West Virginia's State Girl

"There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it."

-from Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau

It's no secret that I just adore old postcards. The combination of image-collecting and correspondence is just irresistible. Why, look here! West Virginia as she ought to be: rhododendrons in bloom, and bursting forth from state beauty is State Beauty-- the West Virginia State Girl. However, if the state song of West Virginia is any indication, it is hardly fruitful to dwell on such nostalgic imagery. I reference the third verse of West Virginia Hills:

"Oh, the West Virginia hills! How unchang'd they seem to stand,
With their summits pointed skyward To the Great Almighty's Land!
Many changes I can see, Which my heart with sadness fills;
But no changes can be noticed In those West Virginia hills."

Of course, those lyrics are outdated at best and tragic at worst, because the hills of West Virginia are anything but "unchang'd". West Virginia's State Girl, proudly perched on a penny postcard with fair skin gleaming in the rosy glow of her state flower, might better represent her state's beloved hills if her face was smudged with coal. The tourism bureau of today will likely point out the splendor of the hills and the flowering rhododendron bushes, but it would be foolish to mistake that for a celebration of what is. It seems that if things are to be idyllic on postcard or brochure, they merely celebrate what still is.

For that, we can thank the destruction of mountaintop removal mining. I think there might be a gentler term for it, one I heard in fifth-grade geology, and one my father uses-- "strip mining" is that it? I think it's meant to emphasize the "stripping" of resource from the earth, which really doesn't sound too much better, but certainly less mythical. At any rate, I'm sure I do not have to explain this practice to you, because you already know just what it is; even if you don't, the name sort of speaks for itself. Say "mountaintop removal" and immediately you can picture all sorts of wild scenarios and consequences, and I doubt you'd be too far off. The whole thing just looks ghastly. The man in charge is positively merciless. And, to provoke the sympathies of the unsympathetic: The charming Lorax of your childhood would doubtless be rendered apoplectic. (If you still don't get the idea, or if you'd just like to know more, I suggest taking a look at this article in Vanity Fair .)

Now, I am hardly an activist for anything much, but beautiful things are dear to me, and so I will derive my authority on the matter from this angle, rather than attempting to explain the vast ecological impact that mountaintop removal ends up having. This might be a defect in my personality, that despite taking an interest I am not moved to leap to the region's defense, and throw myself in front of the first flowering shrubbery I can find. I am lucky, though, because I happen to know Sophie, who got herself arrested on Wednesday for doing just that.

Well, not exactly. There were no rhododendrons involved, so far as I know (they bloom earlier in the season, anyhow), and Sophie's defense of the wilds of West Virginia was far more relevant than my imagined "Save the Shrubbery" campaign. Instead, Sophie and three other activists locked-down a highwall miner (a large piece of equipment used in mountaintop removal mining) in a nonviolent act of protest (you can read more about it here). After an arrest, Sophie sits in jail, where she doubtless knew she might end up for breaking the law in the name of, well, this. I think you'll find that Sophie's motivations are far more easily defended than my own. For all of its admirers, natural beauty generally fails to hold its own in battles against corporations or people trying to make a living. This is another reason I am grateful to Sophie, because she is one of the people who might rescue the cause from well-intentioned folks like me (we generally spoil things and have pathetic arguments, if we bother to argue at all).

I know Sophie would love it if you read her activist statement (which I linked you to above), but if you don't have the patience, you can listen to her and the other protestors describe their motivations and personal justifications here:

It all is terribly complicated, like everything else, and I worry for my dear friend now in a West Virginia jail. Still, I am terribly proud of her, and I have written her a letter telling her that, and I will write again tomorrow. Although this time, I think I will address it to West Virginia's State Girl.

Maryland, My Maryland

"I am sorry to hear that you are to pass your summer in Madrid. What a pity that the diplomatic circle should be doomed to the sterile monotony of that city in the desert; what a residence in Seville might have made for.."

-Correspondence: To Madamoiselle Bouvillier from Washington Irving

Seville, May 28, 1828

It has been decreed that I should spend six months in Maryland, rather than returning to the bricks and the prairies of Galesburg for school come September. It is next to impossible to determine the justice of the situation, because from where I stand things look impossibly bleak and quite unfair, and from the position of the powers that be*, sending me to Illinois once more appears absurd and foolish and irrefutably doomed to fail. It is so terribly difficult to be objective, and "There is everywhere enough liberty of arguing both for and against, on both sides" (from The Iliad By Homer). With that being the case, and with the decision having been quite firmly made, I will have to just take the advice that I love to give, and be a sport.

As it happens, I'm an awfully good sport. I've referenced the miserable Maryland summer several times, but I do not dwell upon it. And, trimester after trimester, I hang back in Baltimore while my friends head back to school to be reunited and transition into a fresh term's joys and dilemmas all at once. No matter how many times this happens, it seems just as calamitous as the last, and I find myself stranded in some little room at Johns Hopkins (outpatient if I'm lucky) waiting on some sinister mystery lurking behind blood vessels to be solved. This is very frustrating, but even with wires protruding from my scalp, connected to the wall, systematically sleep-deprived and video monitored 'round the clock, I have occupied myself. I have looked forward. I have watched movies. Written letters. And so when I've pined, it was in a small room full of diversions that I had created for myself; I was equipped to very quickly open a book and carry on.

The six-month sentence, however, presents new challenges in recreation and  in sportsmanship. I will have to leave the Little Room. I think I will be lonelier than I am now come September.

*The decision to "take a term off" was made by my parents, rather than say, my school's administration.

Photographs taken from the window of the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at Johns Hopikins Hospital in Baltimore, MD