subsidence

R. gene turchin

Subsidence occurs when the ceilings of the spaces carved out of coal seams collapse to the floor. The earth above shifts and sinks downward to fill the voids. Inside it is a minor cataclysmic event without observers. A violent cracking, inside the hollowed out spaces of the mine, echoes with the screams of shifting earth as the roof falls. On the surface, the ground dips and seeps lower, forming small potholes, divots, and depressions. It happens with the slowness of warm summer days. Houses ultimately suffer from the quiet straining. A small crack in a foundation wall grows into an errant branch and becomes age lines on the face of the home.

We moved into a house in West Virginia, a place heavy with wood and cast iron radiators. Thick oak boards framed the beveled glass doors and windows while small crossed wood inserts adorned the glass. Wood floors creaked underfoot. On the bank above the street it squatted like a sumo wrestler centered on a street slashed high on a hill surrounding the town.

Its aged wood and small rooms closed in on us like dank storm clouds. My mother’s dream home back in Pennsylvania was a modern ranch, a bright jewel in a spacious, sun drenched field. The chaos and newness of the move blinded us to the contrast of this old, heavy place.

My mother, Kathy, left behind her dream house, the one which, when completed in our old small town neighborhood, would have conveyed a status of success. Dad had done much of the construction himself, laying foundation block and putting up walls. It was unfinished when the Pennsylvania mines barricaded and sealed their portals with concrete block during the recession of 1958. Dad did odd jobs to keep the family afloat, but there wasn’t enough money for the mortgage and food. He traveled further away in an ever-widening circle of despair until he eventually found work at a small mine near Glenville in West Virginia. He sold himself as a mechanic. Machine maintenance was considered skilled and so paid more than regular labor. He exaggerated his experience with the thick steel machines. At home he confessed he’d seen them operated and knew what they were called. It was a small lie to learn and muddle his way through.

At first he navigated the twisted roads on weekends to come home for a few days and return to the hills on Sunday afternoon. He joked about how the highway people had followed a snake through the mountains to build the roads. Nothing straight. Nothing linear. It was the path of our life, blind twistings and turnings leading into unknowns.

During the time he was gone, she lived a transitory life in a half finished house with plywood floors, scant furniture, and two boys, my younger brother and me. Uncles drove us to the A&P store for groceries and we walked to church and school. We lived this for a year until Dad bought the old house near the top of the hill on a street, unnavigable in winter months. He made the purchase without her input, perhaps thinking it would be a pleasant surprise, to unite us again as a family. Before that he’d rented an apartment near the mine. The long drive each weekend wore on him, drawing rivers on his face and making his voice like coarse smoke. Once he’d taken us to the apartment, five hours to show us the single room in a plain white building above the Sand Fork Post Office. Mom’s unfinished house had closets bigger than the apartment. Her eyes wide, she said that a spot in the road would not be a place we could live.

Weston was a small valley town filled with the runoff and detritus of the hills. The house on the high street was within walking distance of both the single yellow brick Catholic school and the newer red brick public one. The Catholic church, an anomaly in the heart of unyielding Protestant central Appalachia, supported the out-of-place Catholics. From our point of view, only heathens and pagans attended the looming red brick structure of the public school. St. Patrick’s was a fortress. During that time, canon law forbade Catholics to set foot in the buildings of other denominations. Somehow we would be tainted by their spartan buildings. What we experienced was culture shock.

Mom felt the change hard, like the deep pressure of still air before a summer storm. She was far from her friends, her family and, except for the church, we were unwelcome strangers. Even there, the parishioners were Italian and Irish who could trace long histories back in time while we were “Hunkies,” two steps from the old country and of indeterminate origin. We reeked of strange, cabbage-laden foods and customs. Newcomers, birds not of this flock.

It broke her. No single incident. An amalgamation of small losses wore her down, wind and sand blowing against her psyche, etching at her skin and the fabric of her soul, leaving behind a pitted, scarred surface.

After we moved, the modern ranch house was either sold or repossessed by the bank. I was too young to be privy to the details or comprehend impacts. With her life disconnected from everything familiar and safe, she floated, her soul flotsam on a muddy river. She became susceptible to opportunistic diseases. A failure of mental immunity laid a path to physical collapses. Asthma. Suddenly without cause, nights became wheezing endurance battles, her breath ragged and choking, catalyzed by the fire of an internal raging anger.

I began to dread those dark nights when Dad worked the late afternoon or night shift. He called it the “hoot owl” shift.

My brother dove into innocent sleep while I worried myself awake. The hall that connected our bedrooms with Mom and Dad’s was a dark tunnel with no overhead light. The single bath, a study in old porcelain and white tile, sat on the right. A trap door in the hall served as a basement entrance and lifted to the side like the lid of a coffin. The floor creaked and groaned with steps at the entrance. A constant fear of the door giving way, subsuming me into the dark below whispered at the edge of my thoughts. I always stepped along the wall as I tiptoed to her room with visions of a roiling pit of alligators from some old horror movie lurking in the darkness. The boiler lived down there in a dark shadow under the kitchen, the same heaving furnace that supplied radiator steam in winter. There were dark things under that floor that terrified me but perhaps much less than the thought of losing my mother as she choked.

In the doorway.

“Mom, are you all right?”

Gasps and wheezes. An engine failing. No answer as she struggles to pull air through narrow pipes.

Black phone. Lifted handset, a sigh, the night operator. 

“Number, please.”

“We need an ambulance. My mother has asthma. She can’t breathe.” She asks our doctor’s name. The town is small enough so she knows whom to ring. Flashing red lights caress the ceiling through the windows.

Doctor, white shirt, rolled up sleeves. Calm and confident. Magic black leather bag. 

“Kathy,” he asks. “How are we doing?” A flicker of a smile dashes across her face. Injecting emergency epinephrine. The first time is the hardest, but there are repercussions. Doctors cost money. Some nights she was angry at me for calling. Gasping to the doctor, “I told him not to call, but he doesn’t listen.”

A sidelong glance from him and a nearly imperceptible nod allow me some validation.

Other days she hung on until Dad came in from work. I waited till one o’clock, listening and praying for the sound of his car pulling up. He found her gasping to breathe on the bed. I lay in my bed with a blanket clutched in my tight fists, hoping for him to come sooner.  He carried her to the car after coming to our room.

“I’m taking your Mom to the hospital. It’s okay,” he said and touched my head. “Keep an eye on your brother till we get back.” I wondered some nights if she would return.  

Much of West Virginia is undermined with coal seams. Houses, streets, hillsides slowly sink lower to fill the voids, a phenomenon called subsidence. 

Our family experienced subsidence. It takes years; after all, the voids are not huge. A collapse of a ceiling in an excavated section, earth, dirt, rocks, pushed by a trickle of water, filter down to replace the fall. Damp dust in the dark.

The thin tether that kept my mother from sagging down finally lost the ability to keep her grounded and she slid into the pit.