Long Way Home (8 page)

We're too inured to mediocrity to object to it now, but the motel in Cumberland still demoralized me. I borrowed a page from Steinbeck, poured a healthy shot of Kopper Kettle, and popped
Old Songs
into my laptop. Almost immediately, I felt better and less alone. The room, deliberately antiseptic, filled with a warm, human glow. A fiddler and a slug of whiskey might be the prescribed cure for anybody's blues.

The songs were unfamiliar to me, but they wouldn't be to most West Virginians. If you heard “The Wreck of Old 97” just once, it would stick in your mind forever. The rousing tempo matched the lyrics about an out-of-control mail train determined to reach Spencer, Virginia, on schedule.

Though the stoker threw on more coal, the engineer lost his air brakes at the seventy-five-foot-high Stillhouse Trestle near Danville, and Old 97 plummeted to earth and killed nine people—a true story. The engineer was found in the wreckage with his hand on the throttle. He'd been scalded to death by steam.

That number got my blood pumping. I poured another shot, bit into a Virginia Gold apple—still as crisp as ever—and listened to “Faded Love,” a Bob Wills song. The lyrics weren't a patch on Old 97—“I miss you darlin' more and more every day/As heaven would miss the stars above”—but if you blocked them out, the melody was catchy.

My favorite was “The Legend of the Rebel Soldier,” an anthem for those who'd like to fight the Civil War again. In a dreary Yankee prison, the rebel confronts his mortal fate before a parson. He asks but one question, “Preacher, will my soul pass through the Southland?,” after which he lauds Georgia, Alabama, and the rest of Dixie.

The sympathetic parson will reassure him, we think, but that's not what happens. The last line goes, “Then the rebel soldier dies.” He never gets his answer. Life is unfair, it seems, even for a Confederate with a cause.

A FRESH START,
that's another American anthem. In a rush to return to West Virginia the next morning, I slapped
Old Songs
into the car's CD player for some extra energy. Wayne and Ralph were more bracing than caffeine. In my atlas, U.S. 50 ran almost straight from Burlington Junction to Parkersburg on the Ohio border—a piece of cake, I thought, but that was another oversight in planning.

They don't call West Virginia the Mountain State for nothing. The highway imitated a roller coaster. It dipped and climbed at abrupt intervals, and swerved and twisted at will. On most roads, you can safely ignore the posted speed limit, but on this stretch of U.S. 50 you'd go the way of Old 97 if you did. I crept along like a grizzled codger to the consternation of the natives, who couldn't pass me and vented their spleen by tailgating and gesturing obscenely.

The woods were also responsible for my dawdling. The leaves had changed color overnight, and the effect was hypnotic and entrancing. Oaks were the dominant species and contributed a palette of reds—scarlet, crimson, and rust—and most of the browns, while more than twenty different trees accounted for the shades of dull, pale, and bright yellow. Hornbeams and sugar maples threw splashes of orange into the mix. West Virginia's autumn carnival surpassed New England's, at least to my eye.

The highway was desolate, except for the color—no businesses or industries, and only an occasional farm on a cleared plateau. Instead of proper towns, there were unincorporated clusters that all looked the same. Some properties were in good shape and already decorated for Halloween, but others were run down, ringed with junk, and barely habitable.

Arsonists had been busy, too. A few torched and abandoned cars littered the woods, and some houses had been burned out. One failed motel rented its rooms to tenants now, while a wildly optimistic Realtor had posted his “For Sale” sign on a failed café tangled in ivy and covered with moss.

The settlements seemed frighteningly cut off and vulnerable. Where did you buy food or clothes, and how did you support yourself? You'd have no services to speak of in case of an emergency. Clarksburg was a good two hours away over that torturous road. Maybe the extreme isolation accounted for the surfeit of churches, one per cluster. The wish to connect with a higher power might well be enhanced.

The living was dirt cheap, though. Pensioners took advantage of it, and so did those who liked to hunt, fish, and avoid the government. Others sought the liberty to do whatever they wanted to do regardless of the law—dodge an arrest warrant or an alimony payment, say, or cook meth or grow some pot under heat lamps. The backwoods have always belonged to the lords of misrule.

