Strange as this Weather Has Been

“Truth was, though, after a month away, I was feeling a kind of lonesomeness I’d never known there was. I’d start drinking in my dorm room most evenings, stretched out on my window ledge on the eighth floor of Tower Two, a rum and coke between my legs, or a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20, and if anybody asked, I’d say I was just warming up for that night’s party, but really I’d be watching the ridges in the distance. It was like I was all the time feeling like I wasn’t touching nothing, and wasn’t nothing touching me back, and yeah, they had hills in Morgantown, but not backhome hills, and not the same feel backhome hills wrap you in.” 

After desiring to leave her hometown all her life, Lace finally goes away to college. However, she feels homesick for the very place she struggled against. This is the first time she misses her hometown and family, and the time when she realizes how deeply connected to the landscape of the mountains she has become. Once she moves back, she realizes that the sense of nostalgia she felt for Yellowroot was actually the dawning awareness that her hometown hills were part of her. Specifically, as the novel progresses, she realizes that she gets her identity from the land, and that when she’s off the land, she loses herself.

“Then I could feel not only the hot wet, but also the nervousness off him. I felt, too, his soberness, felt him there in a way all the drunk flirting and groping and messing around in Morgantown hadn’t been there at all. And I felt also, although I only named it later, the familiar of him. Again, after all that Morgantown, how so simple and familiar Jimmy Make felt even though I’d never been near him.” 

This explains Lace’s initial attraction to Jimmy Make. Despite going away to college and being three years older than him (he was only 15 and still in high school), Lace was attracted to Jimmy because he reminded her of home. Since she felt homesick ever since leaving for college, Jimmy gave her a sense of comfort. 

“Then the sediment ponds. I’d seen these before in other hollows, clear back to when me and Grandma were running the woods. They were put in by the company to catch the runoff, but I saw that Lace was right, Lyon Energy wasn’t keeping them up. They were jammed with stuff, and you could see pretty quick how the sides of some were tore through by the flood. I knew Jimmy Make believed it was these busted ponds that had caused the flood, and I saw what he meant.” 

Bant describes seeing the ineffectual and dangerous sediment ponds after she and her father cut through the company’s gate to see the state of the mountain for themselves. This is the first time the novel makes the connection between the unkempt, company-built sediment ponds and the flooding in the hollows. This connection between mining company negligence and environmental damage is strengthened as the novel progresses. 

“The edge of the mine top towered several hundred feet right over our heads, a straight gray line that started at the east flank of Cherryboy, then ran as far to the right as my head could swivel. Lace had said they hadn’t got Cherryboy yet, and she was right, but not even all those late-night listenings had got me ready for hot the top of Yellowroot was just plain gone. Where the ridgetop used to be, nothing but sky. Under that sky, what looked from this distance like raw colorless gravel but must have been piled-up rock. And beyond that, nothing at all.” 

Bant describes the effects of strip mining on Yellowroot. For generations, her family has lived on Yellowroot, surviving on the lush vegetation in the region and drinking the clear water. However, after Lyon starts strip mining Yellowroot for coal, Bant is devastated to see that it’s no longer the same landscape she has seen her whole life: Grand and majestic hilltops have been demolished into flat plateaus lacking vegetation. Moreover, neither she nor her family had any say in the matter, despite having lived on that land for generations. 

“They slosh through pigshit-colored creek water that comes to right below Corey’s knees, right above Tommy’s. Used to be too deep to wade, but every year it gets more shallow, and the water with a bad odor to it, even though it was two years ago all the fish and crawdads died. A different thing to watch. The flood ripped and rearranged the neighborhood, and from here in the creek, behind the houses, you can see how people’s property had changed. Some yards are smaller now, like theirs, while others have been stretched longer and higher with rock and trash and the dirt off yards of the people who lost theirs. Corey likes the change.” 

From Corey’s perspective, the flooding that has changed the landscape of the people living in the hollows is an exciting and potentially fun thing. Even though he can clearly see that the flooding has ruined houses and yards and killed the fish and other wildlife, Corey likes the transformation because it allows him to treasure hunt in the creeks that are now littered with metal trash. 

“Like the heart of the rhododendron thicket, the limbs bendy and matty and strong, it was like being inside some kind of body there. It felt animal live. The rock overhangs in the winter, how icicles would make off them, great scary masses, the rocks making faces, angry and beautiful. I’d feel closest in spring, before the leaves came all the way out, when the mountains show their hope with little color patches, redbud and dogwood, dogwood and redbud, the roll of the words in your mouth. And if you look real close, how all the leaves are tightly curled, bulging just a little beyond bud—leaf-wait, I’d call it. And inside them, right before they bust out, you see what looks like a feather.” 

