Roadkill Zen (n.): The state of emptying oneself through spiritual creativity involving the searching out and usage of mediums dependent upon the seeming discards and decay of everyday life balanced with cultural overabundance and the ignored beauty of natural circumstances. This involves both opening the mind’s eye and closing at least one of the body’s eyes, searching out the center of sight. Acronymically referred to as “RKz”.
Roadkill Zen (n.): An online quarterly journal with concentrations in poetry, flash fiction, and cultural creative non-fiction.
Roadkill Zen (n.): A funneled electronic destination, whereby one artist and writer (Larry “Threecrows” Thacker) may rest the cumulative results of writing, poetry, art, photography, and other potentially adventurous or disastrous undertakings without trying to manage ten different websites (and none of them as cool as this one, thanks to Josh D).
Nutrition Facts Serv, Size: 1 visit, Amount per serving; Calories 0, Total fat 0g (0% DV), Sodium 0mg, Total Carb 0g, Protein 0g. A significant source of creative alternative thought provocation. Percent Daily Values based on a 200 page per day diet. Ingredients: About, Mountain Mysteries, Poetry, Roadkill Zen Journals, Art-i-Zen, Blogsmack, Angstiness, Columns, Photography, Linkage, Archives, Caffeine (coffee and Diet Rockstar).
….Roadkill Zen Call to Action….
Ever head out to find something but along the way you found something else that suddenly became just as important to you? We’ve probably all had that happen. Here’s my story. I’ve been working on the Mountain Mysteries Project on and off for most of my adult life, collecting folklore, stumbling upon paranormal things we often take for granted in a mountain culture rife with such stories.
In the early winter months of 2008 I traveled with a friend over to Wise County, Virginia (near the very southwest tip of the state) in search for details concerning the “Black Mountain Lights” I’d first heard of from a student back in 2002 and which was confirmed as a long-standing story by a family member. Apparently, around the peak of Black Mountain – the highest point in Kentucky – strangely acting unidentified lights have been reported for decades. The student heard about them from her mother. The family member heard about them years ago, associated with mine battles occurring up there.
So we headed out for a leisurely day of what I thought would be UFO hunting. A fine Sunday afternoon in my book. By the end of the day, however, we returned empty handed of any UFO stories but emotionally changed and “all in” on a completely different subject. This is the story of how UFOs sparked my interests with the anti-Mountaintop Removal movement growing so strongly in the coalfields of Appalachia.
You can get to the Black Mountain region in two ways, from the Kentucky side through Harlan County, or the Virginia side through Wise County. Either way will get you there but not in a straight line. Both are every bit a two hour drive from my home in Middlesborough, Kentucky at the Cumberland Gap. We took the Virginia way, looking at the map and following what looked like an easy enough route.
We traveled up along Hwy 58 to Pennington Gap, up to Big Stone Gap, then to the small town of Appalachia. We headed north out of town, in the direction of the highest mountain tops we could see, just sort of roaming around up in the hollows, hoping we’d run into some folks to ask about the rumor of mountain lights around the peeks to the north. I’d also briefly heard about controversy surrounding mining around Black Mountain so we headed in the direction of where we could see evidence of that in the distance. We wandered up a few roads along hollow communities with lots of little coal dust covered matching homes along thin roads that suddenly up and quit, not because it’s the head of hollow, but because a mining gate blocks your way.
Once in a while we’d make a turn and a clear mountain view came into view. That is, what was left of the mountain. Most every mountain we saw north of town was flattened at the top, chunked off in large steps like South American pyramids, drastically contrasting with some hills filled with evergreens and bare trees versus these mountains of terraced yellow-brown dirt. Entire mountain peaks gone, flattened, shortened, deforested. Mutilated forms of a prior state.
Along one stretch of road we noticed how abandoned about a half mile of community looked. The coal dust was so think on these homes they were black. There was a church, covered in dust, unused looking. Many of the structure’s windows were broken. No one appeared to be around of actually living there. We saw two men and a boy chopping wood on the side the road, the only life within sight. We continued down the road but were stopped at a gate and had to turn around. On the way back out, only a few hundred feet from the gate, I pulled up to speak with them. It was cold, they were working hard, chopping and filling the bed of a truck. I asked them about the lights, but by that time we’d taken in half a day of out and out strangeness, distracted away from our primary task and growing curious to see what was really happening up on the mining sites. They’d never heard of the lights.
