**Everything in Its Path**

**Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood**

**Kai T. Erikson**

**Collective Trauma: Loss of Community**

The disaster stretched human nerves to their outer edge. Those of us who
did not experience it can never really comprehend the full horror of
that day, but we can at least appreciate why it should cause such misery
and why it should leave so deep a scar on the minds of those who lived
through it. Our imagination can reach across the gulf of personal
experience and begin to re-create those parts of the scene that touch
the senses. Our eyes can almost see a burning black wave lashing down
the hollow and taking everything in its path. The ears can almost hear a
roar like thunder, pierced by screams and explosions and the crack of
breaking timbers. The nostrils can almost smell the searing stench of
mine wastes and the sour odor of smoke and death and decay. All this we
can begin to picture because the mind is good at imagery.

But the people of Buffalo Creek suffered a good deal more that day, for
they were wrenched out of their communities, torn from the human
surround in which they had been so deeply enmeshed. Much of the drama
drains away when we begin to talk about such things, partly because the
loss of communality seems a step removed from the vivid terror of the
event itself and partly because the people of the hollow, so richly
articulate when describing the flood and their reaction to it, do not
really know how to express what their separation from the familiar
tissues of home has meant to them. The closeness of communal ties is
experienced on Buffalo Creek as a part of the natural order of things,
and residents can no more describe that presence than fish are aware of
the water they swim in. It is just there, the envelope in which they
live, and is taken entirely for granted. In this chapter, then, as in
the preceding ones, I will use quotations freely, but one must now
listen even more carefully for the feelings behind the words as well as
registering the content of the words themselves.

I use the term "communality" here rather than "community" in order to
underscore the point that people are not referring to particular village
territories when they lament the loss of community but to the network of
relationships that make up their general human surround. The persons who
constitute the center of that network are usually called "neighbors,"
the word being used in its Biblical sense to identify those whom one
shares bonds of intimacy and a feeling of mutual concern. The people of
Buffalo Creek are "neighbor" people," which is a local way of referring
to a style of relationship long familiar among social scientists.
Toennies called it "gemeinschaft," Cooley called it "primary," Durkheim
called it "mechanical," Redfield called it "folk," and every generation
of social scientists since has found other ways to express the same
thought, one of the most recent being Herbert Gans's concept of "person
orientation."

*What's a neighbor? Well, when I went to my neighbor's house on Saturday
or Sunday, if I wanted a cup of coffee I never waited until the lady of
the house asked me. I just went into the dish cabinet and got me a cup
of coffee or a glass of juice just like it was my own home. They come to
my house, they done the same. See?*

*We was like one big family. Like when somebody was hurt, everybody was
hurt. You know, I guess it was because it was the same people all the
time. I don't know how to explain it. It's a good feeling. It's more
than friends. If someone was hurt, everybody was concerned, everybody.
If somebody lost a member of their family, they was always there.
Everybody was around bringing you something to eat, trying to help. It's
a deeper feeling.*

*Here, if you have a neighbor, it's somebody you know, it's somebody
that maybe you take them to the store. I mean, to us neighbors are
people that we have. We just know each other, that's all.*

*Neighbor? It means relationship. It means kin. It means friend you
could depend on. You never went to a neighbor with a complaint that they
didn't listen to or somebody didn't try to help you with. That's a
neighbor. When you wanted a baby-sitter you went next door and they'd
baby-sit. Or you did something for them. They'd either need something or
we'd need something, you know. When you see somebody going down the
road, it's "Where are you going?" "To the store." "Well, bring me back
such and such."*

A neighbor, then, is someone you can relate to without pretense, a
familiar and reliable part of your everyday environment; a neighbor is
someone you treat as if he or she were a member of your immediate
family. A good deal has been said in the literature on Appalachia about
the clannishness of mountain life, but on Buffalo Creek, as in many coal
camps, this sense of tribal attachment reaches beyond linkages of kin to
include a wider circle, and the obligations one feels toward the people
within that circle are not unlike the obligations one normally feels
toward one's own family.

In good times, then, every person on Buffalo Creek looks out at the
larger community from a fairly intimate neighborhood niche. If we were
to devise a map representing the average person's social world, we would
capture at least the main contours by drawing a number of concentric
circles radiating out from the individual centerthe inner ring
encompassing one's immediate family, the next ring encompassing one's
closest neighbors, the third encompassing the familiar people with whom
one relates on a regular basis, and the fourth encompassing the other
people whom one recognizes as a part of the Buffalo Creek community even
though one does not really know them well. Beyond the outermost of those
rings is the rest of the world, the terrain populated by what an older
generation called "foreigners." Given the size of Buffalo Creek, it is
obvious that the community contained people who were relative strangers
to one another. Yet there was a clear sense of kinship linking even
those relative strangers togetheralthough, as we shall see shortly,
that sense of kinship turned out to depend to a greater degree than
people realized on the security of one's neighborhood niche.

Communality on Buffalo Creek can best be described as a state of mind
shared among a particular gathering of people, and this state of mind,
by definition, does not lend itself to sociological abstraction. It does
not have a name or a cluster of distinguishing properties. It is a quiet
set of understandings that become absorbed into the atmosphere and are
thus a part of the natural order. The remarks below, for example, are
separate attempts by a husband and wife to explain the nature of those
"understandings."

*Braeholm was more like a family. We had a sort of understanding. If
someone was away, then we sort of looked after each other's property. We
didn't do a lot of visiting, but we had a general understanding. If we
cooked something, we would exchange dishes. It was sort of a close-knit
type of thing.*

*Before the disaster, the neighbors, we could look out and tell when one
another needed help or when one was sick or something was disturbing
that person. We could tell from the lights. If the lights was on late at
night, we knew that something unusual was going on and we would go over.
Sometimes I'd come in from work on a cold day and my neighbor would have
a pot of soup for me. There was just things you wouldn't think about. I
would look forward to going to the post office. If my car wouldn't
start, all I'd have to do is call my neighbors and they would take me to
work. If I was there by myself or something, if my husband was out late,
the neighbors would come over and check if everything was okay. So it
was just a rare thing. It was just a certain type of relationship that
you just knew from people growing up together and sharing the same
experiences.*

And the key to that network of understandings was a constant readiness
to look after one's neighbors, or, rather, to know without being asked
what needed to be done.

*If you had problems, you wouldn't even have to mention it. People would
just know what to do. They'd just pitch in and help. Everyone was
concerned about everyone else.*

*I don't think there was a better place in the world to live. People was
there when you needed them. You got sick, they helped you. If you needed
help of any kind, you got it. You didn't even have to ask for it. Now
I'm a person that didn't make friends easy. I wasn't hard to get along
with, I just didn't mix. But I knew everybody, andwell, I just don't
know no way to explain it to you, to make you see it.*

*You'd just have to experience it, I guess, to really know. It was
wonderful. Like when my father died. My neighbors all came in and they
cleaned my house, they washed my clothes, they cooked. I didn't do
nothing. They knew what to do. I mean it's just like teamwork, you know.
If one of the kids was sick, they'd drop every what they were doing,
take the kid to the hospital or sit up all night with him. It was just
good. How did they know when you needed help? I don't know how to
explain it, really. The morning my daddy diedhe died in Loganmy aunt
called me and told me on the phone at about ten o'clock in the morning,
and I had just got time to get off the phone and go set on the bed and
in come three of my neighbors. They knew it that quick. I don't know
how. They just knew.*

The difficulty is that when you invest so much of yourself in that kind
of social arrangement you become absorbed by it, almost captive to it,
and the larger collectivity around you becomes an extension of your own
personality, an extension of your own flesh. This means that not only
are you diminished as a person when that surrounding tissue is stripped
away, but that you are no longer able to reclaim as your own the
emotional resources you invested in it. To be "neighborly" is not a
quality you can carry with you into a new situation like negotiable
emotional currency; the old community was your niche in the classic
ecological sense, and your ability to relate to that niche is not a
skill easily transferred to another setting. This is true whether you
move into another community, as was the case with the first speaker
below, or whether a new set of neighbors moves in around your old home,
as was the case with the second.

*Well, I have lost all my friends. The people I was raised up and lived
with, they're scattered. I don't know where they're at. I've got to make
new friends, and that's a hard thing to do. You don't make new friends
and feel towards them like you did the people you lived with. See, I
raised my family there. We moved there in '35 and stayed there. I knew
everybody in the camp and practically everybody on Buffalo, as far as
that is concerned. But down here, there ain't but a few people I know,
and you don't feel secure around people you don't know.*

*Neighbors. We used to have our children at home, we didn't go to
hospitals to have children. The one on this side of me, them two in the
back of me, this one in front of methey all lived there and we all had
our children together. Now I've got all new neighbors. I even asked my
husband to put our home up for sale, and he said, "What do you think
we're going to do? We're old people, we can't take to buy another home."
And I said, "I don't care what you do with it, I'm not staying here. I
can't tell you in words what's the matter." I said, "I don't care if we
go to the moon, let's just get out of here. I'm just not interested
enough anymore. You go out the back door here and there's a new
neighbor. In front of me is a new neighbor and on the other side of me
is a new neighbor. It's just not the same home that I've been living in
for thirty-five years. It's just not the same to me."*

A community of the sort we are talking about here derives from and
depends on an almost perfect democracy of the spirit, where people are
not only assumed to be equal in status but virtually identical in
temperament and outlook. Classes of people may be differentiated for
certain purposeswomen from men, adults from children, whites from
blacks, and so onbut individual persons are not distinguished from one
another on the basis of rank, occupation, style of life, or even
recreational habits. This is not hard to understand as a practical
matter. The men all work at the same jobs; the women all command
domestic territories of roughly the same original size and quality; the
children all attend the same schools as an apprenticeship for the same
futures; and everybody buys the same goods at the same stores from
equivalent paychecks. Yet the leveling tendency goes even beyond that,
for the people of the hollow, like the people of Appalachia generally,
do not like to feel different from their fellows and tend to see status
distinctions of any kind as fissures in the smooth surface of the
community. Good fences may make good neighbors in places like New
Hampshire, where relationships depend on cleanly marked parcels of
individual space, but they are seen as lines of division in places like
Buffalo Creek.

In most of the urban areas of America, each individual is seen as a
separate being, with careful boundaries drawn around the space he or she
occupies as a discrete personage. Everyone is presumed to have an
individual name, an individual mind, an individual voice, and above all,
an individual sense of selfso much so that persons found deficient in
any of those qualities are urged to take some kind of remedial action
such as undergoing psychotherapy, participating in a consciousness
raising group, or reading one of a hundred different manuals on
self-actualization. This way of looking at things, however, has hardly
any meaning at all in most Appalachia. There, boundaries are drawn
around whole groups of people, not around separate individuals with egos
to protect and potentialities to realize; and a person's mental health
is measured less by his capacity to express his inner self than by his
capacity to submerge that self into a larger communal whole.

