One September he came to Martha’s Vineyard, where I live. It was a beautiful cold gray day with the wind out of the north and long horizontal rain clouds hanging low over a rough dark-green sea. He was standing on the front porch when I returned from a walk with my two small sons. He had simply appeared, unannounced, not wishing, as he said, to cause us any bother. He and Mrs. Richter had already found accommodations in one of the hotels that were still open. He wanted to see the children, he said, to see where we live. But in less than a day he grew terribly concerned over the fact that the ferryboats were not running on schedule because of the weather. He had no appointments to keep on the mainland and there was so much that we wanted him to see on the island. But in another day he was gone. Perhaps he had accomplished what he had come for; perhaps his uneasiness had to do with being separated from the mainland, the literal land mass of the continent. He had never gone to Europe, I know, because he felt it would hamper him, hurt him as a writer. Mexico was all right because Mexico was part of the same land mass.
I saw him last in Pine Grove three months before his death. He had been bothered by heart trouble but looked fine. He was born on October 13, 1890, and 13 was a number he liked. The number he did not like was 30, which in newspaper work is used to mark the end of a story. He died of heart failure in 1968, on October 30.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man
AS FAR AS anyone knows, the first white man to settle in Letcher County, Kentucky, was a North Carolinian by the name of James Caudill, who came over Pine Mountain in 1792, raised a cabin near the headwaters of the Kentucky River, and became, as a state historical marker near the site proclaims, “progenitor of a large, widespread mountain family.”
Immense changes have come to eastern Kentucky in the time since, but in Letcher County, and particularly in Whitesburg, the county seat, Caudills still abound. Their names figure regularly in the columns of Whitesburg’s weekly Mountain Eagle (“It Screams!”) and take up most of one page in the phone book; they own lumberyards, run for judge, mine coal, win scholarships, get killed on the highways, get married (to one another, on occasion), bear and rear more of their line; and if they happen to be born with more than ordinary ability or ambition, chances are excellent that they will one day pack up and leave Letcher County, thereby carrying the Caudill blood ever farther afield. The reasons so many leave are plain enough to see: poverty of the kind that has become synonymous with the word Appalachia, inadequate education, few jobs, and the grim prospect that the one thing left of any real value or beauty—the land—is being rapidly ripped to shreds by what is euphemistically known as surface mining.
But there is one very able and talented Caudill—a great-great-great-grandson of the original James—who has not only elected to stay on in Letcher County but has for years been fighting to save what remains of that Cumberland Mountains domain of his forebears and to bring to national attention the plight of the people who live there. He is Harry Monroe Caudill (KAW-dle, it is pronounced), a Whitesburg man. He has taken on the strip miners, the loggers, the government dam builders, politicians, bureaucrats, the T.V.A., and several major U.S. corporations. He has written books, newspaper and magazine articles, and countless letters. He has spent hour upon hour of his own time attending local meetings, arguing before judges, appearing on television, lobbying in Washington, guiding interested visitors from “the outside” on tours of his home country, all in a single-minded and deeply felt one-man campaign to stop what he sees as the senseless mutilation of the place he knows and loves better than any other.
Testifying before a Senate committee in 1968, Caudill expressed the view that there are two great crises in America. One is a crisis of people, white and black, who are impoverished and embittered and who, in their frustration and hatred, threaten to burn everything down. The other is of the American land. And as he is quick to point out, in his part of America the two crises exist side by side and are directly related to one another.
Wendell Berry, a Kentucky author and poet and a great admirer of Caudill, says, “Harry’s interest in conservation really begins with people. He doesn’t think of conservation, or any issue, as an abstraction, the way so many do. He sees his country being destroyed every day and he sees what that does to human beings. The other thing about Harry, maybe the most important thing, is that he lives with the evil he is fighting, and that makes him a rather unique kind of crusader. He doesn’t have to read about environmental troubles in the newspapers, he just looks up at the hillsides.”
The troubles Caudill sees are gaping yellow wounds slashed sideways along the steep wooded slopes of the mountains that crowd around Whitesburg. One such cut can be seen from Caudill’s own backyard. About half a mile up the mountainside, it is an old cut, a relatively small one, and like numerous others to be seen from the roads that wind through eastern Kentucky, it does not look terribly bad from below. The trees cover much of it half the year. It might be something as commonplace as a highway cut, unless you know better. But up on the strip mines themselves the view is very different. There is a place, for example, known as Pigeon Roost, near Hazard, a town in neighboring Perry County. There the land looks as if it might have been the set for All Quiet on the Western Front. The devastation covers hundreds of acres, all of them wild and unspoiled only a few years back. Huge gashes have been ripped out of the mountainsides and lie raw and exposed, with no green cover. To judge by the vast unrelieved stretches of yellow clay, baked iron-hard, by the sun and speckled with greasy dark splotches where poisonous acid has seeped through, nothing will ever grow there again.
