Comical, conical hills appear, like the hills in hillbilly comic strips—Snuffy Smith, Li’l Abner—with sagging gray shacks snagged on their summits. The leafless trees of winter, looking like the bristles on a brush, stand against the skyline. In each yeoman’s frontyard there is a great pile of coal. Prepared for winter. The deadly fumes of coal smoke float on the breeze. Somewhere nearby, somebody’s home and farm is being disemboweled by dragline, Euclid and power shovel to provide such fuel for this person in the shack, for TV A and Oak Ridge (“sub-capital of Death”), for Con Edison, etc., for you and me. Vast crimes are being committed in this region, whole hillsides raped and robbed, life systems that required ages for their weaving ripped apart.

But it’s all legal. As local boosters eagerly point out, strip mining does provide jobs as well as fuel the turbines. What would you have those men do, weave baskets? fire bricks? bake biscuits? We’ll have more on this matter later. And who, you might be thinking, is “they”? That referenceless pronoun. Nobody knows exactly who “they” are, that’s part of the trouble. They is It, that’s all I know, that fantastic labyrinthine sky-towering ziggurat of iron and stone, paper and wire, glass and aluminum and cement, habit and obedience through which we creep and scurry in our channeled runways, us 200 million nice, neat mice. Call it The Leaning Tower of Babel. Call it what you will, it’s the greatest thing since Atlantis went down with all aboard, explosions in the boiler room and rockets firing at the moon.

We drive through fields of dead goldenrod in the gray chill air of December. Snow gleams in bald patches on the blue mountains beyond. We pass tawny hills, more ramshackle shacks and pause for a while at a deserted crossroads to contemplate an abandoned country store.

The store just sits there in the cloud-filtered daylight, its old silvery clapboards warped and sprung, shakes dangling from the edge of the roof, screen-door ajar and hanging by one rusty hinge, the long front porch sagging in the middle, the whole aching creaking vacant structure canted to the east, in line I suppose with the prevailing winds.

We read and photograph the messages placarded in tin on the walls:

CHESTERFIELDS ARE BEST FOR YOU
DRINK DR. PEPPER
DRINK COCA-COLA
DRINK NESBITT’S CALIFORNIA ORANGE
TAKE HOME KERN’S BREAD
TRY W. E. GARRETT & SONS’ SWEET, MILD SNUFF:
A TASTE TREAT
BUY MERITA BREAD VITAMIN-ENRICHED

Failure. Capitalism sounds good in theory but look at this old store. Heartbreak and bankruptcy. The metal signs are rusting, they are loose, they flap and rattle in the wind. We pass on.

Past rocky pastures. Beautiful gray-green boulders mottled with lichen rise from, or sink into, the tough winter grass. Cows lounge about in the vicinity, picking their teeth, not getting much accomplished. Sumac and willow stand with glowing leaves and glowing skin along the fence rows. Mighty white oaks grow on the higher ground, their dried-out red leathery leaves still clinging to the stems.