“I’m gonna be wrassler,” says Logan, age 7. He flips forward and howls.
This is a rolling land of mountains teeming with burnable rock, isolated by two-lane roads forced to loop back on themselves to make it over the peaks, with too little flat bottom land for factories, tied by rail and highway to a nation hungry for electricity and the cheap fuel needed to generate it. Here, escaping the ubiquitous, cyclical, perilous and strangely enriching life beneath the mountains of Appalachia is a thing not often done.
“It’s not easy to escape because there are so few economically viable options in the coalfield communities,” says Dwight Billings, a University of Kentucky sociologist who grew up in Appalachia and has studied its coal culture. “For those who wish to live there — and … the deep ties to family and kin and place is the lure — mining represents the best-paying opportunity despite the danger.”
The economic draw doesn’t explain it all, though. Shannon Elizabeth Bell, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky, has lived among and studied the people of the region since 2000.
“This identity of being coal people is very strong in the region,” she said. “It’s part of their heritage and their history, and a great source of pride.”
Both mineral and metaphor, coal defines towns like Baileysville. It is as much a culture as a job. Even in times of cheap oil and the subsequent low demand that registers in layoffs across the coal fields, men and women call themselves miners and mining families. The bonds are born of shared cycles of wealth and poverty.
Shared, too, is the suspicion that much of the outside world, the one from which their winding roads and isolated hollows shield them, a world known by satellite television, looks down on them.
Adam Vance lives in a spotless, prefabricated house, the kind that crowds narrow strips of flat land between mountains. In the living room, a 55-inch television shows Jerry Brown in a campaign commercial before his victory in the California governor’s race. The station beams by satellite from Los Angeles.
He’s seen other commercials, notably the ones mocking the idea of “clean coal.” They’re a slick set of 30-second spots pushed by environmentalists, mostly from outside West Virginia, and the Vances can’t help but think someone is mocking them, belittling their labors, without answering the question of whether global warming is a safer bet than freezing in the dark.
“They don’t understand coal,” he says. “Just ’cause we got coal dirt on us or whatever, they think we’re uneducated. Yeah, we all have accents from down here. We’re not the most well-spoken people.”
Baileysville is a spread of land with no government of its own save the general consensus that the people there like one another and, in large measure, have deep roots. The town’s post office closed in 1973. The local high school at which Adam Vance piled up the third-most rushing yards in the football team’s history is shuttered.
The road on which the Vance family lives — and this means the immediate clans of Adam, his father, his uncle and the cousin with whom he rides 40 minutes to work most days — stops abruptly. When a long-gone coal company that cut the road played out its mine a generation ago, maintenance ended.
“There’s a tree growing right in the middle of it,” says Adam’s uncle, Roger Vance.
Wyoming County is tucked just short of the Kentucky border. To its west is Mingo and to its south McDowell. The Tug Fork River marks the West Virginia-Kentucky line and the Vances have been here long enough to lay a profound claim on Appalachian lore.
One ancestor, James Vance, was kin to William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, patriarch of the clan that feuded for a generation with the McCoy family from the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork. The murky origins of that feud have been as various as a fight over the ownership of a razorback hog to a jilted bride. The Vances were among those killing and dying alongside the Hatfields, and the nearby Hatfield-McCoy Trail now hosts hikers and ATV riders.
At the county seat of Pine-ville, locals are mixed about whether it has appreciably bolstered the economy. Tourism does not pay the way coal does. Tourism, in the words of Pat Armstrong, doesn’t keep the lights on.
If the Vances are characteristic of coal’s hold on the families of southern West Virginia, Pat Armstrong’s shop, called Pat’s Fashions and Tax Service, is emblematic of coal’s secondary economy.
“Every time a coal truck goes through here, I don’t feel bad about dust blowing all over town. I think that’s another man supporting his family, going out making his living,” she says.
Mrs. Armstrong lives where she grew up: Glen Rogers, an old coal camp where her father worked underground. She worked in the dress shop on Pineville’s main street and bought it out when the owner ran into problems. Yet it was a fascination with taxes that held her. So, like many a person in rural West Virginia, she doubled up on jobs.
This odd mix works. The formal wear side bustles during prom and wedding season in spring. Tax season picks up in the winter. In addition, Pat’s offers UPS shipping, Western Union wire transfers and a tanning salon.
