October Sky - DanTraveling in Coalwood, West Virginia

A short drive up the mountain from Bluefield, West Virginia sits a small, seemingly abandoned coal town called Coalwood. We wove our way up to visit the town last October for the Rocket Boy's Reunion. We drove through several small coal towns, Bramwell, Maybeury, Switchback, and Keystone just to get started. Then continuing on like we were picking up bread crumbs from Hansel and Gretal, there was Vivian, Kimball, Superior, Maitland, and finally we reached Welch. When we hit Welch we were certain that the curvefest was over, but oh no, up over the mountain to Coalwood was even slower and more curvy. The thirty three mile trip from Bluefield took us over an hour. Hailing from the mountains of East Tennessee would usually prepare one for nearly any kind of road bearing topography, but nothing, and I mean nothing, is like driving through the coalfield town roads of West Virginia and thank goodness for that, it’ll keep the Starbucks and Wal-Marts out. Strike that, they went and built a Wal-Mart on the outskirts of Welch, but I don’t see a Starbucks in their future.

We actually made two separate trips to Coalwood one was on a Monday afternoon, and we only saw a handful of people in the two hour period that we spent there, but the second on October sixth in Coalwood was a different story. The town’s annual October Sky Festival was in full swing. The “Rocket Boys”, Author Homer Hickam was there, along with his long ago partners in missile-ry, Roy Lee Cooke, Billy Rose, and O’Dell Carroll . This year there were astronauts and movie stars in attendance. Well there was an astronaut or two and the fellow who played Homer’s brother in the film, Scott Miles. I really did like that the honored people in attendance such as Homer, NASA Astronaut Bill Readdy , and actor Scott Miles were very approachable. More than that they were just plain nice people. They signed endless autographs, answered questions and posed for pictures. Scott was there with his wife and young child, and in between autographs and pictures, he promoted his new film called “Little Chicago” . He and his whole family seemed to take all of it in stride. I will go see Little Chicago and likely read another one of Homer’s books, thats what I do when people are nice to me, I support their careers.

Back to the festival, Rockets were launched, by school groups from all over the country, from a field at the end of a gravel road where Homer and his compadres had launched them so many years before. There were people from all over the US and farther I am sure. I was so excited to meet some of the names I had only seen from the Coalwood website. Steve Date was there all the way from Minneapolis to continue work on his documentary about the town. Charlie Myers was up from Tennessee to participate in the fun. Charlie mans the extended town's important website. www.coalwoodwestvirginia.com

We have traveled through so many small towns and several coal towns. While waiting on the masses to arrive at the launch site, I had a moment to reflect on this phenomenon I had just witnessed, of thousands of visitors standing in the hot sun, listening to endless speeches, and standing shoulder to shoulder in a town where that is a rare thing these days. I thought wow, they really love Homer and they do, but I believe there is more to it than that.

There are so many towns like Coalwood in the Appalachians that I can’t count them on both of my hands and feet. Something changed in the coal fields around the nineteen fifties and sixties that forever impacted all the small mountain towns. The parents, mostly mothers decided that living and dyeing in a coal mine wasn’t good enough for their children. People began to focus on education. Children were raised to believe and raised to understand that if you didn’t want to end up in a hole in the ground from morning to dark digging coal you better get an education. It worked! The unfortunate part of this change of dynamics was that after so many left the coal fields to go to college and get a big fancy degree, they had to stay out of the mountains if they wanted to use it. The coal towns died. The schools shut down, and then the last of the people that were there living on any kind of fixed income went away as well. I know, I know, I’ve heard that the town died because the mine left or shut down, but that is only part of what kills a town. There are no coal mines on Okracoke Island in North Carolina. I didn’t see a single coal mine in Seagrove, North Carolina. There are none up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee either. (I should make this part more clear, towns sometime do go away because the major employer leaves it, but for some reason or another there are towns that find other ways to survive) For the most part whatever the economic reason, a town goes away because people go away. Well at least one day a year Coalwood reaps the economic benefit of the previously mentioned tourist locations.

There is one more thing that draws people to this particular festival: Homer has become an Iconic Appalachian Figure. Non Appalachian people have various ideas about what it means to be an Appalachian-American. To many outside the hills and valleys of these mountain communities, poverty is viewed as an act of laziness. It doesn’t matter how hard you may work, even two jobs, there is the perception that there must be something wrong with you if you don’t wear the today’s most popular name brand shoes and own an i-pod or two. People, especially young people, are susceptible to this kind of socio-economic pressure. With all the world at your internet fingertip, this pressure only increases, but when people from the mountains are reminded about Homer, the best selling author and former NASA engineer, raised in a coal mining town with every opportunity to fail, they can say with pride and evidence, “see, we’re as good as anyone else.”

Please check out our video on Coalwood.