4. I looked for the Mountain
I decided that I wouldn’t write any of the lyrics for this project from the perspective of a character. It is important for me to accurately articulate what I have researched and learned from the participants, and not speculate what it must be like to live someone else’s life. My experience traveling down to West Virginia to meet Larry and see the destruction surrounding his home was powerful and devastating. I tried to convey those feelings in my lyrics.
It was quite a long and steep climb for my car up to Larry’s cabin. I feared that half way up the unpaved rocky stretch the car would overheat or pop a tire. When I arrived at the top there were fifty or so cabins where people lived or vacationed. Next to Larry’s cabin there was a sizable green space with a stage where he hosts yearly concerts. He explained to me that there used to be a thriving com- munity up on the mountain, with farming, stores and hundreds of families who lived there year round. Larry’s cabin used to sit at a low point on Kayford Mountain, but after decades of mountain top removal mining it’s now one of the highest points.
Larry and I took a short drive up another steep climb to get to “Hell’s Gate,” his name for the gate at the end of the path behind his cabin. To paraphrase him, the gate separates the area’s life from death. There is nothing beyond the gate that is living anymore: no animals, trees, water, just crushed rock and arid dust. Larry’s massive and majestic home, the beautiful and bountiful home he has known his whole life, the home of his family for three centuries, now exists only in his mind. My eyes took in the vast desert before me in a sickened breath of disbelief. If people saw firsthand what I saw that day, how our consumption of coal powered electricity is irreversibly destroying this most amazing land as well as the lives of the people, plants and animals upon it, I am certain we would limit our consumption of coal and support the renewable alternatives with haste.
One last note, I visited the site on a Sunday: the only day of the week where they are not blasting the sites with dynamite. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to hear and smell those massive explosions all day every other day of the week. It’s terrifying what we can do.
My thanks to Larry Gibson and Jen Osha for their help with this song.
lyrics
I looked for the mountain
There was no hill on it, no peak on it, no lookout off it
Yeah I looked for that mountain but the coal is all I’ve found
I looked on the mountain
For the trees and forests, the forest creatures, the streams and the hollers Yeah I looked for the mountain but dust and rubble is all I found
First they bulldoze the forests and scatter the fauna With dynamite blasting they fill all the valleys
And burn down the cabins of those who oppose this A coal fire rules this town
I stood on a lookout with a man of sixty
Who grew up on the mountain that is now a memory, and we stared at its ghost In four years they brought it down
And so he stands in protest with many a people
Losing their homes, losing their clean water
But at the risk of losing money the coal companies would rather kill them out
That 900 acres of dead land is humongous for my eyes to take in
But it’s really nothing compared to the 6,000 that’s next in the destruction Or the millions of acres that have been destroyed by now
You can’t blame the workers for wanting their jobs
In a place with no industry how can you feed your own
And so the citizens proposed a wind farm
Yet their politicians passed on this beautiful windfall, they’d rather blast it off
And so I looked on the mountain
There was no peak on it, no windmills on it, no life upon it
Yeah I looked for that mountain but greed’s senseless destruction was all I found
credits
from this land,
released January 1, 2009
Additional Musicians: Jack Ohly – Bass; Jacob Mitas - Viola
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