“This rock here marks the top of Jukes. It’s about a hundred seventy acres up either side of this bowl and fifty acres below the waterfall where the cabin is. Everything above us is Bridger Mountain, which is now owned by the Company. Their plan is to blow the top off the mountain and push everything into Jukes. That ain’t gonna happen, least as long as I have a breath in me.” He paused and looked over the beautiful hollow of his childhood. “My brother and I own Jukes together; when one of us goes, the other owns it outright. Hersh would sell out in a Memphis downbeat. Quite an incentive to stay healthy, don’t you think?”
“How come you can’t give your share to Mom?”
“I can if Hersh dies first. Like I said, the last living brother owns Jukes. Until then he and I have to agree on everything. That’s just the way my mother wanted it. Guess she figured decisions about the place were best made by the folks who grew up here. Wise woman.” He turned and headed up the trail, his walking stick working like a third leg, pushing off the dirt and stones to propel him forward. Soon he was a distant speck on the trail face.
Buzzy and I rested a moment more, then clambered after him. He continued to shrink in the distance despite our efforts to keep up. “Man, he’s haulin ass.”
“Come on,” I urged and double-timed it, grabbing the back of my pack to hoist the weight off my shoulders. We scampered up the steep trail, hunched over, me staring at my feet as they made like two horses in a neck-and-neck race. After a half hour, we reached the ridgetop. Pops was sitting under an ash tree with his hiking hat low over his face, sleeping. We threw our packs down, huffing and blowing.
“Lord help us, it’s as if you boys have never hiked up a mountain before,” he said without looking out from under his hat. We collapsed next to our packs, against the wide tree trunk. I looked over at Buzzy, who was breathing out of an O-shaped mouth.
“Why are you going so fast, Pops?”
“When you see Glaston, you’ll know. Besides, I gotta show up you striplings, don’t I?” He stood and sniffed at the mountain air, hands on hips. We were at the top of Six Hollow Ridge, which ran across the crest of Beaver, Pine, Jukes, Slow, and what was left of Corbin and Wilmer Hollows. We picked up our packs and headed north on an old logging road that ran the ridgetop. The route was truck wide and accorded easy passage across the rolling shoulder of mountain, giving good time for the next three miles over a series of minor hillocks and shallow dints. The trees were lush and large, with holly, mountain laurel, and dogwood filling in the forest floor. As we came over a gentle rise, the trees ended abruptly. What lay before us was a scene of unimaginable devastation.
We stood on the edge of a flat, gray moonscape two miles across and dotted with pooling water of a color unknown to the natural order of things—orange, red, purple, bright green. It looked like a rainbow had fallen out of the sky and each hue had gathered into its own pond. Pops stopped and leaned on his walking stick.
“We are at what used to be the top of Corbin Hollow.” Pops pointed to a slight indentation in the landscape between two gray plateaus. “They blew the tops off Indian Head on the left here and Sadler there in the middle and pushed all of it into Corbin. When they were done, they covered the whole area with that green spray-grass stuff that will grow anywhere. Last summer, when I hiked through here, grass was growing everywhere, even on the rock. It looked like a massive Chia Pet.”
Now it was nothing but gray and a hint of straw where the spray grass had died. “None of it took,” he added, though he didn’t need to.
From our vantage point two hundred feet above it all, we could see across the dead land to the far tree line. From here to there were three long flattop plateaus where Indian Head, Sadler, and Cheek Mountains had been. Between them, where the Company pushed the overburden, were shallow valleys filled up with the rock and soil taken from the mountains. A series of roads rutted over the flat tops and through the valley fill. Rock piles twenty feet high dotted the plateaus in between the rainbow ponds. And on the middle table, checked by a wide oval berm, was a lake brimming with black coal sludge—not normal black, but a darker, ominous alchemy of black that seemed to have been contrived by the devil himself.
The mine operation was completely barren of trees, grass, or any vegetation. The huge oaks and rich green of Jukes and the surrounding mountains made this place seem like a wholly different planet, one that had its normal color bled out.