I asked them about the abandoned houses and church. The coal company bought it, one of the men explained. A lot of the people were moving out anyway since it was impossible to live there with the constant coal trucks and equipment, unbreatheable air, coal dust on everything inside and outside their homes, the blasting. The company had simply bought the street and homes up as “a favor” to these people, places they’d lived for years. The place looked as if it had been deserted for a long time. I asked how long ago the company bought it up. “About half a year ago.” We were stunned. It resembled a scene from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, desolate, full up with unanswered questions, confusion, the scene of something devastating that no one was left to talk about.
From there we wanted to get up on the mountain as high as we could and asked how to get there. They said, “Go ahead. People four wheel and camp up there all the time. They won’t mind, especially on a Sunday.” We took off up another road, in my non-four wheel drive Suzuki, heading for the distant high brown patches they probably once called mountains. The further out and up we drove along the winding road of frozen mud, the more alien the scene transformed. We drove away from trees. Away from animal movement and sound. Away from the smooth contour of the hills. Away from commonsense.
We reached what was one of the highest parts of the area, having driven for at least thirty minutes through what can only be described as a moonscape, a no-mans land. There were only a few scraggly trees at the top, layered in frost, a little snow in patches. Though we weren’t on the Black Mountain’s peak we were along one of the Black Mountain ridges, now flattened, but still very high. The view across Kentucky went for miles. No description can do justice to what it looked like where we stood, however. the earth was exposed in almost every direction, the view out across Kentucky pretty much the only visible land undisturbed. It is thousands of acres, in most places making the entire world look turned inside out and lifeless. It was not reclaimed, not developed back to some semblance of its original contour.
I was taking photos when the guard pulled up and told us to leave. “What about all these other folks running around on their four wheelers, I thought it was alright to be up here?” Mostly friendly, but to the point, he responded, “You all need to go ahead and get off the private property.” We’d been officially thrown off a mining sight.
Having grown up in the mountains and seeing coal-related activity all my life, even secondarily benefiting from the coal industry as many in my family labored in steel fabrication at a company fed with coalfield supplied jobs, seeing strips of mountain disappearing here and there was sort of weaved into my expectations. But in my area of home, it was significantly removed from my everyday view, never jolting my senses. It was a clean ignorance of what was happening just over the ridges. I never had to deal with waking up to bed-shaking blasts or having to dodge coal trucks on the way to the bus stop. Witnessing the region north of Appalachia, however, pushed me out of old thinking into new understanding.
There are some things you just know when you see them. Things you deeply understand as soon as you happen upon it, dwell on the event, digest it in your thinking gut, and allow it to land naturally in a part of your brain. Mountaintop Removal is just such a thing. I recognize it in every fabric of my make up as simply wrong. I generally understand what it is, why it is, but especially what it does. I understand what explosions are. I understand what pushing the top of a mountain over into a valley does to everything from natural animal habitat to ground water supplies in neighborhood wells. I understand what a slurry spill will do. I recognize callous greed from a distance and up close. I understand the confusing state of helplessness so many feel about how to tackle this invasion of common sense. I understand why over-ground miners, with no other job resources in the area, defend their jobs. But more than any of that, I recognize a scar on the spirit of the land when I see it and, more especially, when I feel it in my soul.
If that experience wasn’t enough, a few other trips were sufficient to push me over the edge further. I took some other weekends and sought out some sights – west of town toward Fonde and Pruden, Frakes, over to Fork Ridge and Tackett Creek. We’re in a basin in Middlesborough, the remainder of a 300-million-year-old meteorite crater. We love to promote the crater. It’s unique in the nation and we’re all about promoting that and, of course, our sharing a boundary with the famous Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. But winter, when nature shows off what’s really up, exposes the dominating brown swaths of scarring along the western and northwestern mountains of the basin which increase with every year. I’m sure some would remark that these are “reclaimed.” Some of these long strips of emptiness may be seeded with grasses – spring will tell, I suppose – but they stand out as particularly disturbing because of their treelessness. Ironically, you can even see much of this from the Pinnacle, the park’s celebrated lookout.
