This photo is of a place called Peachtree Hole. Back when I was a teenager this was one of my favorite fishing spots. The first real camping trip I ever went on without supervision was right here. I was probably around 12 at the time. It was only about a mile from where I grew up but at that young age it may as well had been on another planet.
I remember my friend Ronnie and I would come here and fish to early in the morning. It seemed like when we were that young we were on a mission to stay up all night when out camping by ourselves. We never took a tent or anything like that and always got here in time to gather plenty of firewood to last through the night.
The area all around the hole of water was very secluded. There was only one house nearby and it was a little hike through the woods and up the mountain to the right of the river. In that house lived an old trader. His name was Cuby and he would absolutely trade for anything. To give you an idea - I traded him a basketball for a fishing pole. When Ronnie and I would come here fishing we would always stop by Cuby’s house just to see what he had to trade.
Cuby would tell us stories of a huge bear that lived in the woods by his house. His stories were especially believable simply because he lived in such a secluded area. I think he got a kick out of trying to scare us knowing we were going to be camping at the river. At that age, it worked to.
Our camping spot was right beside the big rock in about the center of the photo and there was a path right behind it that went up the mountain. It seemed like no matter how big of a fire we built we could never see very far up the path and after listening to Cuby tell his stories all of the monsters and bears we encountered was just outside of our light shuffling around on the path. I know it had my heart beating fast quite a few times.
On one night in particular we heard something moving around and it seemed like it took all of the fun out of fishing. Usually when we went camping like that we just took a few sandwiches and something to snack on to get us through till morning. On this night we had decided to roast hot dogs over the fire and make chili dogs. We sat there eating our hot dogs, fishing, and listening to some unseen monster moving around on the path for the biggest part of the night. By the time we did lay down to get a little sleep we were both as nervous as a couple of long tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs. We had a small flashlight but neither one of us was willing to go investigate the restless prowler so we went to sleep not knowing what was on the hillside.
We couldn’t have been asleep very long when a new noise wakes me up. It sounded like something playing with a tin can. Normally that wouldn’t have bothered me too much except this time it was right where we were sleeping. I thought whatever was on the hillside had decided to join us on the river bank. I couldn’t fathom what it could be doing to make that weird noise.
As I said, usually we just brought sandwiches with us but since our late night snack this time was chili dogs, Ronnie had brought a can of chili. Taking all the nerve I could muster I turn the flashlight on and start scanning the area. What I found was so funny and at the same time such a huge relief. I had forgotten about the can of chili when I was lying there listening to the noise but when the beam of the flashlight landed on it all I could see was the hind end of a mouse sticking up out of the can. That little rascal was going to town on the left over chili and rocking the can back and forth as he ate.
The mouse cured the scary nights because afterwards anytime I heard something moving around I pictured that little mouse tail sticking up out of the chili can. We never did encounter the bear Cuby was always telling us about. But we did catch some monster catfish and even one huge mud turtle. That was an adventure in and of itself. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.
Visiting Twilight, West Virginia one finds themselves in the very heart of coal country. Stopping in at small convenience stores, the reflective stripes of coal miners rein supreme.
I had the opportunity to be in Twilight for most of the day today and I took a few photos. I had been wanting to visit the area for a while to take some photos. There was a heavy fog on so I didn’t really get to see what I wanted. Someone not used to the area would immediately notice a smell in the air. It was kind of like a taste and an odor. The odor was of burning coal and a strong sense of sulfur. I believe the sulfur is what was causing the sweet taste at the back of my throat. All up and down the potholed two-lane road you can glance up on the mountains and see smoke rising from the ground.
The only thing I’m not certain of is whether the smoke is coming from an un-mined coal seam or from abandoned coal mines. One thing I am certain of is that whichever it is, it is on fire. Oddly enough the smell brought back memories from quite a few years ago. There is a little town called Birchton just a few miles from where I live now and I remember a slate dump that used to burn right beside the road. You could smell it long before you could see it but after that it left no doubt where the odor was coming from. Although the fire at Birchton has been out for a long time, I’ll never forget the smell. Fires like these will smolder for years.
