Almost Heaven, West Virginia

I want to write something profound like: There is a price to pay for beauty and freedom. That there’s a certain way the sun rises over the mountains. That the land is hardy, the people resilient. I want to write about the impossible green of the mountainside against the endless blue of the sky. I want to write about history as if it were but soil fed by mountain springs and not something else. That in order to appreciate grace, you have to endure suffering.    

But none of that’s the truth. 

My mother’s people are from Adolph, West Virginia. I usually say they are from Elkins because that’s where the closest Walmart is. It’s a stock landmark. My great-grandfather worked the coal mines until he died at 47 leaving my great-grandmother with 12 children to raise. All the kids had breathing issues from the coal dust that hitchhiked from the center of the earth home to that tiny farmhouse on my great-grandfather’s clothes. 

I spent some time as a child visiting the family farm: the graveled ruts where the train tracks used to be, the valley that used to be the farm, the mountain spring water that left pink-colored stains in the toilet, the bubbling creek that twice flooded the whole valley. During family reunions, the land became a story. Each bit animated by childhood memories of snakes and broken bones and felled trees and near drownings. And when people had enough wine, later in the evening, the story about a truck whose brakes went out coming down Hamburger Hill and a brother who didn’t come home. 

When my great-grandmother passed away, the surviving children drew lots to divide up the land. Some got level ground where you could block up a trailer; others got what by any measure is just swamp land. I had early dreams of building a cabin on my grandfather’s parcel. He had great affection for what he called “the old home place,” and I thought I wanted to settle some part of his legacy. 

“Before you do anything,” one of my uncles warned, “check the ground water. Poison.”

Another time, much later, a random Tuesday during a summer off from teaching, that same uncle: I heard the bays from a pack of coonhounds and the roar of souped-up trucks echoing somewhere in the mountain. 

“What’s all that about?” I asked with a naïveté that only family humors. 

“They’re hunting, trying to tree bear,” he responded. 

“Shouldn’t they be at work?” My stupid attempt at a joke. 

“They sell drugs.” 

Two paradoxical things can be inextricably true:  

Beauty: The way the fireflies come out at dusk and pepper the valley with specks of radiance. My grandfather staring out the window at a tree in the distance, infinite and whole. The panic when that first snatched crawdad lands its pincher. The breathless cold when you leap into the only spot in the creek deep enough to swim. A buffet of greasy food and your father, sleeveless holding a loaded styrofoam plate. The smell of burnt oil and cut grass behind the wheel of a blue tractor, old and abiding. The heat from a bonfire. The cold beer in your hand. A cloudless night that birthed a half-baked poem. Ditching your grandfather’s truck. The long walk back to tell him. Catching what you later find out is a brown trout. Fried. Delicious. The day you discover your future wife is a better shot than you. Crying your way through a version of David Allan Coe’s “I Still Sing the Old Songs” for reasons that you understand but can’t talk about. Laughing with people you know and don’t know at the same time. When your grandmother stood before the ruins of her childhood home. Playing tag. The sound of car wheels across the old bridge. The musty smell of the family chapel. Weathered names on tombstones sinking into unkempt ground. The song of the locust as you drift off to sleep. 

Pain: We don’t know what the Calicua, Mohetan, Moneton, Monecaga, Monahan, Tomahitan, Kanawha, Shattara, Shenandoah, Lenape, Ouabano, Guyan, Guyandotte, Little Mingo, Tionontatecaga, or Shawnee called West Virginia. Whole tribes were massacred to supply beaver fur to European markets. John Brown was hanged in 1859 after fomenting a slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. Civil war led to two Virginias. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway lines became the main arteries of the coal industry. More than 20,000 coal miners have died in West Virginia since 1883. In 1907, an explosion at the Monongah coal mines killed 362 people. During the Mine Wars of 1912-1921, workers seeking higher wages and safe conditions were systematically fired, arrested, and killed for attempting to unionize. Mountaintops have been scalped and toxic coal slurry has seeped into groundwater aquifers. Since 1968, more than 75,000 miners have died from black lung. Chemicals used in fracking have displaced and poisoned families who have lived in West Virginia for generations. West Virginia consistently ranks among the states with the highest jobless rate. It has led the nation in overdose deaths since 2010. 