It was once fashionable in the social sciences generally to compare
human communities to living organisms. Scholars anxious to make the kind
of distinction I am wrestling with now would argue that persons who
belong to traditional communities relate to one another in much the same
fashion as the cells of a body: they are dependent on one another for
definition, they do not have any real function or identity apart from
the contribution they make to the whole organization, and they suffer a
form of death when separated from that larger tissue. Science may have
gained something when this analogy was abandoned, but it may have lost
something, too, for a community of the kind being discussed here *does*
bear at least a figurative resemblance to an organism. In places like
Buffalo Creek, the community in general can be described as the locus
for activities that are normally regarded as the exclusive property of
individuals. It is the *community* that cushions pain, the *community*
that provides a context for intimacy, the *community* that represents
morality and serves as the repository for old traditions.

Now one has to realize when talking like this that one is in danger of
drifting off into a realm of metaphor. Communities do not have hearts or
sinews or ganglia; they do not suffer or rationalize or experience joy.
But the analogy does help suggest that a cluster of people acting in
concert and moving to the same collective rhythms can allocate their
personal resources in such a way that the whole comes to have more
humanity than its constituent parts. In effect, people put their own
individual resources at the disposal of the groupplacing them in the
communal store, as it wereand then draw on that reserve supply for the
demands of everyday life. And if the whole community more or less
disappears, as happened on Buffalo Creek, people find that they cannot
take advantage of the energies they once invested in the communal store.
They find that they are almost empty of feeling, empty of affection,
empty of confidence and assurance. It is as if the individual cells had
supplied raw energy to the whole body but did not have the means to
convert that energy back into a usable personal form once the body was
no longer there to process it. When an elderly woman on Buffalo Creek
said softly, "I just don't take no interest in nothing like I used to, I
don't have no feeling for nothing, I feel like I'm drained of life," she
was reflecting a spirit still unable to recover for its own use all the
life it had signed over to the community.

I am going to propose, then, that most of the traumatic symptoms
experienced by the Buffalo Creek survivors are a reaction to the loss of
communality as well as a reaction to the disaster itself, that the fear
and apathy and demoralization one encounters along the entire length of
the hollow are derived from the shock of being ripped out of a
meaningful community setting as well as the shock of meeting that cruel
black water. The line between the two is difficult to draw, as one
survivor suggested:

*We can't seem to put it all together. We try, but it just isn't there.
It may be the shock of the disaster or the aftermath of it all. I don't
know. It's hard to separate the two.*

But it seems clear that much of the agony experienced on Buffalo Creek
is related to the fact that the hollow is quiet, devastated, without
much in the way of a nourishing community life. What is Buffalo Creek
like now? The shorter answers were crisp and to the point.

*It is almost like a ghost town now.*

*It has changed from the community of paradise to Death Valley.*

*Some reason or other, it's not the same. Seems like it's frozen.*

*I don't know. A dreary hollow is how it seems to me.*

*It's like a graveyard, that's what. A cemetery.*

And the longer answers seemed almost to fuse together into a long litany
of despair. There is something missing, something gone; and that
something is very hard to pin down.

*I have found that most of the people are depressed, unhappy, mournful,
sick. When you go up Buffalo Creek the only remains you see is an
occasional house here and there. The people who are living in the
trailers have a depressed and worried look on their faces. You don't see
children out playing and running as before. Buffalo Creek looks like a
deserted, forsaken place.*

*What I miss most is the friendliness and closeness of the people of
Buffalo Creek. The people are changed from what they were before the
disaster. Practically everyone seems despondent and undecided, as if
they were waiting for something and did not know what. They can't
reconcile themselves to the fact that things will never be the same
again.*

*The best I could tell you, what lives on Buffalo Creek lives in sorrow.
I've talked to so many people and they are so tore up. Some of them just
don't care anymore. There's a part of us all missing somewhere.*

*It's kind of sad around there now. There's not much happiness. You
don't have any friends around, people around, like we had before. Some
of them are in the trailer camps. Some of them bought homes and moved
away. Some of them just left and didn't come back. It's like teeth in an
old folk's mouth down there now.*

*This whole thing is a nightmare, actually. Our life-style has been
disrupted, our home destroyed. We lost many things we loved, and we
think about those things. We think about our neighbors and friends we
lost. Our neighborhood was completely destroyed, a disaster area.
There's just an open field there now and grass planted where they were
many homes and many people lived.*

*We did lose a community, and I mean it was a good community. Everybody
was close, everybody knowed everybody. But now everybody is alone. They
act like they're lost. They've lost their homes and their way of life,
the one they liked, the one they was used to. All the houses are gone,
every one of them. The people are gone, scattered. You don't know who
your neighbor is going to be. You can't go next door and talk. You can't
do that no more, there's no next door. You can't laugh with friends. You
can't do that no more because there's not friends around to laugh with.
That don't happen no more. There's nobody around to even holler at and
say "Hi," and you can't help but miss that. You haven't got nobody to
talk to. The people that is there are so busy trying to put back what
they have lost.*

And so it goes. The observer listening in on all this has to confront
two related problems. The firs of those problems, of course, is that the
words people are accustomed to using in everyday speech seem pale and
insubstantial when assigned the job of conveying so immense a subject.
This is true for survivors who are trying to find ways to express their
sense of loss, but it is also true for observers who are looking for
ways to pose questions. At one point in the study, realizing that I
would never have time to interview everyone in the plaintiff group, I
sent a questionnaire to some five hundred persons asking for a few brief
answers to a few crisp questions. Some of those answers have appeared in
the material presented so far, and others will appear later. But most of
the answers reached so far beyond the questions that I did not really
know what to do with them. It was as if I had asked people to compress a
world of grief in the space reserved for a sentence or two. "What do you
miss most about the old community?"

*All my family were killed here. My old home is gone and I can't tell
where it used to be. I don't know where any of my friends are now. I
never see anyone anymore.*

Once the observed gets over his embarrassment at having tried to
confront so deep a pain with so casual an inquiry, he begins to
recognize the futility of trying to convert everything into the coin of
words. And yet the emotion behind the words seems easy enough to detect
if one searches for it. One must look for the particular in a comment as
general as this:

*Everything has changed. Nothing is the same. The people that were left
up there has changed. They don't seem like the same people I once knew.
It don't look like the same place.*

And one must look for the general in a comment as particular as this:

*I miss my house and furnishings and clothing, which I have very little
of now. I had a large yard, two shade trees. I miss it very much. I miss
the pictures from the school yearbook. A lot of things. It's hard to
explain.*

The second problem has to do with the extraordinary repetitiveness of
the comments people make, a problem we have already encountered. This
study is based on thousands of pages of transcript material, whole
packing boxes full of it, yet a researcher is very apt to conclude after
rummaging through these data that there is really not very much to say
after all. This is not because the material is contradictory or
difficult to interpret but because it is so bleakly alike. I noted
earlier that the psychiatric evaluations seem to indicate that virtually
everybody who managed to survive the flood has suffered at one time or
another from anxiety, depression, apathy, insomnia, phobic reactions,
and a pervasive feeling of depletion and loneliness. What makes these
data so frustrating is that one reads and hears the same remarks again
and again, almost as if a script had been passed around the creek. At
first glance, it does seem logical that something of the sort may have
happened; phrases that do a particularly apt job of capturing a feeling
common to many people may have circulated up and down the hollow,
expressions that strike a common chord may have come to serve as a group
explanation for what are otherwise individual emotions. But this theory,
common in disaster research, will not serve entirely. For one thing, the
survivors are scattered all over the area and do not keep in close touch
with one another, and for another thing, those who do keep in touch
generally make a point of talking about something else.

So the only reasonable conclusion one can reach is that the second
trauma involves a syndrome as general and as encompassing as the first,
and that we are dealing with a phenomenon stretching across the whole of
the community.

Certain features of that syndrome, of course, must be understood as
local to the particular situation of Buffalo Creek, but others appear to
be common to large-scale disasters in general, and we should pause here
for a moment to consider the distinction between the two.

Virtually every study of a disaster in the social science literature
reports that the first reaction of survivors is a state of dazed shock
and numbness, and one of the reasons for that stunned reactionthe main
one, according to researchers like Anthony F.C. Wallaceis a feeling on
the part of the survivor that the larger community has been demolished.
Even when the individual has not suffered any serious personal loss and
has not been exposed to any immediate danger, he is shocked by the
"cultural damage" and is likely to drift around in a state of "stunned
disbelief" at the sight of his home territory in shambles. Wallace
studied Worcester, Massachusetts, in the period following a vicious
tornado, and he concluded in part:

The precipitating factor in the disaster syndrome seems to be a
perception...that practically the entire visible community is in ruins.
The sight of a ruined community, with houses, churches, trees, stores,
and everything wrecked, is apparently often consciously or unconsciously
interpreted as a destruction of the whole world. Many persons, indeed,
actually were conscious of, and reported, this perception in interviews,
remarking that the thought had crossed their minds that "this was the
end of the world," "an atom bomb had dropped," "the universe had been
destroyed," etc. The objects with which he has identification, and to
which his behavior is normally turned, have been removed. He has been
suddenly shorn of much of the support and assistance of a culture and a
society upon which he depends and from which he draws sustenance; he has
been deprived of the instrumentalities by which he has manipulated his
environment; he has been, in effect, castrated, rendered impotent,
separated from all sources of support, and left naked and alone, without
a sense of his own identity, in a terrifying wilderness of ruins.^1^

Wallace's point here is that the most prominent features of the
"disaster syndrome"the numbness and apathy and insomnia and
depressionare in part a reaction to the thought that the community, and
maybe even the whole world, has been obliterated altogether and can no
longer serve as a source of personal support. We will see in a moment
that many survivors of the Buffalo Creek flood felt the world had come
to an end, and several of them, like the woman quoted below, were afraid
for one terrible moment that they were the only persons left alive.

*And so we got up there on the hill and I looked back and said "It might
have been best if we'd all gone with it, because I don't see nobody
else." I couldn't see nobody else nowhere. As far as we knew, we were
the only ones alive.*

The symptoms that make up the disaster syndrome, then, are the classic
symptoms of mourning and bereavement. People are grieving for their lost
friends and homes, but they are grieving too for their lost cultural
surround; and they feel dazed at least in part because they are not sure
what to do in the absence of that familiar setting. They have lost their
navigational equipment, as it were, both their inner compasses and their
outer maps.

