Word: coaling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prenter, W. Va., where David lives, is a tiny coal camp of a town some 40 miles and a mountain pass south of Charleston. A single paved street runs through the town. One-story look-alike houses with green shutters, rickety porches and peeling paint are squeezed between the road and the steep hills. No traffic light. No police station. No firehouse. No school. That is ten miles down the road, where Prenter Creek empties into Big Coal River...
...David Nelson, a pudgy, serious, persistent boy, there was never any question that he would be a coal miner like his dad, who came back from Viet Nam in 1971 and followed his father and grandfather into the coal mines. When David was younger, Larry took him for his first look at the mines. "He was ridin' me around," David recalls, "and I looked up and there was this big ! mountain covered with coal. I thought about working there someday...
...choice is more than a mere wanting. It is a profound longing, a matter of identity. David's younger brother Stephen wants only to play football for West Virginia and go on from there to play professionally, even if it means leaving the hills and the coal mines. David wants his father's identity, his land and context...
...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...