Strange as this Weather Has Been

Bant goes outside to escape her parents’ arguing. She is suddenly mad at Corey because of his naiveté regarding the mountain devastation: He thinks it’s all fun and games because the floods bring in pieces of metal that he hopes to assemble into something functional, and he loves the machinery that is tearing up the mountains. She is so angry that Corey is replicating Jimmy’s inability to accept the destruction that she longed to hit her brother: “I wanted to shake Corey, […] I wanted to rub his face in it, show him (you can live off these mountains) because Corey did not understand. Jimmy Make copycat did not understand” (154).

Bant gets on her bike and tells Corey to follow her. Tommy pleads to come along, but Bant says no because they’re going through the dangerous snake ditches and up the mountain. Bant and Corey pedal hard and fast until they are in a place where Bant hopes to shock some sense into her brother:

Now we were passing more and more thrown-over trees, so we were getting closer. To the coal company, trees were nothing but in the way, they just bulldozed them over the side, and there they dangled, their roots spooky, hairy and dirt-clotted. Waiting to wash down on top of somebody (159).

They climb up the broken, blasted side of the mountain, but the rocks are too loose under their feet and they slip. Corey is about to fall fast and hard, but Bant manages ground herself and hold on to him by his tank top. 

After Bant pulls Corey up, he stands and looks out at the devastated mountains. Unlike Bant, Corey only experiences reverent admiration: “As soon as he sees, he can’t see enough. His eyeballs aren’t big enough to hold what he can almost see, he wants to stretch his eyes wide like you can do your lips, for a big ole burger, for three-layer cake” (162). While the destruction makes Bant heartsick and angry, it has the exact opposite effect on Corey: He can’t stop thinking about how amazing it is that something this large would be in their “sorry-ass piddly” (162) neck of the woods. He can’t stop staring at the huge machinery and thinking about how fun it would be to ride a four-wheeler along the carved and butchered earth. 

While Corey is in awe over the sight, Bant feels sick by it all: “Whole top of Yellowroot amputated by blast, and that dragline hacking into the flat part left” (165). She feels nostalgic over what Yellowroot used to be and remembers roaming the woods with her grandma. Amid her sadness and feelings of loss, she realizes Corey is making a mechanical noise with his mouth and looking out at the beaten landscape with wonder: “And I knew Corey had learned nothing at all” (166). 

This is the only chapter told from Bant’s gentle uncle Mogey’s point of view, and it begins with his explanation of his nature-based religiosity:

Although I had been a Christian all my life, I have never felt in church a feeling anyplace near where I get in the woods. This worried me for a very long time. Even when I prayed in church, I couldn’t make much come, where woods, I had only to walk in them. To walk in woods was a prayer (168).

He feels guilty about this for most of his life, worried that feeling spirituality in the woods is a form of paganism or something. While preachers tell him that God gave man dominion over the earth, Mogey has always felt like he isn’t separate from earth but part of it.

Mogey thinks about how every living creature and all other parts of nature give off a “hum,” or “something he carries around himself that you can feel without seeing […] It’s not something caught by ear” (169). The first time he experienced this sensation was when he was 10 and he and his 13-year-old cousin Robby shot a buck. Before they shot it, the buck just looked at them and “held himself still, like he should not have, an animal that old knows better, and I stared at him, wondering at that stillness” (169). The buck was standing near the edge of a ridge, and after Robby shot him, the animal fell over the edge.

Mogey and Robby hurried to the bottom to find the buck, to stop the deer’s suffering if it were somehow still alive. But strangely, there were no signs of the deer anywhere: “Not only no body, but no blood, and no tore-up leaves or brush, and no knocked-loose rocks” (170). Robby and Mogey split up to look for the deer, but neither found it. However, Mogey found a little clearing that looked like a small room made of rocks. Here, he heard the hum for the first time, feeling enwrapped by this electric sensation. It made him feel bigger, sure, and peaceful:

It melted my edges. It blended me, I don’t know how else to say it, right on out into the woods. It took me beyond myself and kept going, so I wasn’t any longer holed up in my body, hidden, I saw then how before I’d been hidden, how I’d believed myself smaller than I really was (172).

