public autonomy, that public respect, that public place of leadership.” But not necessarily in private. Judy thinks that Cherokee background is what drives a lot of the Appalachian women involved in the fight against MTR, as many of them count Cherokee women among their ancestors. “I’d always heard there’s an old saying in Cherokee, and it’s Appalachian [too], that while the men sat around the campfire and talked about what to do, the women got out and done it.”
On the other hand, she says she blames “a lot of this materialistic culture on women. The men like the power and the profit. But for a man to keep that trophy wife, he has to provide that trophy with all the beautiful trimmings. And she craves that. I’ve noticed a lot of the women of the coal miners [want] tanning beds and diamond rings and fancy cars and fancy shoes, plenty of clothes. I know that, because I was there once. There’s never enough—always more, more, more, more.”
Judy knows her Cherokee ancestors and her anger at how her home and family have been affected are good reasons why she should fight against MTR, but they don’t fully explain why she has devoted her life to this. What sent her down this path remains, ultimately, a mystery. “I don’t know. I just feel compelled to do it. I try to touch it, but it’s something I can’t touch. It escapes my grasp, every time I try to touch it. Now I can’t ever go back. Because I know the truth now.
“You’re not going to get every coalfield person, just like you’re not going to get every American.” In a way, though, Judy and her colleagues have already “got” most of their coalfield neighbors—most people know that MTR is not a good thing. The hard part is “getting them active, motivated to do something.”
I ask Judy whether she thinks that maybe everyone involved in MJS or any kind of activist work that seeks to change the world is a misfit in some way. We’re not comfortable with things the way they are, and that makes us more prone to act than our neighbors, who for whatever reason are better able to go along with the status quo.
“I think they’re the misfits,” she says. “I think we’re the normal people. They’ve caught a disease, and they’re not even aware of that. They’re addicted to comfort.” Looking at the big picture, Judy’s right—only for a few decades out of all of human history has even the minority of humans in the fully industrialized world been able to view such a level of consumption as “normal,” and this won’t last. Their grandchildren won’t live like they do. “We’re trying to change that [mindset] before they get a rude awakening,” she says. Changing that mindset and lifestyle before the resources needed to make that change are desperately depleted “is a lot easier than doing it [like] Mad Max.
“We’re reaching out to college students, and trying to get the college students to reach out to the high school students because they’re the ones going to be faced with this awful future of no resources and a mess to clean up.” Judy’s also trying to reach parents. “We’re selling our children’s feet to buy ourselves fancy shoes.”
It’s ironic that people seen by much of the rest of the world as ignorant hillbillies are so far ahead of most Americans in understanding this. Judy points this out when she’s doing roadshows. After explaining to the audience why it’s important to pass the Clean Water Protection Act (which would affirm that the law against burying streams applies to mining), she’ll say: ‘I think it’s awful ironic that us ignorant hillbillies have to teach America about the Clean Water Act and the importance of having clean water.’ Some people find it funny. Some people don’t find it funny. And some people—it goes over their head.”
Appalachia, because it’s been passed by and in many ways left behind by mainstream modern culture, retains remnants of older culture useful for making a transition to ways of living well that don’t depend on far-reaching consumption and destruction. Part of this is local lore about subsistence, about hunting and gardening and the wealth of edible and medicinal plants and other renewable resources in the woods here. But part also is habits of mind and living that don’t depend on spending money. For example, entertainment is traditionally seen here as something you do for yourself and the people you know, not something you buy. This was the way it was “for eons, until the industrialized world came,” Judy says. “People did entertain themselves. Setting on a porch, in a swing, or just setting there listening to the birds. Looking at the wildlife. Going for a walk. Walking up the road and saying ‘Hi, how’re you doing, neighbor?’ Talking to your neighbor and looking out for your neighbor’s children. It doesn’t exist anymore except in a very few places in the country, particularly here. Here you can still see people setting on porches and talking.” That it still exists here is because corporate America didn’t deem Appalachia important enough to fully commercialize life here as it has elsewhere. There are no shopping malls or multiplexes along Coal River. That there’s anything of the older way of life here, that it hasn’t been displaced as it has elsewhere in the country, is an accident of neglect. “Lucky us.” Judy isn’t being ironic. She really means it.
A New Movement
There’s been a school at the site of Marsh Fork Elementary since the 1940s. When Judy Bonds was a student there, in the mid-1960s, it was a middle school. She remembers that the school was rebuilt after being partly destroyed by fire in the 1950s, then rebuilt and expanded after another fire in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It became an elementary school in the 1990s.
The school is the lone survivor in the Coal River valley of a series of school closings and consolidations that began in the late 1960s, in tandem with depopulation of the valley after the mostly boom years in coal mining—from the 1940s to the early 1960s—ended. Depopulation accelerated in the 1980s as MTR began, as many families were forced from their homes by mining operations or lost their jobs to mechanization and out-of-state hiring. What population remains here now is concentrated along Rt. 3, as most of the hollows along the streams that feed, or formerly fed, the Coal River have been taken over by MTR operations.
When Judy was in middle school, the high school football team played on what is now Marsh Fork Elementary School’s athletic field. On nights when games were played, you couldn’t find a place to park within a mile of the school along Rt. 3. “Friday night football was really big,” Judy remembers. “Not everybody went to the same church, but everybody went to the same school. The school was a real close tie, for our sense of community.
“When I went to school here, there was no mining around this school whatsoever. [At] football games, you could look up on the hill and see people with bonfires up there watching the football game from the top of the mountain. It was kind of comforting to look up there and see those people standing up there.” Now that mountainside is off-limits to all but Massey employees working the enormous mountaintop removal site just over the ridge.
That MTR site feeds coal to the Goals Coal prep plant, a Massey subsidiary, where coal is washed with water and chemicals by the river right next to the school. Coal moving along the prep plant’s conveyor belts and into and out of its coal silo sheds dust and chemicals into the air just 150 feet from the school grounds. The byproduct of the coal’s washing, called slurry or sludge—black goo laden with toxins—gets pumped up into the 2.8 billion gallon slurry pond back behind the 385-foot earthen dam that looms over the plant and the school.
Construction on the dam began in 1985. “Of course I did not know that in ’85,” Judy says. “A lot of people did not know that dam existed—thought it was a few buildings up there, and they’s loading coal up there. I didn’t find out about that dam until 1997 or 1998, when I found out about the one [down the river] at Marfork [and] someone said: ‘Well, don’t you know there’s a dam over the elementary school?’
“The coal companies really do not want anyone to see what they’re doing, don’t want anyone to know what’s going on in Appalachia. It’s as though we’re the coal companies’ private