I am not real familiar with contour mining but I’m pretty sure that is what is going on in these next few pics.
These photos were taken a couple of miles down the road from Bandytown right before entering Van, WV. I really feel bad for the people who live on that side of Bolt Mountain. They have quite a lot to deal with.
Lately it seems as if my blogging has been more just simply going through the motions than really getting into it. I’m not happy with that.
At the moment I have some personal issues going on with my new handicap and for the time being at least, it is dominating my thought process. I really don’t like feeling like I am forcing posts. Like this one for instance. I did feel the need to post this since I may not be around much in the next couple of weeks. It depends entirely on how fast issues get resolved.
I’ve been doing a lot of talking on here about mountaintop removal but lately I have even had trouble concentrating on that devastating issue. I’ll get back into the swing of things, soon I hope.
I have been known to use song titles for posts before. This title is from an old Led Zeppelin song and I think it fits rather well with the photos in this post.
It is impossible to look into my past and not see the time served as the town paper boy. The town in those days was Naoma, WV and it amounted to three country stores, a post office, a beer joint, and a gas station all within rock throwing distance of each other. To say Naoma was a one horse town would be overstating it a little. By the time you got on the horse on one side of town, you’d be getting back off on the other. Although the town isn’t very big, the paper route was huge. At least it was to me. The route consisted of somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 houses in the town of Naoma and parts of two adjoining hollows - Peachtree and Horse Creek.
I started in the paper delivering business with my brother. I love him to death but we used to fight like cats and dogs. For the first two years of delivering papers it seemed like he had me mad all the time. He is a couple years older than I am and now probably about 120lbs heavier and near a foot taller - but I can still take him. At any rate, two years into the route my brother went to the Army. I know we fought a lot but I sure missed him out delivering the newspaper.
Not long after taking on full responsibility of delivering the people their morning news I came to realize the positive side of being in this business alone and the negative - I now had twice as much money to spend and twice the work to earn it. I don’t care who you are, if your paycheck doubles, you are a happy camper. I didn’t mind the extra workload because it just kept me out longer and even then - I had a thinkin’ problem. So I started missing my brother less and spent my mornings delivering papers with two canine friends and thinking the whole time of things to spend my new found fortune on.
I have to tell you about Blackie and Brownie my canine friends. These dogs basically saved my paper route. I was up every morning at 4 o’clock and at my papers by 4:30. I say at my papers because I lived in Peachtree and the bundle of papers was delivered to Naoma. Taking shortcuts, it was about a mile from the house. Not long after my brother leaves for the Army I go to the papers one morning and there is a jet black Labrador Retriever and a brown Norwegian mix laying right at the papers. They lay right there and watch me roll the papers getting them ready for delivery. I talked to the dogs the whole time. I called them the simplest names I could come up with because I didn’t know who the dogs belong to but I was sure they had real names. So I just called them Blackie and Brownie.
For the next year or so those dogs were waiting by the papers every morning ready to follow me through the early morning neighborhoods. I was grateful for their company more times than you could imagine. They were always waiting for me and they always disappeared shortly before I got home. I never did know who the dogs belong to because never once did they give an indication of being home. They definitely had a home because they were simply beautiful dogs.
Now let’s get back to the money part, I was rolling in it. I could play pinball or space invaders and eat candy at Glen Dale’s store until I was sick and my fingers were about to fall off. After a bit of spending with reckless abandon, I got a little wiser and bought something with longer lasting benefits, or so I thought. I bought a new ten speed bike. What I didn’t take into consideration was the fact they weren’t really designed for off road use and I lived off road. That bike stayed new for about a month after which it was held together by a hope and a prayer.