Mogey spends much of his life daydreaming about that lost buck, and his dreams reflect his fears about his present and future. He has built a house in the woods with his wife, Mary, and he’s built a life on the land. However, the mountaintop mining companies, but primarily Lyon, have been ruining everything. The blasting from the mountain demolitions is cracking his home, poisoning the fish and water, scaring away game, and ruining the edible plants on his land.

Mogey was injured at work, and ever since he has had horrible nightmares of “deer not quite deer, deer like something got in their blood and turned them in funny ways” (175). His dreams keep getting bleaker, and he has a hard time shaking the emotions they stir up when he wakes up.

Lace says that after having Dane, her sense of herself as an individual faded:

The next eight years passed blurrier than any other part of my life, my life became my kids then, and I have not one regret over that, but when I look back on the thirty-five years I have lived, those are the eight I remember least (181).

After they got married, Lace’s mom gave them a piece of land, and they put a modular home on it. Then, even though Lace’s mom’s home has housed their family for three generations, Jimmy argued that it would be easier for Lace’s mom to live in a trailer. Since he was the one bringing money into the family, no one felt free to disagree with him, so she moved into a trailer. Then Jimmy bought himself a truck—something he’d always dreamed of.

Lace says that things grew different between her and Jimmy once they were married. For one thing, she no longer felt desire for him: “After the wedding, it was hard to want him anymore. I learned that for me it was either have sex or have a home; sex in houses, in beds, meant something else and not enough. But sex was the least of what changed” (182). After living together, she realizes that he’s simple-minded and lacking depth: “[H]e started spending all his free time either watching or working on things that ran, because, I couldn’t help but think, that engine noise blotted out anything else might turn up in his head” (183).

Despite feeling distant from him because of their differences, Lace “sometimes […] did truly love him” (183). When Jimmy would come home after a long and grueling day of work, despite having showered, his back would still have black spots from the coal mine dust. She used to sit behind him, wash his back with a wet cloth, listen to him talk about his day, and rub his sore muscles. Soon, even these moments of connection stop happening: “But that was early on. By the time Corey was born, Jimmy Make had stopped touching me unless he wanted sex and stopped touching the kids unless I reminded him to” (184).

Lace recalls how strip mining had at first been a smaller nuisance on the mountain. It had been going on since “the ‘50s, but we’d always hated it […] But now we heard rumors that the operations were getting bigger than anyone’d imagined” (186). When Lace was pregnant with Tommy, Jimmy hurt his back at work. Her mom moved in to help her take care of him and the kids. After he eventually went back to work, he ignored the family even more. They went long stretches without having sex, and when they finally did, it was emotionally void: “I not only saw no love in his face, I saw no pleasure, either. What I saw was urgency. Pressure. Strain” (187).

Jimmy was laid off from his well-paying mining job and couldn’t find work in the area. When he found a job in Raleigh, he moved the family to a “half-apartment, half-house crammed between a bunch of other houses” (191). Lace tried to make it work there, but she hated the lack of woods and the way the local people looked down on her. After more than a year of living unhappily in North Carolina, Mogey called to say that Lace’s mom died of a heart attack, so they immediately went back to West Virginia. While cleaning up her mom’s trailer, Lace told a resentful Jimmy that she wouldn’t go back to Raleigh.

Mrs. Taylor’s son, Avery, is visiting, and Dane notices that he “looks like city, but he talks like home” (200). While her son is originally from this area, he went to college and now lives in Cleveland. Dane is working on a stew while Mrs. Taylor, Avery, and Lucy Hill sit in the kitchen and talk about the recent flooding, wondering whether the coal mining company has a fill on the mountain or, even worse, a slurry impoundment. Avery wants his mom to move to Cleveland with him to get away from all the nastiness happening with the mining companies. Lucy despairs that any help is coming, saying, “[I]t’s gonna take another Buffalo Creek. Gonna take all of us warshed out of here and killed before the first thing’s done about it” (202).