Among the characteristics of the disaster syndrome, according to
Wallace, is a "stage of euphoria"a sudden and logically inexplicable
wave of good feeling that comes over survivors shortly after the
disaster itselfand this feature of the post-disaster experience, too,
has been noted by a number of other observers. The following remark, for
example, is from a study of tornado damage in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Many observers have commented on the increased intimacy and solidarity
which characterizes populations in the post-disaster period. There seems
to be a general reaching out to others and a readiness to share one's
resources and experiences that lasts for a considerable period of time
after a disaster. We have found it helpful to think about this process
of reaching out as being in part a means of reassurance after the crisis
is over. It seems to be a way of achieving a sort of talismanic
protection which comes from figuratively (and literally) touching one's
fellows.^2^

Other researchers have indeed reported the same findings. S.H. Prince,
studying a ship explosion in Halifax, talked about a "city of comrades."
R. I. Kutak, studying a flood in Louisville, talked about a "democracy
of distress." Charles E. Fritz, studying a tornado in Arkansas, referred
to a "community of sufferers." Martha Wolfenstein, reviewing the
literature on disasters in general, called the phenomenon a
"post-disaster utopia," while Allen H. Barton, having surveyed much the
same literature, spoke of an "altruistic community."^3^

Wallace attributes this stage of euphoria to a discovery on the part of
survivors that the general community is not really dead after all. The
energy with which rescue operations are pursued and the cooperation of
neighbors act to reassure people that there is still life among the
ruins, and they respond with an outpouring of communal feeling, an
urgent need to make contact with and even touch others by way of
renewing old pledges of fellowship. They are celebrating the recovery of
the community they once thought dead, and, in a way, they are
celebrating their own rebirth.^4^

I mention all this because nothing of the sort seems to have occurred on
Buffalo Creek, even for a moment, and this raises a number of important
issues. On the more general level, it may very well be that the
emergence of a stage of euphoria depends upon the continuance of most of
the larger community, so that survivors, digging out from under the
masses of debris, can discover that most of the body is still intact and
is mobilizing its remaining resources to dress the wound on its flank.
In Buffalo Creek this was simply not the case. Most of the work of
rescue was done by outsiders following plans and initiatives issued from
distant headquarters. They were strangers, many of them in uniform, and
they cleaned up the wreckage without consulting the owners, sealed off
the residents from their own homes, and generally acted more like an
army of occupation than a local disaster team. No wonder that the
suspicion of looting was so widespread.

The work of those outsiders restored order on Buffalo Creek, and most of
the survivors were glad to acknowledge the help:

*The first couple of days there didn't seem to be any organization at
all. You know, people running around, not knowing what to do. Then the
National Guard came in and started taking people back out across the
mountain. Things were beginning to take on a little organization then.
Up to then, it seemed dark and unreal.*

But the feeling was general, nonetheless, that the people of the hollow
had lost control of their own home territory, and this could only add to
the perception that the immediate community had disappeared.

In most disasters, according to available reports, the initial state of
shock wears off quickly. Two of the most experienced students of human
disasters state flatly that "disasters do not generally have disabling
emotional consequences or leave numbing mental health problems among any
large numbers of their victims."^5^ One reason for this outcome, they
suggest, is that victims are invariably outnumbered by non-victims in
situations like this, leaving a more or less intact community into which
those affected by the disaster can be gradually reabsorbed. On Buffalo
Creek, of course, the victims outnumbered the non-victims by so large a
margin that the community itself has to be counted a casualty.

The lack of a discernable wave of euphoria, then, as well as the
inability of the survivors to recover from the initial effects of the
"disaster syndrome" had something to do with conditions local to Buffalo
Creek; and in order to follow that line of approach properly, we should
again look for particular themes in the larger syndrome.

Before doing so, however, one reservation should probably be noted in
passing. I am talking about syndrome here, by which I mean that the
experience of the disaster and its aftermath was generally shared by all
the survivors. But this does not suggest that the suffering itself was
quantitatively the same for everyone, and, in reading the material to
follow, it may be worth keeping in mind that people living in the higher
reaches of the hollow saw a great deal more destruction than those
living farther down, and that women may be more distressed on the
average than men, if only because the men can fall back, if weakly, on
the fellowship of work. These differences are not great, however,
because everybody on Buffalo Creek, regardless of his or her exposure to
the black water, was implicated in the loss of communality, and in that
regard, at least, all were hurt in much the same way. This does not
appear to have become a new basis for community, as has so often been
the case in other disasters, but it has certainly contributed to the
leveling tendency already pronounced along the creek.

One further note before we move on to the particular themes. It is quite
likely that the survivors' memories of the old community are somewhat
idealized, partly because it is natural for people to exaggerate the
standard against which they measure their present distress, and partly
because the past always seems to take on a more golden glow as it
recedes in the distance. It is important to remember and to make
allowance for that idealization, but it is also important to remember
that the ideal tone of those memories, whatever its basis in fact, has
now become the only relevant reality to the people of Buffalo Creek. One
way to convey the sharpness of one's pain is to contrast it with a
climate that may never have existed in quite the form it is remembered,
but the need to do this is itself a strong indication of how deep that
pain must be.

MORALE AND MORALITY

The Buffalo Creek survivors face the post-disaster world in a state of
severe demoralization, both in the sense that they have lost much of
their individual morale and in the sense that they have lost (or fear
they have lost) most of their moral anchors.

The lack of morale is reflected in a weary apathy, a feeling that the
world has more or less come to an end and that there are no longer any
compelling reasons for doing anything. People are drained of energy and
conviction, in part because the activities that once sustained them on
an everyday basisworking, caring, playingseem to have lost their
direction and purpose in the absence of a larger communal setting. They
feel that the ground has gone out from under them.

*People don't know what they want or where they want to go. It is almost
as though they don't care what happens anymore.*

*My husband and myself used to enjoy working and improving on our home,
but we don't have the heart to do anything anymore. It's just a dark
cloud hanging over our head. I just can't explain how we feel.*

*I don't know. I just got to the point where I just more or less don't
care. I don't have no ambition to do the things I used to do. I used to
try to keep things up, but anymore I just don't. It seems I just do
enough to get by, to make it last one more day. It seems like I just
lost everything at once, like the bottom just dropped out of
everything.*

*I don't have the heart to work. I don't know. I just don't feel like
it. It used to tickle me to get ready to go to work, but now it seems
like I've got a dread on my mind or something.*

The clinical name for this state of mind, of course, is depression, and
one can hardly escape the conclusion that it is, at least in part, a
reaction to the ambiguities of post-disaster life in the hollow. Most of
the survivors never realized the extent to which they relied on the rest
of the community to reflect back a sense of meaning to them, never
understood the extent of reference. When survivors say they feel
"adrift," "displaced," "uprooted," "lost," they mean that they do not
seem to belong to anything and that there are no longer any familiar
social landmarks to help them fix their position in time and space. They
are depressed, yes, but it is a depression born of the feeling that they
are suspended pointlessly in the middle of nowhere. "It is like being
alone in the middle of the desert," said one elderly woman who lives
with her retired husband in a cluster of homes. As she talked, the
voices of the new neighbors could be heard in the background; but they
were not *her* neighbors, not *her* people, and the rhythms of their
lives did not provide her with any kind of orientation.

This failure of personal morale is accompanied by a deep suspicion that
moral standards are beginning to collapse all over the hollow, and in
some ways, at least, it would appear that they are. As so frequently
happens in human life, the forms of misbehavior people find cropping up
in their midst are exactly those which are most sensitive. The use of
alcohol, always problematic in mountain society, has evidently
increased, and there are rumors spreading throughout the trailer camps
that drugs have found their way into the area. The theft rate has gone
up too, and this has always been viewed in Appalachia as a sure index of
social disorganization. The cruelest cut of all, however, is that once
close and devoted families are having trouble staying within the pale
they once observed so carefully. Adolescent boys and girls appear to be
slipping away from parental control and are becoming involved in
nameless delinquencies, while there are reports from several of the
trailer camps that younger wives and husbands are meeting one another in
circumstances that violate all the local codes. A home is a moral sphere
as well as a physical dwelling, of course, and it would seem that the
boundaries of moral washed down the creek. The problem is a complex one.
People simply do not have enough to do, especially teenagers, and
"fooling around" becomes one of the few available forms of recreation.
People have old memories and old guilts to cope with, especially the
seasoned adults, and drinking becomes a way to accomplish that end. And,
for everyone, skirting the edges of once-forbidden territory is a way to
bring new excitement and a perverse but lively kind of meaning into
lives that are otherwise without it.

A widow in her forties speaking of her sixteen-year-old daughter:

*And then she started running with the wrong crowds. She started
drinking. She started taking dope. And feelings wasn't the same between
her and I. Before the flood it wasn't like that at all.*

A retired miner in his sixties speaking of himself:

*I did acquire a very bad drinking problem after the flood which I'm
doing my level best now to get away from. I was trying to drink, I
guess, to forget a lot of things and get them removed from my mind, and
I just had to stop because I was leading the wrong way. I don't know
what the answer is, but I know that's not it. I don't want to drink. I
never was taught that. I've drunk a right smart in my life, but that's
not the answer.*

And a woman in her late twenties who had recently moved out of the
largest of the trailer camps:

*There was all kinds of mean stuff going on up there. I guess it still
does, to hear the talk. I haven't been back up there since we left. Men
is going with other men's wives. And drinking parties. They'd play
horseshoes right out by my trailer, and they'd play by streetlight until
four or five in the morning. I'd get up in the morning and I'd pick up
beer cans until I got sick. The flood done something to people, that's
what it is. It's changed people. Good people has got bad. They don't
care anymore. "We're going to live it up now because we might be gone
tomorrow," that's the way they look at it. They call that camp "Peyton
Place," did you know that? Peyton Place. I was scared to death up there.
I don't even like to go by it.*

Yet the seeming collapse of morality on Buffalo Creek differs in several
important respects from the kinds of anomie sociologists think they see
elsewhere in modern America. For one thing, those persons who seem to be
deviating most emphatically from prevailing community norms are usually
the first to judge their own behavior as unacceptable, even obnoxious.
Adolescents are eager to admit that they sometimes get into trouble, and
those of their elders who drink more than the rules of the hollow
normally permita couple of beers exceeds the limit for mostare likely
to call themselves "alcoholics" under circumstances that seem remarkably
premature to jaded strangers from the urban North. To that extent, the
consensus has held: local standards as to what qualifies as deviation
remain largely intact, even though a number of people see themselves as
drifting away from that norm. Moreover, there is an interesting
incongruity in the reports of immorality one hears throughout the
hollow. It would seem that virtually everyone in the trailer camps is
now living next to persons of lower moral stature than was the case
formerly, and this, of and by itself, is a logistical marvel; for where
did all those sordid people come from? How could a community of decent
souls suddenly generate so much iniquity? It probably makes sense to
suppose, as the last speaker quoted above did, that quite a few of the
survivors are acting more coarsely now than they did before the
disaster. But something else may be going on her too. The unfamiliar
people who move next door and bring their old styles of life with them
may be acting improperly by some objective measure or they may not, but
they are always acting in an unfamiliar way, and the fact of the matter
may very well be that relative strangers, even if they come from the
same general community, are almost by definition less "moral" than
immediate neighbors. They do not fall within the pale of local clemency,
as it were, and so do not qualify for the allowances neighbors make for
one another on the grounds that they know the motives involved ("we
don't worry none about that, it's just the way Billy is"). One can find
a strong hint of this in the following comment:

*I think that morals have degenerated. I think that is a characteristic
of the whole society of Buffalo Creek now. Things which I didn't notice
before. I have been in all areas of Buffalo Creek and it has never
manifested itself as it has now. It is much more open. I have lived on
Buffalo Creek all of my life. Before, you had the town drunk and that
sort of thing. You knew which family did what. Everyone knew everyone's
business. But now it seems it is much more open. No matter where you go,
this type of thing is going on where it didn't before.*

Clearly, the speaker is lamenting the apparent rise of immorality on her
home turf, but she is also suggesting that the old communal order of the
hollow had niches for some forms of deviation, like the role of the town
drunk, and ways to absorb others into the larger tissue of everyday
life. But the disaster had washed away the packing around those niches,
leaving the occupants exposed to the frowning glances of new neighbors.
So the problem has two dimensions. On the one hand, people who had not
engaged in any kind of misbehavior before were now, by their own
admission, doing so. On the other hand, the unfamiliar manners of a
relative stranger seem to hint darkly of sin all by themselves, and
personal habits that once passed as mild eccentricities in the old
neighborhood now begin to look like brazen vices in the harsher light of
the new neighborhood. A resident in one of the smaller trailer camps
said:

*Well, living there was an intolerable situation for me because my
children were exposed to people that I didn't want my children to be
around. There were drunkards. There were fights, vulgar language. And
all of these were situations to which my children had never been
exposed. This is not the type of home life we have nor our friends and
families have. Even the small children used language which I didn't
approve.*

And other person living a short distance away echoed the same thought.