In the valley beyond the far trees, I recognized the twisting road that ran through the middle of the Mitchell farm. The fields were empty now, and I traced the line up to the cul-de-sac. Two of the barns had been carted away, leaving flat concrete. The third was a pile of beams and boards splayed like pick-up sticks. The old Mitchell house was nothing but a single sidewall, chimney rising above the fist of brick like a middle finger raised to rebuke.
The trail from the woods disappeared, so we picked our way over rocks and gray mud down to a roadway of gravel and more mud. Huge tire tracks were filled with rainbow water from the recent rains. We followed the rutted way that ran on the valley fill around the curve of the first flattop. The road rose and merged with the plateau that had once been Indian Head. We walked among the rock piles—rock that had been hidden underground for millennia—now exposed and stacked like displaced corpses.
Pops’ face was a twist of anger. “Indian Head was not a large mountain, but notable for a huge rock formation at its summit. When you saw it from the south, it looked exactly like an Indian warrior in profile.” He turned halfway around to orient himself to the history. “It was about sixty feet high and just an amazing sight—you could see it for miles. Folks around here called the Indian face Red Cloud because the rocks had a reddish tint to them, but the legend goes back hundreds of years to the Shawnee who lived in these mountains before the white man. It was said that any brave who could scale the face would be able to steal some of the warrior spirit’s bravery and would be protected by the gods in battle. No one ever achieved it and many braves died trying, until a white hunter, captured by the Shawnee and sentenced to a torturous death by the Shawnee chief Blackfish, negotiated a reprieve if he could scale it. He did and was adopted by Blackfish himself as his son. The Shawnee called him Sheltowee, but we know him as Daniel Boone.
“Since then, generations of Missi County boys tried to prove their courage climbing up the face of Red Cloud—only thirteen actually made it.”
“Did you ever climb it?”
Pops smiled. “I did. But not until my third try.” He looked up at a place in the air where Red Cloud had been. “That’s a story for another day. Let’s get on down the road.” Pops moved out with dispatch, his pace quickening to escape the tortured landscape. We were able to keep pace on the flat land, down into a slight depression that was once Corbin Hollow. On the side of the track was the rusted boom of an abandoned dragline, its broken cable curled like a waiting snake.
The road thrust upward sharply to the next plateau. Pops’ pace gave him separation and he achieved the top a minute before us. He stood there on the edge and surveyed the rubble as Buzzy and I scrambled up the slope. “This used to be Sadler Mountain. In front of us was Wilmer Hollow, where the Kracken family lived.” He waved his hand at the filled-in valley below us. “Sold it all to the Company for thirty-five thousand dollars and moved to a trailer park somewhere in central Florida.” He shook his head at the inequity of the math.
“Kevin, I told you about the Sadler Mountain War, and, Buzzy, I know your grandfather has told you about it. My father and your grandfather led the efforts to unionize the mines in the thirties. Then Bubba Boyd’s father had my dad killed and your grandfather led a revolt against the Company. They were lifelong friends, my dad and your grandfather. He and about thirty miners holed up on this mountain for three months, launching a series of guerrilla raids against the Company. The Boyds imported ‘peace officers,’ who were nothing more than hired guns, and sent twenty up to root the miners out. Not a single one came back. Then they sent up
sixty to try and flush em out; they retreated after a day. Your grandfather was a handful as a guerrilla fighter. He and his Sadler Mountain boys brought the mines to a standstill. Finally, Washington, D.C., sent down the federal marshals to get everything running again. The union prevailed, and life for the miners started getting better after that, thanks to your great-grandfather, Kevin, and Buzzy’s grandfather. They were true men—something for you both to live up to.”
“My grandaddy tole me stories. I always thought it was him tellin porky pies.”
“You need to pay attention to your grandfather and show him the respect he’s earned. Those stories he tells you are all true.”
“Yes, sir,” Buzzy said, chastened.
