Stranger to Blue Water

Mud tracks and erosion wind down the hill. Courtesy Doddridge Cty Watershed Association

June 20^th has always carried a special meaning for me, even before I moved away from my beloved mountain home.  Anyone from West Virginia can easily understand the ‘sense of place’, though few of us can actually explain it. This date reminds me of the lessons I’ve learned from my parents regarding family, dignity, heritage, and community. My father could drive through the entire state blindfolded if it weren’t so important to wave to oncoming traffic. My step mother, who sits along his side on the boards of numerous Ritchie County organizations, comes from a long line of Gilmer County farmers, woodsmen, and quilt makers. My mother, who taught me the only way to listen to Country Roads was at full blast with the windows down, has devoted her entire adult life to the growing population of people in need across the state. Despite my parents’ complete devotion to West Virginia, this date will always remind me of my Grandma Scott.

Winnifred Scott

This wasn’t just our state’s sesquicentennial anniversary; it was also the day my grandmother would have turned 99 years old. Though, as founder of the Ritchie County Historical Society, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t mind us all celebrating the biggest West Virginia Day of our lives. Her great-grandparents first settled western Ritchie County in 1834. Her grandmother, Caroline Tharpe, was one of the first native-born residents of Ritchie County. My great-grandparents operated a hotel in Auburn during the oil and gas boom, or as my grandma called it- the mud, money, and dust days. By a stroke of luck they sold it just months before the market crash of 1929. Grandma Scott would spend most of her life in Harrisville as a parent, teacher, and historian and leave a legacy that we are all very proud of and aspire to continue through our own lives. I can’t help mentioning that the best green beans and tomatoes I’ve ever eaten in my life came out of their garden on Church Street.

Courtesy Ritchie County Historical Society

The Ritchie County where Winnifred Scott grew up is a lot different than the one we are more familiar with- well, except for the mud, money, and dust.  Thanks to the departure of the garment and glass industries, and the arrival of the four-lane, the streets of downtown Harrisville on Saturday afternoon look a lot more like they do on Tuesday evening. The town isn’t the only thing that’s changed since my Grandmother’s youth; this is also a different kind of gas boom.

Fracking fluid spill on Buckeye Creek.
Photo courtesy of Doddridge Cty Watershed Association

As home to a ghost town named Petroleum, Ritchie County is no stranger to the natural gas industry. Due to the drilling practices of the day Ritchie escaped the water contamination that’s more common in the coal fields. I grew up chasing minnows in the Hughes River at North Bend on weekends and watched a family friend pull an unbelievable catfish out of a hole just upstream from the campground. While fishing on the lake seems to be normal to this point, I worry that the frenzy of drilling and fracking upstream will lead to future problems on the Hughes that have shown up in other areas. You have to look no further than Doddridge and Harrison Counties to find problems with contaminated well water and resulting illnesses.

Photo courtesy Doddridge County. Watershed Association

These days, companies like Antero are using chemicals hidden by the proprietary rights that were negotiated and written during those infamous Energy Commission meetings at the White House. These chemicals, along with millions of gallons of valuable clean water, end up sitting in containment ponds in the open air all across north central West Virginia. I suppose these out of state drillers aren’t worried about the potential for flash flooding or leaching. Bone Creek might not have always run clear back in my grandma's day, but it certainly wasn’t in imminent danger of carcinogenic contamination.

Building a new containment pit in Doddridge County. Courtesy WV Host Farms

Failed lining allows carcinogens to leach into ground water. Courtesy Doddridge County Watershed Association

My grandmother taught out at a one room school house in Hazel Green at the foot of a hill where many of our relatives are buried now. I remember going on a picnic with her there in late spring; we all ate in the shade of an old oak tree. I’ve been there many times since visiting the graves of the Luzaders; the whisper of the wind and chirping of the birds have always offered a divine backdrop to such a solemn scene. Just around the bend of Spruce Creek they’ve recently built a compression station that will surely create enough sound and vibration to spin my Luzader ancestors in their graves. Teaching class in that old church would be impossible now, even for ‘the General’. They’ve also dug up much of the flood plane in this holler for a pipeline.

Wake up, Great Great Great Great Grandpa Luzader!

Hazel Green, WV

Pipeline ponding along Lynn Camp.
Courtesy of Friends of the Hughes

The chemicals and methodology may be 21^st century, but the infringement on property rights and water sources would leave any 20th century practitioner of laissez faire economics drooling at the mouth. People across the region have lost the rights to use their wells; they’ve lost the use of their farm land; their hillsides have been eroded, and they’ve been overrun by convoys of water trucks and noise pollution. The use of eminent domain, or mineral rights, in the name of cheap and convenient energy doesn’t fit the value system of the people I grew up with. The people I know in Ritchie County are hell bent on maintaining their rights to hunt and pray in school.  I’m still trying to figure out why property rights don’t fit into that equation.

Courtesy Doddridge County Watershed Association

I suppose someone should point out that there is the environmental aspect to all of this. How much benzene, radon, and whatever’s in the special frack sauce do we really want to introduce into what has been a pristine ecology? How much methane do Ritchie Countians want to release into an ever warming climate? I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the persistent drought that occurred for several years prior to the building of the dam. We need to stop treating things like water and life as though they are just layers of unspecified rock that must be drilled away. Collateral damage they call it. Financial institutions like Citibank are advising their clients to invest in water; the days of taking it for granted are over. We are also warned about this in the book of Isaiah, chapter 24.

The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the exalted of the earth languish. The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earth's inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left.

If we truly believe that this is West By God Virginia, then why are we so eager to permanently destroy its mountains, streams, and aquifers? Believe me, there is something much more loyal about moving away than there is to staying and destroying it for a buck. You know what they say, ‘Mountaineers are always free’, but sometimes we sell out for $25 an acre. The gas industry will be hiding behind a team of lawyers when the pipelines rupture, when the hillside gives way to the erosion, and when the well casings fail- as they eventually do, while neighbors and relatives help out with water and other needs- as we always do. 

Scott Family, 1976

All West Virginians have ancestors and beloved grandparents who grew up in these hills, and surely we all think of them as we sing along to Country Roads. There was nothing radical about most of our mountain mommas; they just valued their heritage and communities and gave it their all. If we want to hold on to this heritage and pass those traditions on to our future generations then we have to actively defend it. There are local groups in West Virginia who are doing this very thing. Please reach out to them and ask what you can do to help. Time is running out.

Doddridge County Watershed Association

Friends of the Hughes 

O.V.E.C.

Mountain Justice and RAMPS