After one rainstorm the water surged through the creek beside his house with such fury that it moved a giant boulder sixty feet. His own water supply began to give out, until only a trickle came from the kitchen faucet. “Not enough even to do dishes,” his wife says. When Barnett went to see the operator, he was told the coal company would “make good” on any damages. But as Barnett says, “When you are trying to go to sleep at night and you know that spoil bank is hanging up there, you don’t think much about who will be paying for ‘damages.’ You think about getting buried alive.” Friends have urged him to move out. Barnett has decided to take his case to court and has asked Caudill to represent him. He says he “can trust Harry,” as do numerous others who have tried to fight the strip miners.
As one might suspect, Harry Caudill is not universally popular in eastern Kentucky. The state reclamation people give him ample credit for getting the law on the books in the first place. “He served his purpose,” says Elmore Grim, the tall, businesslike director of the program. But Grim and those who work for him suggest that Caudill gets the operators so furious that it sometimes seems they make trouble out of spite.
Grim insists that the best way to make progress is to work with the operators, to get them to “see the light.” His inspectors look over every strip mine in Kentucky on an average of once every two weeks, he claims. He has closed down several for failure to conform to the law, but, as he admits, he has still to enforce it to the hilt. “Why, we’ve got enough law on the books now to shut down every strip in this state. That is, if we were to nitpick. But we can’t do that. We’ve got to find out how these things can best be handled, reasonably and intelligently.
“Hell, I could be a dictator. But the federal government doesn’t even know what to do. Take acid mine drainage. Nobody knows what to do. Stop it up on one side of a mountain and it will start coming out the other side, where the streams are good. Plug it? The plug will blow, and what a mess that is…. I don’t know the answer. This isn’t like geology or agronomy, where you can go and look up the answer in a library. We’re writing the book as we go along.”
Grim, a professional forester most of his life, talks with impressive passion. “If there isn’t an answer to strip mining,” he says, his voice rising, “then I’ll be the first to say stop it.” Then he adds, “What we need is time, time to experiment.”
To which Harry Caudill says, “Oh, I suppose they will be experimenting all over these poor benighted hills for years and years to come.”
About the worst Grim and those in his camp have to say about Caudill is that he is “overemotional,” a term used frequently against conservationists. Others say Caudill is careless with facts. Even Anne Caudill allows that “research has never been our line.” But Loyal Jones, who is the executive director of the Council of the Southern Mountains at Berea, Kentucky, and who knows Appalachia and its problems as well as anyone, says, “To criticize Harry Caudill on accuracy is about like saying that Thomas Wolfe’s portrait of his mother was not precisely accurate. Harry speaks to sway people and to get at a kind of truth that is beyond facts and figures.”
Not surprisingly, it is the coal operators who have the strongest language for Caudill, whom they see as a self-serving spouter of pieties and slander. The Mountain Eagle quoted one man as saying, “When he [Caudill] gets up in the morning, he stands in front of the mirror and smiles at himself and wonders who he’s going to slander today. It must be a nice life.” When a Life writer, David Nevin, was gathering material for a strip-mining story, a coal operator told him, “I went to college with Harry Caudill. He was a sonofabitch then and he’s a sonofabitch now.” When Nevin related this to Caudill afterward, Caudill only smiled and replied softly, “Strip mining has become a very big business.”
It is not uncommon for some coal operators to suggest that Caudill, or anyone else who speaks out against them, is somehow in league with the Communists. But this seems in keeping with other public pronouncements made by some of the industry’s leaders in other parts of the country. At a convention of the American Mining Congress in Pittsburgh, James D. Reilly, vice president of the giant Consolidation Coal Company (which is owned by the Continental Oil Company), said that conservationists who demand that strip miners do a better job of restoring what they tear up are “stupid idiots, socialists, and Commies who don’t know what they’re talking about. I think it is our bounden duty to knock them down and subject them to the ridicule they deserve.”
One of Caudill’s staunchest allies is the Mountain Eagle. Tom Bethell, a Bostonian and former editor with the Houghton Mifflin Company who writes for the Eagle, came to Whitesburg largely as a result of reading Caudill’s first book, and with Tom Gish, the paper’s editor, he has been doing some exceedingly tough, crusading coverage of eastern Kentucky’s many problems. Scarcely a week goes by that Gish and Bethell are not after the strip miners in one way or other, often by running an open letter or article by Harry Caudill. “Although we do all our own editorials on the subject,” Gish says, “a lot of people say Harry really wrote them.” As a result, all the traditional devices for “bringing pressure to bear” have been used on the paper: advertising has been withheld by local tradesmen who sell products or services to the coal companies, and open support has been given to an opposition paper, The Community Press, published at nearby Cromona. At one point emotions got so strong that an arsonist was reportedly hired to burn down the cabin Bethell was living in, and three antipoverty workers (Appalachian Volunteers) who had been sympathetic with the anti-strip-mine faction were arrested on sedition charges and put in jail. Although tempers eventually quieted down, hatreds over the issue persist below the surface. One afternoon, as I was taking a photograph of Gish and Bethell in front of the paper’s office on Main Street, a burly strip-mine operator who happened to be standing nearby became so infuriated that he did all he could to ruin the picture, standing directly in the way and shouting in my face, “We don’t want any more of you goddamn outsiders coming around here giving this county a bad name.” The idea that strip mining itself might give the county a bad name, or that most strip miners are themselves “outsiders,” had apparently not crossed his mind.
