keeping her hand against the cool, gray skin of the rock. “I always think of my father, coming up here when he was little,” she says, sighs, and then moves on.

Once May is settled on one of the cliffs' jagged edges, she looks out toward the land where her family has lived for generations. Her view is obstructed by thousands of trees, but this is a hindrance she is glad to live with. Somehow, though, May seems to look past the billions of leaves and all those swaying limbs. She is looking not only past the trees but also back over the years, back more than 100 years ago.

“In the late 1800s, my great-grandfather, Felix May, owned half of the holler that's nearest the mouth, here on Wilson Creek,” May begins. “He worked rolling logs down the river to Cattletsburg, and one day he fell in. So in 1904, his wife, Suzie May, had nine children and one on the way, when he died of pneumonia,” she says.

In those days, property rights reverted to the brothers instead of the wife. Suzie May became destitute while the brothers were suddenly very land-rich. Apparently they offered Suzie very little, if any, assistance. Despite the odds, she and her children survived, and she never remarried.

“She had a big bunch of boys who worked hard and helped her,” May says, shaking her head at the determination of her ancestors. “She even had other family that came in and lived with her, and she had to help them, too. She raised lots of kids, not just her own, and eventually the land all got divided up and some sold out and now there's only about 100 acres left in the family.”

Sometimes, May admits, she thinks about what it would be like to lose this mountain. “But then I can't think about it,” she says, quickly, waving her hands as if to usher these thoughts away. “It makes me feel like I'm falling off the edge of the earth, to think of that. It's too painful. So the thing to do is to hope it doesn't
happen,” she says. “I realize that fighting the coal company is like David and Goliath, but I have to keep hope.”

So that's what she holds onto. And every once in a while she reminds herself that in the face of impossible odds, David ended up winning his fight.

May doesn't understand people who can't see what's wrong with mountaintop removal. At the suggestion that there might be another side to the fight—say, a positive side to the mining practice—she grows fidgety, wringing her hands, a scornful grin on her face.

“It's morally wrong,” she says. “Because every mountain in Eastern Kentucky is ours, really. Our heritage. In some cases, the only legacy we have. Whenever they blast another mountain, they're blasting away the future: the lumber, the watershed, the wildlife. Tourism, sustainable communities, everything. There hain't no putting it back,” May says, laughing—maybe to keep from crying. “When we treat mountains like they're expendable, well, all I know is that it all boils down to short-time profits for the coal company and no justice at all for the people. The coal companies are all the time talking about overburden, you know,” May says.
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“Well, we're just overburden. Their job is to remove overburden and retrieve the coal. We're the first level of overburden, so we can't let them remove us, we can't give in.”

May keeps looking at the trees, perhaps imagining them all pushed into a valley fill so that gigantic draglines can remove the overburden and make way for the extraction of coal. Then she turns, clenching her jaw, and her face is filled with defiance. She is fierce, determined, ready to fight.

“I just feel like we're being assaulted from all sides. That's what it's like, to live here,” May says. “They're taking out gas and timber and coal all the time. There should be some balance. I believe they ought to be able to mine, but they want to level everything, and I'm not going to sit by and watch that happen. People ought to be able to live.”

May looks up at the purpling sky, wonder playing out over her
face. “Lord, it's getting late! I guess we ought to go back down,” she says, with resignation. She hops off the edge of the rock, calls Rufus, and ambles her way back down the mountain.

Bev May talking…

When I was growing up we kept a garden, we raised cattle. What we had to eat and what was put into the freezer came out of the garden. And then we got our eggs, of course, from my Uncle Speed right next door there; he had a magnificent gas-heated chicken house. Did I tell you that he didn't have an inside toilet but he had gas heat in his chicken house? You know, because there's some things you ought not be doing in the house, right? So the man had priorities.

When I was little, living off the land was still very much critical to our well-being as a family. Having the land to garden and to hunt and to play in was just a huge part of my coming up. I can remember—we're talking in the seventies—I can remember my Uncle Speed plowing with mules, but I can remember a guy even plowing with an ox. There was still that sense of the preindustrial time. We still had the remnants of that, the good parts.

