BartonMemo28and+29

Memos 28 & 29: Describing a Place/Event/Encounter to make convey how the culture of the place, and how it works.

We park the car, carefully stripped of all bumper stickers, in the gravel driveway and walk towards the two men sitting on the front porch, calling a greeting as we go. They are friendly, but suspicious, as we introduce ourselves and launch into our spiel: we're volunteers, in the neighborhood doing a listening project, how long have you lived here? This last is supposed to be our 'hook' question, the question people answer automatically, willingly, that lets you start a conversation without getting into the potentially problematic issue of who we are and why we are there. We are volunteers with Mountain Justice, a radical environmental group seeking to end mountain top removal (MTR) coal mining in Appalachia, working in conjunction with United Mountain Defense, a Tennessee-based organization working on the same issue. "Listening projects" are an established practice for these and other MTR-opposition groups. The listening projects have three purposes: to learn from local expertise, and to keep organization members in touch with the realities of residents' lives, and to make connections with potential allies. There are three of us working together, all young women, all from Virginia, and this works to our advantage. We'd been advised previously that we should always go in groups of two or three, and that there must always be at least one woman in the group. Two strange men approaching a door might well be interpreted as a threat; two women are at worst a nuisance. Most of the people we meet treat as a something of a curiosity. They are a bit bemused and a bit pleased that we want to learn about their lives, and are willing to humor us, to an extent, because we seem young and ignorant.

As we introduce ourselves, the younger of the two men stops cleaning his pistol to introduce himself and the older man and to shake our hands. We are not invited up on to the porch. How long have you lived here? we ask. What do you like to do in the mountains? We have a script, a list of questions that we are supposed to ask in order. If we find that the person is or becomes resistant or hostile, we should thank them for their time and move on. We are not supposed to write down the answers as we as hear them, because that would distract us from actively listening, which is our primary goal. We write them down later, after we get back into the car. I find these instructions somewhat contradictory. I want to ask questions that flow naturally from the previous responses. I want to ask different questions of people who are clearly not potential allies, but who are nevertheless interesting, who nevertheless have needs and concerns. My listening partners feel the same and after the first few efforts, we have agreed to deviate a little from the script, to ask the questions in our language and in the order that makes sense in a particular conversation. But we can't entirely disguise that we are there to learn about people's lives only as they relate to their immediate environment. The older of the two men we are speaking to, halfway through the conversation, warns us to be careful of what we say to other people along the road. He assures us we have said nothing wrong yet, but that we could stir up an awful lot of trouble if we were to indicate that we were against mining in any way. He also advises us not to grow up to be environmentalists, advice we thank him for as honestly as we can. He'd been deputy sheriff for thirty years, he tells us, and now works part-time as a night watchman for the mine just across the way. The younger man, perhaps his son, is the deputy sheriff now, but used to drive a coal truck. Most of the folks out this way, they tell us, work for the coal companies in one way or another, and they're good paying jobs. They used to have some trouble with the mining, they say, but since they started "putting in the regulations" about some years ago, it's been a hundred times better. We ask if they've noticed any changes in the waters—any orange or smelly streams? The answer is no, and they both begin an extended defense of the local water quality. They have no concerns about eating the fish, or drinking straight out of the streams, although not Roach Branch, which the younger man tells us is orange like we mentioned. And by the way, he says, that river that runs behind the house? It's always been bright green like that.

A little ways down the road, we talk to a woman who has no connection to the mines, has a very different opinion of the river. She not only won't eat the fish out of that river, she won't put a toe in it, it's so poisoned, she says. As we walk away, I can feel a knot of pure anger starting to form in the pit of my stomach. That river happens to be the New River. Contrary to its name, it is thought to be one of the oldest rivers in the world, running north and west across the mountains, mere miles from my hometown in Virginia. I spend my summers swimming in that river; it's where my drinking water comes from. Here in Tennessee it runs a bright, toxic green. This area of Tennessee happens to have naturally occurring pockets of phosphorus, which will turn the water green. The fact that the phosphorus is naturally occurring, however, does not mean that it isn't a contaminant or that it isn't present in the water in such concentrations because mining has disturbed the bedrock. We had earlier seen an even greener pool in the midst of a reclaimed mine site. The pool's purpose was to collect the heavy-metal contaminated water from the site and contain it while the heavy metals precipitated to the bottom. But such pools only retain so much of the water that flows through and out of the mine sites. They flood and leach and break. And while some of the streams are bright green and many more are bright orange, clearly warning of contamination, others look and smell just fine. Most of the heavy metals that contaminate the water and runoff—arsenic, antimony, barium, cadmium—are not detectable without special instrumentation. Such contaminants seep into the groundwater, into wells, and into rivers. And the thing about water is that it moves. The waters of the Appalachian mountains flow east, west, north and south. These are the waters that become the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Potomac Rivers, that become the drinking waters for millions of people throughout the Eastern U.S.