Lesson learned from the bike purchase, my next big purchase was a used go cart. This thing had chrome wheels, flames down the side, and would be nothing but a blur going by. Or I should say this thing was covered in oil, was likely to be on fire, and was powered by a 3hp tiller motor. I would work on it for a solid week, spending all my money, just to have a few hours of fun on a weekend - which usually ended with me pushing the go cart back home and setting it up for the next weeks work. I spent a lot of mornings with two dogs delivering papers and wondering how I could get the chain to stay on once and for all or how to get those damn brakes to work. Being able to keep it running would have been nice as well.
I delivered papers starting with my brother while I was in Jr. High and continued by myself nearly all through high school. On school mornings I was up just like any other time delivering papers before I went to school. Mondays were the best because the papers were light and I could carry the whole route in one go. Which usually meant I got to go home and sleep a little before school. Sunday was the worst. The papers were always heavy and I had to make a couple of return trips to where the papers were delivered to me. All through the week I could deliver my route and be home before the sun came up. Not on Sunday, I was never home before it got daylight.
With my paper route, I was like the postman. It didn’t matter the weather, 7 days a week 365 days a year - I delivered the newspaper. Thinking back I believe my favorite time of the year was in the winter. Sometimes I would go out the door and find myself in new fallen snow up to my knees. I loved those times because everything appeared clean and new and even mysterious in the pre-dawn light. Myself and my canine friends were the first to break the surface of the new snow on many mornings.
My service as the paper boy also came to an end with a trip to the Army shortly to follow. But that is a story for another day. I can say this, another thing I thought about on those early morning walks, and that was finding a way to leave these hollows. That is where the Army came in to play. Now I spend all of my time away from the hollows anxious to return. Funny how that works.
These two deer were having a time in the field this morning. They are part of a pretty good size herd that stays close to the house. I woke up one morning and there were 11 of them bedded down within 50 feet of the back of my house. I’m glad they are comfortable here because I like having them around. A cup of coffee, a comfortable back porch, deer playing in the field… it just doesn’t get much better.
The next two photos I have added. When I first noticed the deer this morning they were kind of sneaking up on the tree on the right of the first photo. At the time I wasn’t sure what it was that had their curiosity piqued. Come to find out, there was a Shetland pony just on the other side of the fence. It was no wonder they were curious. I’m sure you don’t see many Shetland ponies in the life of a deer.
With myself knowing it was a Shetland pony the deer were curious of, that made this next photo just a little bit funny. The deer bringing up the rear was the most curious but neither one would get close enough to the pony to see what it was. So as they walked off - their curiosity unsatisfied, the second deer was listening to make sure whatever it was, it wasn’t going to sneak up behind them. I could just picture that little pony come charging through the tall grass after those deer. If that ever happens, I sure hope I have my camera.
The pony was no longer out by the time I thought to get a picture of it, but I’ll get one soon.
Growing up I used to spend a lot of time in the mountains. If hunting season wasn’t in I was hiking or senging (looking for ginseng). I especially enjoyed squirrel hunting. I remember a time all too well where you could judge how well someone has done in the squirrel season by how many squirrel tales were tied to the antennae of their truck.
At any rate I remember this one time a friend came to the house and got me to go hunting with him. I may have been around fourteen or fifteen at the time. We were headed towards a favorite hunting spot when we stopped on the ridgeline to take a breather and just have a look around. If we moved five feet left or right we could see the entire hollows opened up before us. It was the perfect place to watch for squirrels among the leaves on the ground and in the branches of the trees.
We were standing there and we hear something coming down the ridge toward us. You could tell it wasn’t very big because it sounded like it was swimming in the leaves. Both of us were standing there ready to meet whatever was coming head on. It turns out we weren’t prepared because what came into sight was a hilarious vision. Two fox pups were absolutely having the time of their life. The second one close on the heels of the first and nipping at the back of the legs of the first one.
These pups couldn’t have been a year old and still had the puppy look to them. The paid no more attention to us as if we were trees standing there. They did have the sense to dodge us and in just doing so they end up in a slightly bigger red and white ball as they go rolling over the ridge to our left. I thought it was probably the funniest damn thing I had seen to that point in the woods.
