The first few pages of my memoir

Travel through Southern West Virginia from any direction and you'll necessarily pass through the small city of Beckley. From there you can continue west, through increasingly winding mountains toward Charleston, dense rolling hills gradually giving way to the Bluegrass of Kentucky. Travel east from Beckley instead, toward the fertile valleys of eastern Virginia, and the drop from the wide plateau on which Beckley is situated will be much steeper. But if you turn due South from Beckley on the state road you'll descend into the heart of coal mining country, one of the most valuable few hundred square miles in North America.

Postcard views of the Appalachians are quickly replaced by rugged, close-set hills with houses teetering on all sides. Four lanes narrow to two as the road passes through smaller and smaller towns. You'll feel as if you're gradually shedding the modern world, and you are—first, the Internet won't be available on your phone. Soon, you'll lose cell service entirely. Road signs devolve to forgotten brands and the dogs meandering along the highway become scragglier. Bedraggled children look at strangers more suspiciously.

You'll come to a long straight stretch that ends at the base of Tams Mountain. At that point there are no more houses along the highway and the road narrows even more. Second-growth silver maple, oak and pine begin to crowd in from above. The road begins a steep climb and you'll need to slow to a few miles an hour for the many switchbacks leading the thousand feet to the top of the mountain, where a large graveyard sits off to the right.

The downslope on the other side of the mountain is not as steep but descends even further. The road is a winding, narrow shelf the mountain barely gave up, a rock wall striate with coal blooms on one side and a sheer drop-off on the other. The valley gradually reveals a black lake of dust and rock at bottom, the refuse from the millions of tons of coal surrendered by the mountain over a century. The sun only reaches the valley late morning and when it does the dust lake absorbs the light and swallows its color, reflecting a dispirited sepia back up the hillsides.

The road continues back and forth and down and earlier in time, past an abandoned coal camp, rusted skeletons of immense tipples, exhausted tarpaper shacks nearly ingested by purple loosestrife. In six more miles, at the bottom of the mountain, comes another rare straight stretch, almost a mile long, and at the end of that straight stretch, finally, is the unincorporated coal camp of Helen, where I grew up.