Free Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal by Silas House and Jason Howard Page B

(D-Floyd County), to attend one of their assemblies, and although he makes no commitments, he is impressed by their determination.
    May brings in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organizer Kevin Pentz, who works within the Canary Project, KFTC's arm that deals with coal issues. Pentz and May are all business at the meetings, but are actually old friends; May recently played fiddle at his wedding.
    At Pentz's suggestion the group decides to pursue having the area declared as a land unsuitable for mining. To be approved as such, it has to be proven that an area is fragile or has historical and cultural significance, or that mining operations would affectthe area's renewable resources, such as the water or food supply, or could endanger lives or property. 2
    The group decides to pursue the argument of the land's natural significance after many of the residents immediately mention that there is an abundance of wildflowers on the ridges along Wilson Creek and Stephen's Branch.
    This is what prompted May's trek up the mountain three times in two days. One of those days she was accompanied by a group of students from Berea College, who chose to spend their Easter holiday searching for rare plants on this mountainside.
    May is thinking of these students when she reaches the High Rocks on a fine summer evening several weeks later. In particular, she recalls one of the students, who came to understand, once she got up to the High Rocks, “what it's really all about. This is what you lose when you blow up a mountain. If you know where you're from, then it's not hard to protect it. But people who haven't ever been up to the ridgetops, well, they have no idea of how amazing this forest is.” May touches one of the saplings that has sprouted up out of the rocky base of the cliffs. “It's not a hunk of rock. It's a living thing.”
    May is someone who takes living things very, very seriously. As a nurse practitioner, she has a job that is in high demand, giving her the opportunity to live pretty much anywhere she would wish to. But she chose to come back to Eastern Kentucky after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1995 with a Master's in nursing.
    “I feel a need to take care of my own people,” she says.
    She does just that in her job as the nurse practitioner and clinical director of the Little Flower Free Clinic in nearby Hazard, which offers free medical service to the uninsured and the homeless by way of a federal grant.
    “In a lot of parts of the country no doctor will take Medicaid, so they have to have clinics for people with Medicaid, for poor people. Health Care for the Homeless projects are a small piece of that funding,” May explains. “Within that funding, there's abouta hundred Health Care for the Homeless projects, all of which are in urban areas, and they're working out of store fronts and church basements and take care of people that live on the street and under bridges and stuff.”
    The Little Flower Clinic is unique in that it is the first rural homeless clinic in the nation. The clinic operates on what May calls “a rural definition of homelessness,” which might not mean that a person is sleeping under a bridge or on the street, like the stereotype of a homeless person.
    “But if you're sleeping in what used to be the family's chicken coop, you're homeless,” May says. “If you're sleeping in an abandoned school bus, you're homeless. If you're a family—say, a mom with three kids—and your husband's beat you and you go to your brother's so that there's five children and three adults in a two-bedroom house, you're homeless.”
    May says that some in the area question the validity of the clinic because they don't think of a rural place as having homeless people. “It's just that because we're hillbillies we think, oh, your family takes care of you,” she says. “Well, they do. It's just that sometimes the family's not able to take care of you, and it puts the whole extended family into