From the edge of the cut, enormous eroded slides of still more clay, rock, and debris spill down the mountain slope, and out of these protrude the blackened remains of great trees that have been knocked askew by the enormous weight of the slides. It is as though the entire landscape, as far as the eye can see, had gone through a hideous convulsion or been ravaged by some crazed monster. But then far below, a mile or more, in a trough of untouched green, sits a cabin with a few wrecked cars scattered about it like toys; and because the strip miners have long since gone, there is total quiet except for the sound of radio music and, now and then, a faint voice or two. Someone lives down there, you realize.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, where I lived near strip mining much of my life, but I have never seen anything like the strip mining in eastern Kentucky. It is beyond belief, and sickening.
Until the late 1950s little strip mining had been tried in Kentucky. Now the bulldozers, the scoops, the diesel shovels, the mammoth coal augers are churning away day and night. In steady procession gigantic Mack trucks creep off the mountains, their brakes crying against the weight of upward of twenty-five tons of coal each. When they roar through Whitesburg, the ground trembles. Of the one hundred million tons of coal being mined annually in Kentucky, half comes from strip mines, and in years to come that percentage is certain to increase. Moreover, much of the strip mining is done on land owned by corporations located outside Kentucky, and the major customer for the coal is the Tennessee Valley Authority, long portrayed as a model of enlightened land use.
Most of the strip mining is carried on by small, independent “operators,” nearly all of whom are also lessees of the big coal-land companies. These include such well-known giants as Occidental Petroleum, National Steel, U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and International Harvester, all of which are based outside Kentucky and all of which own, or own other companies that own, vast tracts of the state’s mineral resources. The big corporations, then, rarely do the actual strip mining themselves (a point their public relations people stress emphatically); that part of the process is left to the local operators. And thus it has been for some time, with the result that mountain people, rightly or not, believe the hidden hand of absentee corporations is behind virtually every move by the strip miners. Mountaineers have an old festering hatred of big corporations and big-city money; and increasingly among some of the young the
re is the more modern attitude that the “system” is rotten and ought to be destroyed.
Yet the fact remains that strip mining is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest method thus far devised to get coal; and, for the operator, it is an exceedingly profitable business. Thus not only in Kentucky but in a dozen other states strip mining continues at a brutal pace.
Further, with the nation’s need for fossil fuels increasing steadily, and with innumerable new electrical power plants buying and burning even the lowest quality coal, there seems every likelihood that things will get worse. Where once coal was a seasonal commodity, it is now in demand year-round, due in good part to the electrical power required for air conditioning. “We can sell anything that’s black,” says one operator. In the northern corner of Letcher County, the Beth-Elkhorn coal company, which has its headquarters in Pennsylvania and is owned by Bethlehem Steel, has announced plans to tear up a thousand acres of choice woodland to “recover” some seven million tons of coal. According to statements made by one company official, the strip mine cuts on the land will run a total distance of somewhere between 120 and 150 miles. (Numerous Kentuckians find a kind of gallows humor in the fact that Bethlehem is currently running a costly advertising campaign—a series of what are called “conscience ads” in the trade—to tell the American public how much it is doing in behalf of the environment.) The biggest independent operator in Perry County, Bill Sturgill, boss of a number of strip-mining companies, now has a fifteen-year contract to supply T.V.A. with two million tons of strip-mined coal per year, all for just one power plant.
For Harry Caudill the seriousness of all this goes beyond the pitiful ugliness, or the bitter irony that those who live with the ravaged land get virtually no share of the coal or the money made from it. The ecological consequences of even one small strip mine are extraordinarily varied, complex, and damaging.
In eastern Kentucky, where the mountains are as steep as any in Appalachia, strip mines are contoured around the mountainsides like gigantic snakes. The cuts are L-shaped, with the “highwall” (the vertical side) exposing raw rock to heights of thirty to fifty feet. In many cases these immense man-made cliffs completely isolate entire mountaintops.
The coal is stripped from the flat shelf, or “bench,” of the cut, and since there is no convenient place to pile the “overburden,” the topsoil, rock, and clay that cover the coal seam, it simply gets shoved over the brow of the bench, smashing or smothering every tree, or anything else, that happens to stand below. (“Spoil bank” is the strip miner’s term for the huge heap that builds up.) As a result, about three acres of mountain are “disturbed” for every acre actually mined. Then roads are needed to get at the coal, and building them tears up another eight acres or so for every mile. And since there are generally two or three seams at different elevations, little of the average mountainside is spared.
Using the conventional equipment, a crew of seven can keep a strip mine advancing along the face of a Kentucky mountain at a rate of about one hundred yards a week. The coal market being what it is, most cuts are worked by two twelve-hour shifts. At dark the big headlights go on, the violence continues.
But the real shattering of the ecology of a mountain begins after the strip miners have come and gone. The resulting troubles continue for years and at a cost no one studying the problem is as yet able to estimate. Even before the rains hit them, the spoil banks begin to move. Full of churned-up slate and mangled trees, spoil banks are highly unstable and slowly succumb to the pull of gravity with a dry, sliding sound one can actually hear. When the inevitable mountain storms strike, rushing water slices into them like a knife. Frequently, like the giant slag heap at Aberfan, in Wales, a spoil bank will let go altogether and thunder down on whatever lies below, which in several instances has been somebody’s house. Landslides block streams and highways, and in the words of a government report, “economic and esthetic values [are] seriously impaired.”