*The people of Buffalo Creek tended to group themselves together;
therefore the breaking up of the old communities threw all kinds of
different people together. At the risk of sounding superior, I feel we
are living amidst people with lower moral values than us.*

Perhaps so. There is no question but that "immorality" is on the rise,
and there is a clear hint in some of the complaints along these
linesalthough not in the one above, as I happen to knowthat the
protesting voices issue from white mouths and are referring to black
manners. But the people of "lower moral values" who populate the various
trailer camps come from the general community too, and if some of them
really are less well behaved in fact, the rest, in their turn, appear to
have their own doubts about the new neighbors across the way. Everyone
appears to be scanning a sea of unfamiliar faces and sensing that a fair
amount of evil lurks out there.

"Morality" is a curious notion anyway. Theories of human nature
generally assume that moral posture is shaped not only by the voices of
conscience from within but by the voices of authority from without. Most
of those outer voices have disappeared on Buffalo Creek for the good
reason that people do not pay that much attention to one another
anymore, but the inner voices, even, seem to have lost much of their
forceas if they were wilting from lack of nourishment. In the long run,
perhaps, morality is a form of community participation. To be moral is
to keep faith with the generality of one's fellows, to be in tune with
the values of the larger collectivity. No matter how stern and
unrelenting one's inner voices may turn out to be, they rarely outlast
the community structures that molded them and gave them tone.

DISORIENTATION

It has been noted many times that the survivors of a disaster are likely
to be dazed and stunned afterward, unable to locate themselves in time
and place. Time stops. Places and objects seem transitory. Survivors
have trouble finding stable points of reference in the surrounding
terrain, both physical and social, to help them fix their position and
orient their behavior.

The people of Buffalo Creek responded to the events of February 26 in
just that way. Many of them reported that the flow of time seemed to
stop all at once: "everything has stopped," "the end is here," "there
can be no tomorrow," "time stopped for us," "our lives are over." For a
long time after the disaster, people were uncertain as to where they
belonged in the universe and how they should behave in relation to it:
"I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't
know anything."

Now all of this can be understood as a natural result of shock, but the
fact is that people continued to experience that same sense of
disorientation for months and even years after the flood had passed. "We
find ourselves standing, not knowing exactly which way to go or where to
turn," said one survivor. "They should call this whole hollow the Bureau
of Misplaced Persons," said another; "we're all just lost." The hollow
is changed, of course, and people continue to live unsettled lives. But
the familiar hills are still there. The old road, though damaged and
scarred, curves its way up the narrow valley as before. The schools have
reopened, the stores are back in business, the churches are functioning,
the men have returned to work. By now, it would seem, a certain
equilibrium should have been restored. But, no. Along the entire length
of Buffalo Creek, people continue to feel that they are lost in "a
strange and different place."

Part of the trouble is that the terrain *is* different.

*Amherstdale just doesn't look like it used to. I've lived here all my
life and it's hard for me now to remember the way some of the houses
looked and where they used to be. Half of the people have not come back
and it just doesn't look like the coal-mining town I grew up in.*

*When I get back to visit, which is quite frequently, I miss seeing the
houses and landmarks. At one time I knew where everybody lived, but now
it's hard for me to point out where anything was.*

*Well, I go right by where we used to live every night on my way to
work. There's only a few people lives there and you can only see a
couple of lights. It just don't seem right. It ain't the same or
anything.*

But the problem clearly reaches beyond the change in physical
appearance, for the spiritual mood of the hollow, if that is the correct
phrase, has changed even more drastically, and people are just not sure
how to relate to those changes.

*Our own yard was a gathering place for the neighborhood children. There
are children here, but we aren't even acquainted with them. There isn't
one family in our trailer park that we were really close to. So we feel
like we're in a strange land even though it is just a few miles up
Buffalo Creek from where we lived.*

*We don't have a neighborhood anymore. We're just strange people in a
strange place. I feel our lives have been completely turned inside out
by what has happened.*

*My lonely feelings is my most difficult problem. I feel as if we were
living in a different place, even though we are still in our own home.
Nothing seems the same.*

Such feelings of disorientation are difficult to talk over because the
language does not lend itself to that kind of complaint. Once one has
said that one feels "strange" and "out of place," one has almost
exhausted the available vocabulary. But these feelings are reflected in
other ways tooin the frequency with which survivors will simply forget
the names of people close to them, for example, or the frequency with
which they will lose track of persons or events or places. Professional
visitors who have gone into the hollow since the disaster have noticed
that survivors often answer factual questions about timetheir own age
or their children's grade in schoolas if history had indeed stopped on
the date of the flood. One psychiatrist remarked at the end of an
exhausting clinical interview:

*I might say at this point in the interview, for reasons that are not
altogether clear, Dr. Michaelson and I both became slightly confused
about sequences and what was going on. It is possible that we were tired
at this point in the day and that this contributed to our confusion, but
it is also possible that Mrs. Hemphill was contributing to our confusion
too, because...there are some indications here in terms of Mrs.
Hemphill's uneasiness regarding dates that she may have stopped in time
as far as the flood is concerned.*

This was those psychiatrists' first exposure to the problem, but
visitors who had spent more time on Buffalo Creek had become used to it.
Even two years after the disaster, it was a common occurrence for
survivors to give vital statistics about themselves as of the date of
the flood, as if that were the last day on which they had measured their
existence in that way, as if that were the last day they knew themselves
to be living at all. Every person in the hollow understands when another
says, "That was, you know, before." There was history before, an orderly
and calculable sequence of time, but there has been nothing since other
than a blurring of logic and a collapse of meaning.

So, in general, people all over the hollow live with a lasting sense of
being out of place, uprooted, torn loose from their moorings, and this
feeling has long outlasted the initial trauma of the disaster itself.
Each of the following remarks, for example, was recorded more than a
year after the flood.

*I just don't know what we are all going to do. The pressure is on and I
just don't understand what is happening. My mind is a blank.*

*People here are not like they used to be. Only people who were in the
flood realize that it's not rudeness when you have to ask them to repeat
something because you weren't listening, your mind was somewhere else.
Or you forget to ask them to come back again when they leave after a
visit. Or, as happens every day, you start to say something and forget
what it was, or just walk away while someone is still talking to you. Or
you start looking for something you know you have and then remember,
"That was before."*

*My nerves have been and are so bad. Sometimes I feel like I hate
myself. My body is one big pain, so stiff when I get up in the morning.
And I feel like I'm going to fall. I feel like the flood has brainwashed
me.*

*I mean I can be out doing something and go into the house after
something to do it with and by the time I get in the house I forget what
I went after, and I have to stop and study. After a while it will come
back to me what I was going after and I'll go get it. I forget easy and
I get real nervous.*

*Sometimes like I'll be in the yard working and want to go in the house.
I'll want to get me a drink of water, but when I get there I think,
"Now, what did I come in here for? What was I after?" Or if I'm in the
house and I go out to my toolhouse. I'll get there sometimes and I'll
study and I'll say, "I came out here for something, now what was it?"
I've got to study.*

*I forget, see. I forget what happens to me. I mean odd things happen.
To me it seems like I can remember but three hours later I don't
remember what happened. And these things worry me. I go places I don't
even know where in the hell I'm at, you know. I have to sit down and
think, "What the hell am I doing down here, where am I at?" 'Cause I'm
in a strange place. I don't know how I got there and what I'm dong
there, you know.*

People normally learn who they are and where they are by taking
soundings from their fellows. As if employing a subtle form of radar,
they probe other people in their immediate surround with looks and words
and gestures, hoping to learn something about themselves from the return
signals. But when there are no reliable objects out there to receive
those exploratory probes, people have a hard time estimating where they
stand in relation to the rest of the world. They come to feel that they
are not whole persons because they have no confirmed place in the
general drift of humanity. One woman, speaking for her neighbors, put
the case well:

*I feel that the disaster has affected almost everyone on Buffalo Creek
emotionally. People have no sense of belonging anywhere. There are no
existing community identities left, only desolation and indecision.
People are not sure yet of what to do or where to turn.*

And a couple of those neighbors described their own feelings.

*Well, I just don't feel like the same person. I feel like I live in a
different world. I don't have no home no more. I don't feel normal
anymore. I mean, sometimes I just wonder if I'm a human being. I just
feel like I don't have no friends in the world, nobody cares for me.*

*I lived all my life at Buffalo Creek, and I hesitated every time I
spoke of the place because I knew if I mentioned where I come from that
they was going to ask what happened and such. And it seemed like every
time I tried to remember anything in my past, it bothered me
tremendouslybecause the flood in its own way destroyed my past in the
mental sense. I knew everybody in the area. That's where I lived, and
that's what I called home. And I can't go back there anymore, I can't
even think of it. I have no past.*

LOSS OF CONNECTION

It would be stretching a point to imply that the neighborhoods strung
out along Buffalo Creek were secure nests in which people had found a
full measure of satisfaction and warmth, but it is wholly reasonable to
insist that those neighborhoods were like the air people
breathedsometimes harsh, sometimes chilly, but always a basic fact of
life. For better or worse, the people of the hollow were enmeshed in the
fabric of their community; they drew their being from it. When that
fabric was torn away by the disaster, people found themselves exposed
and alone, suddenly dependent on their own personal resources.

And the cruel fact of the matter is that many survivors, when left to
their own mettle, proved to have meager resources, not because they
lacked the heart or the competence, certainly, but because they had
always put their abilities in the service of the larger community and
did not know how to recall them for their own individual purposes. A
good part of their personal strength turned out to be the reflected
strength of the collectivityon loan from the communal storeand they
discovered that they were not very good at maintaining themselves as
separate persons in the absence of neighborly support.

Words like "lonely" and "lonesome" appear again and again in local
conversations.

