A Song for the River

Spring took its time arriving this year in the Big Sandy River Valley; the early goading by unseasonably hot temperatures seduced the dogwoods and cherries into bloom just in time to be killed by the bone-chilling frosts that followed. Until May rolled in, it seemed as if nature was holding back, too timid to take another chance. It was a dull early spring without the wild dogwoods on my hillside and the pink variety in my yard and until the goldfinch came back to their feeders, color was in short supply. Only now are the trees beginning to fill out green with the promise of summer, and the scars of a false spring are still visible.
 
Although the Big Sandy did not flood this year, it came close to it. The rains that followed the Big Freeze pushed the river to nearly flood stage from Grundy, VA, where the river rises, to Catlettsburg, KY, where it finally yields to the Ohio. Even though no towns were awash, the river was strangely destructive anyway; great chunks of riverbank earth are missing all along the river’s length. We are accustomed to flooding; it has always been a problem for towns along the river, and adjustments have been made. Pikeville, KY cut down a mountain and re-routed the river, a railroad, and a highway through it; Grundy cut down a mountain as well and will move the entire town into the cut to escape the frequent threats from the Big Sandy and Slate Creek that join in the heart of town. There are two dams on Big Sandy tributaries, but spring rains can
still drive it out of its banks.
 

The Big Sandy now avoids Pikeville, flowing through a man-made channel at the edge of town.

This year, the rains were fierce. The main road from Grundy to Pikeville is now closed, since a critical part of US 460, which connects the two towns, was carried away with the flood tide. It will be June or later before that road reopens. It was fearful to see the river claim the road; it was almost as if it was lashing out, attempting to strike back at some unknown enemy.
 
Maybe the river had its reasons to do so.
 
I tend to be animistic in spring, when I see the earth trying to mend itself again after another year of abuse unimaginable to people who do not live here. I sometimes believe these old hills have souls and take offense at what has been done to them. Since the last time the dogwoods bloomed, even more trees have been pushed down and burned, more valleys emptied of homes and more mountains blown into the hollows and coves where mountaineers have lived since before the Revolution. Even before then, the hollows were not unoccupied; there were the Cherokee, the Adena, the Fort Ancient and the Woodland tribes, and perhaps some culture that was clean enough to come and go without leaving a mark on the land. We have no record or memory of them, but future generations will see the scars of today for eons. They will never fully heal.
 
I am speaking of the unspeakable: it is called mountaintop removal and it is the current preferred method of extracting coal from the high seams in my border region of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. It is one of the most heartbreaking sights imaginable, and a century of standard coal mining cannot compare to what it has done to these hills in the past few years. What’s worse is that it is all legal under current law; although few would submit that it is just.
 
In my animistic mood, I can see why the hills came back to life so slowly this spring and why the river was so enraged: maybe they do have souls and they simply did not want to face another year of ceaseless, senseless injury. Maybe the river was so desperate to run away that it did not care what damage it did in the rush; maybe it knew what is soon going to be done to it.
 
In early April, the Associated Press in Roanoke ran a story that most people could not believe: Virginia authorities had given the go-ahead to a large coal company in Buchanan County to pump untreated mine water directly into the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River above Grundy. The water comes from old shafts that have been flooded for decades and although the major pollutant is chloride, there will also be the detritus of mining: coal dust, rock dust, explosives residue, oil and grease leaked from machinery, heavy metals leached from broken rock, and the natural deposits of working men who toiled underground without bathrooms for sixty years.
 
The AP report said the company would pump between 1,000 and 1,500 gallons a minute into the Levisa, where the flow was estimated at 135,000 gallons a minute. The latest reports indicate that the company intends to pump 15,000 gallons a minute and they have millions of gallons to pump. Naturally, the people of Grundy and Pikeville are up in arms; the river is the sole water source for their water systems, but there is little that can be done. Virginia regulators say the process should pose no problem, even though the “mixing zone” is ten times the usual length of such permits. A Virginia Tech professor challenged the euphemism of “mixing zone.” “A mixing zone,” he said, “is a place where animals will die.”
 
I wonder what the reaction would be if this were announced for the James or the Charles or the Dan rivers. I wonder what the reaction would be if this were announced anywhere outside the coalfields. I wonder what is next for my river.
 
The Twentieth Century was hard on it; the Twenty-first Century seems bent on killing it.
 
The Big Sandy deserves better; it was once the pride of the region and now it seems consigned to the category of some medieval sewer. We seem to have forgotten what it meant to us before it became a convenient trash collector.
 
The river culture of the Big Sandy is now as arcane as the Indian cultures that once gloried in it. There are three major forks: the Levisa and the Russell both rise in Virginia and the Tug rises in West Virginia. Until 1863, all of the headwaters came from the Old Dominion. The Russell joins with the Levisa just above the mouth of Greasy Creek, where my great-great-great grandfather Elisha Hopkins lived and where he floated down the river with his Cherokee friends to sell whisky at the river towns that lined its banks.
 
The first riverboat came up the Big Sandy to Pikeville in 1837. Just less than a hundred years later, the last one departed, with no fanfare. Because it was so valuable to trade, several bills were introduced in the Kentucky legislature during that time to lock and dam the river so that the river traffic would continue, but that did not happen. The last regular customers of the steamboats, the railroads, were successful in blocking every bill. When the Depression came to the hills, the railroads cut their fares so deeply that the riverboat owners largely went broke, and they stopped coming. Today, there are few people living here who can remember smokestacks coming around the bends at Pikeville or Prestonsburg or Paintsville, and there are none living who could remember Confederate and Union spies playing cards with each other in the captain’s quarters of the tiny boats.
 
I was lucky enough to hear stories, however, and I have tried to tell some of them, but there are so many others that are lost. There were songs about the river also, joyful songs; I have heard bits and pieces of some of them, but I can only imagine what they were. The Indians in their canoes would have sung them while they paddled; the steamboaters would have sung their songs as they worked, and in all that time, how many lovers would have walked hand-in-hand in the moonlight along its banks? Only a song could have captured what they felt.
 
I wish someone would write a song for the river now. I know what I would like it to be. It would sing of the ancient Indian village at the confluence of the Levisa and the Russell for centuries and the lives its people led before they disappeared into the mists. It would sing of the builders of today’s towns and the thrill they felt when they heard the booming steam whistles in the distance. It would sing of the loggers and rafters and the great tide of logs that covered the river every spring, floating down to markets on the Ohio in the waning years of the Nineteenth Century. It would sing of the people who were born and lived and died in peace along its banks for ages and it would sing of my father teaching me to make dough balls and string a trot line for catfish when the river was still clean and pure and I could feel my heart beating as I watched the fish approach the hook.
 
This outrage in Buchanan County was not the first assault on the river; it will not be the last, and eventually there will be little left to save. A song for today would have to sing of that horror, of what is happening now and what will happen in the future and I’m not sure I would want to hear it. It would be a fearsome thing to watch a soul die; human beings are not equipped to handle something so profound, but we are seeing it here in the mountains and the rivers and we know we are seeing it.
 
That’s what makes it so wrong.
 
A song for the river should not have to be a funeral dirge.