randomalia - collective memory
degram has just blown my mind -- in part by having read it -- with a note elsewhere about West Virginia, city v. country, all the things that have been percolating in my head about this odd place I live in.
If this doesn't hang together at all don't be surprised. It's for me, really.
The whole state's like this piece of Carnifex Ferry battleground. It's peaceful on the surface, most of the time. It's lovely to look at. It's wildly fertile. Blood's a great fertilizer, after all. We preserve the relics and mount them neatly with brass plaques, then sit down with our fifty closest relatives to gossip over casserole and cake and cans of Big K. Underneath it all are the bits of bone and leather and lead and a lurking horror. It's a bigger version of my own dualism. People drive for miles to ooh and aah over the so-called beauty of the state.
To me, this sort of thing has long ceased to be novel or breathtaking. It's just what's always been there, my back yard, my whole life. It's oppressive, this state. The mountains hem you in. I drove out to the lake on what must have been the hottest day this year so far and went up onto the dam, and there I thought for a while. I look out over some glorious vista and I in my mind I hear, Your namesake was crushed by a truck up on Route 41. Mike and I went and looked at the car. It was bad.
They say there are bodies in the dam. Your grandfather helped build it. There aren't really any bodies, but what if there were?
This is where cousin David used to train with the SCUBA team for the VFD. If you get caught in the current at the base of those falls, it will pin you, and you'll drown. The fish under there were as big as the boats they used -- overgrown from catching anything that comes over the fall and can't get out again.
Up here's where they found that poor boy spread across the hillside. Forty-eight, forty-nine pieces I heard. They took him down to Pennington's and poor Paul had to piece him back together for the funeral.
More of an indication of my own pessimism than anything, no doubt. There's not much point in painting my little hut blue, Marged Howley. The haints are on the inside.
No one will ever be kinder or more foreign to you than a West Virginian, unless you are also Appalachian enough to not need subtitles, and then no one can be more stubbornly selfish, but at least you'll understand the motive.
The main branches of my family left England and Scotland and Germany and Poland and Ireland and settled, mostly, in the same little corner of Roane County, a place called Geary District. From there they branched out -- Clay, Nicholas, Fayette. Several generations on my mother married a total jackass whose family had property in Roane County, and the minute I got there I was home. Woo-woo shit aside, there are places your senses know. Its hills were mild, the sort that invite you to climb and see what's in the valley, not the sort that loom up in your windshield and subconscious. I could have settled down on that little farm forever. The ex-stepfather can go to hell, but I still mourn for the farm.
Most of the old people who survive don't come to the Foster reunion anymore. I don't know most of the kids. Nowadays people show up to eat and then go do other things. If you're not there by one or so, you'll miss a lot of them.
I got to the battlegrounds at 2:30.
Here's what I want, really. A neat little house. A bit of flat green land. No visible mountains, and not just because I'm sitting on top of one. To be out of this beloved, landlocked, glacier-torn state. To be left alone, for the most part. The most unlikely farmwife ever -- that godless liberal black sheep down the holler who flirts with girls and refuses to have a litter of grubby farmchildren. To be of West by God but not in it, because there's too much undercurrent here.
If this doesn't hang together at all don't be surprised. It's for me, really.
The whole state's like this piece of Carnifex Ferry battleground. It's peaceful on the surface, most of the time. It's lovely to look at. It's wildly fertile. Blood's a great fertilizer, after all. We preserve the relics and mount them neatly with brass plaques, then sit down with our fifty closest relatives to gossip over casserole and cake and cans of Big K. Underneath it all are the bits of bone and leather and lead and a lurking horror. It's a bigger version of my own dualism. People drive for miles to ooh and aah over the so-called beauty of the state.
To me, this sort of thing has long ceased to be novel or breathtaking. It's just what's always been there, my back yard, my whole life. It's oppressive, this state. The mountains hem you in. I drove out to the lake on what must have been the hottest day this year so far and went up onto the dam, and there I thought for a while. I look out over some glorious vista and I in my mind I hear, Your namesake was crushed by a truck up on Route 41. Mike and I went and looked at the car. It was bad.
They say there are bodies in the dam. Your grandfather helped build it. There aren't really any bodies, but what if there were?
This is where cousin David used to train with the SCUBA team for the VFD. If you get caught in the current at the base of those falls, it will pin you, and you'll drown. The fish under there were as big as the boats they used -- overgrown from catching anything that comes over the fall and can't get out again.
Up here's where they found that poor boy spread across the hillside. Forty-eight, forty-nine pieces I heard. They took him down to Pennington's and poor Paul had to piece him back together for the funeral.
More of an indication of my own pessimism than anything, no doubt. There's not much point in painting my little hut blue, Marged Howley. The haints are on the inside.
No one will ever be kinder or more foreign to you than a West Virginian, unless you are also Appalachian enough to not need subtitles, and then no one can be more stubbornly selfish, but at least you'll understand the motive.
The main branches of my family left England and Scotland and Germany and Poland and Ireland and settled, mostly, in the same little corner of Roane County, a place called Geary District. From there they branched out -- Clay, Nicholas, Fayette. Several generations on my mother married a total jackass whose family had property in Roane County, and the minute I got there I was home. Woo-woo shit aside, there are places your senses know. Its hills were mild, the sort that invite you to climb and see what's in the valley, not the sort that loom up in your windshield and subconscious. I could have settled down on that little farm forever. The ex-stepfather can go to hell, but I still mourn for the farm.
Most of the old people who survive don't come to the Foster reunion anymore. I don't know most of the kids. Nowadays people show up to eat and then go do other things. If you're not there by one or so, you'll miss a lot of them.
I got to the battlegrounds at 2:30.
Here's what I want, really. A neat little house. A bit of flat green land. No visible mountains, and not just because I'm sitting on top of one. To be out of this beloved, landlocked, glacier-torn state. To be left alone, for the most part. The most unlikely farmwife ever -- that godless liberal black sheep down the holler who flirts with girls and refuses to have a litter of grubby farmchildren. To be of West by God but not in it, because there's too much undercurrent here.