My friend and I both were laughing at the antics of the little fox pups as we watch them roll over the edge of the ridge. When we came to our senses both of us rushed to the edge to see the fox in the hollow. They were no where to be seen. It made no sense because we were close to the edge and looking over within seconds of the fox going over. They had apparently vanished. My friend asked me if fox climbed trees. At the time I thought that was a ridiculous idea and laughed in spite of myself. To me a fox climbing a tree would be like Old Blue climbing a tree. For some reason I could picture Old Blue scaling up the side of a hickory tree - that’s a pretty funny picture.
As I got older and thinking about the little fox pups, I tend to think the more likely reason for their apparent disappearing act is because we were in close proximity to the den and just didn’t know it. I would also hear stories later that made the idea of a fox in a tree not so far fetched. But until I see it with my own eyes - I’ll have to leave that one in the doubtful category.
Back then I considered the mountains a place of wonder and mystery. It was a whole other world where the laws of man counted for nothing. Fox pups still played in the woods in the same fashion as they have been since the dawn of time. I enjoyed trips to the mountains just for the solitude because in the mountains you could literally imagine yourself in any time in history. I miss the time when it seemed as if even the animals were more relaxed. Now you can go into huge areas in the mountains and you have no doubt what time you are in. The peace and quiet of the mountains takes on a whole new meaning. In a lot of places one would be lucky to hear a squirrel bark let alone watch two fox pups in careless play together. It is these simple things in life we will regret losing the most. Or, at least, I will.
I wanted to let my readers know of some decisions I have made. The first was to take the Bolt Mountain blog back out, dust it off and put it back in full operation. In making that decision I have also decided to keep the subject of mountaintop removal off the Bolt Mountain blog. I do have a page there with photos but I’m not going to talk about it there. As I said in a post on that blog, I have to have someplace to escape to sanity. I’ve also given the Bolt Mountain blog the tagline of The BackWoods Drifter to tie it together with this blog.
As far as this blog - I believe I have decided to flex my story telling muscles - what few of them there are. I can’t say the stories won’t be related to mountaintop removal as far as heritage and culture is concerned but I can say they will take a more indirect approach. As a resident hillbilly and a neighbor to the coal industry I see a lot missing from our culture today as compared to just 20 years ago. Plus I see all that we stand to lose. I’m going to tell you about it.
On another note - for those into SEO, the BWD Gallery hit a Google pagerank of 3 in it’s first indexing. I’m kind of curious why it ranked so high and being so young. But apparently Google loves photos. If I had to guess it would have something to do with all of the photos having titles, descriptions, and tags. I don’t know what the reason but it is obvious a photo gallery will get you on the good side of Google - in a hurry. So if you go there and like a photo or not - leave a comment. It’s so hard to get good interaction these days. 
This old bridge crosses Big Coal River in Edwight, WV. I would be afraid to even guess how old it is. At one time it supported coal and logging trucks. Up the road behind me there used to be a sawmill. I remember years ago when it was a viable place of employment. People worked at the mill or in the mines. I helped tear the sawmill down in the mid 80’s.
Right behind me is this overgrown softball field.
As a young boy I would come here to watch my dad play softball. This started out as a coal miners softball field and was actually built by the coal company. If I’m not badly mistaken, and I might be, but I believe the coal company was Armco back in those days.
After the miners quit using it and I got into my teens, we started having friendly games here between different hollows. It was just a good time and all in good fun.
I hear no one is allowed there now because the field belongs to the coal industry. I’m not 100% sure about that so don’t quote me. It just seems to me that if kids were allowed to play ball on this field - they would be.
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The title of this post came with the fact the bridge is over Big Coal River. About a mile upstream is Goals Coal, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. From this point forward the river winds it’s way through the heart of coal country. A Bridge Over Troubled Water seemed fitting.
