100 years ago today...

the greatest mining disaster in America took place in Monongah, WV. If you're from Morgantown you may not be terribly familiar with Monongah. But if you're from Fairmont or any of the surrounding towns (holla at me Barrickville, Rivesville, Idamay, Fairview, et al.) you know where Monongah is. Or, at the least, you've heard the name said but maybe you can't quite remember which of the little downtrodden former mining towns it is. There are too many.

That's how it is for me.

Everything in these towns is covered in coal dust. It might be the stain that the coal left years and years ago when the mines were still active or it might be from the coal trucks that pass through on their way to bigger towns where there's still mining going on. Sometimes--like in Greentown--many of the houses are painted a uniform color to indicate that they were company owned. No one has bothered to repaint. I don't know if it's out of laziness or if it's been left that way as an explanation--"This is what the mining companies did to us." Either way, it's obscene. Most people would pull their dress back down after being raped. Not West Virginians. We leave our dress around our hips and our legs spread. Our faces are alway mixed with pride and regret.

We identify with the thing we most hate so much that it's become a part of who we are. Coal mining is indigenous now. We don't even question it.

We used to ride 4-wheelers up around the fly ash dump and we never thought that it was strange for the water in the creek to be tinted orange. The roads at home aways need repaving from coal trucks passing over them and if you drive to Sugar Lane from Morgantown on a weekday you'll need to leave yourself some extra time cause you're guaranteed to get stuck behind one of those slow, lumbering beasts. Everyone knows a miner. If your dad wasn't a miner then his dad was and you probably have an uncle or two that works in the mines. The dust stays under their fingernails and you'll never see them entirely clean. They told us to stay away from abandoned mines but sometimes we'd still play right outside the mouth of one, pretending that it was our cave. We're used to things like runoff ponds that catch the rainwater after stripmining changes the topography. When they stripmined in Sugar Lane we stocked our runoff pond with bluegill, catfish, bass, and even a few drum. We put in a diving board and spent many summer days in intertubes on the pond. My brother was married at our runoff pond with the stripmined hill blocking the sun.

You just don't think about any of it. It's always been that way.

I knew that mining was big in WV but I had no idea that it was somewhat non-existent in other areas. Over the past two years I've met people that have no miners in their family. Some of them seemed surprised that people still had jobs mining. They say things like, "You mean, down in the earth? In a hole? Digging at rocks and stuff." I say, "Yeah. Some of the technology is different but yeah...down in the earth." And they say, "I didn't know people still did that." Of course they do. My oldest brother's first job out of college was as a mechanical engineer for the mines. It was a terrible job and I wondered if I was supposed to hate him for working for the company or respect him for keeping things running right and making sure the miners were safe. Being a company man in WV is similar to being a...well...I can't think of anything that doesn't rely on the typical overplayed Nazi comparision. Suffice to say, being a company man in WV is like being a person that isn't liked very much.

If you want to know more about the Monongah mining disaster, this site is a good overview:
http://www.boisestate.edu/history/ncasner/hy210/mining.htm.