The red clay of the Appalachian slope does not remember the names of the men who clawed at its belly, but it remembers the weight of their hunger; it is a soil that has swallowed the black dust of the mines and the white bones of the dispossessed, yet now it is asked to host a new kind of ghost, a foreign specter born of the veldt and the kopje.
I‘ve spent thirty years underground, breathing in the dust and history of these Appalachian hills. Now, in late 2025, my breath comes short, a rattling reminder of the price we paid for “keeping the lights on.” They call it Black Lung; I call it the sound of a man running out of time. But lately, it ain’t just the miners who are wheezing—it’s the whole state. We’re witnessing what the folks in suits call “demographic decline,” but down here, it just feels like we’re being erased. Continue reading