To a large degree his feelings are understandable, since Letcher County has been the subject of numerous articles and television reports, including one by the BBC, and a film for the Houston Hemisfàir, during the making of which the leader of the film crew was shot and killed by an elderly local man who did not want his property photographed for such purposes.
Why so much attention has been focused on Letcher County—when there are dozens of other places in Appalachia where the same or similar problems are just as dramatically on display—is readily explained: Harry Caudill. His own magazine articles and books have been read in New York and Washington by those who make editorial or policy decisions, and from what they read it appears that in Whitesburg there is a unique man, someone who can talk intelligently about the problems, someone who belongs there and must know whereof he speaks; and so to Whitesburg they come. In July 1969, when CBS was looking for places to show what America was doing as the first men landed on the moon, one of the communities picked was Whitesburg, because a CBS producer, Bernard Birnbaum, had read Caudill’s book, and had later met Caudill and listened to him talk.
To many in Whitesburg, including its business people, drawing such attention is a grave mistake. A coal operator like Bill Sturgill, who has known Caudill since college days, cannot understand why Harry behaves as he does. When Caudill was campaigning for strip-mine legislation it was Sturgill who led the attack against him, claiming that if the law were passed it would put every strip miner out of business. Sturgill stressed the importance of strip mining to the local economy. His 287 employees were earning from $7,500 to $12,000 a year, he said. He himself was making annual purchases from some 104 different companies and individuals amounting to more than six million dollars—all this in contrast to Harry Caudill. “It is still a matter of record,”
Sturgill wrote in a letter to the Courier-Journal, “that Mr. Caudill does not support the economy or provide job opportunity, but rather has made much personal gain from advertising worldwide the ills and misfortunes of his friends and neighbors.”
For Sturgill and other operators the idea that there may be something fundamentally wrong with strip mining seems almost impossible to grasp. As they see it, they are helping to serve the nation’s energy needs; they are providing jobs, making dollars move in their communities, making otherwise valueless land pay. Coal is Kentucky’s great cash crop, a point they take pride in.
To Wendell Berry such men are blinded by the jargon of free enterprise—“as if,” he says, “the freedom of free enterprise implied freedom from moral responsibility.” Loyal Jones believes the problem rests on the pernicious notion that people and the land are there to be exploited, used up, and consumed, and that the roots of such beliefs can be traced to frontier times. Harry Caudill sees strip mining as symbolic of something more serious. “I think it tells us more than anything except war about the darker side of our nature. I remember coming home from the war on a hospital ship and worrying about that. I began to think that perhaps that darker side would prevail. This devastation of the earth is a manifestation of that tragic, base side, the side that in the Bible is represented by Satan and his works.”
Caudill’s conviction is that strip mining ought to be the subject of a national policy, that federal laws must be enacted as soon as possible and strictly enforced. “The current Kentucky law and the way it is being handled is a little like attacking a crocodile with a cornstalk,” he says. He wants strip mining outlawed anywhere that the slope of a mountainside exceeds twenty degrees, and authorized only where total reclamation can be carried on promptly and effectively. He supports the system used in several European countries—in England, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, among other places—where the topsoil is carefully put aside and the subsoil and rock kept separate. Then, once the coal has been removed, rock, subsoil, and topsoil go back in their original order, the layers being compacted during the process. “There’s no reason why we can’t do that if they do.”
To pay for this, coal prices will have to be raised. “The way it is now, coal is undercutting the price of other fuels at a hidden cost to tremendous stretches of the American land.”
More must be done to enlist the interest and energies of the great corporations. In Caudill’s view the nation’s industrial centers are being fuelled by Appalachia, with coal and with low-paid workers, and Appalachia is getting little in return. “I don’t think the men at the top of those enormous corporations are wicked men. But you know there’s not a one of them that has ever been down here to see things with his own eyes, to see what is going on here. Not a one! And yet, the decisions they make have everything to do with how we live here. So we just can’t help but think they have no interest in people, or in the land. They’re just interested in coal and profits.”
Indeed, Caudill sees a prevailing lack of interest in Appalachia, despite all that he and others have had to say. “The millionaires and the celebrated politicians like to come to the Kentucky Derby, of course, and they always make a great big show of that, but just try to get them to come over here!”
What Caudill keeps calling for is an informed understanding of the Appalachian land. “This is always thought of as a bleak, poor, broken-down, God-forsaken place here. But the truth is, this mountain island has tremendous natural resources, not the least of which is its people, and if we can make changes in the ways the land is utilized, then we can become the premier part of the United States. We have plenty of green country, an abundance of water, a superb climate, minerals, strategic location, extraordinary beauty. And as the shortage of open land in this nation grows more and more serious, all this magnificent country is going to have a value far surpassing anything like coal. And we just can’t afford to sit back and watch all that be destroyed so a few people can get rich now. One of these days the dear old federal government is going to have to come in and spend billions of dollars just to repair the damage that’s already been done. And guess who will have the machines and the workmen to do the job? The same coal operators who made the mess in the first place will be hired to fix it back, and the taxpayers will bear the costs.”
