Road Trip 2016 # 6

Unlike my wife who shuts hotel blinds and curtains tightly to ward off the morning light, I leave the window uncovered when I’m alone and let the light wake me up early.   When I woke up in Weston it had stopped snowing.  The sky was bright but still cloudy.  I packed up my few things and went down to the lobby.  Breakfast was on.

It’s amazing how good those relatively untended hotel breakfasts can be.  This spread had not only make your own waffles but hot biscuits and a tub of sausage gravy.  I don’t generally order biscuits and gravy in a restaurant, but when it’s right in front of you, when you can feel the heat coming off the gravy and the little plastic tongs are inches from the biscuits, it sends a powerful message to that part of my brain that loves food.  I took two biscuits apart, making four round wheels of tan wonderful on a Styrofoam plate, and smothered them with thick sausage gravy.  It steamed and carried a delicious smell up to my nose.  Life can be good early in the morning on the road.   I put the plate down at an empty table and surveyed the rest of the buffet.  To appease the muted, barely perceptible practical part of my brain that cried out for healthy eating I filled a bowl with fresh-cut melon, got a couple of hard-boiled eggs, grabbed two cartons of white milk, and a black coffee.

TV is so prevalent everywhere you go in America.  I was one of three persons in the dining area and the other two had their eyes glued to Good Morning America.  I had purposefully not turned the TV on in my rooms on the way down to make my escape from home more complete.  But in nearly every public space I entered, TV was there, shooting bright images across the room, often with both subtitles and loud audio.  I never watch morning TV.  I was amazed at how happy the announcers appeared.  They were absolutely gleeful in contrast to the morning breakfast eaters at the Holiday Inn Express in Weston.  My two fellow travelers looked absolutely glum.  But then they were most likely working.  I forget about work sometimes.

“Excuse me, but I came in last night in the dark.  Where do you suppose you get the road to Elkins from here?”

I said this to one or both of them, hoping to break either’s TV-induced trance.  The dressed-up woman on my right responded.  The young guy on my right just stared at the screen and slowly ate one spoonful of instant oatmeal after another.

“You go down to the main road and turn left.  I came up past Elkins last night.”

“Nasty drive in the snow?”

“Yeah, but the road is fairly flat. “

“What’s the weather look like today?”

“They say that storm is past us.  Cold though.  7 degrees right now.”

That was apparently all the human contact she could handle.  Her eyes went back to the TV and stayed there.  Donald Trump was on the screen making a pouty face.  I went back to my biscuits and gravy, which were surprisingly good.

The road to Elkins, Route 33, was more well-traveled and flatter than I was looking for, but the trip went quickly.  Past Elkins in Mill Creek I picked up Route 219 South, a two-lane road that put me on the edge of the Monongahela National Forest in the Allegheny Mountains.  My Rand McNally atlas named the mountains I was near.  On that morning I would pass by Cheat Mountain and Gauley and Yew.  I loved the names.  I loved being off the main road.  I had made it to where I wanted to be.

 

The roads were snow-packed in places but the plows had been through to clear them.  And though they salted the pavements heavily, salt stops working effectively, that is melting ice off the road, somewhere around 15 degrees.  I figured it was only a matter of time till it warmed up, the ice started working, and the pavement cleared entirely.  There was no wind and little traffic.  I started feeling like I was the only car out there.  This day had promise.

 

I was following a small river or a big creek in a valley that widened.  As it did little farms with barns began popping up.  Around them were pastures with beef cattle.  As I looked at the cattle dotting the now white grassland the clouds above them, which had been gray for two days, whitened and began to crack apart.  In the cracks between the clouds was a beautiful blue.  The weather was turning.  I rolled down my windows and put my arm out.  I could feel the air warming.  Then the sun came out.

You don’t know how much you miss the sun till you see it after a couple days' absence.  I reached for my clip-on sunglasses.  Light bounced off the snow in the pastures.  Trees threw shadows on the pavement.  I was in West Virginia on a day that was becoming bright.  That’s what I’d been waiting to experience.  America at full volume.  Country roads on a beautiful day.   Sometimes life is just good.

