Every Time I Think Of Those Buchanan Hills
They’re awfully rugged, those hills,
Sometimes almost straight up and down
Interspersed with cliffs and slate dumps,
With here and there, a ghostly town.
They’ve cut all the stately foliage
To prop up the kettle bottoms
In the small drift shafts they have mined
Memories of sultry autumns,
Summers, inside the mine, respite
From hoeing corn, hot sun, where sweat
Made one’s shirt to cling to one’s back,
Causing peeling, unease, fretting.
Edd and Stell raised their family
Among those rocks and freshet springs
Instilling a deep faith in God,
Where one could fly, if he had wings.
Tears well up in smog-burned eyelids,
Chasing soot down my furrowed cheek,
Every time I think of those hills,
Where, life is not meant for the weak.
Those left, have meek souls, softened by
Years of fighting the elements,
With coal companies stealing rights,
To their gas, coal and sentiments!
Frank Shortt
(Dedicated to the nine that are left)
The hills of Buchanan County, Virginia are very rugged. They are mostly straight up and down with no place to build houses. The sparse small towns were built in the scarce flat land between the two steep hills. Shotgun houses and later mobile homes were built where coal companies had left enough flat land to erect and edifice. Otherwise, a bulldozer had to be brought in to ‘doze’ out enough land to build on.
This did not stop the Shortt clan from settling this neck of the woods. Here and there are gray slate dumps, remnants of mining’s past. Cliffs pop out of the sides of the hills as if pushed outward by a giant thumb. Only the white frame houses remain to remind the young generation how hard their ancestors had to work to eke out a meager living from under the cliffs. There are towns such as Jewell Valley, Whitewood, Keen Mountain, Deel, Rowe, once bustling with coal fever, now almost forgotten. The higher-ups have determined, after all these years of usage, that coal is the main culprit causing global warming. I wonder…..!
These hills have been stripped of all the useful hardwood lumber, mostly used to prop up the ever-present kettle bottoms of the drift mines. Some men made their living cutting Edd Shortt’s timber for this purpose. Edd was a gentle soul. Prior to this, men like the Hornes, made sawmills; cutting and dragging anything that would make a two by four to their little mill on Grassy Creek. They left only the sawdust pile used for years by each succeeding generation of kids to play cowboys, Tarzan, and anything else that grabbed their fancy. All virgin timber played a part in the accumulation of this sawdust pile.
At the promontory of Shack Ridge, Edward Shortt my father, bought a forty acre parcel from Ord Wade thinking to make a new life for his wife, Stella, and the remnant of their ten children. He had found the outcropping of six feet of Red Ash coal, and had dreams of making enough money to feed his brood with a sizeable nest egg to boot. One problem that presented itself early; there was little drinking water on this parcel.
Edd’s dream of making a lot of money was cut short by the seam of coal dwindling down to less than three feet as he and Sherman Whited, his partner in this venture, slaved beneath tons of eminent falling rock. Those two worked this seam clear through the mountain to the outcropping in Shack Fork. This was all done with an old drag-cable motor and one carload of coal at a time. With all this hindrance, Edd fed and clothed his children.
Stella ‘ramrodded’ the, sometimes futile attempt, of farming the rocky hillsides. My brother, Wendell and I, shouldered the heaviest load of bringing in the bug-eaten vegetables that mom so patiently, sometimes not, canned and preserved. Three of the eldest siblings had flown the coop at this time. We grew some very healthy potatoes on that hillside farm. Blight and bugs made it very difficult to raise a decent crop. Wendell and I have spent hours removing potato and bean bugs from uncertain, stunted vines.
There were evenings when mom would have to cut our old flannel shirts from our backs where heat, combined with boiling sweat, caused us to burn even though our backs and arms were covered. Sitting inside the drift mouth of the mine was a welcome relief from the hot sun and sweltering humidity of the cornfield. Water, kept inside this mine, was as refreshing as if kept in a refrigerator. Oftentimes we had to haul water from other locations.
I can still hear, “Wendell, Frankie, time to hit the field. The potatoes can’t hoe themselves. The corn is getting so weedy, it’s hard to tell the weeds from the corn!”
Six a.m. came very quickly in those days. Actually, mom was right in getting us into the cornfield early. Later in the day the sun was unbearably hot.
“Mom, why can’t we sleep a little longer? We haven’t rested enough yet. We worked twelve hours yesterday,” one of us would whine.
Actually, between throwing rocks at crows and chipmunks and gabbing between rows, we probably had worked about nine hours the day before. Boys can find divers ways to kill time. Thank God there were biscuits left over from breakfast. About eleven a.m. we would stop for an hour or so to partake of cold biscuits and rhubarb jam washed down with cold coffee. Then we would lay in the shade of a tree and doze off for a spell.
The one important thing that Edward and Stella instilled into their ten children was a deep faith in the Creator. After we all left home, we flew off on our own, if we had wings to do so. Memories of praying, as a family, are still ingrained in my heart.
Steep hills were not created for the weak of mind. Those hills require stamina, resourcefulness, faithfulness, and, my own word, sticktuitevness! Many men have left the hills only to grow homesick after remembering the home-cooked meals, the greenness, and the solitude. Smog and overcrowded conditions of most cities seems to speed a yearning for the peace of home.
Residents of these old Buchanan County hills have been robbed of their natural resources. Their water wells have been depleted by shafts, sunk below the creek beds, seeking the rick coal veins underneath. Companies have come in and claimed all the natural gas, claiming ‘mineral rights’. If oil should suddenly be found on a man’s property, there would suddenly appear a document claiming ‘rights’ to it.
These remaining residents of the old Edd Shortt property cannot even dig enough coal from their own properties to heat their furnaces for the winter. Water has been piped in, but some folks would rather have the old means of obtaining water. It tastes better they say.
It is written, “Man was created from the dust of the earth.” Is this why men yearn to once more become part of the earth he came from? Is this why men yearn to go ‘home’?