Gray Mountain: A Novel(45)

“You’re the pilot, and you don’t know where we’re going?”

He smiled, banked to the left, and pointed to an instrument. “This is the altimeter; it monitors the altitude, which is pretty important when you’re in the mountains.” They were inching up to fifteen hundred feet, where they leveled off. He pointed outside and said, “That’s Cat Mountain, or what’s left of it. A big operation.” Ahead and to her right was the strip mine, which looked like all the rest: a barren landscape of rock and dirt in the midst of beautiful mountains, with overfill shoved far below into the valleys. She thought of Francine Crump, the client in search of a free will, and the land she wanted to preserve. It was somewhere down there, somewhere close to Cat Mountain. There were small homes along the creeks, a settlement here and there. The Skyhawk banked steeply to the right, and as it did a perfect 360, Samantha looked straight down at the mining trucks and loaders and other machinery. A blasting truck, front-end loaders, a dragline, mining trucks and haul trucks, track shovels, track loaders. Her knowledge was expanding. She spotted a supervisor who was standing beside an office, straining to watch the airplane.

“They work on Saturday, huh?” she asked.

He nodded and said, “Seven days a week, sometimes. All the unions are gone.”

They climbed to three thousand feet and leveled off. “We’re over Kentucky now, heading west and north,” he said. If not for the headsets, he would have been yelling into the roar of the engine. “Just look. Too many to count.” The strip mines dotted the mountains like ugly scars, dozens of them as far as she could see. They flew directly over several. Between them she noticed vast open areas covered with patches of grass and a few small trees. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing just ahead. “That flat spot with no woods?”

“A casualty, a reclaimed site that was once a strip mine. That one in particular used to be Persimmon Mountain, elevation twenty-five hundred feet. They took off the top, got the coal, then set about to reclaim it. The law requires it to have the ‘approximate original contour’—that’s the key language—but how do you replace a mountain once it’s gone?”

“I’ve read about that. The land must be equal to or better than it was before the mining.”

“What a joke. The coal companies will tell you that reclaimed land is great for development—shopping centers, condos, and the like. They built a prison on one in Virginia. And they built a golf course on another. Problem is, nobody plays golf around here. Reclamation is a joke.”

They flew over another strip mine, then another. After a while they all looked the same. “How many are active, as of today?” she asked.

“Dozens. We’ve lost about six hundred mountains in the last thirty years to strip-mining, and at the rate we’re going there won’t be many left. Demand for coal is rising, the price is up, so the companies are aggressively seeking permits to start stripping.” He banked to the right and said, “Now we’re going north, into West Virginia.”

“And you’re licensed to practice there?” she asked.

“Yes, and in Virginia and Kentucky.”

“You mentioned five states before we took off.”

“Sometimes I go into Tennessee and North Carolina, but not that often. We’re litigating a coal ash dump in North Carolina, a lot of lawyers involved. Big case.”

He loved his big cases. The lost mountains in West Virginia looked the same as those in Kentucky. The Cessna zigzagged right and left, banking steeply so she could take another look at the devastation, then leveling off to check out another one. “That’s the Bull Forge Mine, straight ahead,” he said. “You saw it yesterday from the ground.”

“Oh yes. The ecoterrorists. Those guys are really pissing off the coal companies.”

“That seems to be their intention.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring a rifle. We could blow out a few tires from the air.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

After an hour in the air, Donovan began a slow descent. By then, she was familiar with the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and the compass. At two thousand feet, she asked, “Do we have a destination?”

“Yes, but first I want to show you something else. Coming up on your side is an area known as Hammer Valley.” He waited a minute for them to clear a ridge; a long, steep valley appeared. “We’re gonna start down here at the end of it, near the town of Rockville, population three hundred.” Two church steeples rose through the trees, then the town came into view, a picturesque little village hugging a creek and surrounded by mountains. They flew over the town and followed the creek. Dozens of homes, mainly trailers, were scattered along narrow county roads.

“This is what’s known as a cancer cluster. Hammer Valley has the highest rate of cancer in North America, almost twenty times the national average. Bad cancers—liver, kidney, stomach, uterine, and lots of leukemia.” He gently pulled back on the yoke and the plane ascended as a large hump rose before them. They cleared it by two hundred feet and were suddenly over a reclaimed mine site. “And this is why,” he said. “The Peck Mountain strip mine.” The mountain was gone, replaced by small hills smoothed by bulldozers and covered in brown grass. Behind an earthen dam, a large body of black liquid sat ominously. “That’s the slurry pond. A company called Starke Energy came in here about thirty years ago and stripped out all the coal, one of the first big removal sites in Appalachia. They washed it right here and dumped the waste into a small lake that was once pristine. Then they built that dam and made the lake a lot bigger.”