A working man I am … and I’ve been down underground … with many thanks to Rita MacNeil and a tribute to South Wales and Cape Breton coal miners …
A working man I am … and I’ve been down underground … with many thanks to Rita MacNeil and a tribute to South Wales and Cape Breton coal miners …
rogermoorepoet
There are mines in Eastern Kentucky, but around here it is mostly strip mining. Dirty, ugly and another effort on man’s part to kill off the earth. At least now they are beginning to plant trees when the coal plays out. Guess it doesn’t matter whether the coal is stripped or dug out of the ground, it kills indiscriminantely and dirties everything it touches.
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“And every time I cough I get a mining souvenir” … Max Boyce. I remember from my childhood in South Wales the old men wheezing, coughing, and spitting with their various forms of lung disease. I saw the same thing in Ponferrada, Spain, another mining town, when I was walking the Pilgrim Road to Santiago de Compostela. This was all ‘deep’ mining: the strip mining certainly destroys the land.
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We could pick up surface coal on our farm, and at one time I was sure I would succumb to Black Lung Disease when we used the old coal furnace, but other than that I have only seen the mines from a distance. They are prettier in Kentucky than the mines I’ve seen in Pennsylvania, but it takes so many years to reclaim the land after the company moves out and the mountain tops have been desecrated and left to nature again. An acorn takes a long time to become a tree, and it takes a lot of acorns to reforest an abandoned strip mine.
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In South Wales (and elsewhere in Britain) it was once called sea-coal because the seams showed in the cliffs where the sea washed them away. Thus the coal turned up on the beaches. Later, of course, we dug for it.
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coal mining is a very dusty dirty job! I grew up in coal mining country of Southwestern Pennsylvania. My neighbor had a small coal mine in his yard!
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My father worked in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales (not in coal), but we grew up surrounded by the coal industry. Pennsylvania … William Penn, if I remember correctly … a Welshman … and another coal mining area … brothers under the coal dust that covers our skins …
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Yes, Black and Dusty!!
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