Bant remembers what it felt like to roam the woods with her grandma, back before the mining company started destroying it all. Bant uses language that personifies the landscape, comparing the rocks to “angry and beautiful faces.” This demonstrates not just the literal liveliness of the vegetation, but also the feeling that it used to give her to be in the middle of it all—as if she was part of something greater than herself. 

“I pushed my forehead against the streaked window, the pull in me to go back to the counter, look harder, get it clear in me for sure, like looking at pictures of naked people. Like looking at pictures of dead bodies.” 

Look at the photographs of the blasted mountaintops, Bant is ashamed and yet simultaneously interested. For her, the sensation is akin to what she feels around pornography. This connection between naked bodies and exposed mountains demonstrates a link that is solidified throughout the novel: The mountains as living, breathing beings. This personification technique makes the destruction of the mountains akin to the murder of a human, and it makes that loss even more emotionally devastating. It also emphasizes how serious that loss is for the people living in the region—people who have been part of the landscape for generations. 

“Then she’d go too far. Even though I’d come out to the living room all on my own, even though I had to hear—there’d come a point where I couldn’t take no more, where I’d suddenly think: I’m just a kid. I’d look at her ranting from the couch over top of me, and then I’d slide far away from her, without really moving at all. There she’d be, across a wide river from me, waving a cigarette and ranting away, and I’d think, Why do you tell me everything? This is not how moms do on TV, not how my friends’ moms do, not even what you do with the boys. Go on. Keep away that flame.”

As Bant listens to her mom talk about all the environmental destruction happening around them—the floods, poisoned water, and chemical leaks—she resents her mom’s honesty. She wishes her family could be more like the picture-perfect families in TV shows—an echo of the way Lace used to absorb messages from the media. Lace has always been blunt with her, but here Bant reveals that she wants her mom to be a caring maternal figure that protects her from the hard truths of the world rather than treating her like a peer. 

“I learned what it is to grieve your life lost while you’re still living, and I learned that there are few losses harsher than that. It was grief beyond anything I’d imagined. I can still feel sometimes that dry raw socket. The slash, then the body-burning pain. For so many years, I’d only seen myself at all, I realized then, because I could see myself as different, as more than ordinary. The sweet peach-pink. But now I saw that was a make-believe choice I’d only pretended I’d had.

Lace describes the inescapable suffering and loss she felt when she first found out she was pregnant with Bant. However, it wasn’t just the unplanned pregnancy and the idea of having a baby that made her depressed, it was the loss of her dreams that made her feel hopeless. Her entire life, she dreamt of leaving her hometown. After becoming pregnant, she had to accept that she was now anchored beyond her control.

“I was scared to think what it would do to her to see this kind of violence on a piece of ground she loved. But after I felt for Grandma, it was like I no longer knew where I was. I all of a sudden got dizzy, so many times in my life I’d walked up this hollow, followed the creek, and back then, you couldn’t see the top of anything. You were just in it, in the hollow, in the mountains, in the woods, up above you trees and vines and rock overhangs, and higher than that, a change in the light that let you know where the top should be. But by then, finally, I did feel the hurt for myself. I understood. It was like they were knocking down whatever it is inside of you that holds you up.” 

When Bant sees the mining destruction on Yellowroot for the first time, she remembers her grandmother introducing her to the woods. Grandma is the one that taught her how to survive in the woods while also taking care of them. Bant is glad that her grandma isn’t still alive to see the loss of the land because it would break her heart. However, once that feeling passes, Bant feels sad for herself, as she understands the land to be a part of her. With the loss of the land, Bant feels a loss of herself. 

“They never have to grow up, Lace would say, stay babified. Never have to because the women always take care of them, first their mothers, then their wives, and they die. The women always wait and die later […] the women, are tougher than the men, because the men just take it from the industry and the government, and then they take that out on the women. So the women are tougher, because they take it from the industry, the government, and the men, which means the women are stronger and for sure older, because the men never have to grow up.”

Bant recalls Lace complaining about the simultaneous weakness and abusiveness of the men in their hometown. Although she speaks in generalities, Lace implies that she’s talking about Jimmy Make: While Lace was caring for their baby and scavenging the land for plants to sell, Jimmy was at home being babied by his mother. Even after they are married and have several more children, he never really takes full responsibility. To Bant, these words are a warning not to get pregnant. The fear of pregnancy, of being tied to R.L. forever like Lace was to Jimmy, makes Bant not want to have sex.

