When I reflect back to the time when I was a young boy growing up in Appalachia it seems so long ago. Looking back now I realize those days were very peaceful, serene and a true delight to have grown up in. For a boy like myself it was a blast from day to day, one adventure after another. If there wasn’t something to do we invented something. The mountains were very majestic with lots of wild life and huge trees from large virgin forests covered the area. The streams were very clean. They were so clean that you could drink from any of them without any worrying of contaminations of any type.  The larger streams had a nice variety of fish in them.

Late evening and night time was a special time of the day. When it started getting dark the lightning bugs would light up the late evening air.  Just like clockwork we would grab a jar, take off chasing after them to put as many as we could into our jar to see them light it up. The sound of the whippoorwill, katydids and crickets chirping was like an early evening symphony as their music filled the air. Like most kids in our community we would play outside way up into the night. There was very little television to watch or video games to play. All the young people were physically active.

I woke up one morning and I could sense how things were changing. In the distance I could hear the sounds of a huge engine roaring. The early morning sounds of the birds were missing. There were no crows hollering, no blue birds singing. All of the morning sounds that we were accustomed to hearing every morning was silenced. Then I heard the sounds of trees crashing coming from across the road in front of our home.  As I looked up towards the top of the mountain I saw the boom of a huge shovel swing around and dump its load over the side of the mountain. Huge rocks were rolling down the mountainside. As the rocks picked up speed on their journey down the mountain they crashed into trees and bowling them over the way a bowling ball strikes and knocks over the pins at a bowling alley.  That sound was a message to all of us that things in our community was changing.

Now strip mining was being introduced into our community.  I knew deep down that our lives would never be the same.  As time went by the mountains were silenced even more. Those morning and evening sounds that we enjoyed hearing so much were getting weaker and weaker till finally they were only a blurb to be heard every now and then. The road that went by in front of our house became very busy with one coal truck after another going by our home. They left a trail of suffocating dust and a rutted out potholed road in their wake. Finally they moved on after a few years when the coal seam was depleted.

Our community didn’t have time to catch its breath when things changed again. A huge gas and oil company discovered oil and natural gas in our area and the rigs were pouring into our neighborhood. This lasted for quite some time as they cut and bulldozed roads into areas that were untouched. The creeks and streams were now polluted and filling up. There is no way now that any streams in our community could have clean fresh clean water so clean that you could drink it right from the stream.

As I got older I moved away for many years away from what was once a beautiful unspoiled place that we called home. After a number of years had gone by, I went home to visit family and friends. As I turned up the road that led to our old home place everything had changed. Now on both sides of the road leading up the hollow to our old home place, the mountains had been leveled. Things had really changed. I could hardly recognize the place where I grew up. The scene of Appalachia had changed a lot and as I just realized at this very moment, it just keeps on changing.