Poems by Brandi Jo Nyberg

Oldest Mountains

by Brandi Jo Nyberg

From Canary Summer 2019

Brandi Jo Nyberg lives 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle in the Tanana River Valley, a tributary of the Yukon River. She has spent the past several years migrating from river to river and misses Appalachia's New River the most.

Today I was a raft guide. The Upper New River in beautiful West-By-God-Virginia. Mostly flat water with ripples and rocks here and there, ending with two class III rapids. An easy section of river. Today, I had the pleasure of rowing.

It felt great to row again, as it had been a year since I rowed down a stretch of river. Initially, it burned. But once I worked through the burn it felt glorious. Satisfying.

The first of the class III rapids on this section is called “Surprise,” because if you follow the beautiful glass tongue down the center of the rapid, you are tricked by the water and end up running the “meat” of the rapid. In this case, guess what that means? Surprise! You’re probably going for a swim. Also, your boat may be upside down. Luckily, I managed to row the boat slightly to the left center of the hole. This is lucky because what I did not manage to do was straighten the boat out, and I dropped into the hole sideways. Had I been in the center, my boat probably would have flipped. Novice mistake. I’m going to blame it on my out-of-practice rowing arms.

Most of the trip I rowed alone, carrying our lunches, everyone else – customers and a few other raft guides – in duckies (inflatable kayaks). I rowed ahead or behind, relaxed, and gazed at the lush, deep green mountains that rose up out of the river. Compared to mountains of the Western U.S., they seem small. Time and erosion have softened these peaks. When I am wrapped in West Virginia’s mountainous arms, I feel at ease. At home.

Why?

Why do only these mountains of Appalachia make me feel it?

Is it my West Virginia heritage, my family ties? My mountain blood knows its home?

Or is it a comfort drawn from something deeper?

Can my body and emotional self somehow sense how old and wise these Appalachian Mountains are?

Some of the oldest there are, that’s how old. Four hundred and eighty million years old, old.

The Appalachian Mountains once rose higher than the Rockies, the Alps, the Andes, and many scientists believe they were the first of their kind. The first, ever. On Planet Earth. And the New River, well, contrary to its name, is even older than the mountains. Could one place monetary value on a natural history such as this? Industry can.

Once upon a time, this region was a swamp – near the equator – rich in plant life different from that of the present. Massive trees and ferns and muck all dying and forming a thick layer of peat. This incredibly carbon-rich peat was slowly covered by layers of sediment, accumulating little by little, year by year. Then some tectonic plate shifting. Then some tectonic plate slamming, continental uplift, and the peat became buried. Buried under lots of pressure. Peat then turned to lignite (the lowest ranking, ‘softest’ coal), then with some more high pressure to sub-bituminous coal, then bituminous coal (or, soft, black coal), then anthracite (the hardest coal with the highest carbon content, the fewest impurities, and the highest energy density). This biological and geological transformation was a slow one. The conversion from peat to anthracite coal takes place over millions of years.

The coal of Appalachia is of the bituminous type – relatively soft and containing the tarlike substance bitumen, or asphalt. Historically this coal was mined by many men underground in tunnels and cave-like spaces. As technology progressed, mining companies realized that instead of burrowing into the mountain side, the top of the mountain could simply be scraped off.

Surface mining, which includes strip mining, open-pit mining, and mountaintop removal mining, was a different kind of beast. In 1977, when the Surface Mine and Reclamation Act was put into place, strip mining was permitted in Appalachia but only if the land were reshaped afterward to be “as close as possible to its original contours upon completion of operation.” However, this act made no specific references to mountaintop removal. The result was a legal loophole through which mountaintop removal operations continued to function. These mountaintop removal mining operations use explosives to break up the mountain’s rock layers above the coal and then scrape off the tops of the oldest mountains in the world– scrape them flat. They extract the coal. They make no effort to reshape the mountain to its previous form. What is left: a manmade dustbowl, a hidden sort of collapsed colosseum. Hard, barren edges carved out of what was once a soft, prolific peak. Over 480 million years of geological evolution scraped flat in a matter of months.

Instead of “reshaping” the mountain to its “original contours,” the tops are left leveled, a white eyesore against the green slopes. The excess rock from the scrapings and explosives are usually pushed and dumped into adjacent streams, hollows, or valleys. There is no effort to contain this casualty. The result is the death of a stream. Ecosystems lost. Nutrient cycling and food webs disrupted and destroyed. Poisoned. Several West Virginia watersheds already have at least 10 percent of their total area affected by mountaintop removal. The EPA has found that more than 90 percent of Appalachian streams below valley fill sites (the “nice” term used for the dumping of excess mountaintop removal materials) were affected, according to the Clean Water Act’s standards. The valley fill sites appear as a giant staircase from the mountain hollow below but act as a slow seepage waterfall.

How long will it be before the New River, believed to be one of the oldest rivers in the world, is destroyed? Sure, some of the River’s course in West Virginia is designated as a National River under the U.S. Park Service, but the Ohio River Watershed which contains this river is huge. Of the approximately 360 miles that encompass the New River’s path, only 53 of them are the New River Gorge National River section.

