Appalachia Project: Sky of Stone, 2001

Sky of Stone, by Homer Hickam

Sky of Stone is a follow-on book to Hickam's first (and more famous) memoir, Rocket Boys. (See previous blog post.) After a year of college, Homer's fame as the first National Science Fair winner ever from his West Virginia high school has receded. Returning home for the summer, he faces a town more inclined to criticize than praise, and rightly. As is the wont of many college freshmen, Homer had too many new experiences to have to knuckle down and study. Some boys went into the mines after high school. That was their job and they were expected to commit to it with gusto. Homer went to college. That was his job and he had frittered his gusto away.

Because of family emergency, Homer is forced to spend the summer between his freshman and sophomore years of college at home. His parents are newly separated, with Mom living in Myrtle Beach. Homer's dad has been accused of causing the death of a miner and is under investigation. Everybody says Homer's dad needs him in town for the summer, but most of their interactions (following the long-standing pattern) leave Homer wondering if his father cares about him at all. His help is actively rejected.

The death in the mine sets up the main action of the story--the investigation of the mysterious circumstances of the fatal accident. None of the key workers in the mine behaved normally. Homer sets out to solve the mystery.

Following his path of mostly passivity and then stubbornness, Homer ends up joining the union and working in the mine where his father is the superintendent. Homer's father and mother hate the unions, are sworn enemies thereof. Still, once Homer gets signed up, he follows through with all the grit he can muster.

A disappointment to me in the book was that the process of mining was not better described; the underground setting was not fully developed as a world. Hickam did a better job in one chapter about the mine in Rocket Boys than in this entire book. The mine is not a setting that should be taken for granted, but Hickam and his boy-self Homer do. And I understand the rapid adaptation that humans are capable of, but it would've enriched the book to have more physical detail.

Sky of Stone is a bit slow. Too much of Homer's adolescent introspection is included and it got old fast. Once the book was set up as a mystery, I wanted it to get along with its job. I wanted plot to happen. I wish someone had advised cutting about 40 pages from the text. The cuts would have been obvious.

Still, I enjoyed the book and feel enriched by it. The town of Coalwood, West Virginia, is every bit as quirky as the shtetl setting of Fiddler on the Roof. In fact, I dearly want a musical about this lost world, the lost world of coal mining. For one short space of time (about 50 years), Coalwood co-existed with the coal. It had its own ways and its own secrets and its own ways of evening out the bumps and dips of a small community. How may times in this book is Homer, investigating the mining death, answered with the phrase, "It's Coalwood business." The phrase was code for a way of life, a way of doing and being--a way that is gone now, except in the hearts and memories of an ever-shrinking population of people who lived there.

Lost Worlds
The Lost World is a common theme in my reading. Fiddler on the Roof was much in my mind as I read Hickam's books, and also Camelot. Camelot was an idea as well as an ideal. And the founder of Coalwood had been a dreamer, he had constructed an ideal, non-exploitative community, believing that happy families would send efficient men to the mines. And for a while, at least on the surface, it worked. Other company towns were harsh and squalid, but Coalwood was attractive, had its own doctor and dentist, and was ruled benevolently for the most part. That's how they all liked to see it. And it worked--till the coal got scant and more expensive to mine.

Hay loft--lost world

Other lost worlds include Shangi-La, Middle Earth, and the 1960s (a fictional time). I ponder lost worlds in my own poetry as I see more and more of the farm where I spent my holidays as a child gradually disappear one landmark at a time. Now only I and about 6 other people know where to look, know how to find it. 


Lost worlds are full of beauty and sadness. And you absolutely cannot get them back. The universe never looks back, never pities the creations of the past. The universe fundamentally and simultaneously creative and destructive. I remind myself of this to keep myself from sucking the teat of nostalgia. We are in our own Coalwoods right now and someday our children will weep for the lostness of the life I am living now.