Zombie Fuel
Coal
I. 1887
Elias Calloway swung the axe until his hands bled through the rags he wrapped them in, and still the cold didn’t care. The hillside above Gauley Bridge had been thick with oak and hickory when his father first cleared a plot there, but that was twenty years and a thousand cords of firewood ago. Now the slopes looked like something skinned. Stumps jutted from the mud in every direction, and when the spring rains came, the topsoil slid into the creek and turned it the color of rust.
He loaded the sledge and dragged it down to the settlement, where women fed split logs into iron stoves that barely held the February night at bay. A full cord lasted a week if you were careful, two days if you weren’t, and nobody in the valley was careful because careful meant cold.
His wife, Mary, stood in the doorway with their son balanced on her hip. “How much is left up there?”
Elias looked back toward the ridge. The tree line had retreated so far uphill it seemed to belong to a different property. “Enough,” he said. It was not enough. He knew that by summer he’d be cutting green wood, which burned poorly and smoked terribly, and by the following winter he’d have to range two miles further to find anything worth felling.
He told himself it was honest work. Every man in the valley did it. The forest would grow back eventually. Progress meant warmth, and warmth meant survival, and survival meant the trees would have to wait.
II. 1953
Thomas Calloway had never seen a tree worth cutting, but he’d seen enough coal to last a lifetime. He rode the man-trip into the Kanawha seam every morning at six and rode it back out at four, and in the hours between he existed in a world without sky. The tunnels smelled of sulfur and machine oil and the particular chalky sweetness of freshly broken bituminous coal.
He was proud of the work. His father’s father had scraped a living from timber, heating one house at a time. Thomas helped heat cities. The coal he cut moved by rail to power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where it became electricity, which became light in a million windows. He thought about that sometimes, standing in the dark with his headlamp cutting a white cone through the dust. All that light, starting here.
The company doctor told him his lungs sounded like a paper bag with a hole in it. Thomas shrugged. Every miner’s lungs sounded that way. It was the price of the work, and the work was what mattered, because the work was progress.
His son, Dale, was eleven years old and already saying he’d never go into the mines. Thomas didn’t argue. He figured the boy would find something better. That was what progress meant: each generation climbing one rung higher.
III. 2019
Dale’s son, Kevin Calloway, had found the next rung. He was a pipeline engineer for a natural gas company operating in the Marcellus Shale, and he made more money in a month than his grandfather had made in a year underground. The work was technical, clean by comparison, and he could do most of it above ground in daylight.
At a town council meeting in Fayette County, a woman from an environmental group told him he was poisoning the water table. Kevin sat in the folding chair and listened. He did not argue, because arguing never helped, but afterward in the parking lot he said to his wife: “My granddad dug coal with a pick. My dad dug it with machines. I work with gas, which burns cleaner than either one. How is that not progress?”
His wife, who had grown up in the same valley and remembered the coal dust on every windowsill, said she didn’t know.
Kevin thought about it on the drive home, the two-lane road winding through hills that had been strip-mined and reclaimed and strip-mined again, the landscape carrying its history in visible layers like a cut-open cake. He knew gas wasn’t perfect. He knew methane leaked from wellheads and that the fracking process left scars. But it was better than coal. Every step up the ladder was better than the last. That was the whole point.
IV. 2037
Kevin’s daughter, Lena Calloway, worked for a solar installation cooperative based in Charleston. She had helped design the array on the old Calloway ridgeline, the same slopes her great-great-grandfather had stripped of timber a hundred and fifty years before. The trees had grown back. The panels sat among them like dark windows angled toward the sky, and Lena thought of them as the final rung, the top of the ladder her family had been climbing since Elias first swung an axe.
Then the federal reclamation order arrived.
The new policy, passed under a Republican trifecta via emergency energy provisions, authorized the reopening of dormant coal seams on formerly mined land. Lena’s ridge qualified. The letter informed her that subsurface mineral rights had reverted to the state under eminent domain and that extraction activity would begin within ninety days. The solar array would need to be removed.
She drove out to the ridge on a Tuesday morning. The panels were still generating. She could see the output on her phone: clean kilowatts flowing into the grid, silent and steady. In ninety days, crews would tear them out and dig beneath them for a fuel source that produced twice the carbon emissions of natural gas and less energy than the solar infrastructure already sitting on the surface.
She called her father. Kevin listened without interrupting, which was his way.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Lena said. “We climbed the ladder. Wood to coal to gas to solar. Why would you go back down?”
Kevin was quiet for a long time. Through the phone she could hear the television and the dog shifting on the kitchen floor.
“Maybe the ladder was never the point,” he said. “Maybe they just want what’s underneath it.”
Lena stood on the ridge, phone pressed to her ear, looking out over the valley where her family had cut and dug and drilled and built for five generations. The panels hummed. The trees swayed. Somewhere below, the coal sat in its ancient seam, waiting to be burned all over again, as if a century and a half of progress had been a long walk in a circle.
The only honest thing to do was refuse to complete it.