COLUMN ONE : Burnout in Coal Country : The mines of Appalachia can no longer provide the jobs to sustain the region. It is a time of unsettling change, but the area has always lived on hope.

Through the valleys and hollows and along the creeks and wandering country roads, the little mining towns of Appalachia huddle in weary isolation, as if waiting for a thankful nation once again to embrace the power of coal.

For more than 100 years, the thick coal-laden seams that reach back into the wooded hills have sustained the men of these coal camps who, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, disappeared each day into the bowels of the earth. By custom, from somewhere in the sunlight, outside the tunnel’s mouth, a voice always called out as they slipped into the damp blackness: “Y’all have a safe trip, ya hear.”

The money was good and still is--Virginia miners average $35,000 a year--and that’s what brought the people here and kept them here and held them hostage, to the dream of steady work and often to the company store. It was a laborious life, seeped in danger and disease, but in the end the coal fields were as benevolent as the church: They took good care of decent men who were long on endurance and short on education.

Now all that is changing. Coal still provides 57% of the nation’s energy and consumption is up, but competition has driven down the price commanded by high-quality Virginia and West Virginia coal. The use of huge “longwall” mining machines in the larger deep-shaft mines has made new operations prohibitively expensive even as it has reduced the number of miners needed.

“I’ll tell you something,” said Gratten Webb, 64. He leaned over his cup of coffee in Richlands, Va., and spoke softly in a confidential voice. “You see those fellows, behind me by the wall? They’re miners, retired. They got black lung. But with their pensions and benefits, they’re not doing bad. Course, you got to take into account their health is ruined.”

Like most of the men in the coffee shop, Webb had quit school early, in the seventh grade, to enter the mines. “My father didn’t speak to me for a month. He said: ‘Get your schooling, boy, the jobs’ll always be here waiting.’ ” His father, though, had left school in the third grade. “Lord, after 31 years in the mines he’d worked himself nearly to death and could hardly walk.”

His grandfather, too, had spent a lifetime running coal. “By the time he died in 19-’n’-36, he had 137 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now there’s Webbs all around here.”

Webb himself invested wisely and is comfortably well off. But of the next generation of Webbs, his nine nephews, Webb says: “They’ve all left the area. They know there’s no future in coal.”

All across Appalachia other miners echo similar sentiments these days. It is as though the nine-month strike in 1989 against the Pittston Coal Group’s mines in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky was a harbinger of something more worrisome yet: Coal can no longer provide the jobs to sustain a region.

In 15 years’ time the number of mining jobs in Virginia has fallen from 15,000 to 9,000, and with the coal market softening, the little coal camps tucked away in the deep ravines of Appalachia are turning into ghost towns, reminiscent of what happened in Montana and Arizona when the gold and silver mines no longer paid their way.

The coal processing plant in GaryVa.--once the largest in the world--is being demolished. Pittston has announced the eventual closure of its Sea B No. 1 mine outside Richlands, with the loss of 80 jobs. The Island Creek VP No. 1 mine in Oakwood, Va., will close too, resulting in 340 more layoffs, if the outlook does not improve by 1993. Many other mines are cutting back on their work forces and reducing shift hours.

Bobby Strouth, the local union president, says he is not angry and can’t blame anyone; he’s just sorry for the miners. “Some men have been there 19 years,” he told the Richlands News-Press. “It’s really like a big family. It hurts when they ask me: ‘Where do we go, what do we do now?’ I can’t answer that.”

The still plentiful resource that Strouth’s men thought would provide for their families forever--the resource that once heated the nation’s homes, fueled its industrial age and powered the westward expansion--has dropped in value for many reasons: the recession, the decline in the steel industry, temperate winters and summers (80% of domestic coal is used by electric utilities), environmental legislation and Washington’s indifference to developing coal as an alternative energy source to oil. Meanwhile, foreign markets have become so competitive that Virginia--the nation’s seventh-largest producer--operated its utilities on some occasions last year with cheaper coal imported from Colombia.

George McGonagle, who runs a mining supply company, settled into his seat at Bowen Field the other evening to watch the Bluefield Orioles take on the Martinsville Phillies in the Appalachian League. A season ticket for the minor league baseball club costs $25, and by buying surplus buns at the bakery each afternoon the team manages to keep the price of hotdogs at $1. In the stands that night there was as much talk of coal as there was of baseball.

“I started this business 14 years ago and it’s been steadily downhill ever since,” McGonagle said. “If steel would turn around, that would help as much as anything, but I really don’t see much happening. I never thought I’d live to see coal peter out.”

