For as long as I can remember I have been a little bit of a history buff. Not just West Virginia history, but history of all sorts including West Virginia. As far as WV is concerned I like to learn the history of the mountains as passed down from one generation to the next. I could sit and listen to people tell stories of a time since gone and be perfectly content until the storyteller got tired of telling their stories. Which is actually a very rare event. More times than not the stories end with a to be continued hanging in the air unspoken but implied. That is fine by me as well because I enjoy their company and always look forward to my next visit.

That is one reason I liked Larry Gibson right off. He is one of those people that loves to talk about his family history and the history of the land he grew up on. I’m one of those people that love to listen so we hit it off just fine.

I feel bad for Larry. I don’t feel sorry for him. That’s not what he wants or any of us for that matter it’s not about us. But I feel bad. His stories now are at times just sad to listen to. Stories about a mountain and community that no longer exist outside of his memory. Everything that makes up Larry’s life has been or is being leveled by the coal industry.

Growing up in Peachtree I just absolutely loved to be in the mountains, plain and simple. In the fall I loved to squirrel hunt and it began as soon as I was old enough to shoot a .410 guage shotgun. I started hunting around the age of 8 with my dad and both of my grandpas. I started hunting alone when I was 12. I was always a moving hunter. I couldn’t go somewhere and just sit down I had to be moving through the mountains albeit slowly. I think it played a big part in my being a backwoods drifter now.

It would seem as if I was born to be in the mountains. The mountains around Peachtree quickly became familiar. A friendly kind of familiar. I knew which trees I was most likely to find squirrels in during the early morning hours. I knew which hollows where ginseng was the most abundant. I knew where every trail went and how long it would take me to reach my destination via mountain paths.

I’ve always been more comfortable on a trail somewhere in the backwoods among the tall oaks and the wildlife than anywhere outside of the mountains. There is a familiarity to the mountains. When people like me and Larry talk about losing everything we know to mountaintop removal it is that familiarity. It is like watching a lifelong friend lose their life to cancer. We are trying to find a cure before it is too late.

A lot of the trails and paths I use to hike and hunt now lead to the same place, the mountaintop removal site in Schumate and Clay’s Branch. When I look at that site I can’t help but remember what it used to be and you would probably be surprised at the profound sense of loss I feel.

That is why I feel bad for Larry. I imagine his loss is many times greater than mine. He has had to watch the very mountains and valleys he grew up in destroyed by the cancer that is mountaintop removal coal mining. What has been lost can never be replaced. The really sad thing about that is the memories of what used to be will die with our generations as well. Because as go the mountains, so does the culture.

If the bottom fell out of the economy tomorrow we could live off the mountains. I wonder how many friends of coal could live off of a lump of coal? The friends of coal like to say that God put coal there for us to use. The only thing they can do with coal is burn it. The resources God gave me, I can build a house to keep the weather out, feed myself and provide myself with medicine. At least I could do those things as long as I left the coal right where it is. I have said in the past, if God put coal here I think it is more like the forbidden fruit, we should leave it alone because we are destroying our Garden of Eden, willingly and continuously.

It’s just not worth it.