My Brain was Interrupted

 

 

I don’t know how writers, particularly nonfiction writers trying to compose essays about real and perhaps current events, stick with a topic when a more pressing one emerges.  I was in the middle of writing about my recent road trip through West Virginia, a short account about people I met and things I learned when I was completely interrupted by national news.  Emotionally ripped away by the slaughter of fellow Americans in an upstate New York supermarket and an elementary school.  It’s been hard for me to think about anything else.

I read a New York Times account of the newest classroom tragedy, after hearing earlier reports from news conferences held by local officials at the scene.  The news comes at you in so many ways these days.  I was listening to an NPR interview in my car in which an expert of some kind was talking about nineteen children killed in one classroom.  The NPR interviewer, to his credit, asked this question.

 “Do you know for a fact they were all in the same classroom?”

“No, I don’t.  I assume so because Texas mandates no more than 22 kids in one classroom.  It just makes sense to me.  But no, I don’t know.”

It made sense to me, and I accepted his assumption.  Until my brother called.  My brother, older than me and as tuned in as anyone I know to the news, was the first to suggest otherwise.

“I couldn’t sleep the other night, got up, and tuned in to cable news.   Now they’re saying he was in more than one room.  The rooms are adjoined.  There were more than nineteen kids who went through that hell. Some lived through it.”

I had been grieving for nineteen kids, and two teachers (team teaching perhaps?) all of whom died.  Now my grief expanded to include the lifelong impact that experience would have on those who were in those rooms but live on.

For thirty-some years I was the director of a youth service/child welfare agency that expanded its expertise and programming from troubled teens, including runaways and those caught up in the juvenile justice system, to include services for those suffering neglect and physical and sexual abuse.  It was the sexual abuse that was most chilling, although it is open to debate as to which experience is most devastating.

Physical abuse and neglect are at least understandable to the public.  Sexual abuse was a taboo rarely considered until the mid-80s.  In the early days when Americans first felt able to openly talk about the sexual abuse of children, after a network news show called “Something About Amanda” starring Ted Danson, my staff couldn’t make a public presentation about our sexual abuse treatment program without some adult coming up after the talk and divulging their own traumatic experience.  The lid came off the dynamics of sexual abuse, most often familial, and the specter of its damage, the sheer extent of the trauma suffered by those abused and not believed, or never sharing their secret, was breathtaking.

It was my job as director of a child welfare agency to read and sign unusual incident reports, familiarize myself with court reports being submitted by my staff, to understand the problems confronting both the children and families we served but also the depth to which our staff and foster parents were affected by hearing their stories.  It was as simple as taking the material from my inbox, mail received and information from staff, walking back to my office, sitting down, and reading it.  What I read was often horrific.

And confidential.  Children and families involved in our child welfare, juvenile justice, and family court systems have a right to privacy.  I could talk to my staff who were involved about what I was reading, and I did often, but not to family and friends close to me.  It was hard.  I knew things about my community that others did not, and I couldn’t talk about it.

I retired over ten years ago. Things have changed. Privacy laws and confidentiality measures have remained the same, but we have changed our attitudes about volunteering information about ourselves.  Social media has made us all reporters.  Both journalists and everyday people are giving us more information than ever before.  You must look at it closely for accuracy, but there is no shortage of material to review.  In fact, I sometimes feel we’re drowning in it.

After the initial press conference following the mass murder in a Uvalde Texas elementary school, in which the Governor of the state flanked by its ranking U.S. Senator and others told the world a school resource officer confronted the gunman and brave law enforcement officials ran towards the deadly attacker, we learned otherwise.

The school resource officer was not on school grounds.  Upon returning to his post, he drove past the alleged killer who was in the vicinity of his wrecked truck, and never challenged the alleged killer’s entry into the school he was hired to protect.  (I’m dropping the alleged adjective.  To my attorney friends, I admit I’m wrong to do so.)  The killer entered the school through a propped open side door.  He shot his way into a classroom before the teacher could lock it.  That room adjoined another classroom, and methodically, over time, he killed both teachers and students in both rooms with an AR-15-style rifle he’d purchased legally days earlier on his 18^th birthday.  He was armed with more rounds of ammunition than is supplied to U.S. soldiers in battle, clip after clip of deadly merciless bullets.  Shell casings at the scene told police he had fired 142 rounds of that ammunition.

