Member-only story
Ain’t No Neutral Here
Blackjewel Miners, Appalachia, and Solidarity
Coal Country
He pulls back his sandy blond hair to show the place where his ear once was and tells us that — I kid you not — his name is Choppy.
It was a long story about how he lost his ear, full of dramatic reenactments, swigs from his Coors can, and a couple sidetracked stories that wound around and around and came to dead ends just like the backroads that run through the hollers here.
The short version is that he was really high. He’d fixed up his car to run too fast on too small roads, Reagan was in the White House, Knight Rider was on TV, coal was dying, and so was he.
His had us doubled over laughing; he’d been perfecting this tale for thirty years and he was a hell of a storyteller. Matewan, West Virginia has only three streets and I imagine everyone in town could hear us carrying on. My friend who was traveling with me was an East Coast sort, the type of guy who grew up in suburbs with neat lawns and cul-de-sacs, and he was looking at me like he couldn’t believe his damn luck: A real live Appalachian on his first trip here.
Choppy was what my grandma would call a hoot and it’s true: He fit every bit of the hillbilly stereotype that West Virginia and Kentucky, right there across the Tug Fork, is…