Mrs. Taylor describes her experience of the Buffalo Creek disaster, a story that Avery lived through and Dane has heard about numerous times. Mrs. Taylor recalls the unimaginable horror:

‘After that flood. I can’t begin to tell you. There never was a time like it. The world just went inside-out. People climbing out of that black mud near naked, your friends and neighbors climbing naked out of mud. People just squatting and going to the bathroom right there in the open. Wasn’t nothing else they could do, you know. And you just stood there and watched like it happened every day’ (205).

This chapter is the only chapter told from Mrs. Taylor’s son Avery’s point of view. Early one morning while staying with his mom, he decides to climb up the hollow and see what’s up there. On his way, he sees the “freshly wrecked” hollow:

[A] wreck that begins with the plugged-up creek and the flood-trashed yards before you even get near the devastation on company land, and then there is the damage that you can’t see from outside: the ruined wells and dropped foundations and cracks in walls and ceilings falling (211).

He finally reaches the padlocked company gate that attempts to keep people off the mountain. He goes around it, trekking up the slope with his city loafers on, and his feet start to blister. However, his aching feet are the least of his problems. Once he’s behind the gate and has been climbing a while, he sees that “everything is dead, the hollow an amphitheater of kill, and the grass itself isn’t even green” (213).

He thinks about how he went off to college and how everyone perceived him as smart because of it, but he realizes he was just a product of a different time on the mountain—1978, “when more kids were directed towards college” (214). He also understands why his mom is reluctant to leave this region that she has always called home. To leave is to be a kind of traitor who would be “perceived as dirt. To leave home is not just to leave a piece of land and family and friends, it is to leave your reputation, the respect you’ve earned from others, your dignity, your place” (216). Avery sympathizes with his mother: “That’s the dilemma of his mother, how much more you lose than you’d ever imagine unless you’d already left and lost it before. Avery knows” (216). He thinks about how when he left for college, he always felt divided between who he was at home and who society thought he should be.

He finally reaches the top and sees a scene of environmental carnage: the “inside-out mountain” and a “wall of dead world the height of a small skyscraper” (216). This horrible, unnatural sight makes him think about surviving Buffalo Creek, and how those who lived through it were never the same. He never thought about his experience critically until he was in college, when one of his professors, Dr. Livey, asked if he could record Avery talking about his experience for research. Avery agreed because Dr. Livey paid him, but afterwards, when Dr. Livey gave him a book, he began for the first time “thinking about it [his experience] in the daytime, and it made him want to learn” (221) everything he could about it: why it happened, the implications of the disaster, the people involved.

Avery thinks back to the day it happened. He was sleeping over at his friend Tad’s house. When the Buffalo Creek dam broke and the flood hit, Tad’s house filled with water. Tad and Avery (who was nicknamed “Bucky”), climbed onto the roof to escape the black water full of mining poison: “Tad’s house coasts, free, and the roof begins to tilt, and they start sliding down the slick tin, at first scrabbling with fingers and nails and knees the ridges in the roofing, but finally Bucky grabs Tad’s hand and they leap off into the water” (241). He lost sight of Tad, and it’s implied that Tad didn’t survive the flood.

Bucky woke up without pants or shoes on, covered in black gunk, and lying next to a dog covered in the same mess. Bucky wandered through the debris; his feet ached, so he searched for shoes in the wreckage. The dog followed him closely. He went into a stranger’s house, found some boots, and put them on. Then, as he walked through the flood, he saw a dead body. He walked up into the hills, passing bewildered, confused, and clearly hurt people. Seeing a group warming themselves by a fire, he stopped to warm himself, too.

Avery thinks back to this moment with anger at how this disaster and others like it weren’t being taught in schools in the mountain communities. He’s mad that instead, kids are given an education that encourages submission: “They didn’t learn their history” (235). They were taught things like the Pledge of Allegiance, and how “not to ask questions, to do as they were told, expect little, they were raised to expect disappointment” (235). They did not learn about the area’s bleak history of poverty nor about the powerful companies who destroyed the land taking advantage of them. He still finds it hard to reconcile the things he saw as a child, the man whose scalp was hanging off, the dead body in the water, “the one hundred and twenty-three others who died that morning on Buffalo Creek” (238).