LITMIR.BIZ

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like we’ll have more people than we know what to do with,” john johnson says.

      Chris Irwin responds, “We’ll know what to do with them.”

      Much of the weekend is devoted to working out a rough-draft calendar for the summer, and to meetings of and report-backs from working groups focused on Listening Projects, training camps to be held early in the summer, finances, art, intake process for volunteers, media and outreach, logistics of housing and feeding and transporting volunteers, music, and scouting for possible actions sites and to learn what’s happening with mining in various places. Informally, in conversations during breaks in the meeting, activists are still considering a mountaintop occupation sometime during the summer, with possible locations to be scouted in the next few weeks and discussed at the next monthly meeting, in April.

      Kayford Mountain in West Virginia is five hours of fast driving from Asheville, mostly on highways. There’s a network of wide, well-built highways throughout this region (thank you Sen. Robert Byrd), but when you get off these roads you’re often quite quickly on narrow, light-duty roads with no shoulders and steep drop-offs, not built to withstand heavy truck traffic but subjected to it nonetheless to suit the convenience of mine operations. Coal trucks pound the hell out of roads running within a few yards of people’s homes, and come tearing around blind curves too fast for anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment to get out of their way. Dozens of people on foot and in cars have been killed this way. Sharing the road with coal trucks is scary, and people who live in the coalfields live with that fear every day.

      When I visit Kayford one afternoon in late March, I meet Larry at the Stanley family cemetery, near the top of the mountain, amid a constant din of working equipment from the surrounding mine sites. Trees around the cemetery are still winter-dormant. On the back of a white-painted rock marking the entrance to the cemetery Larry has painted a Bible verse, Psalms 95:4: “In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also.” Larry’s family has been burying relatives here since the early 1800s.

      Members of the Stanley family have lived here for 220 years, Larry tells me. (Larry’s grandmother was a Stanley.) They lost most of their land a century ago, in 1906, as so many other southern Appalachian families did when land companies greedy for timber and mineral rights moved in. “We had 566 acres. We now have fifty. A crooked land company and a crooked notary cheated my family out of [the rest] because they couldn’t read,” he says.

      Gesturing to the trees at one side of the cemetery, Larry says: “Before they started this, in ’86, you could come in here and above the trees there you could see a pasture, with cattle and horses in it. Above the trees.” Now there’s nothing but sky there. The mountainside where the pasture was located has, like all the mountains for miles around now, had its top blown off and been reduced in height by hundreds of feet, with the rubble pushed aside into valley fills. “This here [Kayford] was the lowest point. Everything around me was higher, about 300 feet higher than this.”

      The strip mining that surrounds Kayford stretches for seventeen miles. Larry’s little fifty-acre island in the middle is the only place that isn’t controlled by mining companies. “Thirteen permits, 7,538 acres, several different companies,” Larry says.

      As we’re walking up the private access road to the cemetery, we stop to look at tire tracks from a big mining truck that’s been using the road without Larry’s permission, presumably to dump something beyond the edge of the cemetery. Similarly, mining trucks tear up the private dirt road that goes through Larry’s property past several cabins maintained by relatives, because it’s a shortcut to property a mining company controls and has been logging just beyond the cabins. Flyrock from blasting has landed in the cemetery and its parking area from as far as 1,500 yards away. In fact, Larry’s picked up flyrock all over his property—on the road, in his yard, plenty of places where he or someone else could easily have been standing when it fell. “We’ve had rocks coming on our property as heavy as five tons,” Larry tells me. Later he’ll show me photographs, and tell me to look for flyrock boulders along the road I’ll take down the mountain. Some are as big as easy chairs.

      For all the land that’s being torn up by mining here, there are very few mining jobs. “When I was a boy, in 1960,” Larry says, “they had 25,000 men. Now 500 men take out five times as much coal as the 25,000 did.” The coal companies hire just a few locals “so they can tell people: Well, we’re hiring. But you go sit at the mine site and watch the cars when they’re coming out—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri [license plates].”

      Just a few hundred people live in the hollow below Kayford now, all clustered along the road by the creek, none up in the hills. There used to be a high school here for 1,500 students, but it closed. “We have one elementary school in the hollow, and they’re talking about closing it down. [Since 1960,] we lost sixteen schools that I remember.”

      I ask why people around here aren’t angry about all this. “They feel powerless,” Larry says, adding that the mining companies have succeeded in dividing and conquering. “They’re very good at keeping them fighting amongst themselves. The people that they hire intimidate the people that they don’t hire. Fear is so thick you can cut it with a knife.” There’s good reason for that fear. Since Larry began speaking out against MTR and the destruction of his home place, he’s been keeping a list of attacks against himself and his property. It’s now a very long list. He’s been run off the road. His cabin was burned down in 2002, after a threat the day before. His dogs have been killed. People have shot up his house. People have come here and shot at headstones in the cemetery—he shows me the marks from bullets hitting a relatively new stone. His camper, parked up here, was shot up so badly he had to put a new door on it. “They ripped the windows out of it, they shot it up, turned it over.” The cap on his truck has been busted up. Mining companies also exercise control through “the flow of money” among locals: “If they ain’t making any money, they wait for crumbs.” They don’t want to rock the boat lest if a job opens up the company won’t hire them. Or, if they don’t wait for “crumbs,” they leave.

      We take Larry’s truck up past his home, then continue on along the dirt road past his relatives’ cabins. He thinks there’s likely to be blasting off that side of his property right about now, and he’d like me to see it.

      We drive past a sign warning about blasting, and I ask Larry how that can be, are they allowed to turn his property into a blast site just by posting a sign? “What sign? I don’t see no sign,” he says, grinning. “You gotta know, us hillbillies, if there’s not a picture, we cain’t read.” In fact, the sign marks the edge of his property, and we trespass a short ways onto land the mining company has been logging, to see what’s happening. (Seems a fair exchange, since miners’ trucks have been trespassing across the private road through Larry’s property as a shortcut to get here.)

      When we get out of Larry’s truck, the land we’re standing on, which Larry says they’re going to drop by several hundred feet, is peppered with flyrock. Some pieces I see are big as bricks—and they came from a blast site 500 yards away, Larry says. Certainly, looking down into the enormous mine site several hundred feet below us, the active mining looks that far away. They’re currently blowing off another 150 to 180 feet of rock to get at an 8-foot seam of coal.

      Several times Larry asks: “Do you hear a whistle?” expecting a warning whistle—although they don’t always whistle a warning before blasting. “If there’s a tree still standing and you hear a blast, get behind it. Actually, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a tree now.” After the recent logging, only scattered spindly little trees remain, too thin to offer cover.

      We’ll never know whether my being there stopped the blasting that day; mining companies don’t like to publicize their MTR operations. “They don’t know who you are,” Larry tells me. “They know I’ve been at the cemetery with you.” Several mining company pickup trucks have driven past while I’ve been here, their drivers waving at me and Larry. Larry knows they keep track of his comings and goings because they talk about it on public communications radio channels, which he sometimes monitors.

      “I want

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