I’d been saving a CD you likely have not heard of for this moment.  Way back in the shack I’d figured a nice day in the hills of West Virginia was the perfect time to break out the Irish folk music.  I picked up a collection of music at a private party in Chicago by a group called bohola.  Just three Chicago guys playing a handful of instruments:  accordion, fiddle, viola, baritone fiddle, dobro, and a bouzouki of all things.  I slid the little silver disc in the dash and immediately the Buick was filled with the jigs and reels the Irish brought to the states which, along with Scotch and English tunes, became the American Bluegrass music we know today.  God, I love it.  I rolled down all the windows to let it out, like bringing it back home.  They played Redican’s jig, the Merry Old Woman jig, John Doherty’s March, Peacock’s Feather, Graf Spey, Rolling in the Hay, Colonel Rodney, Irishman’s Heart to the Ladies.  All the old Irish tunes.  My heart swelled.

I went through Mill Creek and Huttonsville, each little towns with a store or two, usually a Family Dollar and something similar, with a tiny church.  At Monterville I began to climb into the mountains and the flat space for towns thinned out.  There were clusters of small homes cut into the hills.  As I navigated the turns and climbs I could first smell and then see wood smoke coming from chimneys.  Modest little homes, with stacks of wood in the yard, or trailers, flanked by old cars and pickups.  I made it to Mingo, then after a long slow drive Slaty Fork.   Except for a ski facility on Snowshoe Mountain, that looked out of place and seldom used, there was little there but hardwood forest and scattered homes.  Just like those that live there like it I supposed.  I want to go back in the summer.  I want to be there again and feel those hills wrapped around me, the next time green and warm.  Maybe it’s because I grew up a flatland farmer from Central Illinois, but the hollers and hills give me a kind of comfort I rarely feel.   The earth and rock close around you, the sky high and away above.  Like being in the canyons of Starved Rock.

Past Marlinton and Buckeye I encountered Hillsboro, where signs directed visitors to the birthplace of Pearl S. Buck, writer of The Good Earth, the novel set in China which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.  It made sense to me, to see the quiet and beautiful place where she formed her earliest memories and know the smooth and simple style that later marked her fiction.

 

The pavement was wet here and there but the sun and warm air warmed the road even in the shadiest of places.  The turns were banked well and well maintained.  The Buick and I climbed through the switchbacks, then dropped, again and again.  Despite the ups and downs, it seemed like we were steadily going higher.  No towns got in our way.  It was beautiful up there.

 

The Buick and I came upon the unincorporated village of Droop.   Unassuming little place.   Past the buildings is the entrance to a state park marking a civil war battle ground.   A civil war battle way up here on this pretty mountain?  Yes.  A hell of a battle as it turns out.

On November 5 1863 Union General W.W. Averill attacked the Confederate army led by General John Echols at Mill Point (which I passed earlier in the day) driving them to the summit of Droop Mountain, where they were joined by other Confederate forces.   Even though the confederates held the high ground, and their artillery guarded the highway, Averill attacked again on the 6^th sending dismounted Union cavalry in a frontal assault against them.  After a violent battle, the confederates fled, scattering down the mountain in all directions, throwing their weapons behind them.  Echols rallied a few remaining troops but retreated to Virginia, virtually ending confederate resistance in West Virginia.  Confederate dead from the battle are buried in a cemetery in nearby Lewisville, down the road where I was headed.

I drove into the state park for a look around.  If blood had soaked the ground on Droop mountain, and men had lost their lives, you could never tell it today.  Tall trees stood waiting for spring.  Birds landed in them and sang.  It was quiet.  One fateful day in history 153 years ago and the mountain I stood on was marked forever for the violence that took place there.  History can sneak up on you when you’re wandering around America.  I went back to the Buick and drove off.

West Virginia state route 219 stayed pretty as I drove down the valley.  At Lewisburg, I almost stopped at the heavily advertised Jack Links Beef Jerky Outlet Store but carried on through Falling Spring, Frankford, and Maxwelton.   Caldwell, Pickaway, Union and Lindside greeted me warmly as well but I pressed on.  And then, West Virginia ran out.  A sign told me Virginia was under the Buick’s wheels.  I hadn’t seen it coming.  I pulled into a gas station to get my bearings.  West Virginia had ended so abruptly.  Just where the hell was I anyway?