Deep River Burning by Donelle Dreese

Denver’s house, maybe two more miles into the countryside. Denver was happy that Helena was still close by but not in the hot zones. Carl didn’t pay too much attention to the mine fire. He didn’t work in Adena, or spend much time there, so he didn’t concern himself with the controversy. He thought it was all “much ado about nothing.” What mattered to Denver was that Helena seemed happy, and although Carl wasn’t there with her at the march, Helena’s gold wedding band sitting next to a modest pear-shaped diamond engagement ring flickered in the sunlight.
    After the little girl in the green dress read her letter, a councilwoman by the name of Sarah Durant approached the podium and displayed a petition with 18,636 signatures supporting relocation that was going to be mailed to the White House. Then, a man by the name of David Lewis stepped to the podium and announced to the crowd that the carbon monoxide monitor placed in his home by the Department of Environmental Resources indicated that he was living with a very high level of the gas in his home. He believed his son’s respiratory problems were a result.
    Despite the opinions of medical doctors indicating that carbon monoxide at such levels could be hazardous to someone’s health, the danger was still downplayed and the Health Department played a significant role in keeping this information quiet. As it happened, Lewis’s home was investigated afterward, and it was found that the house once belonged to a bootleg miner who dug a hole from his basement down to the mine and tunneled his way laterally to the coal pillar that was under the main street running through town. The bootlegger, by the name of Woleski, removed nearly all of the coal from the pillar and left behind a direct pathway with few barriers stopping gas and heat from entering into the basement of Lewis’s home.
    The crowd was captivated by Lewis’s story and the series of stories that followed as each person who felt moved to share their coal experiences, rose to the stage. The time when the crowd seemed most moved to cheer or protest was when a woman, named Betty Snyder, took the stage and recited a poem she had written.
    I was born in the town of Adena
I’ve lived here all of my life
My daddy was a bootlegging miner
My ma was a dutiful wife
    My grandpap was also a miner
He gave his whole life to the coal
To keep his family from starvin’
Till the dust and the dark took its toll
    Now they say Adena is crumblin’
Cause it sits on some tunnels on fire
And we’re standing here waiting for a miracle
While the flames just keep getting higher
    My heart is broken in pieces
From watchin’ my great hometown bleed
If only the miners would’ve stopped diggin’
Instead of being taken by greed
    In the end maybe we’re all to blame
For stokin’ our homes with the rock
When excavation destroys the land
Until we feel mother nature’s hard knock
    Some of you will probably hate me
When I tell you my boxes are packed
The holes in the ground aren’t fantasies
My eyes can see they are fact
    If you stay, I wish you well
Watch out for the gas and the fumes
Adena will soon be an empty ghost town
And old miners will rise from their tombs
    Someone from the crowd yelled, “The miners were just trying to keep their families warm!”
    For Denver, the day was a cathartic success. No longer did the people affected by the coal suffer alone and in isolation. The day of the march restored a sense of hope that had been swallowed up by the deep fire, but the hope would be short lived. A long-term crisis that slowly scrapes the skins of people until they wear their bones on the outside is the worst of all. It would be better for the sky to fall quickly so that in the dank, petrified regions of despair, there is suddenly no direction left to go but up. The people of Adena still had more space to fall into, more time to find blame for this environmental disaster of human cause, more time to hang on to something