*I can't get used to the way it is. It is very lonesome and sad. I'm
disgusted. I'm moving out of this valley.*

*A lot has changed. Nothing is the same. It is just a big lonesome
hollow to me, and I hope I don't ever have to go back up there.*

People are "lonely" in the sense that old and trusted neighbors have
moved away, leaving them isolated; but the word "lonesome" means
something else as well. The people of the hollow are lone some-ones,
left to themselves, out of touch even with those they see every day.
Despite the obvious fact that most of them are surrounded by other
people, they feel as if they have been cast on a distant beach, drenched
and bruised and frightened beyond measure, but suffering mainly from the
feeling that they are in a land of strangers, with no one to talk to
about the past, no one to share what is left of the future, and no one
from whom to draw a sense of who they are. One elderly woman who moved
several miles from Buffalo Creek into a nearby town crowded with people
has already been quoted: "It is like being all alone in the middle of a
desert." And a man of about the same age who continued to live in his
damaged home after the flood put it:

*Well, there is a difference in my condition. Like somebody being in a
strange world with nobody around. You don't know nobody. You walk the
floor or look for somebody you know to talk to, and you don't have
anybody.*

Many survivors fear that they are beginning to suffer the kind of
disorientation and even madness that can come from prolonged stretches
of isolation.

*I just stay mad. Sometimes I think they have brighter people in the nut
house than I am. I haven't had a real good night's sleep in nine months.
Sometimes I wake up and have a big fear inside of me. It feels like
something has chased me for miles. I feel numb, my heart feels like it
is jumping out of me. My mind is just a blank.*

One result of this fear is that people tend to draw farther and farther
into themselves and to become even more isolated. This is the behavior
of wounded animals that crawl off to nurse their hurts. It is also the
behavior of people who string rough coils of barbed wire around their
lonely outposts because they feel they have nothing to offer those who
draw near.

*I don't know. I'm a different person since the disaster. People get on
my nerves. They irritate me. People that I always liked prior to the
flood, I've alienated myself from them now. I like to be in seclusion. I
seldom have a civil word for people now. I'm rather sarcastic and
sometimes I'm a bit too smart. It's mostly because I don't want to fool
with anyone.*

*I took nervous fits all the time. I went crazy. I got real upset and
started shaking all over, and I would just forget about everybody. I
couldn't remember nobody. I didn't want nobody around me. I didn't want
nobody to speak to me or even to look at me. I wanted nobody even ten
miles around me to call my name, I got like that. I just wanted to hit
them and make them leave me alone.*

*Seems like everything in you just curls up in knots and you want to
explode. I've always been an easygoing man all my life and good to
everybody. But here lately I'm as ill as a copperhead. I'm just ready to
explode on anybody right there.*

*Well, I can't hold a conversation like I once could, I can't give
people a good word. I was always a quiet-termed man, you know, but I
could always hold a conversation with any man I met. But I ain't been
able to since this thing has happened. I'm just a different man. I don't
have the same attitude towards people that I had. It used to be that I
cared for all people, but anymore I just keep myself alive. That's the
only thing I study about.*

So the lonesomeness increases and is reinforced. People have heavy loads
of grief to deal with, strong feelings of inadequacy to overcome,
blighted lives to restore, and they must do all this without very much
in the way of personal self-confidence. Solving problems and making
decisions, those are the hard parts.

*Yes, I think the whole society of Buffalo Creek has changed. The people
are more depressed and despondent. Uncertainty seems to rule their
lives. They aren't sure of how to make decisions. If they make a
decision, they aren't sure they have done the right thing. My parents
can't decide whether they want to move somewhere else, whether they want
to build on their lot. They don't know what to do. They don't know what
is going to happen. And I know my in-laws have already purchased one
house and sold it because they didn't like it. They are in the process
of buying another, which they aren't sure they want to buy. That's the
type of thing. People don't know where to go.*

*Well, I'm disorganized. It's like I lost my life and I've never been
able to find it again. That's the way I feel. I want to find it. I try
to find it, but I don't know how. In a way, I gave my life up in the
flood, and it's like I'm not repented. Since then, everything has been
disorganized. I can't organize anything anymore. If I pound a nail, I'll
scar myself all up. Anything I do, I do it wrong. I wanted to get away
from people, so I thought I'll get me some animals or something to
raise. So I got me some dogs to take care of and chickens to take care
of and the damned dogs killed my chickens. It's all simple, but I can't
seem to solve the problems. I mean there are so many problems I've got
to look at and try to solve, but I can't seem to solve any of them. I
used not to make mistakes in decisions and I do today on about
everything.*

The inability of people to come to terms with their own isolated selves
is counterpointed by an inability to relate to others on an
interpersonal, one-to-one basis. Human relations along Buffalo Creek
took their shape from the expectations pressing in on them from all
sides like a firm but invisible mold; they had been governed by the
customs of the neighborhood, the traditions of the family, the ways of
the community. And when the mold was stripped away by the disaster,
something began to happen to those relationships. This was true of
everyday acquaintances; it was doubly true of marriages.

No act in life seems more private, more intimate, than the decision by
two people to get married, particularly in this age when we celebrate
the distance we have come since the times of arranged marriages. It is
true, of course, that people "select" their own mates now, whatever that
may mean. But there are other ways to arrange marriages than becoming a
formal partner to the contractspoken and unspoken encouragements that
pass among families and friends beforehand, as well as a million other
hints and suggestions that become part of the marriage scene afterward.
While we do not know very much about those subtle chemistries, it is
clear enough that marriage, too, is something of a community affair. It
is validated by the community, witnessed by the community, commemorated
by the community, and every married couple in the world knows something
about the pressures exerted on that union by interests outside of it. In
one sense, then, a marriage between two persons lies in a kind of
gravitational field. The human particles who form the union are held
together by interpersonal charges passing between them, but they are
also held together by all the other magnetic forces passing through the
larger field; and when the outer currents and tensions lose their force,
the particles find that the inner charge, the interpersonal bond, begins
to fade as well. Wholly devoted husbands and wives were to discover on
Buffalo Creek that they did not know how to care for each other or to
work together as a team or even to carry on satisfactory conversations
when the community was no longer there to provide the context and set
the cadence.

So some of these marriages limp along, the particles remaining in a kind
of proximity even though the charge seems entirely exhausted. "My
marriage? It's just like a job," said one woman bitterly. Said another:

*Our marriage is just there. We care for each other, but it's like a
fixture in life. We're married, and that is it. We don't seem to have
the time for each other anymore. If I sit down and try to tell him
something, he turns the TV on and me off. We're just not a close unit
like we were.*

But other marriagesa large number of them, apparentlyare breaking up
altogether, the particles drifting farther and farther apart.

*It's tore up I don't know how many marriages. The divorce list is as
long as your arm. There's been hundreds of them I bet, and remarriages
and things. Like I said, I had a cousin to divorce her husband and then
my other cousin married him. And now she's seeing him again. I don't
know, people are just going around in circles.*

*Many marriages have broken up that seemed secure before the flood. My
husband and I can agree on only one thing: we won't go back to Lorado.
When the time comes to buy us a house, we both agree that we will face a
major problem in our marriage. I hope we can agree on where to live. If
not, then we may have to come to a parting of the ways after twenty-six
years of marriage.*

*My husband and I, we was happy before the flood. We got along real
good, other than just a few quarrels that never amounted to nothing. But
after the flood we had fights, and it was constantly we were quarreling
about something or other. We had fights. He would hit me and he would
choke me and he would slap me around.*

All of this reflected, as one might reasonably expect, in a decreasing
ability to get along sexually. Studies of emotional stress have
suggested that a decline in sexual interest is only to be expected after
moments of extreme dislocation, and the pattern has certainly held here.
But it has held too long. As the people of the hollow prepared to
commemorate the second and then the third anniversary of the flood, they
were still reporting all manner of trouble in this sensitive area, and
one has to conclude that the absence of viable community supports has
helped prolong what might otherwise have been a transitory problem. The
following comments of a young couple are a fair sample of what people
from every part of the hollow said in formal interviews or in chance
conversations.

*You wanted to know how the disaster has affected our lives. Well, we
haven't had much time for play since the flood. We have had to readjust
to many new homes, and we didn't feel like having any fun. Really, we
just haven't been a complete family since the flood. I was just unable
to be a whole woman and wife to my husband for the longest time, and
even now we don't seem to enjoy our relations like we once did.*

*I was robbed of my sex life, if that's what you're getting at. I
enjoyed sex before the flood, but now I don't. I still feel for my wife.
I don't want nothing to ever happen to her, and I think she feels the
same way about me. Even though we sleep in separate bedrooms, there is
never a night goes by that I don't go in to her and tell her good night.
But I don't have any desire for sex with her.*

Older couples, too, expressed the same complaints, although sometimes in
the heartier language of people who have known the ways of bedrooms for
thirty or more years.

*Well, male and femaleyou have to get in a mood for something like
that. He quarrels at me and he fusses at me. He says I got another man
because it don't interest me whatsoever. The memories come back when I
least expect them. So you might as well throw a bucket of ice water on
me. It's no good.*

The difficulties experience by so many married couples in relating to
each other spread to the rest of the family as well. In the same way
that wives and husbands stare at each other across the breakfast table
and wonder how to strengthen and reconfirm their relationship, other
members of the family find that intimacy and gentleness are hard to
sustain in an emotional atmosphere as dry as this one. The general
community validated those bonds and gave them shape, and people do not
really know how to keep them intact by deliberate expressions of
affection or by conscious offers of support. For one thing, as we noted
earlier, people are very absorbed in their own problems.

*Each person in the family is a loner now, a person alone. Each of us is
fighting his own battles. We just don't seem to care for each other
anymore.*

But even when heroic attempts are made, old familial bonds reaching
across generations or within generations seem to break noiselessly as
the various particles, drifting now in a dead gravitational field,
slowly separate.

*The family is not what they was. They're not the same people they was.
BeforeI don't know how you'd put thisbut there was love in the home.
Of course we had arguments like everybody else does once in a while,
maybe over something that doesn't amount to anything. But now it seems
like each one is a different person, an individual by himself or
herself, and there's just nothing there.*

*My children are changed. I sit and try to talk to them, tell them they
are a family and should love each other and treat each other like
brothers and sisters. But most of the time they treat each other like
enemies. They're always on the firing line at each other. It's always
screaming and yelling.*

*My grandchildren. It used to be we was the loveliest people you ever
seen. We was, together. Now my grandchildren won't hardly give me a
look. I don't know what's wrong. They seem like they are moody or
something. My grandson there, used to be he loved me better than
anything, and now he won't even look at me. He don't want to be around
me. One of the granddaughters, too, is about the same. She has spells
that way. I don't know. I can't understand it.*

The general problem people have in maintaining intimate ties with others
extends beyond marriages, beyond families, across the whole hollow. The
complaint is heard everywhere that people can no longer get along
warmly. Whether people feel distressed because old neighbors seem
reluctant to approach them or because they themselves cannot mobilize
the energy or confidence to approach others, the situation is difficult.