When I am alone in a boat on the New River, my mind leaves the water and floats up to the flattops – the mines beyond my sight. Thankfully, the river always manages to bring me back. Shortly after Surprise, I was steadily approaching the second of the class III rapids: Big Bologna, actually a very easy rapid to maneuver through, but rated so because of two river features that must be avoided: Plow Rock and Big Bologna Hole. Plow Rock (also called Pyramid rock because of its shape and size): like any snow plow on the road, you don’t want to collide with it. Running into Plow Rock would most likely result in wrapping your inflatable raft or kayak around it. To avoid this rock, you enter the rapid on river left. After passing Plow Rock you ferry your craft over to river right. Then you straighten her out and head toward center-right, avoiding Big Bologna Hole and many unforgiving rocks on the left, as well as the shallower waters of the right. This sounds complex and difficult, but I promise you – it is not. We send inexperienced people out in their own personal duckies urging them to, “Follow me! Point your boat upstream and ferry to the right!”…they usually make it.

Like many rapids on numerous rivers, there is a tall tale behind the name of Big Bologna Rapid. Long ago, a raft was carrying the cooler filled with everyone’s lunch: West Virginia steak – known to outsiders as bologna. The large and easily avoidable hole got the best of that raft, and all the bologna sandwiches met their fate at the bottom of the river.

I went last through Big Bologna, running my boat as sweep. If any unsuspecting novice fell out of or flipped their ducky, I came in behind them, tidying up the mess. Our group passed through Big Bologna unscathed (as usual).

Back in the hypnotic flat water, my mind wandered to last summer. My bathing suit, which formed a large X on my back, soaked in the New River water, and rubbed up against my skin under my tight PFD (personal flotation device). The result was a rash, my back marked with a big X. I scarred slightly and the X remains. That year, there was apparently an incredibly high level of zinc in the New River. What else had made its way into the water?

Part of the difficulty in predicting and studying what will be washed away into the watersheds surrounding mountaintop removal is that every coal formation is different in terms of chemical makeup. Some have high selenium, some don’t. Some have high arsenic content, some don’t. Manganese. Lead. Iron. Hydrogen sulfide. If it’s on the periodic table, there’s a chance of it being in a coal deposit. Whatever is found in the coal deposit mined by mountaintop removal inevitably makes its way into the water.

Although mountaintop removal is now the dominant driving factor of land-use change in the central Appalachian region of the U.S., somehow the unemployment rate of coal country doesn’t reflect this.The miners complain. Bring back coal! they plead to the politicians. Friends of Coal, reads a sticker on the back of a rusty pickup truck. Clean coal, say all of the coal companies’ media sources. Coal keeps the lights on! reads a sign in someone’s yard. We NEED coal.

But the problem is not that consumers no longer need the coal; it’s that the coal companies no longer need the miners. The miners have been replaced, their jobs stolen. By machines. The coal industry has figured out how to get massive machines to do the mining, rather than thousands of men. Mining will never be what it was back in coal country’s heyday. Coal country will never be the same; a way of life is lost. The mountains, too, will never be the same. The oldest mountains in the world.

This way of life is not necessarily a bad thing to have been lost – miners worked dangerous jobs (an estimated 95,000 miners died in the U.S. between 1900 and 1950), long hours, and were historically indebted to the company store. The loss of this lifestyle could present an opportunity to the region; unfortunately, this is not yet the case.

The miner families perhaps don’t see how they are being robbed by the industry. These industries are not bringing life, but death, into their towns. Residents of coal mining areas, especially in Appalachia, generally have greater socioeconomic disadvantages – a polite way of saying they are poor. Their mountains and hollows and valleys and streams suffer greater environmental degradation. Their health suffers, either from working in the mines or pollutant runoff in the water. People die younger here. Minden, West Virginia, a town I drive through every day to reach the river, has a cancer rate of four times the national average.

The politicians of the region claim these flat-top mountains now hold a higher value compared to when they remained peaks. “A lot of people through the years ask why Appalachia is so poor. One of the biggest reasons is we were land poor– we didn’t have any place to build…” Now the flattops are open for development: for subdivisions, for golf courses, for prisons. The oldest mountains in the world – well, now they’ve been scraped flat. And now they’re worth something: $$$.

Is there some subconscious part of me (or conscious, perhaps?) that feels comfort in knowing this is the oldest mountain range in the world? Like a wise old grandmother who knows best? (If only she could control her own fate.)

I looked up from the glassy water ahead and stared at the mountains that enclosed me. They appeared wild – untouched. But there is a rich history within those hills. I know that today I rowed past abandoned mines, old coke ovens, mining camps disintegrating back into earth. The old ways, lost to the forest. How long will it take for the earth to reclaim the flattops that ranged just beyond my line of sight?

West Virginia, I return to you and it feels as if no time has passed – even though your mountains have seen millions and millions and millions of years pass. Four hundred and eighty million years. You welcome me, always, wrapping me with your grandmother-like mountains. The place I feel most at home. Where my heart always is – beating – within and for those mountains. Today, here on the New River, I weep for you.