Even ordinary erosion will cause extraordinary damage in little time. Water races off the mountain loaded with silt, gravel, and the deadly sulfuric acid that drains out of exposed coal or its overlying strata. Creeks that a boy could jump over only a few years ago are now as broad as two-lane roads, blasted out in a way reminiscent of the hydraulic mines of the Old West. Other creeks are so clogged with sludge they have to be cleaned out two or three times a year at considerable cost to the state. Studies indicate that the annual sediment yield from strip-mined lands in Kentucky is as much as one thousand times that of undisturbed mountain areas.
Slimy with mustard-colored coal silt and poisoned by mine acid, thousands of Kentucky creeks and streams are quite literally “dead.” Nothing lives in them. The putrid water is good for nothing, and it stains and poisons just about anything it comes in contact with.
Every spring, farms a hundred miles or more from the mountains are flooded by rivers thick with silt from such tributaries. On the Kentucky River, on the other side of the state, annual floods have been part of its cycle for as long as anyone can recall. But fifty years ago the spring floods were rejuvenating. Like the Nile, the Kentucky bestowed on every acre it touched a fine, thin layer of silt rich with organic matter, very fertile and very welcome. Now, because of bad farming, logging, and strip mining on the upland slopes, the same river leaves a fine, thin film of yellow clay that hardens to the consistency of concrete and is, as one farmer says, about as fertile.
Less obvious but equally serious are the profound scars left on the spirits of the mountain people, who see their country, one of the most beautiful regions in America, being dismembered before their eyes. Farms that have been in the same families for generations are made worthless. Fine timber is destroyed as though it had no value. Public roads, long believed to be the salvation of so-called backward sections, are ruined by the punishing weight and wear of immense coal trucks. Surrounded by ugly abuse of the land, many people become ever more slovenly. Abandoned strip pits are used as dumping grounds for garbage and wrecked cars. Spoil heaps catch fire, often from burning rubbish, and smoulder for months, even years, casting an evil-looking, vile-smelling haze over the landscape.
As might be expected, those who suffer most from such tragic byproducts of strip mining are the poorest, least educated, least articulate, and least able to comprehend why things are happening as they are, or what, if anything, can be done about it. More than anyone, Harry Caudill speaks for them.
In 1965 he helped found the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People, the region’s first serious effort to organize public protest. He also deserves a major part of the credit for Kentucky’s various strip-mining laws, which he fought for long and hard back at a time when taking such stands in eastern Kentucky was a lonely and dangerous business. In 1954, when the state’s first attempt at a strip-mining law was up before the legislature in Frankfort, Caudill was the only representative from eastern Kentucky to vote for it. A law passed in 1966 was said to be the best in the country, though Caudill himself thinks it is nowhere near tough enough. Highly skeptical about how well it is being enforced, he likes to quote a friend who says it is a little like legalizing rape, so long as the rapist first agrees to restore his victim to her original condition. Caudill also emphasizes that nothing is being done about land strip-mined prior to 1966, which means about 100,000 acres.
The law has been revised and improved some. Among other things it prohibits strip mining on slopes steeper than 28 degrees; it requires that the operator grade back spoil banks to about the slope of the mountain and seed the mined area before moving on; and it empowers the Division of Reclamation in Frankfort to suspend an operator’s permit or fine him one thousand dollars for each day that he fails to abide by these and other regulations.
A colorful brochure issued by the state shows strip-mine benches in Letcher and adjoining counties where fruit trees have been planted and appear to be surviving, where a nitrogen-building green cover, a legume known as Sericea lespedeza, grows waist deep, and a highwall h
as been so effectively back-graded and replanted as to be unnoticeable. Such places do exist in eastern Kentucky and are indicative of what can be done. But they are few and far between and greatly outnumbered by places where reclamation has failed. As the reclamation people themselves readily admit, many strip mines and particularly those along Kentucky’s so-called “hot” seams (in which the acid content is extremely high) cannot be restored no matter what is done to them, short of trucking in new topsoil, which no operator is about to try and might not work anyway. Even where conditions are ideal for the prescribed reseeding program (a solution of seed, water, and fertilizer is sprayed over the exposed spoil), there is, as one reclamation official says, no hiding a strip mine.
Still less progress has been made in checking erosion and acid drainage, or in preventing spoil-bank slides. Small dams thrown up to catch silt have proved pathetically ineffective. Though the chief reclamation objective—to get a quick green cover down—is the best solution to the overall erosion problem, only a small percentage of the cover ever amounts to anything, or at least in time enough to do the job. A walk along most “reclaimed” mines is a discouraging experience. Where tiny trees have been planted, twenty are dead stubs for every one that is green. To judge by the stony, water-gullied clay all about, the heaps of rock and pools of foul water, the future for that one green survivor will be most precarious. About the best the reclamation people can say in defense of their efforts is that things are being handled better than before.
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