“Why do we have to love it like we do? The Bible says we are made of dust, but after that making, everybody else leaves the dirt and lives in air, except us, oh no. We eat off it, dig in it, doctor from it, work under it. Us, we grow up swaddled in it, ground around our shoulders, over top our heads, we work both the top and the underside the earth, we are surrounded. And still, Daddy wanting nothing at the end but to sit and look at land. Even though inside it drowns him.”

When Lace’s dad was dying from a lung disease presumably brought on by years of coal mining, he still loved the land that gave him this death sentence. Lace wonders what compels the people who live in the mountains to feel such an incredible tie to the land—a tie that seems unlike anything other people experience. Lace loves her homeland and doesn’t want to leave, but she also feels like a prisoner of this desire. 

“There is what my reason tells me. There is what my church tells me. There is what my dreams tell me. There is what this land tells me. I’m coming to accept that I’ll never bring all those things together before I die. But on my strongest days, I can tell myself without guilt or fear, it is not paganism or idolatry or sacrilege or sin. It’s just what I know. And what they tell me, these things I finally let myself trust, is what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide.”

Mogey describes how he will never be able to reconcile all the opposing worldviews that live inside him. Church tells him that God decreed for man to have total dominance over nature. His dreams show him the inexplicably mystical experience he had with a deer in the woods as a boy. His reason and his spiritual connection to the land tell him that there is no distinction between him as a living being and nature. Although these convictions seem at odds with one another, each view leads to the same conclusion: what is happening to the land will kill them all in the end.

“But even without romance, without touching, without even much talking, me and Jimmy Make kept getting tied together tighter and tighter, only it no longer had anything to do with that slim green vine. This was rope. Knotted rope, scratchy and binding, and if you didn’t feel it always, you sure did if you turned.”

Lace reveals that her connection to Jimmy isn’t an emotional bond or attraction; rather, it’s a feeling of being bound to him out of familial duty. In the beginning of their relationship, while Lace was away at college, Jimmy felt familiar because he reminded her of home; she was feeling homesick, and he was the remedy that gave her comfort. However, once she gets pregnant with his babies and becomes glued to the hometown she so desperately tried to escape, he becomes like an anchor that weighs her down. This feeling is magnified by the fact that once Jimmy is laid off from his job, he refuses to take lower paying work, which means that the burden of providing for the family falls to her. Despite these things, Lace feels like she can’t leave him.  

“Down there, I learned fast, you couldn’t ever really get outside. Couldn’t even get in trees, in brush, much less get into hills, you weren’t ever out of sight or sound of a road, a building, a parking lot, and sometimes I’d miss backhome woods so bad I’d feel land in my throat.” 

This moment describes the homesickness and isolation that Lace felt after Jimmy moved them all to Raleigh—a feeling that echoes what she felt after leaving for college many years earlier. The urban setting was a culture shock. Not only did she miss being in nature, but she found that the people in Raleigh looked down on her and her family, as if they were poor trash. Nobody would talk to them, and they constantly got disapproving looks from their neighbors.

“Then I saw the look she was giving back. Self-righteous. Smug. Redneck woman with so many kids she can’t even keep track of them all. And there crashed back onto me, straight through my grief, through the Tommy terror and the relief, the nothingness that North Carolina made me. Not Morgantown, not getting pregnant, not having to get married, not losing forever that sweet peach-pink, none of those had made me feel that nothingness the way North Carolina did. Because people outside of back home always thought they knew exactly who I was, when they had not the slightest idea. When they’d never see me because they didn’t know how to look, knew only to look for what they already thought they knew, so they always saw somebody else.”

Like the previous quote, this moment further describes Lace’s feelings of discomfort and loneliness while living in Raleigh. The complete dissolution of the self she felt is reinforced by a terrible encounter with a neighbor who found Tommy wandering around while Lace was lying in bed in a depressed state after her mom’s death. After Lace comes for him, instead of showing compassion, the woman judges Lace according to biases about “rednecks.” Lace realizes that the people outside her hometown will always look down on her and her family because they rely on stereotypes rather than taking the time to get to know them. 

“‘Broke-down equipment and logs and chemicals, just anything they’re too lazy to carry off the mountain, just push it in the ponds. So who knows what all’s in the water when it comes through here. Even when it’s not that deep, you know, it’s still poison. You want that in your garden?’” 

Mrs. Taylor is talking about the dangers of the mining company’s negligence. Since the slurry impoundments and sediment ponds aren’t being taken care of, all the dangerous chemicals are running off the company mining site and finding their way into the water of the people living below. As a result, many people don’t want to plant gardens for fear that the water will poison their food, and many people can’t even drink their water because their wells have been tainted. 

“It is a matter of you yourself being 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. 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. The leaving out, the education, how he paid. His mind forever speaking to itself in two Englishes, there were many ways he split, but for him, they were all embodied by that double language.” 

