The creeks flowed a lifeless blend of yellow and orange... [View all]

[WCGreen]

Sometimes they smelled like rotten eggs but most of the time they just flowed down from the mountain were the coal mining was done. This was before fracking, before mountain top mining, before strip mining had come in to favor.

There were deep mines around, many abandoned when they the seem petered out. They just left all their stuff and moved on, chasing after another seem. There were a lot of abandon mines shouting out from the sides of the mountains. We were warned to stay out of them mines which made them all the enticing.

Right around eight o'clock they would sound the lunch siren for the second shift which my grandma called the go to bed siren. That's when we all came into the house after running around the yard, chasing the chickens or standing to count the coal cars on the train as it ran by. Most of the little ones got to the teens and lost interest but the older kids counted them down and argued how man cars that train was pulling. Sometimes there was two locomotives and we would try to get the engineer to wave and blow his horn.

All the ground water at the borough level reeked of farts. The conditioners got most of the stink out but couldn't rinse the taste away.

So we drove up into the mountains, higher than the mines, with gallon plastic jugs to get the cooking and drinking water from natural streams. Up home in Cleveland we drank kool aide, at grandma's house we drank sweet drinks from the supermarket over at the county seat.