A law enforcement official in charge, commanding 19 or so armed policemen inside the school, delayed engaging the killer who was inside the classroom for nearly an hour until proper equipment and additional personnel arrived.  Even after they arrived.  His rationale was that the threat of further death was over, and the shooter barricaded in the room was no longer a danger.  He was wrong.

Journalists have helped us reconstruct the scene inside that classroom by conducting sensitive interviews in which survivors and their families agreed to participate.  CNN reporter Norah Neus interviewed Miah Cerrillo, age 11, who was wounded but survived in her fourth-grade classroom where so many of her classmates died.

Present at the interview was Miah’s mother.   Miah was scared to speak on camera, or to a man, because of what she experienced but told CNN she wanted to share her story so people can know what it’s like to live through a school shooting.  She hopes that speaking out can prevent a tragedy like the one she experienced from happening to other kids.

There was a time when journalists would never expose children to this type of coverage.  Again, times have changed.  Miah and her family freely consented to allow her voice to be heard.

Click this link, and click the redirect notice to view the video

Norah Tells Miah's Story

The story recalled in the video is hard to hear.  It’s a memory that will never be erased in her mind.  Hopefully, it can be dealt with in therapy and its impact blunted, the damage contained at some level.  The video speaks for itself.  If Miah is brave enough to share her story, I think we should listen.  It’s 6 minutes and 47 seconds out of your day.

Near the end of the tape, CNN reporter Norah Neus mentions something that struck a chord with me as a former supplier of therapy to survivors of trauma in a rural area.  You can hear Norah’s words in the video about the question of therapy for Miah.  They go something like this.

“Miah’s parents are trying to get her some kind of therapy help, they’ll probably have to drive to San Antonio for that.  They’re starting a Go Fund Me page.”

Excuse me, but it’s bullshit that the parents of victims should be left to their own devices to get help for their kids.  There should have been social workers in that community starting to gather resources and bring help to that community the day after the shooting.  San Antonio is 83 miles away from Uvalde.  Google maps says it’s an hour and twenty-minute trip.  It’s not just Miah that needs help.  Parents and students throughout the school need help.  Teachers need help.  Extended family members need help.  And police and first responders will need a whole lot of help after this one.

Some will require good debriefing, an assessment, and a limited amount of follow-up sessions.  Others will require medication and ongoing psychotherapy for years.  They deserve great care, and they deserve to have it delivered to them in their own community.

I’m not a trained psychotherapist by any means but I could write a budget for a project like this.  I’d start with staff: a team of well-trained and experienced therapists, supported by consulting psychiatrists including a child psychiatrist.  I’d give them a good case manager (maybe more depending on the numbers) that can visit kids at home, with their families, and in the community.  Included should be community education about trauma, and integration with natural supports in the community like churches, police, and whatever exists to support kids and families.

And rather than choosing which resources to provide from a fixed number of dollars picked out of the sky, I would budget whatever it costs to make this happen.  Is there an existing building that can be remodeled and furnished as an inviting, comfortable place for therapy to be delivered?  Then rent it and get that done.  Is there nothing suitable?  Then build one.  There is work to be done in Uvalde, Texas for years and years.  And Buffalo.  And on and on and on.

Come to think of it, it’s not just victims of mass shootings that need this kind of help.  Victims surviving daily gun violence in cities and towns across the country suffer from trauma.  In our data-rich world, I think we could map the incidence of gun violence and find neighborhoods and communities that need a large amount of mental health treatment but have no local source of help.  Let’s set up centers there too.

And for God’s sake let’s not depend on Go Fund Me as the way to pay for this help.  Our states and the federal government should provide comprehensive and ongoing treatment for their citizens as long as it persists in allowing such senseless violence to occur and until it stops it.  If it proves expensive, I suggest a healthy tax collected from gun manufacturers and sellers.  It’s an industry you know.  They should bear the burden of the havoc their products wreak out of the profits they enjoy in our capitalist system just as oil companies fund the clean up of petroleum spills that foul our environment.  Money should not be the issue.

Helping Miah and her family and others like them should be the issue.  We should be guided by what they want and need to be whole and healthy once again.   And we shouldn’t rest until that job is done.  

 

Cameron West Virginia

Cameron West Virginia was the town that most intrigued me.  Aside from the city of Fairmount, it was the largest community I would drive through on Route 250, and it had a new school and an intriguing past.

