Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal by Silas House and Jason Howard

crisis.”
    The clinic is also supported by several churches in the area, and is named for St. Theresa the Little Flower, a revered Carmelite nun whose religious philosophy is best epitomized by her most famous quote: “I can do no great things, only small things with great love.”
    “We're down with that whole principle,” May says. “That's what we are.”
    May has gotten so caught up in talking that she's refrained from going on to the top of the High Rocks, which she has been waiting to do all day. She takes in the magnificent collection of huge boulders and exposed cliff-face that look as if they have been stacked together for a giant's playhouse, accented by shoots of mountain laurel. The High Rocks are perched at the very top of the ridge, rising some sixty feet above the mountain's summit.Their daunting size and stark beauty suggest a remarkable, open-air church, one assembled by God's own hands.
    May moves up the rocks silently until she gets about halfway up. There she pauses, keeping her hand against the cool, gray skin of the rock. “I always think of my father, coming up here when he was little,” she says, sighs, and then moves on.
    Once May is settled on one of the cliffs' jagged edges, she looks out toward the land where her family has lived for generations. Her view is obstructed by thousands of trees, but this is a hindrance she is glad to live with. Somehow, though, May seems to look past the billions of leaves and all those swaying limbs. She is looking not only past the trees but also back over the years, back more than 100 years ago.
    “In the late 1800s, my great-grandfather, Felix May, owned half of the holler that's nearest the mouth, here on Wilson Creek,” May begins. “He worked rolling logs down the river to Cattletsburg, and one day he fell in. So in 1904, his wife, Suzie May, had nine children and one on the way, when he died of pneumonia,” she says.
    In those days, property rights reverted to the brothers instead of the wife. Suzie May became destitute while the brothers were suddenly very land-rich. Apparently they offered Suzie very little, if any, assistance. Despite the odds, she and her children survived, and she never remarried.
    “She had a big bunch of boys who worked hard and helped her,” May says, shaking her head at the determination of her ancestors. “She even had other family that came in and lived with her, and she had to help them, too. She raised lots of kids, not just her own, and eventually the land all got divided up and some sold out and now there's only about 100 acres left in the family.”
    Sometimes, May admits, she thinks about what it would be like to lose this mountain. “But then I can't think about it,” she says, quickly, waving her hands as if to usher these thoughts away. “It makes me feel like I'm falling off the edge of the earth, to think of that. It's too painful. So the thing to do is to hope it doesn'thappen,” she says. “I realize that fighting the coal company is like David and Goliath, but I have to keep hope.”
    So that's what she holds onto. And every once in a while she reminds herself that in the face of impossible odds, David ended up winning his fight.
    May doesn't understand people who can't see what's wrong with mountaintop removal. At the suggestion that there might be another side to the fight—say, a positive side to the mining practice—she grows fidgety, wringing her hands, a scornful grin on her face.
    “It's morally wrong,” she says. “Because every mountain in Eastern Kentucky is ours, really. Our heritage. In some cases, the only legacy we have. Whenever they blast another mountain, they're blasting away the future: the lumber, the watershed, the wildlife. Tourism, sustainable communities, everything. There hain't no putting it back,” May says, laughing—maybe to keep from crying. “When we treat mountains like they're expendable, well, all I know is that it all boils down to short-time profits for the