And it was also interesting because Maytown—the closest town to Wilson Creek—was there as a community long before there was a coal industry. So I feel really blessed I didn't grow up in a coal camp. I grew up in the woods with a real wonderful sense of where I belonged.

Uncle Speed died in the seventies and so my parents, me, and my brother and his children are the last of the family that are still on Wilson Creek. And of course all the others have moved off to other places or passed on.

I was real fortunate, I think, because me and my brother were the only cousins on both sides of the family to get to be raised as hillbillies. The rest of them on my mom's side, they went to Detroit and to Florida. And on my father's side they went to Lexington.

The ironic thing is that one of the reasons they moved off was in hopes of having a better education for their children, but I'm the only one on my mother's side of the family that ever graduated from college. There was no other option around here. You had to go to college. I mean you
had
to: either that or be poor. So that's one of the things I really appreciate about being a hillbilly is it gave me the little oomph, the little push to go to college. I think my cousins had other ways of getting work, and I knew full well that I didn't. I had to go to school. And the other thing that I learned from going to school around here is that nobody hands you your education on a silver platter. You've got to claim it for yourself. And so if you know that you can figure the rest of it out.

I think that when I was growing up that the people that had the biggest impact on me—now this may degenerate into some storytelling—were the ones who had been in the community their whole lives and had stayed put and had a real sense of commitment. I think that made the biggest impression on me.

As a nurse practitioner, I've got like twelve years of experience and I could work anyplace in the country that I wanted to, literally, but I want to be here because it's just so much more meaningful. I think I'm more effective because I'm a hillbilly. I'm taking care of my people.

And the same thing I think applies to being an environmentalist. If you know where you're from and what the stakes are, then it's not that hard to do whatever you have to do to protect it. And I do think that people that haven't been up to the ridgetops probably just have no idea of the richness and the beauty and the hundreds of little varieties of wildflowers and just the amazing thing that this forest is. And if you haven't seen it I don't know how I'd begin to explain it to anybody or how to make them value it. Because unless you've got out there and seen it, it's impossible, I think, to really understand what gets lost whenever you blow up a mountain. It's not a hunk of rock. It's a living thing that gets blown up.

Speaking of people that stay in one place, there was a librarian in our school named Shirley Stewart—she's still living—and she was a really dedicated educator. Maytown High School was a tiny little school. One of the things I remember is that there was one child in the whole school whose father was obviously black and the rest of the family was white. One little black child in the whole school, and she subscribed to
Ebony
magazine so that he would get some little connection there culturally. I think she helped him…he went to Antioch. Was it Antioch or Oberlin? Shoot, Oberlin, I think. She helped get him into college. And he's a lawyer now. That was the poorest family in the whole county. She was that kind of an educator. She was very independent minded, a strong woman.

One day at church—I was probably in about my freshman year of high school, I'd say—and it was the time that the Equal Rights Amendment was trying to be passed, and it came up for ratification in Kentucky. The opponents to this told all the preachers “This is going to mean unisex bathrooms, this is going to mean women fighting on the front lines of the army, this is going to be the end of Christian civilization as we know it.” And our poor little pitiful country preacher stood up before the church and mouthed whatever it was that the state representative had told him. And Shirley Stewart stood up—I mean, he was doing this from the pulpit—she stood up and said, “Now preacher, I don't think we have enough information about this yet.” She did it real respectful. It was the most amazing thing. I mean, you do
not
talk back to the preacher in Eastern Kentucky. You just don't. But she said, “Now this is what I've read about it. I don't think it means there'll be unisex bathrooms, I think it just means that women will be given equal status to men, and I just think we need to get some more facts about this before we make any resolutions on this.”

It was succinct, it was respectful, it was erudite. I was probably about fourteen or fifteen. If there's a moment that just was defining for me, that was it. It was like, Wow, you can stand up
and talk back to the preacher if you have your facts straight, and you can challenge authority.