Mountain People

      In early January 2005, I received an email about a new campaign against strip mining from Bo Webb, a coalfield resident fighting mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia. I had first met Bo the previous summer, when I was trying to write about MTR and couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the hills and valleys of the coalfield landscape are similar in scale to those near the Coal River, where Bo lives, and I knew about the smaller-scale strip mining of decades past: My great-grandfather’s farm had been stripped half a century ago. When I read about MTR, I couldn’t make sense of how such huge mining operations could take place in such an intimate jumble of small and swervy mountains. I needed to see it for myself, and when I sought guidance from Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), a group of local people seeking to end MTR and sustain their community, Bo volunteered to show me around.

      Bo was born in West Virginia, he later told me, as we sat by the river at his house, “in a coal camp house, near Whitesville, about eleven miles from here. My dad worked at a coal mine, and he got paid in scrip, and we used that scrip at the company store and paid grossly inflated prices for all the products.” When coal’s boom-and-bust cycle went bust in the mid-1950s, Bo’s dad went to work in Cleveland, but the rest of the family stayed in West Virginia. As soon as his father could come back and work at another coal mine, “he jumped on that, because he loved the mountains.” During another bust, in 1960, he went back to Cleveland and started working for General Motors. “So we moved to Cleveland. I was twelve years old.” After graduating from high school there, Bo joined the Marines, was sent to war in Vietnam in January 1968, and came back to Cleveland the following year. “I got an apprenticeship as a tool and die maker,” he says. “I had to have a career, and I didn’t want to be a coal miner.

      “The whole time I was in Cleveland we always came ‘back home’ [to West Virginia] on the weekend and holidays. And I continued to do that after I came back from the Marines. I brought my wife right here, to this property—this was my grandmother’s property—and she sat on this rock right over here [by the river], and she fell in love with this place.” After his grandmother died, Bo bought the land. He put a mobile home on it, for vacations, in the mid-1980s.

      Meanwhile, he and his wife, Joanne, had a son and a daughter. In 1981 he’d started his own machining business, still in Cleveland. After a fire in his shop in 1998, Bo decided, “Let’s move back to West Virginia and relax. I just want to fish and hunt, and I’m young enough to enjoy it. I’m not going to have any elaborate type of lifestyle, but we’ll be OK. We’ll be fine.” So they moved here in February 2001.

      “That first summer, boy I enjoyed this place. Had a big garden. I kept hearing this thing about mountaintop removal, and every now and then I’d hear these little rumbles in the mountains. I started doing some research on the internet about it, and lo and behold I found out they were blowing my mountains away, and they were moving closer. And I heard about Coal River Mountain Watch.” Bo began helping them out from time to time.

      Bo called the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) after a flood in 2001, asking for a water test at the river in front of his house, “because I was getting a funny smell, and all the smallmouth bass in this river—they’re gone. I used to be able to catch three-, four-pound smallmouth.” A few miles up the river, there’d been a blowout from an old underground mine, and all the mud and whatnot from that blowout came downriver to Bo. (Blasting for MTR often cracks previously stable abandoned underground mines and hillsides so that water that’s collected in the old mines comes gushing out.) Bo complained for three weeks before someone from the DEP came out. “That’s the response we get,” Bo says, “because we don’t count.” According to the guy from the DEP, the stream’s pH was a little low, “but he never explained anything,” Bo says, and of course three weeks earlier the reading might have been a lot different. “The bass are not back yet. Last year [2004] I saw a few fingerling. It killed the fish.” This got Bo riled up and ready to fight.

      It never occurred to Bo not to fight MTR’s effects on his home place. “I think that’s because I got out of here,” he says. He moved to Cleveland when he was still young, “and shed the oppression, the atmosphere here. I guess the worst type of oppression is when you don’t know you’re oppressed, so you just follow along. I’ve heard it many times: ‘Well, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it always will be. The coal company’s gonna get the coal and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ I don’t come from that school—especially [after] being in the service and being in Vietnam, and thinking I was doing something for the country. And I come back and it looks to me like the country’s turned its back on its citizens, and it made me angry. I saw a lot of violations of human rights in Vietnam, and I started looking at this, and it reminded me of that. So I wanted to do something about it.”

      When I met up with Bo in the summer of 2004, our first stop was Marsh Fork Elementary School, a short drive downriver from Bo’s home. There we saw a coal silo looming over the school, close to the edge of the schoolyard, part of a coal processing operation run by a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Coal dust and the toxic chemicals used in this facility’s method for processing coal settle on the playground and seep in through the school’s ventilation system. Several children and teachers have contracted unusual cancers, Bo tells me, and headaches, respiratory problems, and other illness are far too common among the schoolchildren there. All this is hard enough to believe. What were the government officials who allowed this to happen thinking? What were the coal company executives and their lawyers thinking? But worse still, right behind the processing plant, just a few hundred yards from the school, a 385-foot-high earthen dam holds more than a billion gallons of slurry, a black, chemical-laden liquid waste from coal processing. (Julia Bonds, founder of CRMW, calls this “waste holding back waste,” as the dam itself is made from MTR rubble.) If the dam were to fail—and Bo tells me local workers who helped build the dam say its construction is faulty—the wall of escaping slurry would roar downstream right over the school.

      Bad as all of this is, at first look it seems like a limited and manageable problem: Relocate the processing plant, drain the slurry, remove the dam, and the school and the valley below should be safe. A stranger driving through the valley might think that the school problem is the worst of MTR effects here. You can still see mostly forested mountainsides on either side of the road that runs along the river. Coal facilities and little towns that look rather down-at-the-heels appear at intervals along the way—but this is southern West Virginia, deep in Appalachia,