{"id":159,"date":"2007-08-15T16:46:18","date_gmt":"2007-08-15T16:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2007\/08\/15\/an-awful-but-essential-lesson\/"},"modified":"2007-08-15T16:46:18","modified_gmt":"2007-08-15T16:46:18","slug":"an-awful-but-essential-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2007\/08\/15\/an-awful-but-essential-lesson\/","title":{"rendered":"An Awful but Essential Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Charles<\/em><\/span>\u2014Wabash junior Nathan Rutz gave up his usual summer job at the camp where his family vacations to spend a month in a ramshackle house with a group of other young men and women trying to help the people of West Virginia save a part of their state from being literally blown from the map.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>This internship with the Coal River Mountain Watch<\/a>\u2014part of a program called \u201cMountain Justice Summer\u201d<\/a> which seeks to end the practice of \u201cmountaintop removal\u201d coal mining and the damage it\u2019s doing to people, communities, and the environment in the Appalachians\u2014changed Nathan\u2019s life.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s my job to chronicle such teachable moments. So when Nathan offered to show me around after his internship was over, I picked him up in Cincinnati and we headed for Whitesville, WV.<\/span><\/p>\n

The folks he\u2019d worked with greeted him with hugs. One of the researchers noted how Nathan\u2019s \u201cwillingness to roll up his sleeves and do what needed to be done\u201d had been a morale booster for the group. And listening to Nathan talk about the people in the Whitesville community he\u2019d gotten to know, to enjoy, and to respect, I understood why he\u2019d become so dedicated to this work.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it was our trip up Kayford Mountain, to a place they call \u201cthe Gates of Hell,\u201d that really opened my eyes to Nathan\u2019s transformation.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019ll articulate this all better than I in the next issue of Wabash Magazine,<\/em><\/span> but here\u2019s a moment from my own experience on the mountain that I\u2019ll never forget:<\/span><\/p>\n

Nathan was showing me the graveyard where the family of the mountain\u2019s owner, Larry Gibson, are buried. He recalled Larry teaching him to walk between the headstones, never on a grave itself. This mountain is sacred ground to Gibson, who was born here in the 1950s when the family owned 500 acres. He returned in the 1980s when coal companies had acquired all but 50 acres of that land.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"You can see what mining has done with that acquisition in some of the photos I took that day. Kayford Mountain is torn apart and surrounded by devastation, the top of the nearby mountains blown apart, the rumble and clanging of D9 bulldozers and the barks of diesel dump trucks the constant soundscape.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nathan pointed across a the now desert-like valley to a mountain that looked like it had been given a mohawk.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s another family cemetery,\u201d Nathan said of the narrow band of remaining trees. He said that the mining companies weren\u2019t allowed to surface mine cemeteries, so they had tunneled underneath this one. Some of the graves had fallen in.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few minutes later I met Larry Gibson, the man they call “the keeper of the mountain,” and I asked him if, after years of protesting, testifying before the state legislature and Congress, and spending time in jail for acts of civil disobedience\u2014after seeing 250 of West Virginia\u2019s mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal mining\u2014he still had hope that he could stop it. What I didn\u2019t know was that only a few days earlier, 12 more grave sites on the mountain had been destroyed by mining.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t keep doing this if I didn\u2019t have hope. You have to have hope.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

An note of anger rose in his voice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201dBut they\u2019ll never get this part of the mountain. This is my foothold. They’ll never get that cemetery. They\u2019ll never get my home.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll never think of coal as “cheap energy” again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last summer, Nathan had a front row seat to an American tragedy of our own making, and he took the stage to try to stop it from getting any worse. He has seen mining companies and government let it all happen, seen the economic dilemma in which the people of the region find themselves trapped. He has watched a state disregard its natural and cultural heritage and put it’s own children at risk (read about Marsh Fork Elementary School<\/a>) so the rest of us can keep the lights on\u2014awful lessons but essential ones if one is to learn to live, as Wabash insists, \u201cto live humanely in a difficult world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nathan\u2019s story will appear in the Fall 2007 issue of Wabash Magazine.<\/em><\/span> Here\u2019s a photo album<\/a> from my time with him. It was, thanks to Nathan, the most teachable moment I’ve experienced in my time at Wabash.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Charles\u2014Wabash junior Nathan Rutz gave up his usual summer job at the camp where his family vacations to spend a month in a ramshackle house with a group of other young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}