Drinking Dirty Water

Dealing With Feeling Inferior

As a young child, I thought we were poor because we lived in a trailer.

Looking back after all these years, though, I can say we weren’t poor poor in those early days; we always had food, clothing, and a roof over our heads. My brother and I had bikes and toys. I’m pretty sure we were never on “relief”, which is what welfare was called back then.

However, I felt like we were poor because we did not live in a house. I recall being envious of house people. And, rightly or wrongly, I thought people who lived in houses looked down on us. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I simply invented it in my child’s mind. Maybe I was just projecting onto the rest of the world how I felt about myself.

I don’t know, I was just a kid and it was a long time ago.

I should have talked to the family elders about all of this when I had the chance. But, it’s too late. They’re all gone and now I’m a family elder.

My father held several jobs throughout his life. When I was a young boy, for a few years he was employed by a strip mining company. For those who don’t know, a strip mine is an above ground coal mine. The land is scraped free of trees and vegetation, then they bring in a humongous machine called a dragline, which has a long boom with a giant bucket attached with thick, heavy cables. The dragline digs the topsoil away, exposing the vein of coal underneath. Then it digs out the coal. If it sounds like an environmental nightmare, it’s only because it is. I don’t know how they do it now, but that’s how it was done then.

This is a dragline.

My dad hired on with a company that was going to open a strip mine in the woods directly across the road from where we lived. I imagine he was pretty happy about getting a job just a few minutes from our front door. He actually helped clear the land with a bulldozer. I know this because one day when the operation was shut down, probably on a Sunday, we walked over there and he let me ride with him on the bulldozer as he knocked down a couple of small trees. As I recall, it was very exciting. We also went inside the dragline and looked around in there. Pretty cool experience for a young lad.

The fact that my father had a job and could walk to work was a great thing for our little family. However, there was a downside - a big one. The strip mine ruined our water supply. I don’t know all the details, but I do remember not being able to drink the water from our faucets anymore. We shared a well with my grandparents who lived next door, and sometime after the dragline started digging, our water got really rusty and dirty and smelly. I remember my dad, along with my grandfather, and maybe one or two of my mother’s brothers, periodically had to pull the pump out of the well and drag it into the yard to clean the rust and gunk out of the lines as best they could.

Eventually, the water did clear up enough for bathing and for washing our clothes, although we still couldn’t drink it. For drinking water, we would pile into my dad’s truck and head to a natural spring that was located along the railroad tracks four or five miles away. The spring water flowed from a pipe stuck in the side of a bluff in the woods, and we’d fill a bunch of five gallon plastic containers with spring water for use at home.

Us kids thought of it as an adventure. Sometimes a train would come through, close enough to spit on if we were so inclined. It was exciting to be so close to a moving train. In the winter, we would drive back in there as far as we could, and if the snow was too deep, we would have to load our sleds with the water cans and go the rest of the way on foot. That wasn’t so much fun.

To my knowledge, the water was never cleaned up, and we were never compensated by the coal company. We were still getting water from along the railroad tracks years later when I left home for good.

This is a recent picture of the pipe in the hillside where we used to get our drinking water many decades ago. The railroad tracks are gone and the area around it has changed, but the water is still flowing.

I have wondered if anyone ever talked to the coal company about our water. I would be surprised to learn if any of our family ever hired a lawyer to look into it. Nobody had the money for that. Plus, my father needed his job and suing his employer probably seemed like a good way to lose it.

Besides, it was common knowledge that many of these coal companies would simply go out of business and open up again under a different name to avoid their obligations. For example, after they were done extracting the coal, the companies were supposed to reclaim the land by filling in the giant hole in the ground and planting trees. Often though, they just declared bankruptcy and abandoned the land after they got all the coal. There were many abandoned strip mines in our area. The open pit across the road from us was there for decades, until someone finally bought the land and filled it in.

The coal companies acted with impunity because they knew most people couldn’t afford the large amounts of money and the many years it would take to untangle everything in a court of law.

We didn’t deserve this.

When I reflect on those long ago days, sometimes life seemed like such a struggle for us. My father was the hardest worker I’ve ever known, so if life was difficult, it wasn’t because he wasn’t trying. I know he was. But, at least in those early times, there was almost an attitude like, since we didn’t have anything, we didn’t deserve anything, so we shouldn’t expect anything to be better than it is. I know some folks are like that. Was that us? I really don’t know.

I mean, I’m sure none of us thought we deserved to drink dirty water. Perhaps because life seemed so full of obstacles, our water problem was just another thing to work around.

I believe things improved a bit for us when my dad got a job at the Westinghouse factory in a nearby town. It may have been the first time he was making a consistent, livable wage. And, after a few years, and the arrival of a few more siblings, we were able to get out of that little 35 foot trailer. You’d think that would have made me happy.

Unfortunately (at least in my snotty, little teenaged mind), we moved into another trailer, albeit a new 65 footer. Certainly it was a plus to have more room and it was nice to have something brand new . . . but it was still a damn trailer. As an adult, I can look back and say it shouldn’t have bothered me.

But, it did.

Our original trailer.

I’ve searched that part of my brain that houses childhood memories, and I can’t recall any specific incidents of people making fun of us for living in a trailer. I think my feelings of inferiority sprouted from my own confused mind. And, in my experience, those kinds of destructive feelings are the most difficult to conquer.

I don’t believe we deserved to drink dirty water. However, if I’ve learned anything in my many years of life, it’s that what we think we deserve, or do not deserve, is meaningless.

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