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

coal company and no justice at all for the people. The coal companies are all the time talking about overburden, you know,” May says. 3 “Well, we're just overburden. Their job is to remove overburden and retrieve the coal. We're the first level of overburden, so we can't let them remove us, we can't give in.”
    May keeps looking at the trees, perhaps imagining them all pushed into a valley fill so that gigantic draglines can remove the overburden and make way for the extraction of coal. Then she turns, clenching her jaw, and her face is filled with defiance. She is fierce, determined, ready to fight.
    “I just feel like we're being assaulted from all sides. That's what it's like, to live here,” May says. “They're taking out gas and timber and coal all the time. There should be some balance. I believe they ought to be able to mine, but they want to level everything, and I'm not going to sit by and watch that happen. People ought to be able to live.”
    May looks up at the purpling sky, wonder playing out over herface. “Lord, it's getting late! I guess we ought to go back down,” she says, with resignation. She hops off the edge of the rock, calls Rufus, and ambles her way back down the mountain.
    Bev May talking…
    When I was growing up we kept a garden, we raised cattle. What we had to eat and what was put into the freezer came out of the garden. And then we got our eggs, of course, from my Uncle Speed right next door there; he had a magnificent gas-heated chicken house. Did I tell you that he didn't have an inside toilet but he had gas heat in his chicken house? You know, because there's some things you ought not be doing in the house, right? So the man had priorities.
    When I was little, living off the land was still very much critical to our well-being as a family. Having the land to garden and to hunt and to play in was just a huge part of my coming up. I can remember—we're talking in the seventies—I can remember my Uncle Speed plowing with mules, but I can remember a guy even plowing with an ox. There was still that sense of the preindustrial time. We still had the remnants of that, the good parts.
    And it was also interesting because Maytown—the closest town to Wilson Creek—was there as a community long before there was a coal industry. So I feel really blessed I didn't grow up in a coal camp. I grew up in the woods with a real wonderful sense of where I belonged.
    Uncle Speed died in the seventies and so my parents, me, and my brother and his children are the last of the family that are still on Wilson Creek. And of course all the others have moved off to other places or passed on.
    I was real fortunate, I think, because me and my brother were the only cousins on both sides of the family to get to be raised as hillbillies. The rest of them on my mom's side, they went to Detroit and to Florida. And on my father's side they went to Lexington.
    The ironic thing is that one of the reasons they moved off was in hopes of having a better education for their children, but I'm the only one on my mother's side of the family that ever graduated from college. There was no other option around here. You had to go to college. I mean you had to: either that or be poor. So that's one of the things I really appreciate about being a hillbilly is it gave me the little oomph, the little push to go to college. I think my cousins had other ways of getting work, and I knew full well that I didn't. I had to go to school. And the other thing that I learned from going to school around here is that nobody hands you your education on a silver platter. You've got to claim it for yourself. And so if you know that you can figure the rest of it out.
    I think that when I was growing up that the people that had the biggest impact on me—now this may degenerate into some storytelling—were the ones who had been in the community their whole lives and had stayed put and had a real sense of commitment. I think that made the biggest