Reflections on a 2034 “Grey Ridge Parkway” tour

‘Mount’ Blankenship horrifies hover-bus tourists

GIBSON, WV, JAN 3, 2034   --  We stepped off the hover bus and adjusted our sunvisors, walking over to the safety fence and gazing out at a flat gray horizon stretching for miles against the distant green mountains. Then we looked down the jagged yellow-black cliff of boulders and slate opening into a stunning depth.   

“My God, it’s horrible,” gasped one of the fifty eco-tourists who had signed up for the Grey Ridge Parkway tour. 

“How could they?” another one croaked, staring down google-eyed, into what looked  like an enormous, gaping, mortal wound. 

The young lady who was our guide assured us that pretty much everyone has this sort of reaction, but it relieve the sense of nausea.  “Over in to the south, see that little orange dot?” the guide asked, perhaps to distract us.   “That’s one of the old drag line cranes. It’s the size of a cruise ship.”  

Even across the vast distance of the open pit, staring at the enormous steel box gave us a sense of the inhuman scale of the devastation, and we tried to contemplate a time  25 years ago when such a thing might have seemed normal.

“This pit mine is called  ‘mount Blankenship,’ the guide said, “in honor – well, more or less in honor – of the coal baron who fought so hard against the people and economy of Appalachia.”  Of course, everyone knew the story, and it seemed fitting that all of his Florida real estate investments had been lost in that massive series of hurricanes. 

We had all come to see the last remaining MTR site, now on the national historical register.  Nearly all of the others had been filled in and partly restored with hardwood forests.  Meanwhile, hundreds of hazardous sludge dams had also been dismantled and dried up, sometimes at great peril, thanks to the Green Conservation Corps...