A few years back, a guy from West Virginia decided to run for president.

He didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, of course.

But he said something on the campaign trail that perfectly summed up what it's like to live here.

In the double V, you get three choices to make a living, digging coal, slinging dope, or joining the military.

He neglected to mention that there's usually some overlap between those three occupations.

West Virginia is full of folk who have dabbled their hands in all three trades, in no particular order.

But my family has always stuck to mining.

As long as there's been minerals and people to exploit, there has been an interest in the mines.

I never met either of my grandfathers.

The mines chewed them up and spat them out before I was born.

My daddy worked in the dirt and the muck from sun up to sundown. He would come home covered in black, except for the unmarred streaks of white, where he wore his goggles and helmet.

Daddy spoke of dark caverns and strange noises, missing miners, and strange animals that words could not describe.

None of that scared me as much as the toil the minds took

on daddy's body, crippled by the time he was 30, riddled with black lung before he was 40,

and dead just shy of 50. Like me, my kids never got to meet their sweet, hardworking grandfather. I think about him every time

I climb into my dozer, today being no different. I've got an old, grainy picture from the 80s

of him on the left side of my console. A photo of my wife and two boys, with our third in her belly,

sits on the right. The image is only a couple

months old. I swap a new one out every year, but it was captured by a relic of an old

Polaroid. Digital might be better, but with all the shaking and quaking that comes from strip

mining, papers a lot harder to break than an iPhone.

Like my daddy and his before him, I work sunup to sundown.

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