I haven’t been back to West Virginia since my grandfather passed away some years ago. So, what do I know? Who am I to write?  

Last spring I picked up William Brewer’s resonant and devastating collection of poems, I Know Your Kind. These are poems about his hometown, Oceana, West Virginia — a town now called Oxyana after it became the capital of the OxyContin epidemic. He writes about addicts “stealing fistfuls of pills / from your cancer-sick neighbors,” about those “waking up in an alley with a busted face, / teeth red and penny-sweet.” Each poem feels like a prayer for those trying to find mercy and a fix. One poem details a miner who has given his “body to the mountain whole” waking to his son shaking him while the syringe still hangs from his arm “like a feather.” Reading these poems, you can see, feel, and even taste the deaths of those unnamed and seemingly forgotten. Brewer’s “West Virginia” is a good example of how poetry can give language to individual and collective tragedy: 

Fall kingdom conquered first by bedlam,

then bedlam’s hunger—hush—heavy

in the air between the hills that crash

like waves into each other. What is a hive

without its queen? Thirst can rule, so can want.

A crown of needles, a gown of clouds she parts.

Bees in the streets below, their tongues

like hands reaching to the sky for an offering.

This is what want does, this and the raindrops

becoming pills in their throats, spurring wings,

all that fluttering the hum of a false heaven.

And who, through that, can hear a few wings

folding under the weight of death? It is too late.

Like timber, like anthracite, death is a natural resource.

The colony glows. The colony does its work.

This winter, a colleague gifted me a copy of Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia. Reading his fictional autobiography, I was greeted by a cast of characters from Fayette County, West Virginia. Characters I felt I knew well: a kid living with his grandmother, Ruby, for reasons that, by now, should seem obvious; an uncle pissed off because of a new law that requires West Virginians to wear helmets on ATVs; another uncle who got arrested for robbing a Kroger; and yet another uncle, wheelchair-bound, who drinks beer through a feeding tube and sends his disability money to a radio preacher; five other aunts and uncles who killed themselves. I met McClanahan’s friends like Little Bill, Lee Brown, Naked Joe, Six Toed Russell, and a host of other “crazy fuckers” who do all the reckless and loving things all teenagers do. And, one-by-one, McClanahan’s friends do “something stupid,” and they end up arrested or dead or both. 

Near the end of the novel, McClanahan writes about the 1972 Pittston Coal Company disaster that killed 125 people. A sludge dam broke, flooding the town below with a thirty foot wave of toxic coal refuse. He describes a young boy’s body found in a tree “thirty feet above the ground” with “his hands up in front of his face like he was trying to protect himself.” He writes about rescue workers combing through the mud, exhuming little baby dolls from the wreckage, except that one little baby doll wasn’t a baby doll; it was a five-year-old girl in her pink dress. Not knowing what to do, the rescue workers “cleaned her up and tried to comb her muddy hair and put her in a body bag.” 

In his denouement, McClanahan envisions all the forsaken people in his life being washed away by that same disaster. “My home is gone” McClanahan concludes. “So I decided to write this book.” By telling his story, by telling the story of those he has loved and lost, he’s orchestrating a sort of seance. He’s taking those drowned by the poisonous flood of history, blood money, and collective indifference and bringing them back to life. 

McClanahan confesses that he’s been taking clumps of dirt he dug from the mountain in his hometown and scattering it everywhere he travels. “I am making the world my mountain,” he proclaims.    

I want to write that I will be returning to West Virginia this summer. That everything on the family farm is as it was. That everyone is there and that nothing has changed. I want to write that I want to go back. That I will be taking my children with me to gambol across the fields my ancestors once plowed. But none of that’s the truth. 

The truth is that I wrote a song, instead. As a sort of substitute — for returning, for transformation, for healing, for atonement. The truth is I don’t know what else to do. Or, that I can’t do what I should.