Coal Country

I'm reading Icy Sparks, a novel by Gwyn Hyman Rubio about a young girl growing up in eastern Kentucky during the 1950s. It's neat reading about a place as you experience that place. Anyways as I was reading today I came across a passage where the author describes the sometimes not so picturesque scenery of Appalachia. It's about the best description I can offer about some of the areas I drive through in Knott County. She puts it better that I could...

"We rounded the curve and I caught a whiff of Ginseng. It was the smell of coal dust hanging in the air. You could taste it on your tongue. Along the road in someone's front yard, ugly car engines lay on their backs like turtles dozing in the sun. Car seats were sprawling on their stomachs, their spines arched high. Remnants of coal company housing rotted, gray and yellow, beside the road. Every so often, I spotted brand-new black seams of coal in the sides of mountains wehre roadwork had been done. Occasionally, a tipple, like a hugh black mangled grasshopper, dotted the side of the road, and a stitch of railroad tracks was etched into the ground beyond it. Ten-ton trucks, filled with coal from the new strip min, growned as they passed us."