In Letters from the Karst, every chapter/story features a cave of some sort. In chapter 4, it’s an abandoned quarry. Where I grew up in northern Ohio, abandoned quarries could be scary places. If they had filled with water there might be rusted old cars and trucks or big boulders just out of sight. They seemed like lonely places to me, possibly haunted by spirits of people who had died nearby. In “Abandoned Quarry” there’s also a play on “quarry,” as a thing that is hunted, a victim.

The story belongs to Patrick (who went hunting with Ned in “Early Blur”) and his daughter Phyllis. Phyllis is an adolescent with a cheerful demeanor who is also fiercely protective of her pet cat, Veronica. I can’t say much about this story without telling too much, but I can focus more on the land.

I don’t have any photos and couldn’t find one online that exactly matches my memory—or what my memory has done to the actual quarries around Amherst. My Ohio friends might want to see these from “Amherst Quarry Photographs.” Since I moved to Kentucky in 1996 and have been to eastern Kentucky many times, I’ve also witnessed other quarries or quarry-like holes in the land. Some of them look like what a human body would look like scraped across an asphalt parking lot. But no, the wounds are deeper. The scars from mountain top removal, for instance, look like a body that has also been carved and gouged out; the wounds are the remains of coal mining, oozing chemicals like arsenic and cadmium, which run through the veins of the communities polluting water and land alike. (One of the “caves” in a later story of Letters from the Karst is an abandoned mine, such as the one in Lynch, Kentucky.)

The “abandoned quarry” that’s located near where Patrick and Phyllis live is dead. But there are signs of life: at the bottom where scrub brush is taking off and along the walls where small trees find a root-hold and their branches reach toward the light.

Rather than show the damage we can do to the land, here’s a glimpse of the beauty of eastern Kentucky. It’s the kind of place that brings serenity, says peace.

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