The Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-earned Lessons in Love, Loss and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

MEMOIR—BOOK EXCERPT The Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-earned Lessons in Love, Loss and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life Chuck Kinder Ghost Rock FOUR HUNDRED MILLION YEARS AGO the whole state of West Virginia lay in a long ditch beneath the tides of an ancient ocean. To the east rose a vanished continent named Old Appalachia. The ancient ocean left vast deposits of brine and rock salt and limestone from the fossils of marine life. Runoff from the highlands of the old continent caused rock strata beneath the ditch to repeatedly rise and fall, rise and fall. Millions of years later the whole state of West Virginia was a lush swampland. Seventy million years ago it was part of a vast windswept peneplain. Over time the horizontal layers of deposited limestone and sandstone and shale and seams of coal were lifted and folded up finally into mountains. Coal is a fossil fuel. It was formed when millions of years ago the great Carboniferous forests settled slowly into their own marshes and marbled themselves there into the dark inner layers of those lifted mountains. Many sorts of fossils can be found in the shale partings of coal seams. Even the casts of whole tree trunks and root systems have been found in coal beds. Long ago, folks had the weird notion that fossils were made by magic forces deep within the earth's heart that had failed somehow to breathe their creations into life. The ancient Greeks had the bright idea that petrified bones were the remains of dwarves and giants who had once roamed the earth. Later yet, in medieval Europe, fossils were thought to be the relics of saints or, on the contrary, the skeletons of drowned, unsaved, pre-Noahian sinners. Many years before I was born, a great-uncle of mine, an Uncle Jarvis, was unlucky enough to die young among sixteen or seventeen other coal miners in a big mine explosion over at Paint Creek. Because of the poisonous methane gas released by the explosion and because the explosion had ignited a fire in a deep coal seam, the rescue teams could not retrieve the bodies. Finally, the mine portals were sealed, and have 63 remained so until this day. As was often the case in such circumstances, smoke from the fire began pouring up out ofthe mine's ventilation holes. My paternal grandmother, Daisy Dangerfield Kinder, who told me this story and most all of the stories I can recall as equally informing and transfiguring my basically weird childhood, told me that Uncle Jarvis's wife, "Ant" Becky, took to rising at daybreak on each Sunday morning and dressing up in her best church-clothes, whereupon she would walk over the ridge from her home to one of those smoke holes. Mimi, as we called my grandmother, told me that "Ant" Becky would sit there for the rest of the day talking down that thin pale column of smoke as though it was some sort of peculiar telephone line to poor old Uncle Jarvis, her beloved albeit squashed-as-a-bug husband. For many years "Ant" Becky, that loyal waiting weird widow, did this, as though her dead husband's ghost was lifting up into eternity slowly from that hole like a thin, sad, curling stream of soul. Finally "Ant" Becky, who claimed she had begun to hear a busy signal, had to be put away for her own good, not necessarily a rare fate to befall kinfolks of mine. What I recall wondering about in my weird kid way when Mimi told me this story was whether eventually over time Uncle Jarvis's bones would be petrified (I was the sort of kid who knew what "petrified" meant; I gobbled words like candy), and if they ever did what if somebody someday would dig across his petrified bones. And wouldn't it be cool if his uncovered petrified bones would somehow rise up among the living again like one of those neat zombies in the E.C. Comics and move horribly among us. Or maybe somebody someday would open a seam of shale and find Uncle Jarvis imprinted there like an ancient fern. Maybe he would...