meeting, in April, I stop for a walk in the woods on a mountain near Caryville, a few miles south of Zeb Mountain.
The leaves are just beginning to come out on trees along the trail here. Maples are leafing out, but the mast trees—oaks, hickories, other nuts—are barely showing leaves. Shadbush is blooming up here; down in valley, where the season’s further advanced, dogwood’s already in full bloom. I hear a Carolina wren calling “teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, tea.” Migrating birds are now coming through—on this sunny day I hear quite a bit of warbler noise, even as late as mid-morning. Blooming along the trail are pure white trillium, violets (white, light purple, red purple, dark purple, white with purple streaks), jack-in-the-pulpit, toadshade trillium not yet turned its mature red, white star chickweed, wild strawberry, several yellow buttercuppy things. The last of the various ferns’ fiddleheads are unfurling. The flowers of bloodroot have already gone by; May apple and columbine are up and leafy but not flowering yet. Ramps ought to be up and ready for digging, and morels up and ready for picking too, though I don’t see any myself.
In the woods today, I meet Jim Massengill, an older fellow who grew up on the mountainside facing Caryville here and still camps up here on the mountain. Jim’s family has lived here for long enough that one of the mountains nearby was named after them. He at first thinks I’m here to poach morels, and he starts his conversation with me with warnings about snakes and game wardens. We chat warily for a while, and then he says, speaking of himself and his neighbors: “We love these mountains. We love these mountains.” I ask him what he thinks of coal companies’ plans to blow up the tops of many of these mountains. Without hesitation he says: “We’re gonna stop that.” No longer wary, we talk about strip mining and the horrific clear-cutting that’s preceding it on thousands of acres of beautiful mountainside like the one where we’re standing.
Jim’s family arrived here in the 1830s or 1840s, migrating south from Kentucky. At one time, they owned 11,000 acres. Like Larry Gibson’s family, they lost most of it a century ago. In the late 1800s, “a land company came in here and they had what they call gun thugs,” Jim explains. “And they run all the people out of these mountains and took the land. That’s what I was told.” Timber was taken out first, followed by coal.
When Jim was a child, in the late 1940s, the only road over this mountain was one dirt lane. That road was first paved only a few years ago, and this summer it’s to be fixed up and widened—a convenience for logging and mining trucks, I guess. Federal funding is involved, ostensibly to make the road safe for school buses.
Jim remembers huge old hemlocks being taken out of the woods near here, some years back. “They left them alone [when the land was first logged] because the people that owned the land would not let them cut them. There was eleven of them. Monster hemlocks,” as big as nine feet across at the base. “I cried when I seen them cut. I’d seen them since I was a kid.”
Jim’s father owned and worked a scattering of little “dog-hole” coal mines in the area, where he scraped out enough coal to make a modest living. His father’s working life extended into the first wave of strip mining in the 1950s and 1960s, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with that. “He didn’t believe in strip mining. He was a deep miner. He wouldn’t work in strip mines. They destroyed the timber, they destroyed the land.”
About ten years ago, up on this mountain not far from here, Jim tells me, “I was on a four-wheeler, and I seen a bunch of wild turkeys, and I just eased up on them.” They were at a place on a hillside where miners had drilled augur holes sideways into the mountain to take out small deposits of coal left behind by previous mining. “Snakes [copperheads] were coming up out of the augur holes, and [the turkeys] were pecking them and eating them. I sat there and watched them for probably thirty minutes. I never seen nothing like that.” The turkeys were so focused on what they were doing that they didn’t run from Jim, who was quite close. “Usually, a wild turkey—you get close to it, and it’s gone. But they were really eating those snakes up. They’d peck ’em in the head, reach and get ’em, throw ’em up, and swallow ’em down.” From the number and variety of snake stories Jim has to tell, I wonder if he isn’t some sort of snake magnet. He tells me he once stumbled into a den of maybe fifty copperheads out in the woods near his old home place. “Man, they scared me to death.” I’m sure they did. I tell him I think maybe I won’t want to go hiking off-trail with him.
I promise to put Jim in touch with some of the folks in Knoxville working on the MJS campaign. He later sends me an email: “It would take days to really show you the damaged mountain and wood lands in this area. I would be honored to talk to you or anyone that can help us (the people of this area) stop all this nonsense. I alone don’t have the knowledge to get it done, but with your help we can get a lot done.”
The April MJS meeting is held in a classroom at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, less than an hour down the road from Caryville. In response to the growing concern about inclusiveness, and particularly in response to the controversy stirred up by how OVEC’s Vivian Stockman was quoted in the Charleston Gazette, the meeting starts with a long discussion about equality and solidarity—how to allow diverse voices to be heard and to enable various groups and individuals to participate in MJS.
Diane Bady, OVEC’s co-director, here instead of Abe today representing OVEC, says that OVEC does want to be involved with and supportive of MJS. She mentions “an enormous amount of anger directed at Vivian” over the newspaper article she was quoted in, and says Vivian has found that anger painful to deal with. Diane says that in the past OVEC has worked on campaigns in which well-intentioned outsiders have come in to help and have done things that cause problems that OVEC later has had to clean up; they’ve made OVEC’s work more difficult rather than bolstered their energy and resources, and then left. OVEC does want MJS to succeed, Diane emphasizes.
Larry tells the group that there are folks in West Virginia who do not feel invited. For the past century and more local voices haven’t been heard, they’ve not been taken seriously or valued—so failing to invite people opens old wounds. Bill McCabe affirms that MJS needs to respect and listen to folks in the mountains who’ve been working against MTR (and other strip mining before it) for years, long before MJS was dreamed of.
Chris Dodson notes, at this point, that there are different groups working to the same end, and we don’t all have to do things the same way. If we disagree, we should do it with respect.
Patty Draus, Dave Cooper’s partner, observes that people at MJS planning meetings are well voiced, but people who are not yet at the table aren’t. Another woman from Kentucky says that there at least, people don’t have a clear idea of MJS. They think that civil disobedience is all there is to it. There’s little awareness, for example, of ongoing and planned work like the Listening Projects.
A while back, john johnson says, MJS organizers made an effort to come up with a comprehensive survey of existing local organizations working against MTR. Obviously we’ve missed people, he says. The group brainstorms for a while about who’s not at the table today and should be contacted.
The inclusiveness problem is not just about getting strangers to the table, but also affects group dynamics among those who are already here. In that connection, john says that he’s an anarchist, not a leader, and notes that there’s no hierarchy in MJS. He acknowledges that the big mouths (himself included) need to make more space for others to speak up—but at the same time everyone else needs to be more aggressive about checking them. We made a mistake over the past few months, he adds, creating the impression that everyone has to completely agree with MJS to work with it. Nonprofit organizations aren’t going to endorse civil disobedience—but even if they don’t sign on officially, many of their members will want to help and should be encouraged to do so.
john adds that he’s uncomfortable with a strict policy of following the lead of coalfield locals, because by itself