Aurora stood out from the crowd, orderly and relatively prosperous, with a library and a small factory that manufactured wood products. The town felt anchored rather than hastily assembled, permanent rather than fleeting.

At the Aurora General Store and Genealogy Archives, Dee Douglas sat in a rocker with a book on her lap, talking on the phone. The store was another museum of sorts. Instead of packaged history of dubious value, it told a tale of the town over the past century or so through the materials people had donated, creating an affectionate tapestry of everyday life.

The exhibits included antique tools and worn-out boots; dolls, model cars, and board games; a leathery old mitt Ty Cobb might have used; football jerseys and Cub Scout uniforms; and such vanished products as Rinso, King Syrup, and Aurora Mills Buckwheat Flour.

“I'm sorry about that,” Dee apologized, hanging up. She's a former nurse, recently retired, with bobbed hair and a vibrant manner, who volunteers at the store.

“That's all right. I enjoyed the exhibits.”

“I'm arranging a sixtieth-birthday party for Mary Stemple,” Dee explained. “The Stemples are a big clan around here. Just about everybody in Aurora's related. Half the time you're talking to your cousin.”

“No secrets, then.”

“None at all.”

“What are you reading?”

Dee lifted her book to show the cover. “A novel by Nicholas Sparks. I love to read.”

That was music to a writer's ears. “Isn't it difficult to get books around here?”

“No, there's the library, and I swap with friends or order from Amazon. I'll go all the way to Clarksburg if I really want a book.”

“Who are your favorite writers?”

Dee considered. “Danielle Steel would be one. Did you know that's a made-up name?”

“I did. I've lived in San Francisco, where she's from.”

“Danielle's disappointed me lately. She puts words in those books we don't need!” Dee laughed at herself. “I sent her an e-mail about it, but she never answered.”

“So Danielle's in the doghouse.”

“For the time being. I bought her new one,
H.R.H.
, to give her one more chance.”

Dee grew up in Aurora and attended the same school from first to twelfth grade. Her husband, Keith, is from nearby Temple Ridge, and they might never have left the mountains except that West Virginia was even more impoverished when they married. They moved to a Cleveland suburb, where Keith put in thirty-six years at a Ford plant.

He never felt comfortable in the suburbs, though. When his retirement loomed, he told Dee, “We're going home.” Sure enough, he picked up his final check on the first of January, and they were back in Aurora on the second. Keith worked a hobby farm now, and drove the town's ambulance.

“And we love it here!” Dee exclaimed. “Oh, yes, we really love it!”

“Doesn't it bother you being so isolated?”

“We don't feel isolated,” she said. “I don't want for anything. There's a good supermarket in Ohio only fifteen miles away. And we love to travel. We just returned from the Canadian Rockies and Jasper National Park. Oh, that was beautiful!” she sighed. “We've visited all fifty states.”

“What about people who aren't retired? How do they manage?”

“It can be tough on them,” Dee allowed. “Some commute to Clarksburg and hire on at Wal-Mart or Lowe's Hardware.”

She related how shocked she'd been when Aurora's last foreign exchange student, a Nicaraguan, mentioned that his father was employed by a shoe company once based in Elkins, West Virginia. She hated to see America exporting its jobs overseas.

“Are people in Aurora interested in the election?” I asked.

“They are, and they aren't,” Dee said. “They're more concerned with local issues.” She and her husband had voted in the primaries, Dee for Obama and Keith for McCain.

“Will you stick with that?”

“I haven't made up my mind. Obama seems intelligent, but he's against guns, and Keith's a hunter. Black's not a problem—not in the least. I took care of lots of blacks as a nurse, and they were often nicer than the whites.” She thought for a minute. “I don't know, maybe Obama can do something for us. We sure need it. Our country's a mess.”

ON DEE DOUGLAS'S
advice, I paid a brief visit to nearby Cathedral State Park to see a 133-acre tract of virgin hemlocks. An overly enthusiastic ranger once compared their lush canopy to the Sistine Chapel.

