My father was a coal miner. He worked from dusk to dusk and dawn to dawn — day shift, night shift, ‘hoot owl’ — ‘doubling-back’ — breaking his back — walking up a mountain — 10 miles up and 10 miles back.
He shoveled coal in the flickering flame of a ‘carbide lamp’ perched on his hard-boiled hat with a battery pack on his hip that leaked acid, burning a deep hole in his skin as he continued his shift, leaving a forever scar. His hands were etched black with coal.
He ‘set’ timbers to support the roofs of the damp, dark, cold, black tunnels as he dug deeper into the coal seams. He filled coal carts – five tons a shift – lit blasting powder, yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and scuttled for cover. He nailed spikes on tracks with a sledgehammer, swung a pick ax, stood in water, and carried rock salt on his back in 3′ of coal.
Inside the mines, timbers creaked, coal cars rattled, blasting powder echoed. Sometimes sparks from the blasting powder ignited ‘firedamp’ — methane and carbon dioxide + other gasses that seeped from vegetation compacted millions of years ago — causing fires to rage with hurricane force through the mine shafts. If the lamp went out, there was no light in the black underground shafts.
My father was young and strong and handsome, but when he went to work, I had nightmares he would never come back.
Miners died from fires, explosions, ‘slate falls’, ‘timber falls’, ‘rock falls’, ‘roof falls’, poison gas, suffocation, runaway coal cars, and a host of other ‘accidents’ caused by the negligence of the coal companies.
I was not supposed to hear.
But I did hear.
I listened. Frozen. Chilled to the bone. I heard my father as he lay on the basement floor when he came home from work and almost died.
From the time he was 12 years old, my father worked the mines with his father – my ‘Granddaddy’.
20+ years.
$2 to $7 for a 12-hour shift.
Robbed of wages.
Paid in scrip — good only at ‘The Company Store’.
Backbreaking, brutal labor in the name of ‘King Coal’, lining the pockets of coal kings (barons) as coal dust lined his lungs.
Coal was not King. It was a Killer.
To my tiny brain, coal was not King; it was Killer.
Granddaddy told stories of a headless miner who walked the tracks at night — the only words I ever heard him speak.
My father is one of those people politicians and bankers berate, ridicule, and call ‘lazy’, admonishing them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I too am one of those people.
My father had no bootstraps. He had steel-toed ‘bank boots’ that laced up to his calf with his pants tucked neatly inside. He carried a ‘dinner bucket’ and wore ‘bank clothes’ and a ‘bank’ belt, but he was not a banker.
He worked in coal banks.
He was a perfectionist.
I was raised in Fayetteville, the heart of both West Virginia and the New River Gorge. When company houses no longer served as housing for the miners, my father tore down the company houses and used the wood to build a house for our family. While my father built our house, we lived in a one-room, tar-paper shack beside my uncle’s house. My father and mother, two sisters, brother, and I lived in a single room.
But before that, on the cusp of Scorpio + Sagittarius, on a cold November day, I was born at home in a Company House in a West Virginia Coal Camp. There was no room at the hospital. The nurse sent my father to The Company Store for a zinc tub, but I arrived before he returned home.
It was not yet time for me to be born.
I came early.
That was just the first time I was early.
I have always been ahead of my time.
And I have always been ‘DIFFERENT’.
The way my mother introduced me is etched into my soul like the coal etched into my father’s hands: “She is so different I would say they gave me the wrong baby if she hadn’t been born at home.”
My mother’s hands too were etched with coal from carrying coal in the coal bucket, building and banking the fire in our Warm Morning heater, cooking on a cook-stove heated with coal, canning in a zinc tub on an outdoor fire, washing my father’s bank clothes with a wringer washer, hanging them to freeze dry on the ice-cold clothesline.
My mother and father did not have the luxury of school. They cared for their younger brothers and sisters. Fed them. Gave them a home. Kept them alive.
In a world of deprivation, poverty, and lack, my mother and father created beauty and abundance from nothing at all. They were different.
They were brilliant, gifted, genius — MAGIC — and they were gorgeous.
I always told people they were angels.
I did not know we were poor – ‘dirt poor’.
After 20+ years, my father quit the coal mines to take a job as a water plant operator for the new water plant up the red dog road from our house. We had never had running water. We carried buckets of water from the neighbor’s pond and from my uncle’s well. I ran barefoot up and down the dirt road carrying two 5-gallon buckets of water. We had an outdoor toilet. We raised pigs and chickens. We grew our own food.
My father bought an old backhoe to take care of water-main breaks. He adjusted the chemicals and kept our water safe. The water company paid him $485/month. At the same time, my father cared for a junkyard, salvaged the metal, loaded it on a huge truck, and hauled it down a treacherous mountain to sell as scrap just so we could live.
I have six brothers and sisters. My father’s brothers and sisters lived with us. After my mother’s sister died at 26, her three babies lived with us.
For too many years, my father held sacred his genius, visionary, wild, entrepreneurial heart and spirit. He was a wild-hearted creative. He could fix anything. He could create anything. And he had a wildly-enchanting entrepreneurial spirit. He was different.
From a single, broken-down backhoe, he created the most sought-after excavating business in our town, county, and state.
My father always said, “My girls are going to have an education,” and I was determined to make that happen – at least for myself.
I did make it happen.
Still, I withdrew from life, hid out, and stood back, becoming invisible. For most of my life, it felt like I was from a different planet. I berated and judged and attacked myself, thinking I was not good enough or smart enough. I felt fat and ugly even though I was 5’6 1/2″, weighed 103 lbs., and was size 0.
I was different. I ‘sassed’. I asked too many questions. I was ‘too big for my britches’. I was ‘too much’. I was ‘not enough’.
I am still all those things.
Like my father, I am a wild-hearted creative and I have a wildly-enchanting entrepreneurial spirit.
Like my father, I am different.
I will always be different.
Different is magic!
BE DIFFERENT …
