This news story originally provided by The Lexington Herald-Leader

October 13, 2005

Coal plays part in lives of all Kentuckians

By Anne Shelby
CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST

People from other states might not think so, but it is possible to grow up in Kentucky and know almost nothing about horses -- or coal.

When I was a girl, we lived in Jackson County, my father's home county. As a teenager, I lived in Laurel County. We spent weekends, summers and holidays in Clay County, where my mother's family lived.

The hills in these counties along the western edge of the Appalachian Mountain range are lower and softer than the mountains farther east. There is coal and mining in these hills, too, and was when I was growing up there in the 1950s and '60s.

I sang along with Tennessee Ernie Ford when Sixteen Tons made the Hit Parade, but I knew nothing about coal mining, had little connection with it and did not think about it, one way or another.

The people I knew taught school, kept a store, grew tobacco or raised cattle. They worked at factories in Ohio and drove home on the weekends. I did not know any coal miners.

The world of coal and mining existed in the same space and time as my world, but like energy escaping from a different dimension, it intersected with my world only in odd moments.

We had electric heat at our house, so the coal that warmed us was far away, and we did not see it. But at my grandparents' houses, the connection between coal and heat was immediate and direct.

There was a coal pile in the yard, which began life as a small peaked mountain in the fall, and shrank and flattened through the winter as it was hauled into the house, bucket by bucket, and dumped in the grate to burn.

The coal was a dead weight when I carried it in the heavy bucket, fingers curled painfully around the metal handle. But the magic of fire brought the coal back to life, and it hissed and popped, whistled and smoked, setting flames to leaping up the chimney and shadows to dancing wildly on the ceiling and the walls.

There was an underground mine about 3 miles from my grandparents' house. Sometimes miners, their faces still covered with coal dust, came to my grandparents' store on their break. There might be a cut-up in the bunch, a guy who laughed too loudly and liked to play pranks, but mostly the men quietly sat or stood around, eating crackers and Vienna sausages, drinking Pepsi and smoking cigarettes until it was time to jump in the back of somebody's pickup and head back to the mine.

My grandmother usually kept store, but my grandfather took over when the miners came. She said it smothered her to think about them working in a low, tight place back under the hill.

When we drove from Laurel County to Clay County back then, before the Daniel Boone Parkway was built, we took U.S. 80. It curved up, down and around a series of mountains, offering scenic views and, for those inclined to carsickness, several good chances to throw up.

At Horse Creek, just outside Manchester, trees, gardens, flowers and even weeds seemed to vanish. Mowed fields and wooded hills gave way to tipples and railroad cars. Tracks cut across the road and ran alongside it. Houses crouched close together in sad, colorless rows.

It did not occur to me to wonder why the only place in the area that had any industry was the poorest looking place of all.

It is possible to grow up in Kentucky and not know about coal. It is possible to go to school, live and work in Kentucky and not know about coal. It is not possible to live in Kentucky and not be affected by coal.

It isn't just that mining coal alters the landscape and affects the water supply. It isn't just that transporting coal tears up the roads or that burning coal pollutes the air.

It's the long history of absentee ownership and exploitation of Eastern Kentucky, making many Eastern Kentuckians grateful to the coal industry for any jobs they could get no matter how dangerous, low-paying or destructive to the land around them.

Coal money finances the campaigns of politicians on the local, state and national levels. It helps determine who makes the decisions in our state and whom those decisions benefit.

Coal helps determine how much money flows -- or does not flow -- into state and county treasuries, and whether libraries, hospitals, schools, roads and bridges are built and properly maintained. In ways we know and ways we do not know, King Coal sets limits on the quality of our lives.

Maybe you have never seen a miner, bulldozers have never come near your house, boulders have never crashed down the mountain into your bedroom and you have never awakened to find your yard covered in black goo from a sludge pond spill.

Your grandfather did not die of black lung, your father in a roof fall, your brother in a mine explosion. Your buddy from high school did not die in a head-on collision with an overloaded coal truck.

Still, even if you don't know a coal mine from any other hole in the ground or a strip job from burlesque, if you're in Kentucky, welcome to coal country.