On the trails, amid the ferns and rhododendrons, I gaped at ancient specimens eighty feet tall and twenty-five feet around, feeling the same awe John Steinbeck did regarding the redwoods, “ambassadors from another time.” Black-capped chickadees flitted from branch to branch, while tufted titmice cried
peter, peter
without surcease.

The hemlock is opportunistic, handles poor soil, requires little sunlight, and can live for more than six hundred years, yet it still took a miracle in the person of Branson Haas for the trees to be saved. Such virgin forests were common when some Lutherans from Maryland first settled here in 1787, but as other pilgrims joined them—the Methodists, Brethren, and Amish—logging began in earnest.

The allure of Aurora, its clean air and pretty vistas, later captivated a judge from Harpers Ferry, who built a resort there in 1888 and sold it to Lee McBride, a Cleveland entrepreneur, in 1902. McBride transformed Brookside Hotel and Cottages into a first-rate spa “dedicated exclusively to health, rest, and pleasure,” and spared no expense in pampering his guests.

The cottages, furnished to a high standard, were fitted with Oriental rugs and had porches that faced the Appalachians. Brookside operated its own power plant, and a farm for meat, eggs, vegetables, and milk. You could swim, ride horses, play pool or billiards, bowl, gamble at a casino, and attend concerts and dances—everything, in short, except drink. Alcohol was banned within a ten-mile radius.

The resort flourished until the early 1920s, when McBride's luck ran out. Beset with financial difficulties, he sold off his land, frequently to timber companies. One parcel of virgin hemlocks went to an unlikely buyer—Branson Haas, the farm's manager, who intended to conserve the trees rather than plunder them.

West Virginia had been consumed in a logging frenzy since the introduction of the band saw in the 1880s. By 1912, twenty billion board feet of timber had been harvested, while 8.5 million acres of virgin forest were decimated by 1920.

Haas started at Brookside as a menial laborer, putting aside enough money over the years to fend off the “galdarned timberman.” His hemlocks, about seven million board feet, were worth a fortune, but he sold the parcel to the state for ten dollars in 1942, with a proviso that the trees would never be cut. He stayed on as their caretaker until his death in 1955.

Not much is known about Branson Haas, but that may well have been his choice. He was a modest man, I'd guess, and maybe shy in the bargain. One can easily imagine the inner glow he experienced whenever he rejected an offer for his hemlocks, and the kick he got whenever someone called him a crotchety old man who stood in the way of progress.

ABOUT MY STAY
in Clarksburg I will be brief. For starters, it has the biggest mall in West Virginia. Two major highways, U.S. 50 and Interstate 79, converge there with predictable results. The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, a warehouse for fingerprints, is in Clarksburg, as is the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which lets gun dealers weed out undesirables.

The historic district—the city when it
was
still a city—has some fine examples of Renaissance Revival and neo-Romanesque architecture, but nobody goes downtown in the evening anymore. I did, not knowing any better, and communed with the ghosts of commerce past. The buildings were as sturdy and stocky as fullbacks, but they'd been benched, at least for the time being.

For dinner, I tried a Mexican place. A busboy brought chips and salsa and asked, “Drink?” His English was severely constricted, a newbie from Michoacán or Cuernavaca. The right answer was “margarita,” of course, but the margaritas in such restaurants are always weak, watery substitutes for the real item, although people still swallow them by the pitcher for the sheer ethnic frivolity.

“White wine,” I said.

The busboy stared at me. “Whine?” He was puzzled, taxed beyond endurance. “Whine?” he repeated, then scurried away.

A grinning waiter soon appeared with a water glass filled to the top with a dark, yellowish liquid.

“What's that?”

“Your whine, señor.”

To be fair, the chicken tacos weren't bad, but I dared not sip the whine. At my motel, I watched a stupid movie about an invasion from outer space, suffered a miserable spasm of loneliness, couldn't believe I wouldn't see Imelda for another month, cursed John Steinbeck and his dog, and fell asleep.

ON MY WAY
to Parkersburg, I took a leisurely detour to Harrisville, the largest town in Ritchie County. Auburn, Pullman, and Cairo—pronounced Care-o—all have fewer than four hundred residents, but Harrisville has nearly a thousand, enough to support Berdine's Five & Dime, the oldest dime store in West Virginia, for the past one hundred years.