Coming from the north, I passed the new school in the woods perhaps a couple miles before entering the town.  It’s a gleaming, spanking new middle/high school, built at a cost of $31M, by an engineering firm that received awards for its green design. 

It serves 323 students and draws, I suspect, from a much larger area than Cameron.  It was by far the most modern building I’d seen since I crossed into West Virginia.  I expected to see a town that was a hub for all the little towns I’d driven through, with maybe a Dollar General and a good chain grocery store.  I had it figured as a place to stop for lunch.

But when I got to downtown Cameron, at the bottom of a valley, I was surrounded by old brick buildings, many of which appeared vacant.

I drove by two tall churches.  There was something of a food and clothing distribution going on near the Presbyterian church. An older woman with a young child, likely her granddaughter, was crossing Church Street heading towards folding tables near the sidewalk stacked with canned goods and neatly folded piles of clothing.  I stopped to let her cross the street.  She took the little girl by the hand, waved, and smiled.

On Railroad Street, I slowed down at a newer concrete building with no sign.  It was across from the grade school.  There were cars in the parking lot.  This sign on a lamppost close to the building caught my eye.

 I pulled in, parked, and walked to the door.  I still couldn’t tell what was inside, but as I got close to the door, I saw shopping carts through a large window.

When I walked in, I saw it was a grocery store.  There was a young man in a stocking hat at a cash register by a bleak produce section. 

“I saw a sign in your parking lot.  Do you sell prepared food here?”

“No. We ought to take that down.  That was for a little event they had in the parking lot a while ago.  We’re just groceries.”

“Thanks.  Do you have a restroom for the public?”

“Yeah.  In the back past the meat counter.  You’re welcome to use it.”

He pointed to the far corner.  Walking there gave me a chance to take in most of the store. I became used to empty shelves during the pandemic, mostly in the paper aisle.  But no store shelves I’d seen in Illinois compared to those in Greg’s Market.  There was very little fresh food of any kind.  Mostly canned.  A very small frozen section.  People were moving slowly up and down the aisles.  Big carts with little food in them. 

There was a lot of looking but little buying going on at the butcher’s counter.  A thin man with faded jeans stroked a long gray beard as he studied the price of the beef cuts.  The beef prices were even higher than at home.

When I got to the corner where the bathroom was supposed to be I encountered swinging doors that divide the front of the store from the back and a sign that said “employees only.”  I stopped.  A voice from behind me said.

“You go right ahead on.  That bathroom is for everybody.”

I turned and saw an older man with cases of canned food on a pallet jack making his way toward me.

‘Don’t pay that sign no mind.”

“Thanks.”

 As I left the store a man was talking to the kid with the stocking hat clerking at the cash register.  Both looked up at me.

“Is there a restaurant here I could get some lunch?”

“You mean a sit-down restaurant?” the clerk said.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, we have a pretty good one.  Follow this street just to the other side of the American Legion, that gray steel building over there.  Bridge Street restaurant is just behind it.”

“OK, thanks.”

I left the store and was just opening the door to the Buick when I heard a voice from the driver’s side of the pickup truck parked beside me. 

“Excuse me sir I want to second Paul’s recommendation of the Bridge Street restaurant.  Pretty good food and a lot of it.”

“That’s good to hear. I haven’t seen much in the way of eating places since I got on 250.”

“Where you coming from?”

“I started this morning in Zanesville Ohio, but I’m from Illinois.”

‘You’ve come a ways then.  How’d you like that drive from Wheeling?”

“I got to say it’s been a challenge.  I don’t have much experience driving on roads like this.  I come from Illinois.  Pretty flat.”

“Whereabouts in Illinois?”

“Ottawa.  About 90 miles southwest of Chicago on Route 80.”

“Ottawa huh? I’ve been on 80 going west but I don’t recall that town.”

“About 18,000.  Good farm ground around there.  It’s on the Illinois and Fox river.  Where they meet actually.  Say, what’s this river that winds around these hills?”

“Not a river.  Grave Creek.  Flow’s past that tall mound in Moundsville where the Adena Indian tribe buried their people.  Ends up in the Ohio River.”

“You lived here long?”

“All my life.  My great-great-grandfather lived here when this town really was something.  Nothing like it used to be.”

“You have really big churches and lots of downtown buildings for a town of 946.”

“That was the 2010 census number.  2020 census has us at 807.  Our high point was 1920.  2,404.  In a hunnert years we’ve lost nearly two-thirds of our people.”