I came back from these daytrips feeling like someone had sucker punched me in the gut, driving all the good air from my lungs. It was sickening, to my mind, heart, and soul. Perhaps a clichéd response, but nevertheless the only way I can describe it.
I don’t know if these are all strip mining, high-wall mining, or pure mountaintop removal sites, or a mix, or whether there’s really a difference in any of them. I have a lot to learn, but I do know it’s a mess, a big disastrous environmental, cultural, socio-economic, spiritual mess. A big incomplete thought and a wrongness at once so noticeable that it seems to call out between the miles. We’re all being shoe-lookers as the world is scraped from above us.
I’m familiar with the wedging arguments of each side: safer mining techniques, cost efficient, potential collapses of slurry ponds, our addiction to burning coal, loss of underground mining positions, permanent earth scarring, the neglected promise of sufficient reclamation, ecological imbalance, loss of jobs for MTR miners, past disasters, flooding, pollution, and corporate greed versus the common man, woman, and child. These keep the debate in limbo. State legislators are scared to death to trade a good choice for less votes come election time. The Feds would rather the states handle it. I understand – I do. Being a city councilman in my first (and final) elected position – not even near the responsibilities of a state legislator – I have learned what it’s like to have a fire in your belly nearly quenched from general apathy and the assumed need to compromise and “pick your battles” in order to know someone will still be around to listen when you need consensus building down the road. That is the reality of politics, not idealistic public service. When you’re fired up and you know you’re right it’s easy to say to hell with the political landscape of tomorrow, my current emotional conviction is correct now and if I burn a bridge maybe I didn’t need it anyway.
But in politics I’m afraid that’s not how it works. And that’s one of the saddest discoveries I’ve ever made. Moreover, legislators hate negative attention, whether they caused it or not. Voter sentiment can take a lot of people down whether or not the legislator had anything to do with the controversy. The safe thing many lawmakers choose to do is lay low, not get too associated with other “trouble making” elements. Maybe the “death by committee” route will serve the purpose of giving upset people a place to vent without having to debate and vote on something on the house and senate floor. Maybe someone else will sponsor the bill, forever associating their names with the controversy. An issue such as MTR brings out the most talented chess player in everybody. While the status quo continues, of course.
I think my detesting of this act, however, runs deeper than any of these issues. MTR is a personal assault. MTR is a cultural assault, akin to someone crushing the hands of a banjo player or writer, mashing the mouth of a gospel singer, or plucking out the eyes of the artist. It’s robbery.
Blasting off the tops of mountains and pushing that dirt and rock into valleys is not only a destruction of the oldest mountains in the nation, it is the blatant destruction of the things making mountain people who we are. We are the mountains. We are our culture. The creation of our culture requires proper ingredients. For us, the mountains are an ingredient that, if taken away, deformed, abandoned, removes yet another portion through which to know ourselves and to continue evolving mountain culture. More than anything we are products of the topography surrounding us. We are culturally dependent upon the geographical position of our raising. The mountains shaped what we became as Appalachians. The mountains, hills, valleys, hollows, and land-shaped bodies of water that sheltered our pioneer ancestors, provided the tough land from which our tough culture emerged, shaped the attitudes and enthusiasm of our great, grandparents, grandparents, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, are being attacked.
We are the land from which our thoughts on living sprouted. And now, we stand by and let that thing – our cultural sustenance – die in front of our eyes. I pride myself in coming up with answers when I rail so emotionally against something. I don’t profess to have an answer for this one but I will educate myself in all the ways possible and lead others into that same understanding I may find.
In the end we’d ventured out to research yet another story. A story that couldn’t exist without this particular mountain area, a place we discovered is in danger of even existing down the road. How this happens, how we let such things roll on under our turn at the cultural watch, I think, will become one of the greatest mysteries I’ve ever tried to understand.