Environmental Hazards

Exeter is a hamlet in Southwest Virginia, whose quaint Old English name belies this grim outpost of the Stonega Coal Mining Company. One day when I was in my teens, my father and I headed out of Tennessee into the gray, damp winter of his boyhood hometown, and I got a look at how he'd grown up. I recall finding the area so devoid of beauty and color, so oppressed by poverty and suspicion, that I wondered how anybody could stand it.

His family had been Hungarian immigrants who – along with Germans, Poles, Czechs, Italians and a number of other nationalities – populated every ridge and valley in those anthracite-rich Appalachian hills. He told stories about helping his grandmother mash dandelions for winemaking, of throwing carbide bombs in the woods with his buddies and of hanging by white-knuckled fingers off railroad trestles while trains thundered overhead (if you fell, you were a sissy). You know… kid stuff.

So one pretty weekend this past October, I decided to rediscover the place. Happily, I found out the road to Exeter was actually beautiful, discounting the occasional contortion of mining machine works cluttering the Appalachian landscape in autumn. But I didn't resent their appearance, because if it weren't for those mines polluting the environment and blasting off hilltops, there would be a locust-storm of real estate developers doing it in the name of gated communities, theme parks and strip-mall parking lots. We lose no matter what, but somehow the human soul seems less polluted in the eyes of a miner focused on feeding his family than in the eyes of a developer looking to fatten up his portfolio.

Hey, hippies, chill out. This is not an apologia for mountaintop removal. (I'm agin' it.) This is just a story about how I almost got arrested for being an EarthFirst! ally on a day intended for a little personal archaeology.

I arrived in Big Stone Gap with a camera-toting Frenchman. I expected to find something like the Depression-era charm of a Walker Evans montage of tarpaper shacks, wallpaper made out of newspaper, and dull-eyed, barefoot locals strumming banjos and grinning at our purdy mouths. Screen doors would slam shut as our VW rolled past, and suspicious slits of eyes would follow my taillights over the crests of hills, along crumbling pavement laid during the New Deal. And everything would be in black and white.

Instead, the road leading into Big Stone Gap was crowded with what looked like scores of cars and people buzzing about like worker bees. Something was going on, and it was all in vivid color. Downhill in town, all was quiet and genteel, a scene more out of To Kill A Mockingbird than Deliverance (much more). But Exeter was not on any map. After a brief visit to the Harry Meador Coal Mining Museum and its very smart, informative and gracious curator, we had directions to Exeter.

Less than a half-hour later, I was standing with my companion in the dusty gravel past the gate to the Exeter coal mine. I don't know its exact name because there were no signs. There was, in fact, no sign of life save for an oxygen generator hissing and gasping against the backdrop of a seemingly otherworldly concussion of large ugly metal equipment, clanging under the sunny October sky. I was almost surprised when a warm-blooded human being ambled out of a trailer office.

He was short and round and no-nonsense. His eyes narrowed on us; his nostrils flared. He needed a Kleenex, but I sure wasn't saying so. My boyfriend had pulled out his camera and taken a couple of shots already, and the round man had apparently spotted him. He slowed to a stop as we approached each other. He glowered at the camera, then the foreigner and then me.

“May I help you?” he asked exactly as might a union delegate say, “Get the fuck outta here.”

“Well, see,” I sputtered, “my grandfather, he was… ” blah, blah, blah. “And my father, he… ” blah, blah, blah.

Round man interrupted me. “We've got activists in the area today.”

“What kind of activists?” I asked. I feigned astonishment. Activists? What's an activist?

He narrowed his narrow little eyes practically shut and said, “The destructive kind.”

Oh, shit, I thought. So that's what was going on just the other side of Big Stone Gap. I stopped a chuckle. Those nutty EarthFirst! kids were at it again.

The round man began explaining that we were trespassers, and he would have to call the police if we didn't leave, when suddenly his eyes widened on my green shirt, something I'd bought at Mast with the words “Live With Nature” emblazoned on the front. Then he looked at the guy who'd been taking pictures, and who judiciously hadn't said a word. A French accent would have sent this dude calling the cops for sure. The round man's nostrils winged out and in – an impressive nasal span of several millimeters – as he deliberated over the countenance of the man with the camera, the European loafers and the look of someone who had never knowingly consumed a Kraft American single.

“What's that for?” he finally asked, pointing at the camera.

“Just, you know, snapshots of history.” I smiled again, my best Scarlett O'Hara. I did not say, “Actually, we're recording the location of machine works to be wired for future detonation. It's part of our larger eco-terrorist master plan.”

No, I did not say that. I just smiled for the interval of the few seconds it would have taken me to say that and get us thrown in a paddy wagon. Then I said, “We'll leave.”

“Good idea,” said the round man.

So we left. And as the VW wound around hairpin curves and kicked gravel off the same ridges my father had climbed as a boy, I thought the town prettier than I remembered, but the suspicion still ran as deep as the deepest mine.

Eco-terrorist out.