CHAPTER
40
TWENTY MINUTES LATER she stopped the truck and pointed up ahead. The moonlight was especially strong tonight and Puller could easily see what she was trying to show him.
“What do you make of that?” she asked. The object was a three-hundred-foot-high mound that looked startlingly out of place between two other peaks.
“Tell me.”
“That’s what’s called a ‘valley fill.’ What they fill it with the coal companies call ‘overburden.’ That’s basically everything they tore off the land: trees, soil, and rock that the coal companies sweep away to get to the seams. They have to put it somewhere. And since West Virginia has a reclamation act, meaning the coal companies have to put the land back close to how they found it, the companies take the overburden, dump it in a valley, hydroseed it, fertilize it, cover it with mulch, and go on their way. Problem is, when they dump the overburden like that they’ve turned the geology upside down. Topsoil is on the bottom and rock that was on the bottom is now on top. Native plants and trees won’t grow in it. So they introduce non-native plantings that are royally screwing up the ecosystem. But they’ve met the letter if not the spirit of the law and they move on. And this dumping also changes the topography of the land. Rivers get redirected. Flash floods occur. Mountains fall down and crush homes.”
“I didn’t really see that many folks living around here.”
“That’s because Trent has bought out entire neighborhoods.”
“Why? People wanted to sell?”
“No, they just didn’t want to live next to a mining operation where they were blowing up the land. Can’t drink the water. Can’t wash your clothes outside. And you got health problems spiking on everything from lungs to livers. Randy wasn’t kidding when he mentioned his lung problems. He was diagnosed with it when he was a teenager. A precursor to COPD. And unlike me he’s never smoked in his life. But he did play football and run track near a coal mining operation. And he’s not the only athlete from around here to suffer like that. Quality of life went to shit. Where there were towns and communities, now all you see is one little trailer, or one little house in the woods. That’s all that’s left. Used to be over twenty thousand people in Drake County. Now we don’t have even a third of that. Next ten years we might just disappear right along with the coal.”
She drove on, stopping in front of a chain-link fence with warning signs posted on it. Behind the fence was a large metal facility rising many stories into the air. It had long chutes running from it in several directions and at several levels.
“That’s a loadout. Where they crush the coal and load it in trucks and on railcars. There’s a railhead that runs right up to it.”
“They’re working late,” said Puller as he watched lights flick back and forth from the facility and from trucks rumbling around.
“They work 24/7, like you said. Used to be they knocked off work at dark, but no more. Time is money. And the only thing they have to sell is the coal. Does them no good sitting here. That stuff will go to power the electrical grid. Keeps the lightbulbs and laptops going, as they like to say around here. At least in the coal company marketing materials.”
“I take it you hate all parts of it.”
“Not all parts, no. It does bring jobs. It does help the whole country because we need the power. But some folks think there might be a better way to get to the stuff than blowing up the land. And at some point the costs do outweigh the benefits. Some folks will tell you we hit that tipping point a long time ago. But if you’re not from around here and you don’t have to deal with black water in your sink, or big rocks falling on your house, or your kid getting cancer because the air pollutants are off the charts, what do you care? They call us the United States of America, but we’re not really united about anything. Appalachia brings the coal to the rest of the country. And when all the coal is gone and West Virginia looks like Pluto, what does the rest of the country care? Life goes on. That’s the reality.”
“How did your dad feel about it? He sounds like he was a salt of the earth guy.”
“He spent a good part of his life looking for coal. I think he stopped thinking about what it was doing to the planet. If he ever did.”
“And Randy?”
“What about him?”
“He looked for coal too. Was apparently good at it. Now he’s obviously dropped out of life.”
Puller paused. “Was he the source of the earlier death threats against Roger?”
She put the truck in gear. “Got one more thing to show you.”