Avery explains why it’s difficult for people like his mother to leave the region. After living in the same place for many generations, people find their identity in the land, and they share this bond with those around them. Leaving not only means becoming a traitor, losing your social connections and standing, but it also means going out into a world that relies on demeaning stereotypes about mountain residents. Avery has lived through both things and now finds himself with a split personality, even speaking two different languages—one for home visits, and one for his new home.

“He taught himself, because they’d never been taught their history (the first thing he learned). Sure, they’d had West Virginia history, in eighth grade, fifty minutes of free-floating information on an overhead projector. The teacher sat humpled, cozy in her fat, behind her desk in the rear of the room where she could watch them without even shifting off her seat, her mouth moving only to scream threats and order Missy Combs to crank plastic sheeting. They copied splintered facts, pencils pressing into greasy desks.”

Avery is making a commentary about the state of education in West Virginia: the poor state of schools and the general lack of care on the part of teachers. Once he goes away to college, he realizes just how little he had learned about the history of his state. While he learned random facts about West Virginia, he never learned the important things, like who they were as a people, and how both the land and corporate greed shaped them.

“Avery takes a slow final look, the corpse-colored ground, the strangled creek, the lopped-off mountains, and on the edge of the mine, three spindly trees. This is a disaster less spectacular, more invisible, than Buffalo Creek. This disaster is cumulative, is governed by a different scale of time. Chronic, pressing, insistent, insidious. Kill the ground and the trees by blasting out the coal, kill all the trees you don’t kill the first time through acid rain, kill the water with the waste you have to dump, and then, by burning the coal—Avery smirks, he’s on a roll—heat up the climate and kill everything left. Because Avery has come to understand (not learn, but understand, confirming) that the end times his mother obsesses about won’t arrive with a trumpet and Jesus come back all of a sudden and everybody jump out of their graves. No. It is a glacial-pace apocalypse. The end of the world in slow motion. A de-evolution, like the making of creation in reverse. The End Times are in progress right now, Avery is walking on them

Avery survived the Buffalo Creek flood, an intense and acute disaster that happened over the course of one day. Now, looking out at the butchered landscape, he realizes that what’s occurring at the hands of the mining companies is a different kind of disaster with a similar outcome. That is, although the Buffalo Creek flood instantaneously killed 100 people and left countless others homeless, what the mining companies are doing to Yellowroot is a slow process with a similar outcome—flooding, poisoned water, and the ruin of the landscape. The eventual conclusion will be the deaths or exodus of the people that have always called this region home.

“At first I didn’t believe everything they said—how nearly a thousand miles of streams had been filled with the rocks and dirt that used to be mountaintops, and how the fill had killed everything there. How what soil was left on the flattened tops was compacted so hard that if anything ever came back besides grasses and shrubs the company sprayed on it, it wouldn’t be for at least several hundred more years. How over fifty percent of the electricity in the United States came from coal.” 

Like Avery, Lace never learned the facts about environmental depredation in West Virginia in school. When she first hears them from Charlie and Loretta, she’s filled with disbelief. She’s also in shock that the people in power would allow these things to happen. This moment shows the general naïveté of not just Lace, but of the people living in the area. It’s not that they don’t care; it’s often just that they don’t know. Once Lace learns the reality of the situation, she can no longer idly sit back. 

“It cracked off, and my mind and my heart were working hard as my body, and this is why, mind was thinking, heart was knowing, this is why we feel for it like we do—the long, long loss of it. This is why. Its gradual being taken away for the past hundred years, by timber, by coal, and now, outright killed, and the little you have left, mind thinking, heart knowing, a constant reminder of what you’ve lost and are about to lose. So you never get a chance to heal.” 

Lace pinpoints why she and others feel such grief over the loss and destruction of the land that they’ve always called their own. It’s because they’ve been losing it slowly and inexorably, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Despite the fact that they’ve lived, worked, survived on, and taken care of the land, outside companies can take ownership and profit from places that should be public and protected. Companies destroy the land without giving any say to the people who have lived there for hundreds of years. 

“Killing the trees, I knew that’s what they did first, and I knew it didn’t necessarily mean an impoundment was going in. But it for certain meant the death of Yellowroot. If I’d looked at it head-on, I don’t think I could have borne it. Because through all those hard, hard years, I understood now, as I’d lost my self, my dream, my dad, my mom—it was place crept in and filled the lack.” 

Lace is describing why the loss of the land is so difficult for her. It’s not just a matter of childhood nostalgia, rather, it’s that she has found her identity and sense of self in the land. After losing so much already, the thought of losing the land—the only thing she has left—is unbearable.