We walked up the fifteen-foot berm to the top of the slurry pond. It was the size of two football fields end to end. The first few inches of water were clear, casing the obsidian ooze like window glaze. And below it, the infinite black maw of slurry, murky and foul, as if everything malevolent in Medgar was spawn of this disconsolate brew. We stood on the edge, silently watching the span of black lap the berm top. Buzzy took up a softball rock and tossed it into the muck. It hung in the air for a moment, then hit the surface with a dull plonk, disappearing under the effluent. The lake surface smoothed itself, removing all evidence of disorder.
“Let’s get off this dump and into the trees. We can pick up the trail over that way.” Pops pointed with his walking stick and moved out. The top of the Sadler Mountain ruins were crisscrossed with ruts and berms, and it was a difficult hike to the edge of the trees. “It’s an old game trail that leads down into Prettyman Hollow, so it’s gonna be tough to spot.”
“What about that third mountain? What happened there?” I asked.
Pops looked sadly over to the gray scar that was once Cheek Mountain. “That’s where Paul Pierce grew up. Now you know why he tried so hard to shut Bubba Boyd down.”
“Why did he sell to Mr. Boyd in the first place?”
“He didn’t. Years ago his grandaddy sold the mineral rights on Cheek Mountain to William Beecher Boyd. Folks didn’t think much of it since coal was mined underground. But the law also allows companies with mineral rights to kick off the surface owners and dig at the coal from the top. So Bubba moved on in and just took the mountain. Paul had no legal way to stop him.”
“How much did Mr. Paul’s grandaddy sell the rights for?”
“Four hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
The dust and rocks from the dig had spilled into the forest, creating a collar around the mine that was caught somewhere between death and verdant life. We walked along the edge of the clearing, trying to scout the trail, trees and undergrowth yellow and dying as if a cancer was trying to invade the forest.
Pops paused at the edge of the Sadler Mountain remains. “I’ve been in these mountains for sixty years, and it’s all a foreign country to me now. I don’t recognize any of this anymore. I’m guessing we go in here.” He pushed off the edge of the plateau, down a steep gravel embankment to the beginning of the forest. First the yellow-and-gray-dusted mountain laurel toiling through the overburden, then a few dying pines, a line of oaks and poplars, stripped of leaves. Farther in, the gravel gave way to the forest floor, but the undergrowth was still yellowed and dying. We hiked through the stand of struggling trees, deeper into the forest until we crossed the old road that had once led up to the top of Sadler Mountain.
Up ahead was a cemetery of twenty or so headstones. The marble and sandstone markers were fairly new, but all of the lettering had been etched away. It looked like a tombstone store had set out samples for prospective diers. I paused and stood in front of the stones. Buzzy came up next to me. “Is that creepy or what… bunch a tombstones with no writin on em. It’s like the family never even existed or nuthin.”
Pops had kept walking but turned and noticed us looking over the stones. He walked back and stood with us. “This is the Prettyman family plot.”
“How come none of the headstones have writing on them? It just seems really weird.”
“Coal dust has a high sulfur content. When they blast up the mountain, it all settles on everything. Then it rains and becomes sulfuric acid and erodes things like headstones.”
Pops and Buzzy moved on ahead, but I stood there for a few moments more, looking over the blank headstones and thinking of the Jukes Hollow markers, which carried my history on them; thinking of the people and the place that was being systematically dug up, hauled off, eroded away. It was as if Bubba Boyd had taken the mountains and now he wanted to take all the memories.
Chapter 26
NIGHT VISITOR
I caught up with Pops and Buzzy just as they found the old trail down the side of Sadler Mountain into Prettyman Hollow. We followed the trail for about a mile, then took a right at what Pops said used to be a rushing creek. It was now a trickle of fetid brown metallic sludge, discoloring the rocks like a giant swath of burnt sienna paint. The trail crossed what was left of the creek and followed a shoulder that ran away from the broken earth. Pops paused at a large rock on the side of the trail. “This marks the entrance to Old Blue National Forest… one of the last truly wild places east of the Mississippi.”
