Appalachian Festival

Friday night Frostburg State’s Appalachian fest continued at the Historic Palace Theatre in Frostburg, Maryland.  The theatre was showing two movies “Split Estate” and “Bonecrusher.”  The event was set to start at 7:30 P.M which is a new, earlier time slot according to the theater staff running the program.  The staff shared with the audience that the movies usually begin at 8:00 P.M but have now been moved to 7:30 P.M in order to accommodate the requests of multiple patrons. 

            “Split Estate” is a documentary and was the first movie shown Friday night.  According to the movie, Split Estate refers to when a land owner owns the land but not the mineral rights to the resources under their land.  With the current mineral boom, this is becoming a growing problem in the Rocky Mountain West.  The documentary shows the struggles of different families affected by drilling extremely close to their residential areas.  At one point in the movie, one of the people interviewed said that the oil and gas companies set wells near houses according to how tall the wells are.  For example, if the well is one hundred feet tall then the oil and gas companies would put that well one hundred and five feet from the house.  Apparently this is done to prevent the well from falling on the house if the well falls.

 A scenario within the movie that got a significant reaction from the crowd was one about a woman named Laura Amos.  Laura and her family live in Silt, Colorado.  In 2001 a gas company called the Encana Corporation drilled four different wells less than one-thousand feet away from Laura’s house.  At all four wells they used a technique called hydraulic fracturing.  During the drilling there was a breach in Laura’s water supply “filling it with gray sediment and fizz like soda pop.”  Laura and her family were told that their water was no longer safe to drink but ok to bath in.  A lady seated in front of me put her hand to her mouth in shock when Ali MacGraw informed the audience that in 2003 Laura was diagnosed with Hyper Aldosteronism (a rare condition involving a tumor in the adrenal gland that affects the thyroid and pituitary glands).  Somebody seated behind me also said, “Wow” when Laura in an earlier interview said that she didn’t only bathe herself in the contaminated water but she also bathed her newborn in the water.  Most people believe the contaminated water made her sick. 

            It was an emotional movie hearing Laura’s story and that of another individual, Gilbert Armenta, a man that has lived in Bloomfield, New Mexico, his whole life.  One could not help feeling sympathy for Gilbert and his family as oil and gas companies have literally taken over their land and have drilled wells everywhere.  The oil and gas companies displayed no respect for their family grave site as they moved head stones, dumped gravel on top of the graves, and placed portable toilets in the immediate area. 

            The second movie was a documentary called “Bonecrusher.”  The story setting is Dante, Virginia, a place where coal mining is a way of life.  Most of the people interviewed said that all of their male family members, e.g., grandfathers, fathers, and brothers all worked in the mine.  From the beginning it is clear how very close the community is and how most everyone knows each other. However, there was one man that everybody knew without question.  When the interviewer asked who he should talk to about working in the mines, everyone responded, “Bonecrusher, he has the best stories.”  One interview that got a chuckle out of the crowd was when he asked “Who knows Bonecrusher?” to three men.  One stood up and said, “I know him.  I used to work with him.”  So the interviewer followed up with, “Why do they call him Bonecrusher?”  After a long pause and a look, the man simply said, “I don’t know” which the audience found funny. 

            “Everybody’s got a nickname underground,” and they call Mr. Chaffin Bonecrusher.   Luther Chaffin is a sixty-one year old man that worked in the mines for a long time and never missed a day of work. He became a coal miner after his dad (who was a miner) died.  He has a son, Lucas Chaffin, who has recently started working in the mines.  Lucas said that a lot of the time they call him Bonecrusher Jr.  Most of the movie is about how Lucas loves working in the mines but how it’s already causing the twenty-five year old health problems.  The other part of the story is about how working in the mines for so long really affected Luther Chaffin.  Throughout the whole movie it was shown how he had to go to the hospital often because he had throat and lung cancer.  A lot of people call it the “Black Lung.”  A lot of people in the crowd enjoyed this movie; you could feel the sadness in the room when at the end of the movie we were informed Luther Chaffin passed away in 2007.  A woman to my right simply said, “Oh no” when a message from Lucas Chaffin was played. 

            Both movies were about seventy-five minutes long.  At the end a lady in front of me said, “It was great.”  Some people were talking about the movie, others left the theatre rather quickly, and one man was heard talking to a woman about how his home town was just hit by a tornado. 

            This was a nice event that most who attended seemed to enjoy.  The theater wasn’t filled but there were a good amount of students and local residents in attendance. 

http://www.bonecrusherfilm.com/
http://www.splitestate.com/