Montpelier
It was the summer of 1947. The awful long war had been over for two years, and people could drive again. So my father piled us into his prized 1946 Chevy and drove us from Syracuse to my mother’s home town, Berlin, in southwestern Pennsylvania. I was only 12, too young to appreciate the Germanness of the name of almost everything, the almost-Southern accents, and the stolid, red-brick, conservative German Baptist “Dunker” churches all around.
We drove one afternoon for a picnic at the home of one of my mother’s sisters and her husband, Uncle Dutch Nedrow. Uncle Dutch had been a miner till black lung sapped most of his vitality, but still dabbled at it with a little mine in a hillside seam on his property. He was a wood shop hobbyist; his yard came alive, in every gust of wind, with windmills powering little men with bucksaws, tap-dancing black men in top hats and birds with whirring wings. It was all very enchanting, if a bit distracting.
Dutch’s house was set in a deep valley with a lovely stream rattling past at the foot of his yard. I had recently gotten into trout fishing, so I ran down to take a look at it. To my amazement, it was bright orange. Orange residue coated the rocks, and a leathery white alga waved in the current where normally would have thrived clumps of watercress or mint. I asked my mother what it was.
That was 70 years ago. The mines then were mostly underground, their entrances marked by yawning black adits. Some years later — but still 56 years ago, shortly after Mother and I were married — I managed to get a weekend job conducting services and preaching during the spring at several little Presbyterian chapels in the coal country of southeastern Ohio, not far from Wheeling and the Ohio River.
Florence Mine and Glen Robbins’ Dorothy Mine were all but closed. The gaunt black steel tipples and conveyor belts rose silent above the coal-dusted, boarded-up villages. There were no trains in sight. The air stank of perpetually burning coal refuse that coated the mountainsides, slowly turning into red dog — coal ash. Old cars lay gutted in side yards or upside down like capsized turtles, stripped of all their usable parts. Beside the office door of the Florence Mine was posted a notice that the second shift would be working Tuesday.
“Times are pretty hard down here,” I warned my wife, “and we’re driving a pretty shiny car” – it was a little black Beetle — “so folks may be a bit sensitive. Last week the collection plate had only 15 cents in it. So whatever you do, don’t bring up any subject that has anything to do with money.” She promised she wouldn’t.
After church she tried to strike up a conversation with a worn-looking woman in a head scarf. “Well,” she asked cheerily, “You got your garden in yet?”
“Honey,” the woman answered, “I ain’t had the money for the seeds.”
The point of all this is that, even in the best of times in the coal-mining industry, the work was destroying some of the most precious natural beauty of the eastern United States — the Appalachian Mountains and the fertile southern hardwood forests that covered them. And in the worst of times, wherever the strip-mining shovels had scooped up all the coal they profitably could get at, it went away, left the country behind as unsightly as a dead dog on the highway, and left the miners and their families bewildered and broke in the despoiled valleys.
During the recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump, as part of his pledge to make America great again, toyed cruelly with the hopes and nostalgia of the few remaining miners. “We’re going to be bringing coal jobs back!” he vowed, “Clean coal! Clean, clean coal! And it’s gonna be great!” As a businessman, he had to know that wasn’t going to happen. Under pressure from environmental lawsuits on one side and cheaper fossil fuels on the other — not to mention the gathering tsunami of renewable energy generation and the costs of lingering health effects for former miners — any claims to restore coal to a position of prominence are but cynicism at its worst.
Making America great again (assuming the need to) seems to involve returning to the days of Trump’s youth, when the giddiness of the recent victory in World War II combined with the GI Bill to produce an unparalleled boom. It ignores the days, for example, of my youth, when soup kitchen lines stretched along sidewalks and farmers abandoned their desolated land for the peach orchards of California. It forgets the scourge of Jim Crow; the suppression of women, the best of whom could get little better than teaching jobs (which many were forced to relinquish if they married); and medicine before antibiotics and dentistry before novocain. A great America is not in our rearview mirrors; it’s ahead of us. Like a slightly tired old mansion, it needs a lot of work — infrastructure, medical insurance for all, equal opportunity, shared responsibility — and rhetoric won’t fix it. As Ted Lieu, Congressman from California has written, “(The) reason coal won’t be back is the same reason 35mm film won’t be. Cheaper, cleaner products won. We need to help coal country, not lie to them.”
I wonder if I were to go back to Uncle Dutch’s place today, whether the stream would be running clear. The recent executive orders from Washington say probably not.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
