Mountain Mama, We're Back...

Happy West Virginia Day! And first day of Summer...

‘Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads’

There’s something about going back to the place of your birth. Something about going home to mama. We live in a time of constant change, constant travel, constant disruption. We live in a time when the ancient connections of blood-line and place have become secondary to income or the allure of desirable zip-codes. But sometimes, like creatures who migrate along the same unseen highways for eons, coming home is inevitable; perhaps it is even genetic. Maybe there is some quantum coupling that takes us back to the place our original molecules were assembled. Who knows?

Jan and I grew up in West Virginia. After she finished graduate school and I finished medical school we left our home state. First for Indiana where I completed my residency training. Then we moved to sunny South Carolina where we started our family and put down roots. (This is not surprising. West Virginians tend to go to South Carolina the way lemmings go to the sea… I mean, sunshine all day long, fried seafood and taffy? What could go wrong?)

But in our hearts, we always missed home a bit. This beautiful state of hills and mountains, rivers and creeks, plateaus and hollows was bred into us. And it always called.

‘I hear her voice in the mornin' hour, she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
Drivin' down the road, I get a feelin' that I should've been home
Yesterday, yesterday…’

We never pulled the trigger on going home. Our children are South Carolina kids who never really knew a truly cold winter. Their lives were bathed in almost constant sunshine and cloudless skies. Eventually our siblings followed and Jan’s parents as well. All of the siblings, nephews and nieces are now in one of the two Carolinas.

But then, two years ago, we looked north again. Because my folks were ill, and my father ultimately passed, I took a job in southern West Virginia in a community emergency department. We rented a house. Jan made it into a home.

And it felt nice.

We rediscovered pepperoni rolls (a staple snack in WV). We live near Tudors Biscuit World, where if you can put in on a biscuit, they will. West Virginia natives understand.

http://www.tudorsbiscuitworld.com/

It was nice to see people in Green and White for Marshall University, and in Blue and Gold for WVU. Those are our colors, with obvious respect to Clemson and USC, where our kids went to university.

We discovered again that we liked the colder temperatures. We found that spring mornings in the 40s rather than the 70s were pleasant. We learned that frequent snow-falls are beautiful and that we could still drive in them. We rediscovered what it was to have a fire in October because it’s cold enough (and not the fire your kids accidentally set with a magnifying glass in the woods…not naming names). Just a couple of mornings ago it was 58; unheard of in June in the south; unless you’re in a refrigerator.

A couple of summers ago we vacationed in Canaan Valley, which looks for all the world like Alaska. We stood on rocks in Dolly Sods, where the wind is so stiff that Spruce Trees often have limbs on only one side.

Last fall we traveled with friends to Cranberry Glades, a bit of arctic tundra left from the last ice age, with associated flora.

Walking in these woods, by these streams, on these hilltops gives one a profound sense of mystery. You can’t spend any time here, or indeed anywhere deep in Appalachia, and avoid feeling deep antiquity.

‘Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze’

In point of fact, the mountains here are older than trees. Trees as we know them came into existence after the Appalachian mountains existed. They’re also older than Saturn’s rings. Or so I’m told.

By the way, the Appalachians have an even deeper origin. Here’s a photo of what they were before they drifted apart:

These mountains, or what’s left of their towering peaks, formed over something like 1.2 billion years. Way before there was ever a Tudor’s Biscuit World!

Actually the mystery one feels here extends all over the Appalachians. We have land in South Carolina and to descend into the woods, by old creeks under bent trees, is to travel back in time and in spirit. It can give you chill, even on a warm day. Walking through the forest is to walk through ghost haunted woods, thick with the memory of plants and beasts and even humans that we’ll never know. There’s a magic here.

All my memories gather 'round her
Miner's lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrops in my eye

Jan and I have memories that ‘gather round her.’ Hers of a vast family and their reunions on the hilltop cemetery in Mingo County where her tight-knit aunts, uncles and cousins meet every year. She has memories from growing up in Boone County, and the back roads she had to drive to go anywhere. Of the love and devotion of parents and friends. Mine from Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln counties, so many names, stories and sadly, gravestones I recall. I have so many friends to this day.

Our people, Jan’s and mine, have been in the state for hundreds of years. Our lineage is deep. It’s good to come from these people.

Because there’s power and wonder in them. You have to try hard not to be accepted in a place like this. The people in West Virginia have worked hard, and have struggled for centuries against enemies and elements, against disease and poverty. They’ve fought actual battles against big business https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/battle-blair-mountain-largest-labor-uprising-american-history-180978520/

They perished in their personal battles against the drugs of big pharma, and continue to die from fentanyl and methamphetamine. They wrestle daily with depression, despair and alcohol.

They die from industrial accidents and black-lung. Chemicals, coal, timber, so many vital things that come from this state are obtained via dangerous occupations.

They die in war, for they are deeply patriotic and (since many of their ancestors are Scots-Irish) they seem to love a good fight. A friend who was an Army company commander in Vietnam once said, ‘I always put my WV guys on point. They knew how to move through the woods.’

They’ve always known the ridicule of people who gladly enjoy the electricity powered by coal, who then mock the citizens of the state with jokes about poor teeth and ignorant hicks. People who have been through all of this that know how to accept anyone, no matter what. And it’s a beautiful thing to be accepted by them.

Life takes us on many roads. As Tennyson says in the beautiful poem Ulysses, ‘I am a part of all that I have met.’ We are mosaics, over time, made of bits of this place and bits of that, tiles with faces and tiles with places all put together by God (or chance if you prefer) into the person we are.

Some of our tiles are color of our home state, some tiles look like the south. Some have the faces of our children. Most have images of one another, intertwined as married people should be.

And for now, at least, we’re spending time with our Mountain Mama. We are nomadic, really, moving back and forth as family needs arise. But it’s good to be back home; it feels safe sometimes. You know where things are. You can let your guard down. Mama is just glad to have you back.

What does the future hold? Who knows? Can you go home again? Time will tell. But I can say that for now, the country roads did take us home.

And at least for now, and at least part of the time, it’s where we belong.

Here’s John Denver singing Country Roads. (Yeah, we know there’s no Blue Ridge Mountains or Shenandoah River. It’s still pretty and it still touches me. And no matter where you are in the world, if there’s alcohol, and it starts playing, somebody is going to start singing and ask if you know their cousin in Morgantown…)