Mountaintop Removal Flight

As we left the ground, I saw Ingrid gripping herself and closing her eyes. She hated to fly. On our flight down to Kentucky, we’d passed through a lightning storm. I was too busy tending to my nauseous seat mate to notice that she was having a near-death experience. But when we landed in Lexington, she was still shaking and pale.

And that was a regular commercial flight. It’s easier to pretend you’re protected from the world outside when you don’t have windows you can roll down. A week later we found ourselves in a four-seater Cessna at the Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia. I’d never been in a small, private plane before. Under normal circumstances, if this were just a pleasure flight, I would have been almost as scared as Ingrid. But I had a video camera in my hand and a job to do.

As we pulled into a spot in the airport’s parking lot, Ingrid had pointed out a sign that said “Reserved for Massey”. I quickly put the car in reverse. Massey Coal was one of the companies responsible for what I’d be filming that day. The purpose of the flight was to get a firsthand view and footage of mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining sites. MTR is a practice in which mountaintops are literally blasted off to extract the coal seams underneath. This practice devastates the land and poses long-term hazards to local residents who must cope with its aftermath. Poisonous coal waste finds its way into drinking water and the depleted mountaintops make floods a common occurrence.

As the plane ascended, we could see the full, rolling hills surrounding Charleston. It was beautiful to see the city falling into a crevice between those hills. There is nothing that makes you appreciate land, its aggregate power, like seeing it from an airplane. Most structures made by man can be seen as what they are – transitory settlements, Lincoln logs. But mountaintop removal is different, it leaves a mark that is unmistakable even from a thousand miles up.

As we began to move south from Charleston, Ingrid was starting to relax and look out the window. Our pilot Tom White told us over the headset that we’d soon be over the first mountaintop removal site. I got my camera ready and he opened the window. I stuck my head into it and felt the hard waves of air bend around my face and run wild with my hair. I loved that feeling. I imagined how amazing it must have been to take off in an early airplane, no windshield, no enclosure, powering through the wind with your own stubborn head.

Soon the site appeared. The green hills were gone. In their place were miles of gutted land - beige, reddish and black from the coal seams. It was monstrous in size, filling my view all the way to the periphery. I tried to fix my camera on a truck I could make out traversing the pit, but the wind shook so hard, I couldn’t tell if I was actually getting it in the shot. Every so often, I’d take my eyes away from the camera and look at the site without it. I preferred looking through the camera though, it made what I was seeing seem less real.

We passed over five sites during our flight, some of which I could identify based on features I’d read about, an elementary school perched under a coal slurry dam, a private land trust surrounded on all sides by MTR. Our pilot talked to us about the coal companies and the novel he wrote on the subject of mountaintop removal. I was excited to have his testimony for our recording, he had a lot of good things to say. Later when I played the tape, I could see his mouth moving, but heard only the motor and the wind. It was a no-brainer, but then, this was my first such flight and I wouldn’t exactly say I had my wits about me. I was so super-charged with adrenaline, I forgot everything beyond the plane and the MTR sites below.

After about an hour, Tom announced we were heading back. I didn’t want to come back down. I wanted to keep going. To fly over more land, the whole United States. I liked the power this perspective gave me. It was impossible to not see the forest for the trees when you were a few thousand feet above it. From the ground, MTR can be ignored, imagined to be just a minor disruption of the land. From up here, it was clear to see that it was a massacre, one that marched in full force, carried out by invisible humans in monster machines.

Though I wanted to see more, I knew Ingrid was ready to touch ground again and our pilot had other things on his schedule than to fly us around for free. After an hour in the air, we began our descent into Charleston. I saw Ingrid clutch her arms tightly enough to leave a bruise. I was trying to hold onto the perspective I’d gained as long as I could. There were the soft green hills again, so close, like I could reach my arm out and skim their grasses with my fingertips.

And then…I heard the low, comforting roll of tires on pavement. I was surprised. Where was the bump? I’d braced myself for a rough landing. I know Ingrid had. But there had not been even a shake. I wondered if the others had noticed. I wanted to express my surprise but didn’t want to offend Tom by suggesting I’d expected anything different.

About 30 seconds of silence, Tom erupted, “Damn! I haven’t had a landing like that in 20 years.” I smiled, happy for Ingrid and for Tom. The grin stayed on Tom’s face all the way to the gate. As he helped us out of the plane, Ingrid’s happy relief made her talkative. From the tarmac I looked back at the little plane that had provided such an eye-opening trip. I was reluctant to leave it.

An hour later we were on the freeway back to Lexington. We passed an enormous coal burning plant puffing out massive clouds of white smoke. It didn’t look ugly. It just looked like industry. What people couldn’t see was the real dirty secret. I thought about the wounds I’d seen in the earth, red and black like the blood and scabs of human flesh. Left, after reclamation, just barely concealed with nothing more than a sparse, hard grass called lespedeza. Some of the most biodiverse land in the world reduced to a barren steppe within a year. We behave like marauding barbarians, coming, plundering and essentially abandoning. But we are not invaders from another land. This is our land. It’s all we have. There is nowhere else to go.