On a cloudy morning in late August, about a dozen coal miners, their families, and a few young labor activists were gathered in a protest encampment, which they had built together, on a set of train tracks that ran through the steep green hills of eastern Kentucky. An air of weariness was descending. The group had been there for about a month, since five miners had stopped an outbound train that was loaded with a million dollars’ worth of metallurgical coal. The company that owned the mine, Blackjewel, had failed to pay the miners for their work, and, in turn, the miners had pledged to block the coal train until they got the money they were due. They were still waiting. Stacy Rowe, the wife of a miner named Chris, was at the camp, wearing a red T-shirt printed with a crossed pickaxe and shovel and the words “No Pay, No Coal.” “I think everybody is tired,” she said. “Physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

Seated next to Rowe was Lill, a twenty-nine-year-old transgender activist, whose feet were soaking in a basin of warm water sprinkled with bath salts. “You gotta take care of your body, even out here,” they said, with a thick Kentucky drawl. “You only get one.” Lill and their friend Nico, who both use gender-neutral pronouns and requested that I not use their last names, had recently bought a house for their collective in the coal fields of West Virginia, and have been involved in many protest camps over the years—against natural-gas pipelines, mountaintop-removal mining, and the prison system. Lill quit their job at a Starbucks when they heard about the miners’ action; they and Nico arrived on day two of the blockade. They set up social-media accounts to post about the miners’ fight, and to crowdfund from activists around the country and the world. “Our sort of gimmick is that we’re just really honest about who we are,” Lill said. “We’re mostly a collective of trans anarchists, and a lot of people want to throw money at the kind of solidarity that can be built between us and coal miners.” Nico added, “It’s almost like they’re shocked by it.”

“It’s, ‘Oh, my God, these coal miners aren’t homophobic! Can you believe it?’ ” Lill said.

Rowe nodded. “Southeast Kentucky gets stereotyped,” she said. “We’re stereotyped to hate all different kinds of people, and we don’t. I don’t care if you’re different from me. So I do like that we’re kind of proving that people can come together.”

Passing motorists honk and holler their support for the camp throughout the day.

The origin of the blockade dates back to Monday, July 1st, when about a hundred men arrived to work at a mine, known as Cloverlick No. 3, up a narrow hollow in the small town of Cumberland. The miners were suited up, ready to go underground, when their superintendent informed them that Blackjewel had declared bankruptcy that morning. The men were untroubled. They were, at this point, accustomed to mass layoffs, to coal companies going belly-up. Apart from Blackjewel, half a dozen other coal companies have filed for bankruptcy since Donald Trump took office. In the last three decades, Kentucky has shed eighty per cent of its coal-mining jobs. (At last count, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, about sixty-six hundred coal-mining jobs remained in Kentucky, and fifty-three thousand remained nationwide.) But, three hours after the miners started their shifts, they were unexpectedly called back outside and sent home. By Wednesday, their bank balances were negative. They had cashed their paychecks from the previous Friday to pay mortgages, utility bills, and medication costs, and to buy food and gas. When banks realized that the checks were cold, they deducted the money from the miners’ accounts. Some miners discovered that the checks had bounced when they heard from ex-spouses that their child-support contributions—withheld automatically from their paychecks—had evaporated.

At the time of the Chapter 11 filing, Blackjewel was the sixth-largest coal producer in the country, with underground and surface mines in four states, including two huge surface mines in Wyoming and Cloverlick No. 3. The company had about three hundred and thirty thousand dollars in the bank, and it owed about two hundred and forty million dollars in debts. Blackjewel, like almost every other coal company in Kentucky, had not been in compliance with a state law requiring coal companies to post a bond to cover workers’ wages in cases of sudden insolvency. All the mines shut down, leaving about eighteen hundred workers without jobs. (As David Roberts pointed out, for Vox, Wyoming, like Appalachia, is now experiencing the fallout from coal’s decline.) In back wages alone—not counting missing retirement-fund contributions, or all the penalties the company should be required to pay for issuing bad checks—Blackjewel owes each miner, on average, between three and four thousand dollars. (Blackjewel representatives did not respond to a request for comment.)

“You work for a company, right?” Sarah Banks, the wife of one of the Blackjewel miners, asked me. “So, imagine you go into work and your company be, like, ‘We’re closing the doors,’ and then not give you anything: no notice, no pay, no nothing.” She and her husband, Jeff (Wiggles) Willig, together have six children, ages eleven and younger, three of whom are disabled. After Willig’s check bounced, he was suddenly in the hole nearly two thousand dollars.

By July 29th, the Harlan miners had not been paid in more than a month. They had not even been able to collect unemployment, since Blackjewel had not officially laid them off. (This situation, at least, has since been resolved.) When a woman who lives near the Cloverlick mine noticed a train being loaded with coal, she sent a message to a few miners, one of whom called Willig. “He said, ‘Hey, you wanna come up here and stand in front of this train?’ And I was, like, ‘Uh, yeah,’ ” Willig told me. “It was pretty straightforward.”

Willig and four other miners stood twenty feet in front of Blackjewel’s train. “The train was going slowly,” Willig said. The conductor inched forward a few times, then, finally, seeing that the men were not moving, stopped for good. After about two hours, the state troopers arrived, shook the miners’ hands, and asked them to step off the tracks; they were trespassing on Blackjewel property. “They were very nice,” Willig said. The miners complied, and started plotting their next move—perhaps, they thought, they could stop the train at the next crossing, farther down the tracks. The train got going, passed them by about ten feet, then stopped again and backed up. Someone had called the federal Department of Labor, which quickly intervened on the miners’ behalf, declaring that the coal sitting on the tracks was “hot goods” and would go nowhere until the company paid the miners for their labor. Blackjewel claimed that it no longer owned the coal but had sold it, before filing for bankruptcy, to a company named Blackjewel Sales and Marketing, which is partially owned by Blackjewel. The judge, so far, has not been convinced. The coal cars, Willig said, “have not moved since.”