Strange as this Weather Has Been

Throughout the novel, the mountains are described as having human characteristics because the people who live near them view the mountains as alive and capable of feeling loss and death. In Chapter 2, Bant compares the side of the mountain to a mutilated human body, describing it as “naked and scalped” (16) and essentially “dead” (20). Using gruesome, violent imagery and pairing it with anatomical words such as “head,” “body,” and “guts” make the argument that the mountains aren’t just being mined for coal, they’re being murdered: “I knew from Lace and Mogey that after they blasted the top off the mountain to get the coal, they had no place to put the mountain’s body except dump it in the head of the hollow. So there it loomed. Pure mountain guts” (20).

This kind of language is used again when Avery sees the butchered mountaintops for the first time. He talks about how the “trees have been slaughtered” (212) and how the water on the hills is “opaque as mustard and colored like the inside of a sick baby’s diaper” (213). To “slaughter” is to kill in a cruel way and implies that the trees are suffering, and describing the water in connection to a sick baby makes the argument that the water has become ill like a child because of what’s being done to it.