“She wanted to do bail bonds, too, but we talked her out of that one,” says Jessica Jewell, one of Mrs. Armstrong’s four employees.
The endless season, and the one families here shudder to think could end in another down cycle for the market, is coal season. It’s year-round, and nobody wants it to fade. By this autumn, the cash register at Mrs. Armstrong’s shop was signaling a slight dip.
“The economy has finally gotten to us. We’re always the last, usually, on the totem pole. We’re always the last to get hit, but we’re always the last to recover,” she says.
Just around the corner is the office of Democratic state Sen. Richard Browning, a former teacher at the local high school, an ardent fan of coal and a counter of the cars and heavy trucks that lumber past his storefront.
“Five of six of the cars that pass here have something to do with natural resources — coal, gas, lumber. It’s our economy here,” he says. People here know a coal mine has shut or laid off because the traffic thins, the town isn’t noisy enough, and the trains stop running.
He knows the blessing and the curse of the business. Thirty years ago, when he taught high school, he had a student in his class who was out-earning him. Each school day, the boy would slip off to the second shift at the mine.
Mr. Browning wonders at the cost of that kind of early economic leap — the ability to graduate or quit high school, take the 80-hour course needed for a mining license at one of the private teachers in town and then slide into a mining life.
By one measure, it means a great income. By another, it leaves the place locked into an economy that cries for diversification because of the fickleness of the marketplace.
“I’m tired of riding this roller coaster,” he says.
There are the other costs. Two of the senator’s brothers were miners.
“Both are dead,” he says. Early heart problems took one. Black lung killed the other. He taught Robert Clark, one of the men who died in the blast at Upper Big Branch in April. His daughter called from college to tell him one of her high school classmates, Adam Morgan, had died as well.
Many of Mrs. Armstrong’s tax clients are mining families. With both spouses working, six-figure tax filings aren’t unusual. Their incomes buttress the other shops on Pineville’s short but noisy main drag. The number of storefronts hasn’t changed much since her girlhood, Mrs. Armstrong says.
That economy is endangered, she says, by an administration and Congress increasingly focused on the environmental harm of extracting and burning coal. In these parts, environmentalists are scornfully called “tree huggers” and the refrain to D.C. is: Leave us alone.
Even mountaintop-removal mining — a controversial process in which coal companies lop off the top of a mountain to get to the coal inside, dumping the waste in surrounding streams — is fine by Mrs. Armstrong, because it creates jobs.
“We’ve got enough mountains around here,” she reasons. “If they haul off a few mountaintops, they’ll re-seed it.”
The coal operation just up Route 16 from downtown Pineville is an underground mine where two generations of Vances have worked. From the depths of Pinnacle mine, workers hauled out 864,000 tons of metallurgical coal last year for Cleveland-based Cliffs Natural Resources.
To work in the dark
In the darkness each night, Adam winds through two-lane roads dotted with churches and convenience stores to Pinnacle, where he works the midnight to 8 a.m. “hoot owl” shift, though those hours often extend with overtime.
To make room for a passenger, he has to move the King James Bible from his truck seat. He stopped taking it underground after someone vandalized it following an argument over a broken piece of mining equipment.
Back home, Patti Vance prays, too.
“I pray every night for him to come home safe to me,” she says.
At the mine, after the pre-shift prayer in a small locker room on the surface, 100 or so workers on the shift take turns crowding into a freight elevator that plunges them 600 feet into the mountain.
Pinnacle is a vast expanse of tunnels. Its miners boast that its footprint is about the size of Washington, D.C., its employees like to boast. Miners have dug here since 1969, when the mine was owned by U.S. Steel, and there are a few more decades’ worth of coal yet to be cut.
The rail car ride to Adam Vance’s usual section, under the undulating roof held up by ancient-looking steel bolts less than 6 feet overhead, takes about 40 minutes through chilly crosscurrents of air, whisking explosive methane and invasive coal dust out of harm’s way.
Along the way, small clusters of miners working to repair train tracks or on other jobs are chipper, offering a “Hiya” or “How’s it goin’, buddy” to passersby.
