I plant the last of our first-crop fields, our only west of town. It is different country, as near as it is to the rest, and I feel an adventure and sense of levity as I drive into rolling hills of open land. Black-eyed Susan’s and day lilies line the ditches of the narrow, no-shouldered, road.
I enter a stretch once mined for coal, and it is broken, rugged land of narrow lakes and steep-sided slopes where the land was stripped, soil pile to side becoming hills, where veins of coal were found and mined and, after, became as lakes—strip pits formed to depths and patterns of coal in earth.
Such practice was said to ruin the land; but world and nature are more resilient than man gives credit (and man less powerful than he perceives); and in a generation the land’s recovered. It is good cattle country—of not row crop; and the same could be said for much of our row crop ground never “ruined” by mining but simple plow and habit and taking more than one returns.
The field where I go is one of our best, the furthest away and a simple 80 acres by itself, and for this we molest and ruin it the least. We forget about it, plant it—no-tilling nearly all the time, weed growth before burn down increasing organic matter and root channels in the soil—and it makes our best crops and we wonder why it is, what makes it different than the rest: maybe it is “us.”
There is something new as I drive this time; unnerving as perhaps coal companies were in past.
But the coal brought jobs. It was a community industry. Until closing in just the past few years, a power plant was our largest regional and community employer. Without it, I wonder what will keep our town alive.
The Mennonites are moving in—by hundreds of families a year, different communities of origin, like dark cultures eyeing, keeping distance, watching but not acknowledging; and their presence is their answer. It is a dying town, and they are waiting for the spoils and easy grab of land and resources that is carrion of community’s collapse.
I pass fields that are fallow, I worked at all and will never be again—or at least for a lifetime as contract expires and if ever a cleanup and removal of waste occurs. Unlike coal, it brings no jobs, returns nothing to community. It is all out of town—out of state—coming in quick and leaving just as fast; 5,000 acres of metal and glass where nature once grew and livings were made to support a single data center in the city for a company claiming “carbon-neutrality.” Apparently, 5,000 acres of once living, cycling, and producing land for the sake of one single site to save emails not worth the trouble and time to delete and picture reels one never clears, is not only a zero carbon-cost, but an enrichment to earth (as well as subsidized power beneficiary).
No one puts solar panels where populations are expected to be. Like the Mennonites, they expect snd operate on understanding we are a community whose death is imminent and only a little further time. They cover the good ground, leak stories of poisoning and contamination from the old power plant (now a dumping ground for waste coal ash from other plants still running—and with communities to think of), and people move away. Incrementally, community weakens.
I don’t have an answer, but it’s sad to see.
Supporters speak of contracts signed and responsibility of cleanup bearing on the companies with whom land owners make the deal. Willingly blind, they don’t connect the dots each and every contract is a new, parceled LLC—designed to fail and for the purpose of exoneration and exemption of contractural duties once the money is had and actual ownership of consequence arrives.
What company in modern business has lasted 50 years? What happens when they fail? Someone else is left with the mess. A society built on expendable goods thinks the same of entities and contracts—they are designed to fail and exempt, while keeping what’s transferred into pockets.
Normally, I like the sight of open wilds—but these fields are different. They are all weeds. They look abandoned—because they are.
They will make some rich, but though many believe they won’t, those benefitting in payments will move away. They’ll tire of looking at the land they worked, a place they loved, covered in glass and steel; change of the thermals, increase of the heat and violence of storms of aberration in earth heat-signature rolling in off the open plains.
Like all who sign the contract for prosperity in this life, fortune’s source will become their shame. Perceived answer to prayer will prove a hell from which they’ll run but never evade. For such is the nature of contracts of the soul—they are forever of you and lasting for eternity.
Drive ends different than it started. Levity is gone. World is always changing, and if we don’t define our place and role another will, and often it is for elimination of place and role entirely.
World is always changing and, for the life of me, I see no future here.