What this project became for me was realizations of all that I don’t know, but also severe skepticism unchanged. Coal was never relevant to me or my life, until Trump started talking about it again, and I thought of the stories my mom mentioned when I was a little girl, when I had to research family history for a project in fourth grade. I’m not anti-coal, but when I hear rhetoric about how great it is--from anyone--I still immediately think about my family. I think about who they were besides their professions. Outside of their professions. And for those who work in American energy today, I wonder who they are outside the term “miner.” I wonder if their conditions are improving, and I hope they are.  But then I think of Leslie Jamison, in "Fog Count":

 

“Heading south down I-79, I feel the border between Maryland and West Virginia as smooth highway turning to sandpaper. The land is beautiful. Really beautiful—endless lush forests, pristine and unblemished, countless shades of green on hills layered back into drifts of fog. I start thinking maybe coal mining is just a notion someone had about West Virginia; or something they like to talk about on NPR. Maybe it’s just a theme for the twisted-steel sculpture garden I see to my left—Coal Country Miniature Golf—and not an actual series of scars in the earth. Because this place seems phenomenally unscarred, phenomenally pure. Freeway exits promise beautiful, luminous places: Whisper Mountain, Saltlick Creek, Cranberry Glades.

 

“I spend the night with Cat, a friend from college, who covers Fayette County for a local paper. Cat lives in a ramshackle house strung with Mexican fiesta flags and skirted by an apron of oddly comforting debris: a pile of old dresses, a bucket of crushed PBR cans, an empty tofu carton with its plastic flap crushed onto the dirt. Cat lives there with her boyfriend Drew—a veteran of anarchist communal living who now works deconstruction and salvage, taking apart empty homes and selling their flooring to hip bars in northern states—and Andrew, a community organizer who works on land reform…

 

"Cat and Drew tell me how to pronounce Fayetteville—like Fay-ut-vul—and they also tell me about bigger stuff, like how most of West Virginia’s forest has been cleared at some point since the 1870s—in multiple waves—for the sake of salt and oil and coal and lumber and gas. But it looks so green, I say. I tell them about my drive south—those lush hills, their lovely curves receding into the middle distance.

"Drew nods. Yep, he says. There’s no surface mining near the highways.
 

Potemkin Forests! I feel like an idiot. Cat tells me to look out for what they call beauty lines—rows of trees planted along hill crests to mask the vast moonscapes of mine-ravaged land beyond... I am being told about the wrongness right in front of me. Drew says that some of the land here has been mined so much it’s essentially on stilts, barely holding itself up. They call this land honeycombed. West Virginia is like a developing nation. It has so many resources and it has been screwed over again and again: locals used for labor; land used for riches; other people taking the profits."

 

 

 

I think of how my family was hurt, how we don't really have Pennsylvania Coal like we used to, because we ran out, and I just don't like it.