*Well, it was a very close-knit, friendly neighborhood, and we all had
fellowship with each other and cared about each other. It was just a
nice place to live. But now you could compare it more to living in a
city. We're all so busy trying to take care of our own business and it
seems like everybody is a little bit hurt or something. It's just not
the same. All roots were pulled out.*

*And you just be stuttering, you just don't feel right among people.
You'd just rather not be around them, you know. You'd just rather be by
yourself instead of being with somebody. Since the flood, well, it just
seems like I'm someone different. It seems like I'm a different person.*

*Well, before the flood I was happy. I was never depressed. I was always
cheerful. I could have conversations with people and I could get along
with them very well. But after the flood I couldn't hold a conversation
and it seemed like it was hard for me to make friends with someone.
Anymore it just seems to me like I am interfering with people or I
bother them or something like that. I just don't feel like I have any
use having conversations with them.*

When one asks why this sense of alienation should exist, a number of
theories are proposed. In part, of course, old attachments have
dissolved because people have drifted apart physically.

*The people there were like a closely knit family. But now people are
scattered all over the state and neighboring states. You can ask for
anyone left and no one knows where they are.*

But that only begins to explain the difficulty, for most of the
survivors are still in the general vicinity of Buffalo Creek, strewn
around the area, to be sure, but still within reach of one another.
There are those who seem to maintain a permanent storm alert and
hesitate to let others wander too far away from the safety of home.

*The people who are here don't get out and do things like they used to.
Before the flood, the men worked on old cars or got together and talked
for hours at a time. Now it's just for a few minutes at a time, and it
seems everyone wants their children to stay close to home.*

*Well, my children. When I let them go anyplace I expect them back at a
certain time, and if they are late, I panic. I always worry that
something will happen to them while they are gone. I fear for the safety
of my children. I used to be a reasonable person, but now I magnify
those fears a hundred times more than I used to.*

There are those who seem so preoccupied, so dulled in spirit, so drawn
in on themselves that they are incapable of anything but the most
perfunctory encounter anyway.

*People don't visit or associate with each other. Most just speak and go
on about their business. They seem to be in a daze, having deep thoughts
or pressing problems with which they cannot cope.*

*For the most part, people don't care for each other the way they did
before. Everybody went through their own agonies and are more concerned
with their own problems. You hardly see a smiling face anymore.*

*I am now back in the community that I lived in before the flood, but
most of my close friends have moved. No one is the same. No one visits,
no children come to play. Everyone seems to be selfish now, living only
for themselves and no one else. Before, they were kind and helpful.*

There are those who feel that they are no longer fit for human company
of any kind, either because they have fallen to so low an estate, or
because they sense some kind of anger or blame in the reactions of their
neighbors and worry that the world looks upon them with a sharper glance
than before.

*I have the impression that people say, "Well, just looky yonder, what's
he doing up here?" or "What's he doing in this gathering or in this
community?" Like I was casted out. I just get that feeling on my mind
that people really don't want me there. I just can't get it straightened
out that I'm still one of the community.*

*They wouldn't come to visit me or come and say, "How are you doing?" or
anything. And I just didn't like that. I felt they could stop by and see
how I was doing or if I was faring all right or if I was sick or
something. I just felt rejected or something. I felt that nobody wanted
to be bothered with me. I felt at a distance.*

*And then I'm hurt in the way I think people feel toward me. I can't go
places like I once did. It seems to me that some people dodge me,
peoples not friendly with me on the street when they pass me or when
they meet me. They just look at me \[as if to say\] "Well, you ain't got
nothing. I don't want to speak to you." It seems to me like they just
want to shun me and get away. And it hurts deep down, buddy. I'll tell
you that. The way people act toward me, I don't desire to go anywhere. I
don't feel that I'm welcome. I just sit around the house all day, and if
something don't change, I'm just going to dry up.*

And there are those who deliberately avoid relating to others as a
matter of policy, ostensibly because they want to avoid the pain of
further separations and refuse to invest any more than is absolutely
necessary in bonds that may be shattered later. It seems clear, however,
that this policy is based at least in part on a profound uncertainty as
to how one goes about "making" relationships in any case. In places like
Buffalo Creek, where attachments between people are seen as a part of
the natural scheme of thingsinherited by birth or acquired by
proximitythe very idea of "forming" friendships or "building"
relationships seems a little odd. Attachments like that are not
engineered; they just happen when the communal tone is right. So people
are not sure just what to do.

*I have good new neighbors, but it's not the same. The neighbors I had
before the flood shared our happiness when our babies were born, they
shared our troubles and our sorrows. Here is the change. My husband has
been sick going on three weeks. My old neighbors would ask about him or
go see him or send him a get-well card. But he only got one card, and it
was from someone away from here. The day the flood came, the people of
Buffalo Creek started running, and they are still running inside their
minds. They don't have time to stand and talk.*

*I have noticed that people do not visit each other as they did before
the disaster. They don't seem to want to establish lasting friendships.
Most people keep pretty much to themselves. You can drive through the
trailer camps and see that most people stay inside with the doors
closed. I do it myself. It is as though we have lost our own identity.
We seem to be a forgotten people.*

*But the friends I have left on Buffalo Creek, it seems like they've
turned cold-hearted against people and I just don't know how to explain
it. It seems like they don't want anything in particular to do with
you.*

One result of this is that the community, what remains of it, seems to
have lost its most significant qualitythe power it generated in people
to care for one another in times of need, to console one another in
times of distress, to protect one another in times of danger. Looking
back, it does seem that the general community was stronger than the sum
of its parts. When the people of the hollow were sheltered together in
the embrace of a secure community, they were capable of extraordinary
acts of generosity; but when they tried to relate to one another as
individuals, separate entities, they found that they could no longer
mobilize whatever resources are required for caring and nurturing. This
story is certainly not a new one. Daniel Defoe wrote of the London
plague:

Indeed the distress of the people at this seafaring end of the town was
very deplorable, and deserved the greatest commiseration: but alas! This
was a time when every one's private safety lay so near them, that they
had no room to pity the distresses of others; for every one had death,
as it were, at his door, and many even in their families, and knew not
what to do, or whither to fly....It is not indeed to be wondered at; for
the danger of immediate death to ourselves took away all bowels of love,
all concern for one another.^6^

And that is what happened on Buffalo Creeka loss of concern, a loss of
human trust. "It seems like the caring part of our lives is over," one
elderly woman said, and this thought was echoed over and over again by
persons of all ages. The following speakers are, in order, a teen-age
boy, a woman in her middle years, and a man in his seventies.

*It used to be that everyone knew everyone. When you were hitchhiking,
you just put out your thumb and the first car along would pick you up.
But it's not like that now. They just don't care about you now. They got
problems of their own, I guess.*

*The changes I see are in the people. They seem to be so indifferent
toward their fellow man. I guess it's because they had to watch a whole
lifetime go down the drain.*

*I'm getting old, too, and I can't get no help. Nobody'll help you do
nothing. You have to pay somebody, and they'll come and start a project
for you, but then they'll walk off and leave you. It's just too much.*

Behind this inability to care is a wholly new emotional tone on the
creeka distrust even of old neighbors, a fear, in fact, of those very
persons on whom one once staked one's life. A disaster like the one that
visited Buffalo Creek makes everything in the world seem unreliable,
even other survivors, and that is a very fragile base on which to build
a new community.

*I've just learned that you don't trust nobody. I just feel that way.
You don't put no confidence in nobody. You believe nothing you're told.
I don't know, you could have come along before the flood and told me you
was going to give me the moon, and I'd have believed you.*

*That's it. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. You know, when we moved back
home I was so scared I went out and bought a pistol. I don't know
whether it was the place or the house or the people or what I was so
scared of. And I'm still scared. I don't know what of, either. Why, my
husband and I used to go to bed at night and leave our front door open,
but now, of a day, those doors are locked. I'm scared to death.*

This emptiness of concern, although he did not say so directly, may have
been what a young miner had in mind when he said:

*Well, it seems like everything don't go right no more. There's a part
of you gone and you can't find it. You don't know what part it is. It's
just a part that's gone.*

ILLNESS AND IDENTITY

I noted earlier that mountain people in general have lived along a
cultural axis marked by a high degree of physical ability on the one
pole and an equally high degree of physical disability on the other, and
that the course of recent events in Appalachia has acted to tip the
scales for many of them. Illness is one of the options open to people
who need to define themselves by their disabilities because they no
longer respect or derive a measure of selfhood from their abilities.
This has always been true of people who live difficult lives, but it may
be particularly true for Appalachia. Words are not really a major
currency of exchange in the mountains. People talk, of course, but their
main vehicles of self-expression are movement and activity. The mountain
mind is oriented to concrete details rather than abstract states, and it
is wholly possible that the large number of somatic complaints one hears
within the privacy of the family circle or in the more public domain of
the clinic is a mountain way of giving palpable form to troubles for
which there are no satisfactory words. Mountain people do not talk
easily about anguish, despair, or hopelessness, but they are quite
familiar with the language of aching backs and stiff joints, of frayed
nerve ends and malfunctioning organs.

Folk medicine still has a place on Buffalo Creek for some.

*I had a sore on my ankle and it would spread and it would come up my
leg plumb up to my belt, and my leg would swell fit to bust. The blood
would run out of it, and I would stay as high as seven, eight, nine days
in the hospital at a time, and they would run that disease down to my
ankle, but they couldn't cure it. They said I could carry it to my
grave...So I was in the hospital one time and there was an old woman
sitting there at the desk and I was on the bed. She told me, she said,
"Mister, I don't know your name, but I can tell you something that will
cure that." And I said, "I wish you would, this doctor here is wearing
me out." She told me to get some bluevittle or bluestone and dissolve it
up in lukewarm water and wash my leg in it. And I done so, and now my
leg is as well as anybody's leg.*

But most of the people of the hollow are quite at home with modern
medicine and have come to depend upon it profoundly, so much so that
visitors are often impressed by the volume of traffic passing through
physicians' offices.

This may have something to do with the fact that the busiest local
doctors are employed by the coal companies and are paid on a check-off
system, with the result that patients are not normally charged by the
visit; and it may have something to do with the fact that men who work
in the mines need to apply for medical compensation through a
physician's office. But coal mining is a hard occupation, and it takes a
heavy toll both on those who work underground and those who never see
the inside of a mine.

So the people of Buffalo Creek logged a considerable number of hours in
physicians' offices even before the flood, but this flow of traffic,
according to the testimony of all observers, has gone up dramatically
since. One Pittston attorney blurted out after having participated in a
number of exhausting depositions: "If you tell me that you haven't seen
Dr. Craft or Dr. Long since the flood, you are going to be the only
person on Buffalo Creek who hasn't." And, indeed, the woman being
questioned visited one of those physicians, not once but several times.

A good deal of the new business being attracted to doctors' offices is
for the treatment of symptoms that do not appear anywhere in traditional
medical textbooks, symptoms that may originate somewhere in the tissues
of the mind but are experienced as organic sensations nevertheless and
must be counted as real disturbances in the ecology of the body.

