c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

ALONG THE BIG SANDY RIVER _ Instead of taking the interstates north to visit family, we decide to mosey along old U.S. 52, to see what is happening in the places where people actually live.

Our route takes us through coal country.

We pass through Bluefield, W.Va., where a local man standing beside a railroad track waits to watch the long coal trains rumble by.”The next train is in an hour,”he says.

We pass through town after town that gave its life to coal. A few seem prosperous, but most seem bereft and yet not abandoned, as if the coal seam gave out long ago but no one had any place to go.

Alongside U.S. 52 runs a gleaming rail line, on which coal is constantly moving to the electric power plants of other states. Huge coal-carrying trucks make every turn of this serpentine road an adventure.

Branching off U.S. 52 are narrow roads named after creeks. They lead into the hollows where mining families inhabit a world that most Americans would find difficult to imagine: clannish families, young men driving new Camaros to the mines, middle-aged men spitting up coal dust, girls bearing babies, young women looking old.

Coal country is a parallel culture, more like a Third World producer of raw materials than a First World processor and consumer. Railroads took the best land. Chemical companies took the rivers. Coal operators took men’s lives. Politicians were bought cheap. Tourists rarely visit.

I first discovered coal country when I was a newspaper reporter based in Pittsburgh, a city made rich by coal mined elsewhere.

I interviewed 35-year-old men who were crippled by black lung disease, the predictable and yet blandly denied result of working underground in air so laden with coal dust it left their faces greasy and black. In a country where secondhand cigarette smoke is considered a public health crisis, I looked at miners barely able to breathe, and I wondered,”Are we in the same country?” I interviewed women who were pregnant at 14, for whom life was a constant search for calories, for relief from debt, for the sound of their men coming home alive. Then I would return to a world where people worried about fashions, pecking orders at the club, which new car to buy and college admissions, and I wondered,”Are we in the same country?” I slipped into a coal company store and saw the exorbitant prices the miners told me about. I sat in coal bosses’ offices and listened to them blithely deny the truth.

I interviewed officials of the United Mine Workers union _ for whose right to exist miners had stood up to Pinkerton thugs firing machine guns _ and heard them say nothing, as if explosions weren’t burying men alive, as if black lung disease didn’t exist, as if the union weren’t pulling health cards from retirees who dared question.

Why would I want to come here again? Because this region is the rest of the story. I don’t want to forget that American prosperity has come at the expense of others. Men literally gave their lives here and then were abandoned by the people whom they made rich. No one handed a flag to their widows.

Women literally gave their lives here and then were invisible to everyone but debt collectors.

Children watched their fathers gasp for breath in living rooms heated to excess by scrap coal, and when they tried to escape _ to cross the border into prosperity _ they were ridiculed as hillbillies.

I don’t want to over-dramatize. There is much in coal country that would seem normal to other Americans: fast food, tidy lawns, football. But this seldom-seen corner of America has been shaped by the unparalleled power of greed, that destroyer of lives, the great deceiver.

I can’t drive out of coal country and leave this behind. For I couldn’t turn on my computer without the coal of West Virginia. I couldn’t heat my home, cook my food or drive safely at night were it not for the men and women of these tortured hollows.

The fact that I can’t see their deprivation doesn’t mean I don’t profit from it.

DEA END EHRICH