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

impression on me.
    As a nurse practitioner, I've got like twelve years of experience and I could work anyplace in the country that I wanted to, literally, but I want to be here because it's just so much more meaningful. I think I'm more effective because I'm a hillbilly. I'm taking care of my people.
    And the same thing I think applies to being an environmentalist. If you know where you're from and what the stakes are, then it's not that hard to do whatever you have to do to protect it. And I do think that people that haven't been up to the ridgetops probably just have no idea of the richness and the beauty and the hundreds of little varieties of wildflowers and just the amazing thing that this forest is. And if you haven't seen it I don't know how I'd begin to explain it to anybody or how to make them value it. Because unless you've got out there and seen it, it's impossible, I think, to really understand what gets lost whenever you blow up a mountain. It's not a hunk of rock. It's a living thing that gets blown up.
    Speaking of people that stay in one place, there was a librarian in our school named Shirley Stewart—she's still living—and she was a really dedicated educator. Maytown High School was a tiny little school. One of the things I remember is that there was one child in the whole school whose father was obviously black and the rest of the family was white. One little black child in the whole school, and she subscribed to Ebony magazine so that he would get some little connection there culturally. I think she helped him…he went to Antioch. Was it Antioch or Oberlin? Shoot, Oberlin, I think. She helped get him into college. And he's a lawyer now. That was the poorest family in the whole county. She was that kind of an educator. She was very independent minded, a strong woman.
    One day at church—I was probably in about my freshman year of high school, I'd say—and it was the time that the Equal Rights Amendment was trying to be passed, and it came up for ratification in Kentucky. The opponents to this told all the preachers “This is going to mean unisex bathrooms, this is going to mean women fighting on the front lines of the army, this is going to be the end of Christian civilization as we know it.” And our poor little pitiful country preacher stood up before the church and mouthed whatever it was that the state representative had told him. And Shirley Stewart stood up—I mean, he was doing this from the pulpit—she stood up and said, “Now preacher, I don't think we have enough information about this yet.” She did it real respectful. It was the most amazing thing. I mean, you do not talk back to the preacher in Eastern Kentucky. You just don't. But she said, “Now this is what I've read about it. I don't think it means there'll be unisex bathrooms, I think it just means that women will be given equal status to men, and I just think we need to get some more facts about this before we make any resolutions on this.”
    It was succinct, it was respectful, it was erudite. I was probably about fourteen or fifteen. If there's a moment that just was defining for me, that was it. It was like, Wow, you can stand upand talk back to the preacher if you have your facts straight, and you can challenge authority.
    And that's someone who has spent her whole life right here in Maytown just trying to do right by the people in her community. And I think it let me know, too, if you stay in one place in the mountains that doesn't mean you have to give up anything intellectually. If anything, it's a great jumping off point for learning about the rest of the world. You don't have to give up a single thing.
    I've always been aware I was a hillbilly. And the way I knew I was a hillbilly was I knew there were people that were more hillbilly than me. And the way I knew that was that when I was a little kid, I remember there was some kind of commercial or something on TV about little children in Appalachia that “don't have