There are people, as we have seen, who come to feel that their bodies
are working improperlythat their joints are moving independently of
their minds, that their reflexes are becoming sluggish, that the sinews
holding the various parts of their bodies together have grown slack and
unresponsive. "I just can't get this body of mine to do what I want,"
said one woman miserably. "I don't know," said another, "I sometimes
feel like a puppet, like somebody else was pulling the strings."

There are people who cannot escape the thought that their bodies and the
rest of the world around them are contaminated in some way, stained by
the events of the past. This feeling begins with the memory of having
been surrounded by mud and silt and sludge.

*And I think I'm losing my mind. I hope I don't have to go through life
like this all the time. I hope there's a better day for me. If I have to
go through any more of this, I don't believe I can make it. The flood,
the mud, I don't know what to think. Looking at all that mud will drive
you nuts. It will almost drive you crazy if you have to crawl in it and
work in it and smell it. Don't nobody know. All the mud. All the
disaster.*

And it grows into a conviction that all this black misery has worked its
way into the hidden center of things. It is lodged between the walls,
under the floor, behind the panels; and it seems to have become absorbed
into the very machinery of the body itself. "Everything is
contaminated," one person said. "I just feel dirty inside all the time."

There are those who feel as though they are always smothering, unable to
draw a clean breath or to loosen the bands around their necks and
chests. Miners who report this sensation, of course, are likely to be
suffering from respiratory ailments connected with their work, but the
complaint is common even among people who have never been exposed to
coal dust.

*Sometimes I take spells that I'm just choking half to death since I
come through the flood, and I tell Dr. Harris and he just goes ahead and
writes. It's just like something has wrapped around my neck. I'm short
of breath all the time. It's just a choking feeling. Just like
everything is atightening up.*

There are people who feel drained by the events of the immediate past,
emptied of reasons for doing anything, emptied of explanations for their
own feelings and motives, emptied of love or conviction or pleasure,
emptied of self-esteem and an ability to relate to others. It is as if
the wells of the spirit had suddenly gone dry.

*I don't know. I just don't take interest in nothing no more like I used
to. I used to live a happy life. Now I don't and I don't have no feeling
for nothing. I feel like I'm drained of life.*

None of these conditions, of course, has a recognizable name, but the
most common complaint found on Buffalo Creek does have one"bad nerves."
Most people understand that "bad nerves" has something to do with
emotional strain and originates in the mind, but they tend to visualize
it as a palpable organic disorder. Nerves, after all, are a form of
living matter, and when people insist that their nerves are "all tore
up," they are suggesting that bodily fibers have been damaged in some
way and need to be attended to. The condition is hard to describe, but
everyone who suffers from it knows what it feels like.

*Well, myself, I'm nervous. I'm not nervous on the outside, like when
your hand is shaking or anything. I'm nervous on the inside. I've got
something that wants out and can't get out. I don't know how I feel.*

*I was in such a shape that I was just all to pieces. It seemed like
everything I went to do went wrong, and I was completely tore up inside.
I felt like my insides was setting there just juggling like that. I kept
feeling a roaring inside of me. I was just shaking all the time. I
couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I was smoking one cigarette after
another, and I knew I had to do something.*

These, then, are some of the reasons why so many people along Buffalo
Creek visit physicians, and given everything that has been said so far
about the effects of the disaster, none of them should be surprising.
The people of the hollow feel ill, out of sorts, disturbed, not quite
whole. Their bodies and spirits have been damaged by the flood, and it
makes sense to assume that people need therapy in the wake of a shock
like that. But maybe there is more to be said than that, for the bodily
sensations we have been talking about here and in other parts of the
report are the symptoms of grief and abandonment as well as the symptoms
of shock, and the volume of human traffic moving in and out of doctors'
offices on Buffalo Creek is not only a reflection on the state of
individual health but a reflection on the state of communal health. Some
people came close to recognizing this explicitly.

*After the flood, I was sick about six months, real sick, but I didn't
know what was wrong or anything. I just had fevers and chills and
diarrhea every day and I couldn't get rid of it. I just got so weak I
couldn't walk around and do my work. And then I took spells of crying
and I would get depressed because I was in a strange place and didn't
know nobody and had lost so many friends, my close friends. My sickness
started when I lost my girlfriend, I would say that was the biggest
impact. I couldn't hardly ever get over it.*

The above speaker, a woman in her early thirties, is almost suggesting
that the loss of neighborhood and community is related in some way to
the loss of bodily function. And there may be something to that, for
there is a sense in which separation from the familiar linkages of
community is itself a form of illness. When one's communal surround
disappears, and with it a feeling of belonging and identity, one tends
to feel less intact personally; and one also tends to turn to illness as
a way of explaining one's own discontents. This is why illness and
disorder can become a way of life, a source of self-identification, a
central fact of everyday existence.

*They offered me a trailer at Latrobe and that very morning I went all
to pieces. I said, "I cannot go up this road no further. I won't have no
friends. I won't have no neighbors. I can't get out and go to the
doctor.*

Now this person may in fact need the services of a physician more than
most, since she suffers from an assortment of medical disorders, but her
situation is far from critical and it seems evident on the face of it
that being near a physician has almost become a form of community in
itself. Physicians, like the community in general, can accredit one's
difficulties, give a name to one's distress, and help one find a place
in the order of things.

Health has something to do with feeling whole and being in harmony with
the larger physical and social environment. I have proposed above that
the people of the creek often seem to feel that their own bodily
integrity has been disrupted, that the spaces inside as well as the
spaces outside have been contaminated, that the pressures of life have
drawn in so tightly that they can scarcely breathe, and that they have
been drained of vigor and spirit. And these missing qualities are
exactly what a community can supply. It can offer a place, a rhythm, a
coherence. It can protect one from contamination, help absorb the
pressures of life, and serve as a source of meaning and energy. When
that insulation is stripped away, most people are exposed and alone, and
their own bodies become the tissue, as it were, on which disturbances in
the surrounding world are recorded in painful detail.

THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY

Among the symptoms of extreme trauma is a sense of vulnerability, a
feeling that one has lost a certain natural immunity to misfortune, a
growing conviction, even, that the world is no longer a safe place to
be. And this feeling often grows into a prediction that something
terrible is bound to happen again. One of the bargains men make with one
another in order to maintain their sanity is to share an illusion that
they are safe even when the physical evidence in the world around them
does not seem to warrant that conclusion. The survivors of disaster, of
course, are prone to overestimate the perils of their situation, if only
to compensate for the fact that they underestimated those perils once
before; but what is worse, far worse, is that they sometimes live in a
state of almost constant apprehension because they have lost the human
capacity to screen the signs of danger out of their line of vision.

All of the other difficulties experienced by the people of Buffalo Creek
as a result of the disaster have been aggravated by that raw sense of
fear, amounting almost to a conviction that death and destruction have
now become an inevitable part of existence. "My whole family," said
Wilbur in a passage quoted earlier, "is a family of fear," and many
other people up and down the hollow have had to cope alone with the
terrors crouched in their minds because they have forgotten how to reach
out and offer one another solace.

The fear takes several forms. For many, it is a sharp concern that the
black water will come again to finish them off completely, and this is
expressed in a constant alarm over rain and storms and bad weather.

*People used to love to sit on their porch and watch it rain, but now
when it starts to rain they gather coats, blankets, plastic, anything
that will shelter them from the weather and wait for the sign that they
have to run for the hills. It can just cloud up and some of the people
start walking the floor and watching the water in the creek.*

For others, the fear is more generalized and diffuse.

*There is something in the atmosphere around herea fear, a fear of
people, of things unknown. You're on the alert all the time, always
expecting something bad to happen.*

*I seem to have a sense of urgency about everything. When I'm at home, I
have an urgent need to leave. When I'm away, I have an urgent need to
come home. It's like I'm always waiting and watching for something
terrible to come along.*

The fear experienced by adults can be measured in sleepless nights,
troubled days, and heavy dosages of medication. The fear experienced by
children, however, is beyond all measureand perhaps even beyond all
description. Each of them has a memory of the flood itself, even if he
was not there to see it, and each of them has to make something of all
that blackness, all that death, all that noise and excitement and
terror, without any real technical understanding of what in fact
happened. At school the pictures they draw of the flood are filled with
peoplepeople floating on the water, people waving matchstick arms on
the sides of hills, people washed up on the banks of the creekand the
dominant accent of those pictures is generally conveyed by a heavy black
crayon. It is clear, then, that the scene has become a permanent part of
most children's recollections. Yet the vividness of that scene has been
sharpened by the conditions of life that now prevail in the hollow and
by the anguish they see in their parents' eyes and hear in their
parents' voices. They know, most of them, that the flood changed their
world, and if they do not quite remember what life was like on Buffalo
Creek before the tragedy, they are nonetheless aware that February 16,
1972, was a special moment in the only history that matters very much to
them. So they, even more than the older people around them, have come to
feel that the flood was not just a freak act of nature or a vicious act
of men but a sample of what the universe has in store for them.

The feeling that something terrible is apt to happen (or maybe even that
something terrible *should* happen) often began on the very day of the
flood.

*We picked up a little kid that morning and put him in the back of the
truck. He looked at mehe was covered with mud from his head to his
toehe looked at me and said, "Mister, are you going to kill me?" And I
didn't know what to do. We just put him in the back of the truck and put
a blanket around him. He didn't have a stitch of clothes on and he was
just covered with mud.*

And it was still one of the main themes stalking those young minds a
year and even two or three years later.

*On the morning the dam broke, he kept asking his daddy, "Are we going
to die too?" He saw the bodies of some of the people. Now, every time it
rains, he asks us, "Are we going to get drowned now?"*

*My daughter, who was four years old at the time of the flood, has
really had a time. She's very nervous. Right after the flood we were at
my sister's house and everyone walked out of the room she was in. We
heard her screaming and ran in there. She just kept screaming and was
shaking all over, crying that everybody had left her there. We were a
long time quieting her down. She still won't go in a room by herself. We
have to sleep with her because she tries to run out and tries to climb
the walls. If she's outside and hears a loud noise, we have to run to
her because she goes all to pieces. When it rains she won't leave our
side.*

*Both my children have changed since the flood. My son will not go to
bed at night without plenty of clothes on because he says that if the
dam breaks again he doesn't want to get cold. When it rains, he sets his
shoes beside the door and asks me if we are going to go up on the hill.
My daughter was small then, but she has a certain hostility toward
everyone. She seems to want to hurt everyone. She is bright for her age,
but she acts very much older than what she is. She liked to play with
dolls before the flood, but now she punches out their eyes and pulls
their arms off. She calls her daddy on her play phone now when it rains
and tells him to come get her because the dam is breaking. They both
seem to be carrying a burden too heavy for children their ages. They
seem to be worried all the time.*

*My little girl, she wakes up at night and all you can do is sit and
hold her, just hold her in your arms until she hushes screamingnot
crying, screaming"The water's going to get us, Mommy, the water's going
to get us." My boy is the same way. At night you can be laying in the
bedroom and him in his room and all of a sudden he'll hit the wall. You
go in there and he's rolling all over the bed. Sometimes he goes onto
the floor.*

These children moved from infancy to childhood in the embrace of an
elaborate network of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other people, some
of the latter attached by bonds of kinship, but most of them attached
only by ties of neighborhood. Communality, to them, meant a continuing
atmosphere of warmth and concern, and their fears were obviously
aggravated by the abrupt disappearance of that surround. Parents try to
fill the vacuum, of course, but they are low on such resources
themselves and cannot substitute for all the other people who once made
up their children's social world.

