Bespoke

I was driving home from the Jersey Shore with my wife early last summer when a thought occurred to me:

This book is almost finished and I’ve never seen the hills.

They lie a few miles southwest of where Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma meet, not far from Joplin. I left the interstate and headed toward the old mining country.

“Where are you taking me?” Karen asked.

“A little detour to see some hills of gravel,” I said.

You can still see them on Google Earth—enormous white scars scattered across the landscape, some extending over the Kansas state line but most of them in Oklahoma. As we drove south, we began to see the evidence of heavy trucks hauling gravel along narrow roads cut through thick, overgrown vegetation. Then came the boarded-up houses. The abandoned schools. And above the treetops, the hills themselves.

Near Picher stands a modern roadside memorial, with panels describing the town’s history, its schools and sports teams, and the mining industry that created it. It is thoughtfully done, something you might expect to find in a museum. My father grew up not far from here. He took us back for a reunion when I was first learning to play baseball. We played with an old wooden bat, a few of us had gloves but not all, and we were in what seemed to me like a pasture. Later, I played in the Little League State Finals against Commerce, Oklahoma, batting against Mickey Mantle’s nephew. Mining and baseball both ran deep in that corner of the state. That landscape was part of my family story long before I understood its history.

My great-grandfather once swung a pickaxe in the coal mines near Timber Hill, Oklahoma. My father, Terrel Taylor, played basketball for Bluejacket High School—or, as he liked to describe his position, “tailback.”

“Taylor, get your tail back on that bench,” the coach would tell him.

Then one night, during an overtime game, several players fouled out and the coach had no choice but to put him in. Dad sank the winning free throws and became the unlikely hero. Bluejacket had lost twenty-six consecutive games before that night.

Stories like that shaped the way I came to understand Oklahoma.

My family has deep roots in both the Dust Bowl Panhandle and the Tri-State mining region, where Oklahoma meets Kansas and Missouri. One landscape was shaped by wind and drought; the other by what men pulled from beneath the earth.

Seven Hills grew from that ground.

The novel is inspired by the region that became the Tar Creek Superfund Site, where decades of mining left behind poisoned streams, abandoned tunnels, towering piles of mine tailings, and towns slowly surrendering to the earth.

But to the people who lived there, it was never merely a Superfund site.

It was home.

It was where they attended school and played baseball. Where they worshiped, raised families, buried loved ones, fell in love, and built ordinary lives beneath the shadow of the mines.

That distinction became increasingly important to me as I wrote Seven Hills. Environmental history can describe contamination, abandoned mines, subsidence, and poisoned water. It can measure what was left in the soil and carried downstream. But sometimes history ignores outwardly ordinary people who turn out to be extraordinary.

Although Seven Hills explores environmental injustice and the decline of an American mining town, it is ultimately a novel about inheritance—not only the inheritance of land, but of memory, faith, sacrifice, silence, and love.

At its heart is a question that stayed with me throughout the writing:

Does telling the truth about a place we love destroy it—or finally allow it to be remembered whole?

More than anything, I wanted to remember the people who lived in places like Jasper—not simply as victims of a disaster, but as fathers and mothers, miners and teachers, pastors and ballplayers, children who climbed hills and dreamed of lives beyond them.

The hills remain. So do the stories.

They deserve to be remembered with honesty, but also with grace.

Brent Taylor