Word: coal
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...basement an American canoeist who has converted a small coal bin into a stagnant river crouches on one knee and endlessly paddles nowhere. His sloshing is a nighttime sound of the neighborhood. A roller skate wedged beneath his forward foot simulates the bobbing boat. Old mirrors of every shape, rescued from dressers and garage sales, are suspended all around. In each of them, he checks his technique against the home movies he has taken of the Rumanians and Swedes. This is the Olympian getting ready...
...able to have it. Last winter David's father, like many other miners, lost his job. Unemployment pays him less than half his union wage. "Yeah, I want to be a coal miner," David says, "if they ain't shut down...
Even at his age, David understands that workers are being replaced by machines that can mine more coal more cheaply. His father has been laid off twice, the previous time for three years, so David worries about coal's future as well as his own. "I'm afraid," he says, "that later on the dead trees and plants won't be able to produce coal and everybody will be losing their jobs...
...These are my hills," a Coal Valley News editorialist wrote more than 30 years ago. His words are no less pertinent today: "I do not hold title to the lands, but I reap every benefit and every injury to them. Believe it or not, you and I are the guardians of these hills. They are God's hills and we are the keepers. More than that, we shall inherit the manifold blessings of the hills. They are our hills...
There is one thing David desperately wants, an object of desire he shares with Nancy, Stephen and his parents: a house of their own. The family's current four-room dwelling, for which they pay $30 a month in rent, is owned ! by a coal company. Taped to the kitchen wall is a newspaper article with a drawing of a house with floor plans. Nancy calls it "our dream house." With its dormer windows and steeply pitched roof, the structure looks more suited to suburbia than to this West Virginia hollow. But it has four bedrooms...