This article originally provided by The Courier-Journal

January 5, 2008

Pancake's powerful mountaintop removal novel

By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal

I have tried to educate myself about mountaintop removal. I've read articles, gone to public meetings and listened to the heartrending stories of those struggling in the Appalachian coalfields to protect their land and families from the devastating effects of strip-mining. I've seen scalped mountains in the distance while driving through the hills of Eastern Kentucky, but that's as far as I could see the problem -- from a distance. A horrifying, inconceivable concept. That is, until I read Ann Pancake's fearless and beautiful debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been.

Not even Pancake's characters can seem to fully absorb the magnitude of what is happening in their small West Virginia town. "It's like you can't get your mind to adjust, the thing won't come into focus, but, no, not like the focus of your eyes, but your mind, your mind can't focus it," thinks Corey, one of Lace and Jimmy Make's four children, after he and his younger brother discover an unidentifiable dead creature among the debris left behind after a spring flood, which has devastated their Yellowroot hollow.



The moment 15-year-old Bant and her father break through the coal company's padlocked gate, to see if the rumors of a slurry impoundment on Yellowroot Mountain are true, Pancake takes us behind the scenes, exposing the destruction she herself witnessed in her native West Virginia during the three years she researched her novel: busted sediment ponds, polluted creeks, ruined roads and hillsides and a valley fill as tall as a small skyscraper. When Bant first gazes up at the tower of dirt, rocks, and dead trees -- "Yellowroot Mountain blasted into bits, turned inside out" -- she can't believe it is real. "It was like my mind didn't want to make a place for this here."

Lace and Jimmy's sad, quiet second child, Dane, sleeps with boots on, prepared for the next flood. "I am only 12 years old," he thinks. "And I'm going to see the End of the World." Mrs. Taylor, the elderly neighbor Dane assists, is convinced it will take another Buffalo Creek disaster (where 125 people died in West Virginia in 1972 when a slurry impoundment broke) before things will change.

When Lace, who eventually speaks out against mountaintop removal, first meets her activist friends, she doesn't want to believe their claims. "It hurt to learn it, it did. It was easier to half-ignore it, pretend it wasn't that bad anyway, or if it was, couldn't do nothing about it so why get worked up. …" But as Bant recognizes in the end, "to not care wasn't to save yourself at all. It was only another loss."

Though there is an unmistakable agenda here -- Pancake's voice rising out against mountaintop removal, nearly every chapter spotlighting some aspect of strip-mining's destructive effects -- the story never falls into sentimentalism or didacticism. Through the unique, convincing viewpoints of multiple characters, Pancake manages to edify without preaching -- or judging. The coal companies' employees, for example, are just trying to put bread on the table, the coal companies themselves the embodiment of humanity's age-old thirst for power. And we are made to see our own culpability in each character's refusal to see, at one point or other, what they feel helpless to fix.

Mrs. Taylor's stories of Buffalo Creek "put shape and control and a kind of finality on a thing that was obscenely shapeless and uncontrollable and forever unfinished." The same could be said of Pancake's tale, both a testament to what has happened and a harbinger of what is to come in other towns, in other states, if we continue on our path of excessive, unregulated consumption. As Bant's wise Uncle Mogey suggests, "what we're doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide."

Strange As This Weather Has Been is not just a story about Appalachians or mountaintop removal. It is a story about vision -- what we choose to see and not to see. Lace learns by novel's end that the most effective way to fight is to refuse to leave. "Stay in their way -- that's the only language they can hear. We are from here, it says. This is our place, it says. Listen here, it says. We exist."

Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.