APPALACHIA

It’s very likely most people think of Kentucky or West Virginia when they picture coal mining. Long before the opioid crisis ravaged the already impoverished residents of Appalachia, these giant machines ravaged the land in South-Eastern Ohio. They were the largest earthmovers ever built on the entire planet. There was the Gem of Egypt, the Silver Spade, and the Big Muskie. They were all within a few miles of where I grew up. When I was just a boy, some friends and I would hike the rolling hills to get as close as we could to watch these massive beasts devour the landscape. We would stare in awe as its bucket chewed away the topsoil to uncover the layers of coal beneath.

Growing up in Appalachia certainly left many unique memories. When I talk about it with my children, I often get the impression they think I grew up in the nineteenth century. Not having an indoor toilet or running water may have been responsible for that belief. Yes, the iconic images of poverty in Appalachia were real, my siblings and I experiencing them first hand. My father was in the navy during World War Two, fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. Sadly, he returned home broken from the experience. They called it shell shock in those days. Now it is known as PTSD. He was no longer able to function in society, leaving my mother to be the bread winner, working in a glass factory painting precious metals on fancy stemware.

Most of the houses we lived in as children were owned by Hanna Coal Company. They had purchased vast areas of land, including former productive farms. The homes dotting the countryside had no value to them, so they would rent them for a token amount. It gave us an inexpensive place to live until it was time to uncover the coal buried there. I doubt my parents ever paid more than ten or fifteen dollars a month for rent. It seemed like we moved about every two years or so, the process repeating until I was in high school, when we finally moved into a house with indoor plumbing. It was owned by, and on the same property, as the factory where my mom worked, The Lotus Glass Company.