A Man of Courage, Constant to the End.

• Author: Berry, Wendell
• Position: Harry Caudill - In memoriam

The still-characteristic American failure to know and respect economic landscapes for what they naturally are amounts to a national disease, perhaps a lethal one. This failure manifests itself most readily in ecologically vulnerable places such as the steep drainages of the Cumberland Plateau, but that is merely an extreme example of the colonial economics and industrial violence that now afflict the landscapes of agriculture and forestry, as well as mining, everywhere in our country. There are few people now living who are not complicit in this destruction, and nobody who is exempt from its effects.

I have known all my life the lower reaches of the Kentucky River, and for the last forty-five years I have lived beside it, thirteen miles from its entrance into the Ohio. The headwaters of this river lie partly in Harry Caudill's native county, near the Virginia line. That this river and all who live in its watershed, my wife and I and our livestock included, are affected by the silt and pollutants that it has carried from the strip mines (among other sources) for the last half century is simply obvious. Its water is no longer safely swimmable and its fish are no longer safely edible. The native black willows are long gone from its low water line, and perhaps as a consequence, the erosion of the banks has worsened.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Of all this I have hardly been an innocent observer. Every time I have turned on a light switch, I have given my support to the coal economy and thus abetted and implicitly consented to the desecration of my home river.

And so from the time I read his great testimony, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, in the summer of 1963, Harry Caudill has spoken to me directly and personally. That book bore witness to the abuses inflicted upon his region and its people by the industrial colonialism chiefly of the coal companies.

In 1976, he published a sequel, Watches of the Night, in which he revealed unsurprisingly that, in the thirteen years intervening, conditions had become worse. Now that book has been reissued by the Jesse Stuart Foundation, with a new afterword by James K. Caudill, Harry's son, and a note "about the author" by his widow, Anne F. Caudill.

Harry Caudill was born in Letcher County, Kentucky, in 1922. Letcher County lies among the steep foldings of the Cumberland Plateau, which originally contained an unimagined wealth of coal and other minerals and one of the most diverse and abounding forest ecosystems in the world. Because of this wealth, throughout Harry's life and increasingly until now, the land has been devastated and the people impoverished.

Harry joined the Army in 1941. In Italy, the following year, he was wounded in action. His wound, a severe injury to his left leg, kept him in hospitals for a long time, and he suffered from it until his death in 1990. It may be that this never-forget-table wound to...