Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal Read Online Free Page A

porch with us as we load everything back into our car and prepare to leave. She talks to us the whole while as we arrange camera cases and backpacks and tape recorders, wishing us well, tellingus about her next planned trip to Kentucky, where she has always maintained a second home in Viper, unable to completely move away. Just as we are fixing to leave her driveway, Ritchie leans on the porch railing and holds up her face so it can be touched by the surprisingly warm March sun. She closes her eyes for a moment, and she can't help but sing: “What wondrous love is this / O my soul, o my soul.”
    Upon reopening her girlish eyes, she sees that we are about to pull away, so she gives a hearty wave. Her smile is like a prayer.
    Jean Ritchie talking…
    My childhood home there in Viper was a place of a happy childhood. When you have a happy childhood you can romanticize your memories. The whole family was there. It was a beautiful place. The mountains really were our backyard. We were right there by the branch, and the mountains were all around us. They were the front yard and the side yard and the backyard.
    There was a certain old path we used to take up to the cornfield. We'd all go up together to hoe corn, all the sisters and brothers, with a mule to plow around the hillside before we hoed. There was this certain little path we took, and I took it not too long ago, showing George exactly where we crossed the creek here and where we climbed the hill there, you know. We'd avoid the road by taking these shortcuts. You'd climb down a clift in one place. We used to go to the cornfield like that. We'd sing and talk.
    I remember us carrying our dinners up to the fields. This one time, my sisters Colleen and Edna and Pauline ganged up and made up a story. There was a tree—there were a lot of trees like this, but there was a great big beech tree that we'd always pass, and it had big old roots that made little circles where they went into the ground. They told me that little people lived down in there, little fairies, who lived back under the tree, and they said the roots was their front porch. We'd take little gifts there—little coffee can lids full of water and honey. They had me believing this was true.And to this day when I pass that tree I still want to put something down there for them, some kind of offering.
    When my people first came to Kentucky it was just subsistence farming. 8 But by the time I was around, most all of the men worked in the mines. All my cousins and uncles, and people all around us. All the men.
    My brother Raymond worked underground, and the thing we noticed most about his hardships was when he got appendicitis. His appendix burst, and he was just lying there in the mines for about fourteen or fifteen hours before they got anybody in to help him. We thought we were going to lose him, thought he's going to die, but he made it through that. It was just neglect, nobody from the company came to get him. They figured since it wasn't a mining accident they didn't have to worry. Poor man.
    My other brother worked in the commissary, and I remember one time he came home with a can of condensed milk. We everyone stood around and took a drink, having a little taste. I remember that it was the smoothest, most wonderful taste. We used to long for him to bring that home. And he'd bring little treats home that we didn't get all the time. His name was Truman.
    I first took note of the coal companies and injustice when they started strip mining. There was a big uproar when that started. People started fussing just like they're doing now over the mountaintop removal, but they didn't get very far, as you can see, because they just stripped all over the place. They kept saying, “Aw, it'll all come back, it'll all grow back.” Then they'd throw down a few little grass seeds and they told everybody that the grass would grow and the trees would grow and so on but it never was the same after that. You can see all those bare