Work — and death — is a way of life

Associated Press

DRY CREEK, W.Va.

Down the road from the disaster scene at the Upper Big Branch Mine, two unassuming brick buildings stand side by side, hugging the bank of the Big Coal River. One is the Assembly of God Church; the other is the meeting hall of Local 6608 of the United Mine Workers Union.

When you make your living digging coal, miner Albert T. Bonds says, you’d better have God and family behind you.

“It’s a tight bunch — and a religious bunch — that’s up and down the river,” says Bonds, 51, who worked 27 years underground, eight of them at the Massey Energy Co. mine in nearby Montcoal, where 25 were killed and four are still missing in an explosion Monday. “And it’s a good place to grow up and be.”

But to grow up here is to know that death, massive and swift, can come at any time. It hit home four years ago, when 12 miners died at the Sago Mine in the northeastern corner of the state, and again Monday when methane gas apparently ignited, causing the blast.

Benny R. Willingham, who died in Monday’s explosion, was just five weeks from retirement. His daughter, Michelle McKinney, says he was looking forward to a Virgin Island cruise but also was prepared for death.

“He talked about it all the time. He said if the Lord come and got him, he’s ready,” she said Tuesday as she clutched a photo of her parents and their youngest grandson. “He was a family man and he loved the Lord. We know where he’s at, but we still want him to come back.”

In isolated places such as Raleigh County, there has never been much of a choice besides coal, timber and low-paying service jobs.

“That’s what you get when you live in this area,” said Terry Holstein, 49, a mine electrician. “Because that’s all we have.”

Unincorporated towns — neighborhoods really — cling to the banks of the Big Coal and up into the surrounding hollows. Covered conveyor belts snake up the sawtooth hills behind the clusters of houses, illuminating the moutainsides like strings of Christmas lights at night.

Holstein was supposed to start his underground shift at the Oak Hill mine at 5 a.m. Tuesday, but his boss told him to come in when he felt like it. At 7:15, he was just arriving at Charles B. Jarrell General Merchandise in Dry Creek to buy his day’s supply of cigarettes: three packs of USA Full Flavors.

His boss “wanted to make sure our heads was right and stuff before we went in there,” Holstein said as he stood on the store’s cinderblock porch. “I wanted to be safe about what I’m doing and make sure I really wanted to go up there and do my job, and that I could do it right and safe.”

As a herd of painted horses grazed on a hillside studded with redbud and dogwood trees in the slowly lifting mist, miners filed into the Jarrell store, their work pants striped with the telltale orange reflective tape, their rough hands stained with coal dust that can never be fully scrubbed off. The store, with its creaky, wooden floors and dust-stained American flag, stocks everything from chewing tobacco and hose clamps to 50-pound salt blocks and apple deer corn for hunting season.

The oldest continuously run business in the county, it also doubles as Dry Creek’s Post Office.

Although the names of all the dead had yet to be officially released Tuesday morning, store manager Lavon Collins was sure each would be a familiar one.