I’d shut the Buick’s driver’s side door and we talked to each other over the hood. He turned from looking at me to looking over his town’s center.

“This town is circling the drain.”

“What happened?”

He turned and looked at me.

“Well, for starters we lost our train.”

“I was looking for tracks.  We’re on Railroad Street but I don’t see any.”

“Nope.  They pulled up the tracks in 1975.  First passenger train ran in 1853 and the last passenger ran in 1956.  Then we lost our freight traffic too.  Took everything they could out of these hills, then walked away.”

“Who’s they you’re talking about?”

“The company that bought the company that bought out the B&O Railroad.  Ended up being CSX I think.  It was the first public access train built in America.  Ran from Baltimore Maryland on the East coast to Wheeling Virginia and the Ohio River in sixteen hours.  It was a big deal for its time.  Like the Erie canal before that.  Set up a way to move goods and people fast.  Spent a lot of money on it too.  Between Cumberland Maryland and Wheeling, they built 11 tunnels and 113 bridges.  That’s what made this town.  People took the train in, took the train out.  This part of town right here was jammed with people making a trip through the mountains.  Slumming it maybe, but they came.”

“What was your great-grandpa doing back then?”

“Made a business out of derrick well drilling.  He dug wells first but ended up making the equipment. You drive pipe into the ground, slam it over and over, then take out whatever.  Mostly natural gas, but water wells too. They took coal outa here, sand, iron ore.  We had an ironworks at one time, and steel was made nearby.  That business mostly all went to Weirton.  But Cameron was a booming place.  And that’s all gone.”

“You got a heckuva high school out there though.”

“Yes we do, and we’re proud of it.  Gotta keep kids in it though.”

“Where’d you get the money for that?”

“$23M from the state and $8M from the county.  Kind of amazing.  We tried to restore our old train depot in the early 2000s, make a community center deal out of it, still can’t find the money to finish it.  But you’re right, we have a great school, and that’s important.”

 “How was the pandemic around here?”

“Well, we live fairly separately anyway.  Social distancing is not really new for us in the hills.  But we didn’t take to masks or shots as well as we probably should have.  I think we lost more neighbors than we had to.  My idea though is some people died of sheer loneliness, especially the older ones.  We didn’t get many visitors like you in the past two years. Not that we ever do now that we’re down to just that winding road.

He paused.

“Covid was terrible.  But I tell you what the opioid thing was worse.  Still is.  We’re going through a lot, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next.  I’m very worried for our young people.”

“I understand.  I don’t think the drug companies did you any favors on the opioid epidemic but you’re right.  I don’t think anybody knows what’s around the corner.”

I had intended to talk to West Virginians about politics.  69% of West Virginia voters marked their ballots for Donald Trump in 2020, a full percentage point more than in 2016.  Marshall County voters, one of which I was talking to, cast 75% of their votes for Donald Trump in 2020 after voting for him at a 77% clip in 2016.

I wanted to ask the nice man I was talking to why.  I wanted to ask him how Joe Manchin keeps getting elected as a Democrat in such a Republican state.  I wanted to ask him what Donald Trump had done for West Virginia to earn such trust.  But I didn’t.  I had the chance, but passed it up.  It felt wrong.  Like I would be badgering him. 

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Dave.”

“I’m Dave too.”

I was going to ask if I could take his picture but when he chose not to tell me his last name, I didn’t do that either.

“Well Dave, it was nice talking to you.  Enjoy lunch in our town.”

“I’m sure I will.  Nice talking to you too.”

I opened the door of the Buick again. Dave’s voice stopped me from getting in.

“Hey, I might tell you.  Don’t know how far you plan to go on 250 but past Elkins it gets pretty rough.”

“Rougher than from Wheeling? “

“Yeah. Lots.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.  Thanks for the worry.”

West Virginia

I crossed the Ohio River and entered West Virginia on I-70 East, then took the Moundsville/South 250 exit.  I’d been on Interstate highways since I turned onto I-80 in Ottawa.  It was April 20, 2022.     

The road to Moundsville takes you down the Ohio River Valley and West Virginia Route 250 takes you up into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.  When I took the South 250 exit and the Buick began the steep climb up, I breezed past the very spot where, in April 2016, a squad car with flashing lights and a barricade stopped me from going farther.  They said it was due to icy road conditions and assured me it was for my own good.  I generally don’t like people making those decisions for me.

