ATVs and Labor Wars

Here we are in Lewisburg, WV………nothing at all like the places we have seen during the past week. We sat down to dinner at the Stardust Café and I realized that we were in a different milieu when our waitress responded to my request for iced tea with this: “do you want sweet tea, regular tea, or raspberry herbal tea?” The menu boasted of organic ingredients and the coffee beans were free trade. In any on the coal towns, this would be a foreign language. Life there is hard, the people are poor, survival is the goal, a good laugh is joy. I realized in the Stardust Café that I will miss coal country. I won’t miss the scary coal trucks that shake the earth or the narrow, shoulderless roads, but I will miss a kind of authenticity that I found in every single person we met. I will miss the startled responses that we received by people on their front porches as we rode past. I will miss the look in peoples’ eyes when we explain to them what we are doing and why. I won’t miss ATVs but I will miss the old American-made cars with dents and the feeling that America’s most forgotten war—its Labor War—took place all around us and remains ingrained somehow in the collective consciousness of a people. I won’t miss menus with nothing but fried food, but I will miss Matewan, Blair Mountain, Harlan, Brookside, Williamson, Logan, Man, Pikeville, and the look on the faces of people when coal is mentioned. I won’t miss the sounds of blasting on mountain tops all around me, but I will miss the downturned faces of a humble people. In these places, this coal country, there is no access to any major newspapers, no access to healthy food, very limited access to the internet or even to cell phone coverage. Fast food, WalMart, Pentecostal churches, and pop television rule coal country…….the mall is the festival……..and hopes of escaping are only dreams.

Tomorrow morning, we head out on the Greenbriar River trail………….a 77 mile rail-to-trail that heads NE from Lewisburg, WV. This will calm our nerves and allow us some psychic rest from the climbs and descents. Gabriela has been incredibly strong, both in her legs and in her spirit.