Twinknit

I go away for a few days and there are 145 feeds in my bloglines. I’ll never catch up.

It’s sunny and 80 here in Kentucky. Thank you, weather gods, because this is exactly what Ineeded, and the weather is perfect for festival-going.  It feels very, very good to be back here.  In a way, it’s almost as though I never left.  I was expecting to feel a wave of homesickness or longing when I returned, but instead it just felt comfortable and right.  I feel incredibly relaxed, and I’m mananging to be remarkably productive.  Small things have changed.  A few houses on a road I used to drive all the time have burned down and a few new houses have gone up.  There are new shops opening in Whitesburg and spring is just starting to peek around the corner (not the abundance of green that had blossomed this time last year, but winter held on for a long time this year, as we are all aware).

There have, almost predictably, been several disturbing changes in my six week absence.  Many of you may remember the banner from my old blog.  If you don’t, it looked like this:

I took this photo last May from the top of Pine Mountain, the range of mountains that separates Virginia from Kentucky along the border between Wise/Dickenson Counties (Va) and Letcher/Harlan Counties (KY).  This view looks out in the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky.  Yesterday, I drove to the top of Pine Mountain and was incredibly disturbed to find that a few of the mountainsides in this photo have been aggressively strip mined, more so than I ever recall seeing in the past.

Now, I know I don’t talk politics on here much, and while several times I have begun posts about water and environmental quality here in the coalfields, or started an educational post about mountain top removal, I never post them.  There are several reasons why I hesitate — this blog is first and foremost a knitting blog, and while I frequently talk about music and my life here, I assume that most of you come to this blog for the combination of these things with fibery-related musings (such as they are).  I don’t assume to know anyone’s politics and if I wanted to write a political blog, I would start one.  But coal mining in general, and mountain top removal in particular, were a large part of my experience and my struggle while I lived in Virginia and they are very much at the forefront of my mind.  Pardon me if I get a little political here.

I love these mountains and I loved living here and this makes the topic of contemporary mining an emotionally charged one for me.  I don’t have words for how much it disturbed me to see the scar of surface mining in that view — I’m not sure what upset me more, the fact that it happened or that it doesn’t surprise me.  I’ve seen the damage that mountain top removal and other forms of surface mining have caused in parts of Virginia and other parts of Kentucky.  I watched a hillside be systematically removed in Dickenson County during my year and a half stay.  I’ve driven by the aftermath of MTR that can be seen from the roadside.  But this particular instance — in a view that has become so familiar to me (this same picture is also my desktop on my home computer) — brings me only a fraction closer to understanding the violation and loss that those who live here must feel when they watch their own land suffer such abuse.

I don’t want in any way to come across as though I do not understand the complication of coal mining here.  I think about it constantly and come up with no solution.  Coal mining is the primary source of employment and livelihood in these mountains (and it has been for almost a century), and it is a souce of a great deal of pride for local residents.  As a country, we are becoming increasingly more dependent on coal as a source of energy (right now, over 60% of the energy in the US comes from coal).  But coal can be a dirty business, and lest the new cheerful commercials fool you, coal is not clean, nor is the way it is currently being mined environmentally profitable or safe.

I’m sorry to fly off the hook here a little (and believe me, if you knew me better, you’d know that this is actually me demonstrating an incredible amount of restraint on the subject).  Thanks for your patience.  If you want to know more, here are some links that might be interesting/educational for you.

- Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

- Coal River Mountain Watch 

- Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition 

- more links here (on the website for the film Sludge)

Thanks for listening.  Back to less political, less inflamatory knitting tomorrow.