The Coal House

The four of us pulled out of Williamson, West Virginia, without a good reason as to why we had gone there in the first place. Williamson is 80 miles from anywhere, cradled in the elbow of the Tug Fork, the muddy brown river that forms the border with Kentucky and has half-a-mind to rise out of its banks whenever it damn well pleases. Dead little coal towns dot the Tug, some encircled with an Army Corps of Engineers flood wall to protect the crumbling structures inside.

Williamson has a few two or three story buildings. But it is not much of a city anymore. Not like it used to be. Three-thousand people live along a collection of streets that snake along the flattest ground. Between the roads and the river is one of America's largest rail yards. More than a dozen railroad tracks sit side-by-side, ready to take all of the coal that comes down out of the hills north to Huntington and the barges. Everything in town is a bit monotonous and inconspicuous, except for the thing you see when you turn left on to East 2nd Street. There, among the vacant storefronts, is the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce, which sits inside The Coal House, a black cube created from 65 tons of coal mined from a single mammoth seam in Mingo County.

I know all of this now. I didn't know any of it when we drove through a gap in the flood wall and left.

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Everyone in the minivan worked for the television station in Huntington, which had a powerful enough signal to penetrate into the valley and hollows of West Virginia. I was fairly new and found myself writing stories about the things that were happening in those valleys and hollows. Rather than try to understand them from afar, I wanted to see these places myself. I borrowed a Chevy Lumina minivan from the station, packed it with some snacks, a Rand McNally road atlas, and three co-workers who had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.

We set no destination. We charted no course. It was to be an aimless wandering, drifting, driving and discovering; a day to see with our own eyes the places we had only viewed on a map. We would find what had been forgotten. We would stumble upon interesting things. We would know more than we did before we left. At least, that is what we thought when we shut the doors and headed south.

Our first stop was Logan, where a few hundred people live behind the Walmart just off of the main road from Charleston. The buildings on Stratton Street loomed over the vacant sidewalks downtown, so close and claustrophobic that their long shadows turned daylight into dusk. We piled out and marveled at the pawn shop there, which sold a large array of semi-automatic assault rifles and transparent toilet seats with mummified roses inside. I paid a few dollars for the least tacky thing in the store: a tiny miner figurine handcrafted from coal.

From Logan, we drove south along Route 10, through Stollings, Lyburn and Man, which consisted of a few intersections and lonely groves of buildings. The two-lane road ran next to a railroad track, which ran next to the north-flowing Guyandotte River. The occasional grocery store whizzed by. Back in Logan, I made the impromptu decision to find the extravagant grave site of Devil Anse Hatfield, the patriarch of the family from Logan that had once so famously and bloodily feuded with the McCoys, supposedly over a pig.

We never found it. The four of us drove onward, and the novelty of our voyage started to wane. Somebody looked at the road atlas and groaned. We were at least an hour and a half away from home, with nothing but windy country roads and rolling green mountains in every direction.

But we kept driving south, thinking that the grave, or something interesting, had to be just around the next bend. We passed a collection of single-wides, rolled over a bridge, and discovered we were in Verner, which was not on the map. I got out to stretch my legs and took the news camera out behind the post office to shoot video of the rolling water for no particular reason. We kept following the Guyandotte and drove down Route 80 until it ended at an intersection named Gilbert, West Virginia, population 417. I had heard of this town. I looked it up on a map once after someone from there started emailing the station to complain.

At Gilbert, we decided to head home on U.S. 52. It was the shortest way back. One of my co-workers started to feel sick as the minivan rounded another corner and rolled though Varney in the blink of an eye. At Delbarton, she begged for me to slow down, her stomach churned from the g-force created when I rounded a bend at 55 miles per hour. Our minivan was now a full 85 miles south of Huntington. That realization made her even sicker.

The sun dipped lower in the sky, and the shadows started to grow, creeping out from mountainsides into the hollows. The four of us sped around a hillside on U.S. 52, past a dozen side-by-side railroad cars heaping with coal and into downtown Williamson. We really didn't want to see it. Between us and home was two hours of the Tolsia Highway, a four lane road where coal trucks passed you just a little too close and a little too fast. The road went winding north along the Tug Fork, through towns with interesting names like Crum, Kermit and Fort Gay. We had all been curious about them when we saw them on the map when the trip started, but since then we had driven through other curiously-named places named Ranger and Harts and Big Ugly and found nothing there.

For hours, we hadn't seen anything except for houses and railroads and coal trucks and empty buildings. We never found the grave. Everybody in the minivan was surly, sick, or both. We didn't have stories to tell. There was only one story, and it would be about the time when I took three co-workers on a trip for six hours through southern West Virginia and we didn't see a damn thing.

As we pulled up in front of The Coal House, I figured out where I had gone so wrong. I had come to see things, and not to understand them. I hadn't bothered to try. We had talked to three people the entire day. Tops. I hadn't taken the time to ask or read about the places I would be visiting. There was so much that I missed. There were shootouts between unionizing miners and coal company mercenaries. There were stories of vote buying in Logan to help John F. Kennedy win West Virginia and the presidency in 1960. The Hatfields and McCoys? It was about more than just a pig. It was all there, and I didn't see any of it because I was too busy concentrating on the road.

People always say that it's not the destination that matters, it's the journey. That's true. But you still need a destination. As I stood in front of The Coal House, I realized I needed to do more than take a picture. I had to see what was inside. I had come so far, and ended up here. This was my destination. I put the camera away, strode up, and tried the door.

It was locked.

Seven years later, I still have the tiny coal miner. It sits on a shelf in my bedroom. For years, I thought it came from a single lump of coal. It didn't. Modern mines don't produce lumps that big anymore. Most coal is sheared from the seam and ground into small chunks. The coal for my figurine had most likely been further pulverized into a powder, made into a paste and poured inside a mold, where it hardened. The coal itself is at least 200 million years old, formed from plants and animals that died in an era so ancient that it's impossible for me to comprehend. And so after all of that time, some people came along and dug it out of the earth, smashed, crushed and molded it into a cheap figurine, then put a price tag on it and stuck it on a shelf in a pawn shop in Logan, West Virginia. And then I came along.

I've been looking at that statue for years. Finally, I understand.