Picture this…

You have worked your entire life in the coal mines. On your meager retirement you plan to live out your life in the peace and quiet of the mountains. You have a comfortable house with a wooden fence. You have a well dug by your grandfather that is thirty feet deep and taps into water that taste better than bottled water - no comparison. You have a nice little garden in the same spot year after year providing fresh vegetables all summer with enough to can to last through the winter. You want for nothing because there is nothing else you truly need.

You know all of your neighbors by name and you are comfortable with that. You cry with them at the passing of a loved one and you laugh with them at weddings. You live in a peaceful community. A community in every sense of the word.

And then one afternoon you hear and feel an explosion. Your windows rattle and your grandmothers portrait falls from over the mantle crashing to the floor. The frame, as old as the picture it contained, suddenly ruined. You thank God it’s over and wonder of it’s origin. You think, although tragic, you can get another frame for the photo but in the meantime you hang it back on the wall - most likely saying a little prayer for the disrespect.

But then it happens again the next day… and the next… and the next. You get tired of picking up the picture so instead you just lay it on the mantle and think what is the use in buying another frame - the walls no longer hold pictures. For the first time in your life, you are afraid. The coal industry has moved in and they are here to take the mountains.

There is nothing you can do to stop the daily earthquakes. There is not a house built in West Virginia able to withstand daily concussions. Most of these houses in the hollows are older than the residents who reside within. They were built to withstand the weather not daily bombardment.

All of the sudden your world has gone to hell in a handbasket and there is nothing you can do to stop it. If you want pictures on your walls then you have to anchor them with screws on all four corners. Forget about the garden because the new floods will wipe it and the well out. In most cases the coal industry has taken from you in one way or another already, be it your health or that of a loved one. Now they are there to finish you off by taking all that you have left - your independence, forcing you into a world of unfamiliarity. A world where you used to be able to provide for yourself but now you have to rely on the system.

You rent some small apartment somewhere, hang grandmothers wrinkled portrait on the wall, and hope life ends sooner than you originally hoped. Everything you know is gone. Even the old cemetery that contained grandma herself. You look out the kitchen window at the apartment building across the street and try to picture the old apple tree in the backyard that was still in full bloom in your mind. You remember family reunions in the hollow. Kids playing in the creek, plenty of good food, plenty of laughing - all gone.

Instinctively you reach for a light switch that is already in the off position. You don’t want to contribute to another losing everything because - coal keeps the lights on.

We are so lucky to have coal.

Posted by Denny