West Virginia

Like much of the nation I have been watching with aching heart what has happened in West Virginia this past week. It is such a sad, sad, sad story and, at the same time, such an ancient one. Men need to feed their families and so they go into the ground -- miles into the ground – to work in order to make a living. It is hard for me to understand the courage it takes to do that. It is courage that I doubt I have. But this has been going on for over a hundred years and, while the practice of mining is more evolved than it was a hundred years ago, when something goes wrong that doesn’t seem to help.

There is a temptation to compare it to fishing. Whether you go into a mine or out on the ocean in a boat to make your living, the risk is comparable. If all goes well, all goes well but when something goes wrong... The only difference I can see is that going out on a boat is something I can understand doing and have done many times with great joy. I don’t know who would choose to go two miles into the earth and find pleasure in it.

The big question, of course, is why do they do it? And they answer is because they don’t see another choice. It’s that simple. I grew up and spent most of the first 28 years of my life in a rural Pennsylvania factory town. In the neighborhood I grew up in most of the fathers worked in factories. My father had his own construction business but we were fairly unique in that neighborhood. Factories are a better choice than mines but I know that if the mines were the only choice, most of those fathers would have gone into the mine. You do what you have to do.

It is hard for people who live in urban areas to understand what it is like in much of rural America, especially in Appalachia. In the Sixties and Seventies, the decades that bred many of the men who died in West Virginia this week, the way people lived bore little resemblance to life in urban and suburban areas. People were bound into their communities by family and tradition but also by a wariness of the larger world. To leave, to go elsewhere to find a better way of life, was a risk that many found hard to imagine. And leaving family and the friends you have known all your life hurts. So people stay to be among those they love and they make compromises, they work in factories and mills and mines. It is an honorable choice and, as long as nothing goes wrong, it can be a decent living.

When I was first out of college in the Seventies I worked for two social service agencies. Most of my client were from the rural Appalachian poor. It was painful work and I saw a lot that would make no sense in the world I live in now. There is poverty here, of course, and there is the concurrent abuse and alcoholism, too, but here people have options. There are clinics and shelters and food pantries and legal protections. If a person wants to escape the poverty and the limitations there are means to do it. But deep in the hill countries of places like West Virginia it is a different story. Just the sheer physical act of getting from a bad situation to somewhere that offers food and a warm bed let alone medical care takes tremendous effort and planning. Sometimes the nearest social service agency is a hundred miles away. Believe me, there is no poverty in America’s cities that can begin to compare with the poverty in remote rural areas. So people do the best thing they can do, they take jobs that most of us have a hard time imagining. They do it because it is all they have if they want to stay among the people they have known all their lives.

When I was growing up I had three friends that I am still close with today. We knew each other from childhood, went to school together, talked about our futures together. Let’s call them Sue, Debbie and Tom. When we graduated from high school, Debbie and Tom and I went off to Penn State. Sue got married. A decade later Sue was divorced and working in a factory, Debbie had quit college to get married but was back home divorced with two kids and working as a bartender, Tom had left college for personal reasons and was back home working in a factory. I finished college and moved to Houston a few years later.

Today we are all in our fifties and I still talk to all of them regularly. Sue has remarried and lives in a very small, very rural town and has a son. Her husband works in a paper mill and she makes ornaments and dolls to sell in tourist shops. Debbie remarried, too, but he was killed in a car wreck and she is working in a tool and die shop. Her kids are grown - one lives near her and works in a factory the other moved to California. Tom started a small business of his own and is doing okay with that. He and his wife have recently separated, he tells me they fought about money all the time. All three of them, Sue, Debbie, and Tom, are close to their parents, their siblings, and the friends who have stayed there too. I am here. I have no regrets.

The point I am trying to make is that people lead lives that are incomprehensible to others - even the people who love them. I don’t think one choice is necessarily better than the other but any choice involves sacrifice. I cannot for the life of me understand how those men went into those mines every day – but I absolutely know why they did. May God rest their souls and bring their families peace.

Thanks for reading.