“I think everyone realizes it is petering out, George,” said his friend, John Duffy, a professor of civil engineering technology at Bluefield State College. “The black stuff will always be around to burn, but will it be economical? That’s the question. We’re going to have to find other things to move the economy along--timber, tourism, other industries.”

The paradox of the plight facing Appalachia is that, nationwide, the U.S coal industry in 1990 marked its fourth consecutive year of record consumption and production, and exported 105 million tons to 30 countries. But more production no longer means more jobs.

Computer-controlled machines eat through walls of coal, where once perhaps a hundred men toiled; electric belts and carriages carry miners and supplies and coal that years ago were hauled by dogs and ponies; hand-held digital meters measure methane levels, just as canaries in cages once did: when the birds dropped dead, the gas levels were considered dangerously high.

Gratten Webb, the retired miner in Richlands, remembers the days of canaries and picks and company stores, and one afternoon not long ago he traveled up a narrow hollow in a friend’s Bronco to visit the Jewell Valley mine, where he used to work. “Lord,” he said, his eyes sweeping over the deserted, weed-clogged parking lot and the abandoned buildings, “there’s nothing left.”

Inside the mine’s red-brick bath house swallows swooped overhead and miners’ soot-covered overalls hung on pegs where they had been placed after the last shift nearly eight years ago. The rows of white clapboard company homes stood windowless and abandoned, the church had been stripped of its pews, the movie theater had no door. The little restaurant was empty, except for a stove, and in the barren company store, a sign pointing at nothing advised: “Quick Check Out. 5 Items or Less.”

Driving out of Jewell Valley, past the ghostly processing plant that loomed over the forgotten town, Webb noted that he hadn’t used coal to heat his home for 25 years. “Even if you wanted to,” he said, “I don’t think there’s any place that’d deliver you a ton of coal these days anyway.”

Although the coal-camp communities may be doomed, the larger service-center and rail towns along Route 460--among them Bluefield, Tazewell, Richlands and Oakwood--are making serious attempts to diversify their economies and escape the fate of Jewell Valley. Two cents from every ton of coal sold is put into a county fund used to attract new industries, and community colleges are offering courses to retrain miners for new careers.

Increased tourism promotion also is being considered. After all, people ask, if tourists flock to Bannack, Mont., why not to new ghost towns like Jewell Valley?

“The problem is,” said Bluefield historian Stuart McGehee, “you mention coal and people think of negative stuff. Black lung. Poverty. Soot. The very nature of the mineral gives a negative connotation, and it’s a tough product to market. So what you’re seeing here is a region that is returning to its pre-industrial roots. It’s not a pretty thing to see happen.”

But Appalachia has always lived on hope, and although everything is changing in its towns nothing seems different. Miners still head to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for a week’s vacation every summer, driving cars whose bumper stickers salute “Coal--America’s Security Blanket.” Johnny Barker delivers his milk from the family dairy, as he has for years, door to door; the roller skating rinks and bowling alleys are filled on Saturdays, and the Norfolk Southern snakes through town, hauling 120 coal-laden cars toward the ports. Its whistle wails in the night and the people pause and feel good.

The other day, on a hilltop outside Bristol, Va., Richard Wolfe, president of Coal Technology Corp., spoke of that hope when he dedicated a pilot plant utilizing a new process to convert coal into liquids that can be refined for gasoline and into coke briquettes used for steel-making. About 50 people--the women in bright summer dresses, the men in suits--took their places on the folding chairs that Wolfe’s assistants had arranged in three neat rows before a makeshift outdoor stage adorned with potted plants.

Wolfe stood at the lectern between two American flags and told how he had, on a restaurant menu, sketched out the idea for the plant eight years earlier. The wind whipped across the hill, rustling the elms and poplars. The two flags flapped wildly, brushing against Wolfe’s face and from time to time he had to pause to wrap one or the other around its staff.

“We have at our fingertips the beginning of a whole new world in coal technology . . . .” he said. “When America marshals its resources, like we did against Iraq in the Persian Gulf, there is nothing we can’t accomplish . . . . This is an exciting step forward. We no longer have to be hostage to the Arab countries . . . .”

After the ceremony, Wolfe, holding a can of Diet Pepsi, took his guests through the small plant. His two sons also worked for the company, and no, he said, the generational continuity of the coal industry wasn’t ending, nor was coal a moribund resource for Appalachia. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was just a matter of summoning up the courage and ingenuity to deal with change, he said.