The major problem, for adults and children alike, is that the fears
haunting them are prompted not only by the memory of past terrors but by
a wholly realistic assessment of present dangers. We noted earlier that
the physical terrain of Buffalo Creek seems less reliable and less
benevolent than it did in the past, and this is no trick of an
oversensitive imagination. Many of the surrounding hills are hollowed
out now and filled with mine wastes. Strip mining is on the increase too
as underground reserves become depleted, and the sight of those cruel
gashes high on the sides of the mountains can be awesome. One teen-age
boy on Buffalo Creek told me that the people of the hollow never venture
up the hills now without probing the ground ahead of them with a stick.
I cannot quite credit this as a literal fact (although I may have
misunderstood) because I have climbed the slopes several times in the
company of local residents and have never seen anybody do it, yet the
statement itself is a telling comment on the confidence people have in
their surroundings. The land they have always counted on has proven to
be dangerous.

*Well, if I think there is going to be a serious rain, I am always
thinking what could happen in a community like Buffalo Creek. It worries
me what might happen because the hills are torn up with strip mines and
I know what can happen. I've seen it happen. Take the place where I
live. It's located between two hollows with very steep mountains in back
of us. Strip mining has torn up the whole area in back, I don't know how
much. And I know what can happen. Your home might be destroyed before
morning.*

The Lord, of course, reigns over all this insecurity, and there are
signs that the doubts many people now feel about the natural world are
easily converted into doubts about the nature of faith. One old Baptist
minister said, "People are much more suspicious of God's justice," and
one hears comments elsewhere in the hollow suggesting that people often
find it difficult to fit their memories of the flood into the larger
logic of their faith.

*Well, I just lost the desire for everything. I don't care for nothing
anymore. I don't even want to go to church anymore. I've been three
times since the flood happened. Now I know I should go to church. I
should be a better person---and still, when I go to church, it seems
like I get hurt and can't stand it. So I guess I feel I've lost
religion, yes. I don't cuss, drink, or carry on in any way, but I always
had the feeling if you didn't associate with your church, why, you've
lost your religion...And I blame the flood for it. It was because it
just tore us all up till we didn't care. I believed in the Bible real
strong before the flood. I believed in going to church and stuff like
that. But the flood just took all of the desire out of me. I don't
believe in the Bible as much as I did, because they told us it was an
act of God. And I set down and got to thinking it over that it could
have been and it couldn't have been. So I just got messed up in my mind
there. I don't know if it was an act of God or not.*

So Buffalo Creek has become a strange and precarious place, not only
because the terrain now seems erratic or because old faiths have lost
their simplicity, but because the people of the community can no longer
trust one another in the way they did before.

*It's just awful. The people you know, you never see them. Everybody
wants to stay right in their house. They don't want to go nowhere, they
don't want to do nothing, they don't want to communicate with nobody.
It's insecurity, I believe. You're afraid when you walk out the door
that you don't know what's going to happen next.*

In general, then, the loss of communality on Buffalo Creek has meant
that people are alone and without very much in the way of emotional
shelter. In the first place, the community no longer surrounds people
with a layer of insulation to protect them from a world of danger. There
is no one to warn you if disaster strikes, no one to rescue you if you
get caught up in it, no one to care for you if you are hurt, no one to
mourn you if the worst comes to pass. In the second place---and this may
be more important in the long run---the community can no longer enlist
its members in a conspiracy to make a perilous world seem safe. Among
the benefits of human communality is the fact that it allows people to
camouflage what might otherwise be an overwhelming set of realities, and
the question one should ask about Buffalo Creek is whether the people
who live there are paralyzed by imaginary fears or paralyzed by the
prospects of looking reality in the eye without the help of a communally
shared filter. An old joke making the rounds some years ago had it that
paranoids, far from being crazy, are the only people who really know
what is going on around them. It might be hard to build a responsible
psychiatric theory around that insight, but there is certainly something
to be said for it in a context like this. One of the crucial jobs of a
culture is to edit reality in such a way that it seems manageable, and
that can mean to edit it in such a way that its perils are at least
partly masked. It is a precarious world, and those who must make their
way through it without the capacity to forget those perils from time to
time are doomed to a good deal of anxiety. And this is what the flood
seems to have done on Buffalo Creek. It stripped people of their
communal supports, and, in doing so, it stripped them of the illusion
that they can be safe.

This is how the world can look when you are required to face it alone
and have to reconsider your place in it.

*No, this world's going to blow all to hell one of these days and it's
not going to be long away. I believe in the Bible, and I believe what it
said in the Bible is happening now. There ain't going to be a world very
much longer. When you see things happening right before your very eyes,
you've got to believe it. That's all there is to it...Mostly I read
Revelations and things like that to tell me what's going to come. It
didn't seem so much to apply to the world and the way it was before the
flood. You didn't think too much of the war in Vietnam and everything
else before '72. But this destruction, this disaster happened to us, I
believe it opened up a lot of people's eyes...I believe there will be
wars, and there will be a bomblike thing that will just destroy this
place to pieces. Somebody, some fool, is going to blow it all to pieces.
Sure as I'm sitting here and you're sitting there. It'll happen...So the
flood has more or less opened up my imagination. It's got me thinking
more about the way of life we're having to live, the way our kids is
going to have to live, and things like that. I wasn't thinking about
those things before the flood. I was easygoing, come one day at a
time...It just seemed like it woke up a new vision, I guess you'd call
it, of what is and what used to be. You know, you're almost halfway
afraid to turn on the TV anymore. Afraid something's broke out in the
United States, afraid some railroad car has broken open with poisonous
gases running out right in your brother's face...It scares the hell out
of me, I ain't kidding. Sometimes I'll go to bed and think about it, you
know---the end of time, destruction, what's going on in wars. It's like
growing up, I guess. Before I wasn't thinking about nothing but making
sure the house was kept clean, making sure my husband had things he
needed for his dinner bucket, making sure the kids had the right clothes
on, making sure they was clean, making sure I went to this place at the
right time and that place at the right time.*

The people of Buffalo Creek come from a land where dreams are thought to
have special portent, so they may have been prepared for the fact that
the black water would come back to haunt them at night. Most of those
dreams are hazy reenactments of scenes witnessed on the day of the
disaster or general dramatizations of the horror they provoked.

*Since the flood, I have dreams, you know. I dream like I'm running from
death, and when I wake up the next morning, I'm just wore out like I run
all night. I'm always running from death.*

*I was dreaming I was in black water and I was underwater holding my
breath, and I like to smother myself to death. I woke up and I was
taking deep breaths.*

*Another time I dreamed of being in this hollowlike place and it was all
muddy and all the trees were dead, and I was trying to get to the top of
the hill. But I woke up before I got there.*

As one might expect, children, both known and unknown, play a prominent
part in those dreams.

*My sister's got a baby about a year old, and I dreamed that we lived in
the hollow and water was coming out of there. She had come down to the
house and she was getting out of the car and she dropped the baby. She
made it to the steps in the yard, but the baby went down and was trying
to get hold of the fence. There's a wire fence there and the baby was
trying to get hold of it and pull itself out. We never did find it.*

*I've had bad dreams, too. I had one dream three times about water. One
time it would be black, and the next time it would be clear. I'd have a
baby in my arms, and I'd go so far in this water and it would keep
getting deeper, and then I would get fear. I'd start smothering and I'd
head back the other way. And this baby were in my arms. I don't know
whose baby it was.*

And it is interesting to note, if only in passing, that one does not
need to have been a participant in the disaster to remember it later in
one's dreams, although that certainly fits the logic of the argument
being made here. The following nightmare, for example, was reported by a
man who was more than two thousand miles away from Buffalo Creek on the
date of the flood, but he, too, has had to face a community in ruins,
and in that sense he is a true witness to the event.

*I have dreams that are hard to describe for the simple reason that they
always got destruction in them. It's not of no one in particular. It is
faces I've seen, but mostly it's just destruction of buildings or
something of that nature. It's black, just real black water, all
mucky-looking. It's not a real frequent dream. It usually comes after
I've been real tensed up or depressed or something.*

One theme that appears again and again in those dreams is the feeling
that one is dead and is being buried by people who were once quite
close. It is as if one's alienation from others is a form of death, a
grim rehearsal for that final act of separation.

*In the dream there is a big crowd at the funeral---the whole family is
watching. I'm being buried. I'm scared to death. I'm trying to tell them
I'm alive but they don't pay no attention. They act like I'm completely
dead, but I'm trying to holler to them that I'm alive. They cover me up
and let me down, but I can see the dirt on me. I'm panicked and scared.
I become violent trying to push my way through the dirt...I think I'll
suffocate if I don't fight my way out...I'm trying to shout that I'm
alive.*

The dreams of the night, then, relive the terrors of that day, but they
also serve to remind people that the fears and uncertainties derived
from the events of February 26, 1972, are still a part of their lives
now. In dreams, the disaster becomes a kind of vortex into which other
problems are drawn, a repetitive drama in which the unsettled anxieties
of the past and the newer anxieties of the present fuse together in a
chronology that knows no time.

*I always dream of water, that muddy water. I'm either out in it, you
know, walking in a sloppy, muddy water, or I'm in a house. It's supposed
to be my home, but the house I'm in is not anything like my house. And
I'm always sweeping water out with a broom, and the more I sweep out,
the water is still there, you see. I had a brother that died about seven
years ago, and some of my children are always there, you know, in the
dream. I'm always telling them that if I get the mud and water out of
here I'm going to cook dinner. I have the same dream over and over
again. I don't know why. It seems like in the dream I am always trying
to get something done.*

In many ways, the whole world of Buffalo Creek is reflected in that
dream. The woman is more or less at home, but it is not quite her home
(not quite her hollow) at all. The entire place is full of black water
and mud, and as soon as she can dispose of that mess she will do what
mothers in Appalachia are supposed to do---look after her family and
prepare dinner. The meal, as it turns out, is not for persons who lived
in the present but for a brother seven years dead and children long gone
from home. And, in the meantime, there is all that water and muck spread
like a black curse over her world, preventing her from doing what she
must, preventing her from joining her people in an act of communion.

Almost everyone on Buffalo Creek could imagine themselves in that scene.
Like the woman, they are trying to sweep the memory of the flood out of
their minds, worrying about their kin, overwhelmed by sludge and dirty
water and contamination, wondering how to bring some sense of order back
into their lives, and longing to sit down to a warm family meal once
again.