They toil as the lights attached to their helmets bore small holes into the dark. Mr. Vance operates the shuttle car, a 20-foot orange hauler that he calls a “buggy.” It whisks loose coal and rock from a continuous mining machine to a feeder, a conveyor belt that takes the material to the surface.
On a recent predawn Wednesday, a small crew is working to prepare a new section for the longwall mining machine, a $100 million feat of coal-shearing engineering. The machine works a few months at a time to hollow out a section before moving on to a new one; the new longwall must be ready to go when the old one is finished so the investment doesn’t sit idle.
Near the end of this shift, work has ground to a halt as the feeder has broken down. Mr. Vance chats with co-workers about his mine foreman class schedule. He has the training to do a variety of jobs in the mine — roof bolting, running the miner — and a foreman’s certification would be another avenue to find work the next time he’s looking for a job.
Mr. Vance could get a fine recommendation from Frank Shrewsbury, a rotund 30-year veteran of the mines who’s operating the continuous miner with a joystick that wouldn’t look out of place next to an Atari.
“He’s a good worker, conscientious of his job and all the safety aspects,” says Mr. Shrewsbury, 49, of Pineville. “When somebody’s running a piece of equipment like this, you’ve got to have a little faith and trust.”
When something goes wrong, Mr. Shrewsbury said, Mr. Vance is “cool and calm. You gotta be.”
‘Put it to back of your mind’
Disasters like the one at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine, an hour away in Raleigh County, are rare, but their reverberations are felt throughout the coal fields. Mr. Vance said he now gives more thought to the methane levels in his mine, which has high levels of the flammable gas, similar to Upper Big Branch.
But more frequent than the headline-grabbing disasters are miners dying alone or in pairs, under fallen roofs or crushed by machinery. The 2001 accident that sent Johnny Vance out of the mines for good easily could have been fatal. A load of coal fell and almost crushed him.
“I worry every day when I go up there it could be the last day I tell my kids goodbye,” Adam Vance said. “But you still gotta go make a living for them. You put it to the back of your mind and go along with it.”
If he’s not heading off fishing or hunting with some of the other 11 men on his section — “your second family,” he calls them — Adam heads home in the morning when his shift is done and spends a couple of hours with son Braden, 3, before going to bed. He’s back up in the evening to go to church or take Logan to peewee football practice and have a little more family time before he returns underground.
On a recent evening, the children bound around the house. Adam and Patti are chagrined. An aunt has treated the boys to Mountain Dew and a small sugar jag has ensued. Adam watches the Cincinnati Reds win a game. He orders Braden down from the coffee table, where the child is brandishing a play World Wrestling Entertainment championship belt.
From the latest video game systems to birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s in Charleston, the boys want for nothing. Yet in a quiet moment before his father leaves for work, Logan pulls a visitor aside, first to show him his stash of video games, his set of wrestling figurines, and then to pass along something that has been boiling inside him for months, something he hasn’t even told his mom and dad.
“I think it’s not very good that he’s in the coal mines. You know how all those coal miners died? I’m scared. He might die.”
The boy looks away, hugs the visitor, and resumes childhood.
The mines’ dangers are why Roger Vance, Adam’s uncle, retired early from his job at a local golf course. It opened up a spot for his 20-year-old son, Joseph, who against his father’s wishes had insisted on going underground.
“It’s too dangerous,” Roger says of the family trade. “People don’t live a long time.” Roger worked in the mines briefly before getting out; three of his four brothers made careers there.
In the weeks after Johnny’s career was cut short by injury, he implored Adam not to go underground. His oldest son, John, wanted no part of the mines and is now a sheriff in neighboring McDowell County. Adam never intended to go underground, but never promised not to, either.
He worked a few jobs and caught on with a railroad company for a while. But when the company told him he had to move to Ohio or quit, he chose to stay in the only home he’s known. There was no choice left, he said, if he was going to make a decent living. Johnny understood but refused to help him get certified. Adam had to go to his father-in-law for that.
Now Adam is focused on logging 20 years of union time. It would earn him medical coverage for life. The labor is dangerous and difficult, but it’s the best way to be a provider in the hollows of Wyoming County.
“If I could find something right now with the same benefits and making the same money outside around here, I’d quit the coal mines in a heartbeat,” he says. “I’d go to it and never look back. But until I do, I guess I’ll stay.”
