On the Road with Cathy Stanley

If I had driven my own car, how different would my experience have been? I was a Vermont girl, young, educated, a stranger with the wrong sentence structure and accent, the wrong last name. Not to be trusted.

But because I couldn't get around on my own, I spent much of my time when living in Clintwood Virginia going places with Cathy Stanley. Usually we were in her heavy, sleek red Camero. It was built for speed, not for comfort. Not much leg room under the dash. The radio was tuned to country stations blasting Alabama or The Oakridge Boys, or to Christian stations where wheezing preachers told of hell and damnation.

There were butterfly decals on the driver's side door, an odd touch for such a tough, sporty vehicle. Cathy informed me that they covered bullet holes, and I had no doubt that it was true. The Council of the Southern Mountains, where both of us worked, was not a popular outfit in this coal mining community. The little non profit worked on mine safety, environmental issues and mineral rights ownership cases, hitting mine owners in their pocket books, and because coal was the only game in town, the miners were also not friendly. I never did find out if the bullets had hit the car while it was parked, or while Cathy was in it. Given some of our travels in the car, I really didn't want to know.

I was a "Volunteer in Mission" at the Council. My rent, utilities and food bills were reimbursed, and in exchange,I worked upwards of 60 hours a week for the quixotic organization. It was my first job out of college.

Mainly I wrote for "Mountain Life & Work" which went out to about 4,000 souls, mainly the converted; environmentalists, labor organizers, radical church organizations such as the one I was volunteering for, and the like. I covered labor disputes, strip mine violations, unsafe working conditions, land grabs, and other topics largely ignored by the outside world. It was 1982, with the Reagan Administration cutting budgets, reducing staffing among mine safety inspectors, removing regulations and going after organized labor, so we had plenty of work.

Cathy, who had grown up in Clintwood, had been at the Council for years. She was one of a huge clan of Stanleys, related in some obscure way, to Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass musician. Cathy also had a cleft palate and a thick, Appalachian accent. We spent so much time together that I didn't have trouble understanding her for long. She had a wicked, somewhat cynical sense of humor. From Cathy I learned that "I reckon" could convey rich layers of sarcasm. She wrote articles, did much of the photography (and developing) for the magazine, and did whatever other jobs needed doing, from researching bogus land deeds to fixing the mean old coal furnace which often filled the office with smoke. And Cathy and I somehow became the travelling correspondents.

. . .

In December of that year, we travelled to Whitwell, Tennessee to follow up on a mining disaster, driving through the night and staying in an unheated bedroom at an off-season conference center. Cold and exhausted from only two or so hours of uncomfortable sleep, we talked to a miner who refused to give us his name, fearful of the mine owners. He was still in shock at the narrow escape he'd had, all for refusing to work in a mine with high methane levels. When one of his friends lit a cigarette, 12 of his other friends died in the explosion.

On that same trip, we attended obscenely speedy funerals, attended by grieving and baffled family members and friends. But no one would talk to us. When we drove to the mine entrance at dusk, too tired to be sensible about safety, we were escorted off the hill between two coal trucks.

. . .

Later that winter, we went to a little town in Kentucky, swamped in black sludge from the breakage of a coal slurry dam. When we got to the devastated town, we got no answers from the close lipped men in the convenience store. Cathy took pictures of the now-solid slide of waist-deep toxic mining residue, cursing through tears because the woman she'd interviewed just weeks before about the shoddy dam had been killed by the deadly wave of sludge. Later, as I transcribed Cathy's taped interview with the woman, her scratchy voice would come back to me from the dead with it's Kentucky twang "Hit wa'ant holdin'"

. . .

Trolling for stories, we travelled through towns named Mousey, Frog Level, or Jeff or, most appropriately, Dante (pronounced to rhyme with "plant") Towns which were little more than strings of houses along the rim of a pit mine. Following a lead about a wildcat mine, we contemplated passing as "Sangers" harvesting ginsing in the woods to get photos of illegal highwalls, naked walls of earth left by wildcat miners which washed dirt, coal and the toxic chemicals of mining into nearby streams. Good sense and bad weather kept us from that plan.

Small wonder I was unnerved by those bullet holes.

. . .

Not all of our travels were so sinister. We went to hear bluegrass gospel groups high up in the hills, and once to a revival, where I was surrounded by people speaking in tongues, weeping, confessing their sins and going forward for altar calls.

And, fortified with bad coffee and chocolate covered cherries, we fought sleep on the two hour trip to Pikeville to the low cost printing company which would print "Mountain Life & Work".

Every month, we frantically wrote and edited articles for the 48 page magazine, proof read articles as they came out of the cranky "composer" an archaic piece of typesetting equipment, then laid out the pages using a light board, graph paper, blue pencils and exacto knives (not a terrific job for someone who's legally blind, mind you). Sometimes I was even drafted into drawing cartoons if we had a space in need of filling. James Watt was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan, and each time he relaxed strip mining laws, or removed funding from clean up efforts, I got to draw that bald, high crowned head.

When we had a magazine ready to print, usually after 36 or so hours of working straight through, living on soda from the machine outside and Hardee's burgers, Cathy and I would pack the magazine boards carefully and, borrowing her "PawPaw's truck, we'd hit the road. We took the curves of the corkscrew road fast in the pre-dawn darkness. We had a 2 hour trip to Pikeville Kentucky, and the main goal was to get there before we fell asleep.

We would wind our way through steep valleys, tiny houses edging along the flat of the road bed, stopping only for battery acid coffee and greasy sausage and biscuits. We had a scheduled time with the printers, and had to be on time.

When we arrived, the printers took the boards and turned them into negatives for printing. Cathy and I would look over the negatives, and once they passed inspection we would climb up on huge rolls of paper, topped with mattresses and dirty magazines, and go to sleep for a few hours. The ratchety roar of the printing press would wake us. A group of friendly, chatting women in their 50s bundled the magazines, tying them in heavy stacks. We'd wearily load the twine bundles into the back of the truck and make the two hour return trip. Once we'd off loaded them at the office, Cathy would drop me off at my house where I would fall into bed as if cut down by an axe.

If I could have a memento of that time period, I suppose it would be one of those Appalachian road signs, indicating curves in the road. As a Vermonter, I'm used to winding roads, but these signs are epic, looking more like complicated letters in some alien alphabet. They capture the complexity and danger of the isolated, mineral rich, impoverished valleys, and my hours of time on the road with Cathy Stanley, all in one.