Local Lore 1.

My first home had a red dog driveway. Most people may not know what red dog is and I intend to straighten that out. I live in an area of southwest Virginia where the big money is in coal. It makes for quite a quandary to think about. The fact that I speak so much of the energy "crisis" and talk of ways to save energy when the truth of the matter is, if we were to quit using coal altogether as a means of energy production it would devastate much of my family.

The process of separating coal from rock was less meticulous in the early days of coal mining. Slate makes the bulk of the rock that was separated from the coal. Even though most of the coal was sifted away a bit of it would end up in the slate pile anyway, far less of it ends up in slate piles today. Coal is made of decaying leaves, dead animals, and rotted trees all covered up over time and with the great deal of pressure among the layers of the earth, the decaying things turn into black rock.

These piles would stay in one place for quite some time. With such a mixture of slate and coal in the early days of coal mining the energy from the continual decaying process of the coal would build up heat and turn the inner part of the pile into a red hot cinder of coal and slate. Once these piles were moved the heated slate inside having been cooled was found to be red. Quite the shock, I'm sure, for the first guy that moved a slate pile. This red rock is called red dog.

According to my Dad, back in the 1960s a young fellow must have had some mischief in him. He was hanging around at a strip mine, probably even though he shouldn't have been, perhaps drunk, and decided to bed down on a slate pile. Perhaps the warmth that emitted from the pile outweighed the fact that it was a bed made of rock, and large ones at that.

So this guy decided to make a slate pile his temporary sleeping quarters. The next day the same man was found on the slate pile dead. Even though it was probably warm to sleep on the pile, the man must not have considered the fact that inhaling the gases that came from the pile would eventually suffocate him.

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I think it's an interesting concept and frankly, I'm more interested in the money saved than conserving energy, although that is quite important to keep in mind. But either way this is something that I think is worth looking into and figuring out a way to cut back on. Think of this, those cordless phones you use, are always on charge. If you don't have one on the docking station, there's still the answering machine, or clock, or caller I.D. that is seeping power.

My Playstation 2, Wii, VCR, DVD player and stereo all have these features. And if some of them don't have power running to them, then the correct time and settings are all lost. And they also are really difficult to unplug since everything is behind the t.v. stand. So what to do? At least my stereo has a mode that consumes less power.

So in the end, more coal is burned, more CO2 is released into the air, and more money is spent on electricity by the consumer. The only ones that benefit are the power companies themselves. I wonder how much money they're losing now that those florescent bulbs are becoming more popular.

I just have to state that cutting back for me would be really difficult. Unless there are ways to make it easier. Any suggestions?