“I’m glad we’re away from there,” I said to no one in particular. “They’ve ruined everything.”
“I thought it was important for you boys to see that,” Pops replied and started up the trail. The land before us was lush again, with hills that pushed up from green valleys, some with immense rock cliffs, some with granite knobs dotting the foliage. “We follow this trail up to Irish Ridge, stay on the ridge for about eight miles, and camp up there tonight. There’s a nice protected spot in the rocks. It’s my usual stopping point for the Tramp.”
The afternoon was getting on, so we picked up the pace. We hiked for an hour down another hollow, then up to Irish Ridge. The ridge ran southeast to northwest into the heart of the national forest. Occasionally we broke out onto a treeless patch with views that went into forever. The far mountains faded to a deeper green all the way to the horizon, which merged with one of the bluest skies I had ever seen. Finally, up ahead in the sweep of evening, we saw a formation of car-size boulders strewn in a semicircle. Smaller rocks formed a fire pit in the middle. We took our packs off and leaned them against the big rocks. Next to the fire circle was a neatly stacked pile of wood for a fire.
“Someone left us some wood.”
“It’s a courtesy pile,” Pops said and passed me his canteen. “One of the unwritten laws of the mountain. Every time you break camp, leave a woodpile for the next guy. If you’ve ever come into a camp in the cold dark, it’s a welcome thing.”
“But what if other people don’t do that? It’s not really fair unless everybody is doing a courtesy pile.”
“Well, somebody’s gotta be first, don’t you think? Just imagine what would happen if we all left a place a little better than we found it?”
“My grandaddy says that too,” Buzzy piped up.
“Your grandfather has the right perspective on life, Buzzy. You boys go on and set up the tent while I get a fire going.”
We laid the tent out on the only piece of flat, clear ground. At Buzzy’s suggestion we piled up pine needles for bedding and staked the tent on top of them. The fire was crackling to life and Pops began unpacking utensils and food for dinner.
“Man, I’m beat,” I whispered to Buzzy. “I’ve never hiked like that in my life.”
“Your Pops goes at it. I think he wanted to show us up.”
“It wasn’t hard,” I said and laughed.
The camp was on the highest part of the ridge, rocky and thin of trees as exposure over time had worn away the dirt and most of the vegetation. What remained were weathered white pines, gnarled and twisted, clinging to the stony soil with determination.
The hot August sun was making its way to the far west; Buzzy and I climbed up the largest of the boulders so we could look out over the mountains. We picked up some broken rock pi
eces and threw them one by one as far as we could down the ridge side, listening to the sound they made as they pinged off trees or flushed last fall’s leaves.
I turned to him. “You know what we should do for the next two weeks?”
“What?”
“Just live.”
He looked at me, interested but skeptical. “I ain’t plannin on dyin up here.”
“Yeah, but you are planning on thinking. Let’s just live without thinking about anything. Put all this bullshit with Cleo and Josh out of our minds.”
Buzzy looked back out to the sun-basted mountains. We were silent for a time. Finally he said, “You can see a little piece a Glaston Lake from here.” He pointed to a sliver of blue in the shadows between two mountaintops. It looked far.
Before I could answer, the smell of cooking hamburgers hit us both. The dull hunger we had been feeling flared on the aroma of the grilled meat. We looked at each other, smiled, and raced back to camp.
Pops had three huge hamburgers sizzling on a griddle next to a pot of Audy Rae’s special molasses beans. “Thought you boys got et by a bear.” He flipped a burger to the sound of popping and spitting grease. We sat on rocks around the fire eating the burgers and beans with no ketchup or mustard. I never knew that a simple hamburger could taste so good.
We cleaned up from dinner, washing pots and dishes in a spring a few hundred feet down the ridge side. Pops tied our food bag to a rope and slung it over a branch outside the rock circle. We turned in soon after sunset, and within minutes Pops was snoring lightly. Buzzy and I lay on our sleeping bags, staring at the tent ceiling and listening to the syncopation of Pops’ breathing and matching it to our own.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 24