The Strip Mines

 I call this place "Appalachia Beach."  It's the homestead in Venango County where my wife grew up.  

 This tired old land has been strip-mined so many times that I almost can't believe there's anything left to dig for.  And yet, here they are...digging again.  Strip mining, in the long run, is less destructive than longwall mining.  And yet, stripping completely obliterates the human and natural history of a place.   Even the best reclaimed strip mine is a treeless earth-scar, a scrubland for at least three decades.  

 Apparently there's one vein of coal at one level, then there's another vein at a lower level.  That's why they pillage the same landscape several times.  But they don't stop there.  Beneath all the coal, there's Marcellus shale gas, and beneath that, there's Utica shale gas.  

Energy companies promise that they'll be suckling on this land's teat for decades to come.  They don't mention the fact that they send all their money back to Texas--along with all the frack employees that they brought here to do the job--leaving the poor people of this poisoned place to die early deaths in the toxic sludge they leave behind.  I wish to hell they'd finally give it a rest.  I hate the native sympathizers worse than the alien occupiers themselves....

As a kid, my brothers and I used to play in the strip mines, and to this day I have to admit that they hold a kind of fascination for me that hearkens back to my childhood: the lunar landscapes, the barrenness, the unnatural topographies.  Back then, they were a place of adventure and discovery.  They could easily look like the landscapes I was reading about in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  (C'mon, I was a kid; I've long since outgrown hobbits.)  It's the murky water that has always haunted me.  From earliest boyhood, I used to have nightmares about what might be lurking beneath the cloudy water in the strip mines.