From the ground level, evidence of the coal mines is indirect, as they are now covered up and secured. Though if you play around with Google Maps, you can get a sense of where some of them were. There are some signs around that announce property still belonging this or that coal company. There are the memorials; there’s another one in the town cemetery dedicated to all the miners who died in all the mining accidents. The infrastructure is haphazard. The population of the town has dropped to 30% or less of its 1980 peak. There are plenty of crumbling ruins, abandoned buildings, with still occupied houses and functional public and commercial buildings interspersed. There’s no apparent downtown or cohesion of the built environment. Several of the streets are wider than expected for a typical town, clearly built for large trucks and heavy machinery, which do not traverse the streets anymore. The Union Pacific still runs through town but no longer stops, not for freight nor passengers.
Being familiar with the town and the area, I already knew all this; I spent this Global Earth Exchange connecting with the Spirit of the Land and the Ancestors of the Land. I sensed that the land and the community are waiting, have been for a while, and are not yet willing to move on to the next stage of its existence. This is wide open space, like much of Wyoming, but that sense echo of the settler activity that was here made the openness and emptiness seem a little different. I got the sense that the Ancestors of the Land were pleased that I was visiting them and that they weren’t entirely forgotten. When I played on my penny whistle, I heard what must have been Otherworldly whispering in response. I knew there had been reported ghost sightings, and it does indeed seem to me that at least a few of the Ancestors of the Land here exist closer to the boundary between the Otherworld and Apparent World than I have noticed elsewhere. It’s a really beautiful land (there’s a reason why I live in this area 😉), but I sense that the legacy of what lies just beneath the surface is not yet done having an impact on it. Finally, I spent a lot of time thinking about people I know in Hanna and nearby communities who long for the return of the coal mines. I know they are thinking of prosperity and community vibrancy and the feeling that it would last forever, but for me, there’s something deeply tragic about longing for something that has contributed to climate change, pollution, negative health impacts on the miners, including the aforementioned explosion related deaths, and a host of other issues, longing for something that has deeply harmed all of us. That’s not easily resolved.

Liz Hills