Mountain Madness

In the cemetery Gibson showed me "flyrocks" dropped by nearby blasting; one I couldn't lift. I righted Patricia Fraker's headstone, which had been knocked off its base by recent blasting. A sharp-shinned hawk shot low over the graves, heading east toward richly forested mountains slated for removal. Five hundred feet below us lay the stumps of mountains that 10 years ago had been at our level or higher. Before the mountains were removed they had been clad in red, black, and sugar maple; pignut, mockernut, and shagbark hickory; cucumber and umbrella magnolia; red, black, and scarlet oak; black birch; beech; ash; butternut; yellow poplar; black gum; sourwood; princess tree; white chestnut; black locust; sassafras; basswood; ironwood; viburnum; pawpaw; redbud; and dogwood, to mention just a few of the species.

"When are they going to reclaim this section?" I asked, stepping onto sparsely grassed rubble furrowed by runoff.

"They already have," he replied, pointing to a single black locust sapling protruding from the slope like a toothpick in a stuffed mushroom. "In spring," Gibson continued, "we used to lose the sun at 5:00 P.M. Now we don't lose it till 8:30. The industry calls that an 'improvement.'" The cemetery is sloughing onto the mountain stumps like a wave-cut beach into a rising tide.

Frank Gilliam, a professor of biological sciences at Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia, found it "amazing" that the industry thinks it can take a mountain apart, reassemble some of it, and bring back the ecosystem. "It's like taking apart someone's clock, then 'restoring' it by stuffing some of the parts into a box." So Gilliam and one of his graduate students drove to Kayford and collected buckets of busted mountain. Then they prepared three batches of planting material--one pure rubble with the big pieces discarded (thereby biasing the experiment in favor of industry), one rubble with 25 percent topsoil, and one 100 percent topsoil. In each medium they planted three native trees--a black cherry, a yellow poplar, and a black locust. Then they cultivated the saplings under the same conditions for four months. Pure rubble or rubble with 25 percent topsoil added resulted in minimal growth at best. In the 25 percent mix, stems of black locust seedlings, a favorite of the industry because they fix nitrogen, were only a third as thick at their base as those grown in the pure topsoil. And in the pure rubble the stems actually lost a millimeter. "The stuff just doesn't retain water," says Gilliam. "You can get a downpour, and it will be arid the next day. It's a desert in the rain." Recently, a coal mogul told Gilliam that his experiment was "soft science," then handed him a study funded by Arch Coal that hadn't been peer-reviewed.

Arch funded another study, in 1997, to assess the biological productivity of headwater streams to be buried in the proposed 5-square-mile expansion of its 13-square-mile mountain-range-removal operation along the Spruce Fork of the Little Coal River. On the Pigeonroost Branch, three benthic invertebrate sampling stations yielded only 3, 5, and 6 taxa, indicating that this rivertop was basically a dry wash.

The Pigeonroost Branch didn't look like a dry wash to me. I hiked along it with Jim Weekley, who has lived beside it for all of his 61 years and who talks like a Grand Ole Opry singer except without trying. Charged by snowmelt, the icy little rill hurried through a lush hollow where mourning cloak butterflies sucked minerals from wet duff and song sparrows caroled from ancient walnut trees. Where Arch wants to put one of its valley fills, half a dozen wild brook trout hovered over clean gravel, their flanks orange as a mountain sunrise. Weekley used to catch them here when he was a kid. Now his grandchildren do. Arch used to say they didn't exist. After Arch had finished surveying the Pigeonroost Branch, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service checked it out for itself. At the same stations where Arch had found 3, 5, and 6 taxa of benthic invertebrates the agency turned up 30, 13, and 24.

If mountain-range removal has been "good for West Virginia," it hasn't been good for Pigeonroost Hollow. Twenty-six families used to live here; now it's down to Weekley. When his neighbors sold out to Arch they had to sign agreements that they'd never protest mountaintop removal. Weekley says that Arch offered him more than a half-million dollars for his seven-tenths of an acre, but that it ain't for sale.

From a high, rocky bluff we looked down on what used to be mountains, a vista no smaller and no easier on the eyes than the one from the Stanley Heirs cemetery. Perched on the bald slope like a heron on a diving raft was the $100 million dragline they call Big John, motionless these past two years.

Half a mile west rose Blair Mountain, leased by Arch and Massey, where even 80 years ago coal was king. In 1921, when 15,000 miners waxed rebellious about working conditions, the industry engaged them in a gun battle, then requested and received help in the form of U.S. Army troops, which turned up the heat with machine guns and bombs. The Battle of Blair Mountain, the second largest civil conflict in American history, lasted 12 days, cost the lives of about two dozen miners, and knocked down union membership from 50,000 to 600. Now Weekley is leading a drive to make the mountain a national historical park.

That's one of the reasons he was hanged in effigy in the town of Logan, and one of the reasons he had a cocked pistol held to his head near the town of Madison. On August 27, 1999, when Weekley, Gibson, and a dozen of their friends reenacted the Blair Mountain protest, a pro-mining mob drove 50 miles from Logan to assault them. Placards were ripped from their hands and destroyed. They were tripped, kicked, choked, spat upon, pelted with cans, eggs, and tomatoes, and informed that they would be killed if they didn't go "back to Charleston where they belonged." Gibson ripped a man off the back of Ken Hechler, then 85 and West Virginia's secretary of state. Last November, campaigning largely on a pro-mountain platform, Hechler was defeated in a second bid for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he had served from 1959 to 1977, laying the groundwork for SMCRA.