Homer Hickam

Guest Columnists

The #1 New York Times best-selling author of “Rocket Boys” (which inspired the film “October Sky”) is also author of “The Coalwood Way,” “Sky of Stone” and the Josh Thurlow novels. In 2008, the novel “Red Helmet” marks his return to writing about West Virginia, this time telling a romantic story set in the coalfields of today.

Sometimes now, there will be a trick of light or shadow, or maybe a sound or a smell that will take me back to those days when I was a boy in Coalwood, W.Va.

Over the years, if I had been asked about my hometown, I might have replied that I knew every inch of the place, every smoky hollow and creek. I would have said I knew every miner who lived there and his Mrs. and their children, and even all the dogs and cats. I would have been certain that I had the place and its people completely figured out in my mind, every road that led through the town as well as the crooked paths that went up and over its forested hills. I knew Coalwood’s rhythms, the low grumble of shuffling hard toe boots as the shifts of miners treaded past my house to and from the tipple grounds of the Olga Number One mine.

But when you think you surely must know everything about a place, I think the truth is you don’t really know it at all. To see it, you have to leave and then come back and look at it with different eyes. I do that now, and I am in awe of that old town, and all the things the people there taught me when I didn’t even know it, things like honor and faith and gentle strength in the face of adversity.

One of my favorite places to go when I was a boy was a hollow high on the mountain that rose nearly straight up behind my house. It was a steep and difficult climb but it was worth it. It was a quiet place filled with tall pine trees with a floor of plush carpet made from dropped needles. There, the industrial song of Coalwood subsided, and the only sound I could hear was the wind rustling the tops of the pines or the squawk of the occasional squirrel. I would go there alone to sit on a dead log and listen to nothing except the thoughts racing through my head. The old green trees arched above and dusted me with their sharp, fresh perfume and rustled their skirts of fringed boughs and preened a bit in the rarified air.

I loved that old hollow and those old trees. I was alone in a deep wood but I was at peace, completely unafraid. I wish all children in the world could have such places to go, where they could be safe and the world is quiet and their parents and friends and teachers waited for them below with patience and love.

Sometimes when I imagine myself back in that hollow of pine, I wonder why there are so many people these days who hate their lives, and walk around angry all the time when all they have to do to be happy is to be like the people who raised me, honest, hard-working, and respectful. I don’t have an answer but I wonder about it, all the same.

Homer Hickam’s annual October Sky Festival celebrates literature and literacy in the region.