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And now as long as you’re driving through
here on the paved road, you’re OK, but if you get off that paved road on one
side or the other, you’re gonna be stopped. You’re not allowed into these
mountains any more! How can they tell the mountain people that they’re no
longer allowed in the mountains? That’s not right. They’re taking away
everything that puts us together as a people. And they’re expecting the wrong
people to sit back and take this.
We’re not stupid by no means. There’s a lot
of very, very intelligent people here that can’t read and write, but they’re
not stupid. They’re brilliant in their own sense of the word. They have
intelligence that’s not taught in college. These people are the people I grew
up with – the people I love. And these are people that I won’t walk away
from. And I would probably stand up to the biggest, strongest, most evil
power in the world in order to protect them and to protect their rights to
retire in their homes – and to protect their rights to be who they are in the
communities they’re in.
In doing this, I’ve had a little bit of everything done to me. I’ve been
accused of all kinds of stuff. I’ve had sand put in my gas tank – cost $1,200
to keep my truck on the road. And you know, in this kind of area, if they
ground your vehicle, you’re grounded! You’re stopped right there, dead in
your tracks. I’m 25 miles from the nearest town, so that really slowed me
down for quite a while. Teachers in the schools make comments to my kids.
It’s not their place to tell my children that their water isn’t poisoned by
coal, when my children know they can’t drink their water. I’ve had my tires
cut, my dog shot. People spit on my truck all the time – big, gross tobacco
juice spit.
One of my dogs was shot and left in
the parkin’ lot where my kids catch the school bus. This was my daughter’s
dog.She actually nursed
this dog when he was a baby – he was fed a bottle and was a little spoiled.
But this was her dog, it wasn’t my dog. My aunt, luckily, worked at the Post
Office. She called me and told me that a dog was layin’ over there dead, and
instead of takin’ the kids to the bus stop, I just took them on to school.
Then when I came back and confirmed that it was our dog, we were just
completely devastated. He was a three-year-old baby, really. He was
very close to the family. He had veered back onto the mountain top removal
site. The last time I seen him, that was the direction he was headed. When
they first came in up there, they used to feed my dogs. I kind of feel like
they baited him in for the kill.
Then I had a dog shot at the back of my house. It was tied at the back of my
house. It’s gotten to the point I can’t leave my dogs untied because somebody
might kill ‘em. Well, I had the dog tied at the back of my house and he was
shot right in the top of the head. This was within thirty feet of my bedroom
window. There’s a lot of trains goes by where I live at, so they
could’ve done it while a train was goin’ by and I wouldn’t have heard
it. Had it been a small caliber gun, I wouldn’t have heard it. They
know that. They know how to get you. By killing off your animals, that opens
them a way to get in your place without people knowin’ it.
The people in these communities, they feel
the blasting, they see the trucks on the road runnin’ over top of their
family. They see what’s going on, but they don’t see what it looks like
from the sky. Seein’ what it looks like from the sky scares you. It scares
you real bad to come home to it. When it rains here, we all get flooded. And
then the coal companies, they care so much! After 5 acres of my land
and my life washed down the stream, the coal company engineer came into my
front yard and said that this was “an act of God!”
You know, the night when this wall of water was comin’ down through the
hollow at me, I run to the mountain. But the mountain was slidin’ and I
couldn’t go there. I couldn’t get out, the streams had me and my family
surrounded. I literally hit my knees, and I prayed for everything I was
worth! And there was an act of God took place that night. But not the one
they claimed. And that was the same claim they made after they killed
125 people in the Buffalo Creek flood. I lost family in the Buffalo Creek
flood. My father was a rescuer in the Buffalo Creek flood. So that
incident was very close to our family.
To see what come off that mountain, and to know what it had been like for 37
years, well, it’s a big eye-opener to realize what a dramatic difference the
mountain top removal makes in everything! I mean, everything around these
strip sites is constantly erodin’, and there’s always water runnin’ in all
different directions. The DEP calls that “streams meandering.” They were never
streams before – now they’re streams!
This process it’s tearin’ my property all to
pieces, and I have no rights over my property. The only right I have over my
property is the right to pay taxes on it! I have no control over what’s goin’
on. The coal company has tore it all to pieces. It looks awful. Our place had
always been pretty much handmanicured. My father and my grandfather
before me took very good care of it. We had fruit trees and just an abundance
of foodproducing plants right there next to where I lived at. Our land has
always been tended in a way that it took care of us. Now that’s no longer the
case. Our soil’s contaminated. A garden that we’d gardened for all the thirty-seven
years that I’ve been there is now covered with coal slurry. You can’t grow
food in that.
My yard was completely washed out. My fruit trees are gone. My nut trees are
gone. I woke up the next morning and looked at this massive trench in my front
yard and just really…it took me three days to absorb it. I went from crying –
sobbing – to being very mad. This was three years ago, and I’m still mad. And
honestly, I’m a little madder than I was then because I realize how many
tentacles this evil has. It goes all the way to Washington, D.C. And if I
have to go up against it and fight for my home, I’m goin’ against it. It’s
even the United States government. And that alone is pretty intimidating. But
at the same time, so is that wall of water sittin’ back up on that mountain
waitin’ for me.
I don’t think I’ve ever run up against anything that intimidated me that bad.
Keeps me up at night. Keeps my kids up at night. And that’s when you know how
powerful the intimidation of these waters are. When you get to the point that
you ain’t had ten hours of sleep in a week, and it comes time to lay down and
go to sleep and it starts rainin’... and you don’t go to sleep... well!
People look at you different ways. There’s a
lot of people here who support what I do. But there’s others who drive in
here every day for their jobs, and given a choice, they’d run over me in a
heartbeat. They’d do anything they could to get rid of me. But I know I’m
bein’ effective and I know I’m makin’ a change. And with that change will
come the intimidation factors. But it just doesn’t work – there’s nothin’
more intimidating than what they’ve already put me through. So – bring it on.
I’m settin’ there on my porch, which is my favorite place in the whole world,
by the way – I’d rather be on my front porch than any other place in the
world and I’ve been to a lot of places. As it stands right now, with
the new permits I saw last week, they’re gonna blast off the mountain I look
at when I look off my front porch. And I get to set and watch that happen,
and I’m not supposed to react. Don’t react, just set there and take it.
They’re gonna blast away my horizon, and I’m expected to say, “It’s OK.
It’s for the good of all.”
Am I willing to sacrifice myself and my kids, and my family and my health and
my home for everybody else? No – I don’t owe nobody nothin’. It’s all I can
do to take care of my family and my place. It was all I could do before I
started fightin’ mountain top removal. Now that I’m fightin’ mountaintop
removal, it makes it nearly impossible. But at the same time, my life is on
the line. My kids’ lives are on the line. You don’t give up on that and walk
away. You don’t throw up your hands and say, “Oh, it’s OK, you feed me three
million tons of blasting material a day. That’s fine, I don’t mind. It’s for
the betterment of all.”
I can’t say that there’s anything out there that I’m willin’ to risk myself
and my kids for. Nothin’. No amount of money, no amount of energy, no amount
of anything. If it come down to it, we could live
up under a rock cliff with what the good Lord above give us. And we could
live like that, as long as we got clean water, clean air, and a healthy
environment. We can take care of ourselves from there. But when they
contaminate our water, our air, and our environment we’re gonna die no matter
what we do. That’s it.
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