The larger, desperate need, Caudill believes, is for a whole new land ethic. “Unless we change our attitudes toward the good earth of this planet, I doubt that life will last a great deal longer. Look how short a time it took us to destroy Lake Erie. And there is absolutely no evidence that the human race is learning the dire need for restoration. If you read history, you see that this has happened many times before on a smaller scale.
“Just imagine this,” he says. “If those three men who went to the moon had started to befoul their aircraft, if they had begun to tear it apart and fill it with all manner of filth, we would say they had gone mad. But here we are on this planet, this huge spaceship, befouling it, ripping it asunder, and nobody seems to say very much about that. Nobody seems to care.”
Such imagery can have a profound impact when Caudill appears before a Senate committee, or when he is writing for national publications. One article, in Audubon, did much, for example, to generate interest in saving Kentucky’s spectacular Red River Gorge from a dam to be built by the Army Corps of Engineers. The campaigning against the dam was led chiefly by the Louisville Courier-Journal and later received national publicity when Justice William O. Douglas arrived to lead a hike through the area in jeopardy. The gorge was saved.
And for every person who is against Harry Caudill, there appear to be many more who are wholeheartedly for him. “He is the one man who can speak for every one of those people who know instinctively that strip mining is wrong and that it is the ruination of their homeland,” says Wendell Berry, while another Kentucky writer, Mrs. Siller Brown, a coal miner’s widow who does a regular column in the Mountain Eagle about things her neighbors tell her over the phone, says flatly, “Harry Caudill is a good man.”
When I asked Caudill why he stays on in Letcher County, he first smiled at his wife, then told a story about one of his favorite characters, Old Claib Jones, who took part in numerous mountain feuds after the Civil War, killed twenty men, later repented his sins, and lived to a ripe old age. At one point, during the “Holbrook and Underwood War,” Claib and five other men were pinned down in a cabin, surrounded by a large Underwood force and some policemen who had been called in to help finish Claib off. The attack began before dawn and kept up until midmorning, when suddenly the shooting stopped and Alvis Underwood’s wife was sent in to ask Claib to surrender. It is at this point in the story that Harry Caudill’s eyes begin to light up.
“So you know the message Claib sent back? ‘No,’ Claib said. He said, ‘We want to fight on a while longer anyway.’ Now wasn’t that wonderful? And I guess that’s the way Anne and I feel: we want to fight on a while longer anyway.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Miriam Rothschild
MIRIAM ROTHSCHILD knows all about butterflies and fleas, birds, fish and poisons, ladybugs (“my real first love”), medieval meadow grasses, Shetland sheep dogs, photography, farming, Clark Gable, and the wild flowers of Israel. She designs her own clothes. She has an art gallery devoted to paintings by schizophrenics. She owns a pub. She has raised six children and she is one of the Rothschilds.
Of her eccentric Uncle Walter, her favorite Rothschild, who was an outstanding British naturalist, she has written a lively biography, Dear Lord Rothschild. About fleas, her specialty, she has written possibly a quarter of a million words in books and learned papers. A single cupboard at Ashton Wold, her country estate, contains sixty thousand microscopic preparations of fleas. But this, she insists, is nothing much at all compared with Uncle Walter’s operations.
“Imagine,” she says, “two and a quarter million butterflies, thirty thousand bird skins, three hundred thousand beetles, and one hundred forty-four giant tortoises!” Imagi
ne, indeed.
In a framed photograph on her bookcase Uncle Walter, in top hat and high-button shoes, sits astride a live giant tortoise, urging it forward with a bit of lettuce on the end of his walking stick. “That,” she explains, “was Rotumah, the famous giant tortoise that died of sexual overexcitation. Walter found that tortoise in the garden of a lunatic asylum in Sydney.” Rotumah was 150 years old, the oldest, largest tortoise in the world, so Walter brought it to England. “And he got the doctor from the asylum to travel with it. That’s the best thing of all!”
She sometimes acts as though she is having too much fun with too many interests ever to be taken seriously. But she is a scientist of the first rank. Her work on fleas, her butterfly studies, and her encouragement of other scientists have brought her all sorts of awards and honors. In the citation for an honorary degree from Oxford (1968), she was lauded for contributions to anatomy, chemistry, entomology, pharmacology, neurophysiology, and zoology. “It is unusual too [the citation continued] that in natural science anyone, still less a woman, should receive an honorary degree without any degree already from any university.” In 1985, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor in British science. Yet Miriam Rothschild had little academic training of any kind—her family believed it would stifle the joy of learning.
“Brilliant is not an inappropriate word for her,” says Robert Traub, a professor of microbiology at the University of Maryland Medical School, with whom she has collaborated on two books and several papers. “People talk about genius and use the term loosely, but this is really it.”
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