Eastern Kentucky Trip

by:  Stewart Pugsley

        When I first heard about the trip to Eastern Kentucky I was mainly interested in just getting out of Louisville for a weekend, I had no idea that the trip was going to be as intense or meaningful as it turned out to be. We started out one cold morning and 4 hours, 3 caffeine products and a seemingly endless supply of bluegrass songs later the group of students and teachers arrived in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The members at KFTC started our education immediately. After a short debriefing about why each of us wanted to come to Whitesburg and learn about strip mining and mountain top removal (they don’t mess around when comes down to business) we headed off to a potluck dinner and a square dance. Us “cool city kids” were a little skeptical when we heard we were going to a square dance in Appalachia, but once we got there it turned out to be the perfect start to the weekend. After hearing some awesome bluegrass music, seeing talented traditional dancers (and some not so talented or traditional dancing) and stuffing our bellies with fried chicken we finally made it into our beds.
   

        Saturday morning came all too quickly but we were ready and eager to learn. After meeting up at the KFTC headquarters and being introduced to some of the residents we headed off to an actual mountain that had been destroyed by mountain-top-removal mining. Who’da thunk it, an actual mountain? Riding in the back of a pick up truck with the wind streaming through my hair and the a steep rocky drop off about a foot away from the truck I felt like a real rebel on a mission, I was out to save the world and I was having fun doing it. Square dancing, food, getting to meet great people, seeing beautiful landscapes, I thought this trip was going to just be a relaxing weekend in the mountains with some friends. But when I turned the corner and saw the bare, desolate, completely obliterated mountain side, my thoughts quickly changed from, “I wonder what’s for lunch?” to “What the f*** happened here?” I learned that this rocky, treeless, stark landscape was a product of strip mining. I stood on a huge boulder teetering on the edge of the cliff, looked at the sea of destruction, heard the roar of coal truck engines and the crack of the trees, which had taken hundreds of years to grow, being snapped like twigs. What had destroyed this once beautiful landscape? What has turned this powerful product of nature into a useless mound of dirt and rock? But most importantly why had this happened? The answer was twinkling in the sunlight, coal, black gold. As I picked up a piece of this black stuff and rolled it around in my hand I began to wonder why the pursuit of this compressed carbon and sedimentary rock had created so much turmoil in the world. Money and greed would become recurring themes in the weekends events.

   
        When I looked around, I saw pain. The landscape was in pain, in agony because its skin had been ripped away leaving the soft underbelly exposed. The people affected by strip mining were in pain, mental, physical, emotional anguish. I began to feel the same way. Hopelessness and anger and frustration swept over me, just like it did my fellow companions. We were shocked and horrified. After seeing a bad side of Eastern Kentucky, we got to see the part that people fall in love with. Hiking to Bad Branch Falls was by far the best part of the trip, but it was bittersweet. As I hopped from giant rock to giant rock under the shade of  mammoth sized trees and felt the spray of the beautiful waterfall, I realized that these places, these little tucked away treasures were exactly what we were losing, what was being destroyed everyday, not just in Kentucky but all over the Eastern coast.

        On the hike back, nobody talked. It seems we all had the same epiphany that I had experienced and were thinking long and hard about what to do next.
Our education continued at Appalshop. After some chili and cornbread we settled down to watch some films, by this point I was pretty sure there were not going to be uplifting, “happy time” films. Boy was I ever right. Sludge, a film about an overflow of toxic coal mining sludge, that was 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill, into a local town, blew our minds. Hopeless, exhausted, overwhelmed, we some how made it back to the house.

        After a rejuvenating gossip session that night, the next morning we all woke up knowing that we were changed, that the knowledge and the burden had been passed onto us. Even though no one ever pressured us to do anything about it, they were simply making us aware of the atrocities that are going on in our own state, we all knew that the only choice was to get involved. We talked with the KFTC members who devote their day to day lives to fighting injustices and they put hope back into our minds. There is strength in numbers, if we couldn’t donate money or go to Frankfort and lobby, the least we could do was join KFTC. It’s complex, complicated and seemingly impossible but there is hope.

        As Zadie Smith said in White Teeth, we are “ Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship.” I believe that we need to get out of our climate controlled gas- guzzling SUV’s, put on a sweater and turn down the heat, because without these mountains humans would not have any of those luxuries. There are things that are more important, more worthy of our attention, energy and love. Everyone deserves clean drinking water.