Coal has stalked Junior Walk his entire life. He remembers his elementary school in the mountainous southern reaches of West Virginia being caked in coal dust, and the representatives from the nearby mine showing up to hand them out mollifying squeezable toys in the shape of lumps of coal.
That school was subsequently shuttered and is now wreathed in weeds, a replacement established a few miles away to escape the shadow of the mine. Walk’s childhood home sits a few hundred yards from another mine, Black Eagle, that spectacularly disgorges coal via a conveyer belt into a huge heap by the main road, like a sort of Stygian waterfall.