On that day in 2016, the skies were dark, and I was in the middle of a terrible snowstorm.  In 2022, it was clear sailing.  I’m still not sure the pandemic is over, but at that moment it felt like it.  I was alone on a road I’d never traveled and was free to go wherever I chose.  I’d waited a long time for that feeling.  During my life, I’ve had no luck duplicating it.

Route 250 is a two-lane road that will take you clear across the state and into eastern Virginia.  Slowly. On that initial climb up a steep grade the pavement was rough and patchy.  At the top of the climb, the road followed a high ridge for only a moment and then turned sharply downward.  A speed limit sign advised me not to exceed 15 miles an hour. At the bottom of the descent, the road turned quickly back up.

That was the first of many kiss-ass turns I’d been told about years ago at Amy’s Candlelight Fine Dining and Sports Bar in New Martinsville.  That same pattern of climb and descend, with a slowed-down switchback turn at each transition was repeated over and over.  I couldn’t imagine driving that road when it was icy.  I give grudging thanks to the cops that stopped me that day in 2016.

The trees had not greened up for the most part, but redbud trees just blooming added faint purple blotches on the hillsides.  I wished I could have gazed at the scenery more, but my eyes were locked onto the road.

The pavement could have been better, but the task of maintaining that winding track of two-lane asphalt must be huge.  Road shoulders were narrow, and I believe every bit of flat land large enough for a foundation contains a building of some kind.  Homes and farm buildings are few and far between.  The few pastures cleared of trees looked impossibly steep, yet cows and sheep clung to them.  Slope has the upper hand over human habitation in those hills. 

It was slow going.  I had considered the mileage but not the speed.  From Illinois, I imagined myself being in eastern Virginia by Wednesday night.  At this slow rate of travel that might not work.  But no matter.  It was a goal rather than a deadline. My overall hope was to be in Tampa Florida by Saturday night.  But if I wasn’t there, it was OK.  Lack of deadlines makes living easier.

I had researched the towns along South 250 on Wikipedia before I left.  Most are unincorporated, but I didn’t know they were practically unrecognizable.  Limestone is for the most part a road sign, a Presbyterian church, and a general store.  

Littleton is listed in Wikipedia as a CDP or Census Designated Place.  It was formerly incorporated but dissolved in 2004.  196 people lived there in 2000 according to that year’s census.  I turned off the road but saw little activity.  I didn’t look long, but mostly saw abandoned commercial buildings.  lllinois has small towns, but their buildings are grouped together.  I suspect Littleton’s 196 people are spread in houses spread up and down the hills rather than grouped along the main road.  There are precious few places to pull off and turn around on 250 South.  I kept on driving.

 

Burton in comparison looks to be doing all right.  It lost its post office in 2011 but still has a gas station and Discount Center store that sells everything from bread to motor oil plus hot food you can eat in a small dining area if you choose.   Core Oil is a full-service gas station that sells tires and does minor car repairs. Burton even has a body shop/car repair business that doubles as a West Virginia Vehicle Inspection Center.  Here’s an aerial view of Burton.

The bad news is the town of Burton is not included in any cell phone company’s current advertised service area.  You can get a landline in Burton, and “high speed” DSL internet service through Frontier Communications.  And while there is outpatient health care available at “The Burton Clinic” housed in the now-closed Burton Grade School, hospital care is an hour away by ambulance.

All these towns are far ahead of Glover Gap which has a dot named after it in the Rand McNally 2022 Road Atlas but is listed in Wikipedia purely in hopes one of its readers can help them locate its coordinates and discover things like cemeteries or razed building sites to verify its existence.  This goes under the category of “we’ve heard of Glover Gap, but we can’t find it.”  Research in the region leads the Wiki people to believe it was once a community and not just a place name.  So, if you know anything about Glover Gap, let them know.

Hundred, a town of 262 people on 250 south, has a colorful history.  It is named after a man named Henry Church, a citizen of the town who lived to be a hundred (109 in fact, or perhaps fiction) and died in 1860.  Henry fought for the British in the Revolutionary War and was taken prisoner by Lafayette’s forces before being released and returning to his home in the hills.  I forget when I travel in Eastern America how much farther the history of white settlers on the continent extends beyond that of the Midwest.

Here’s a photo of Cleveland Street in Hundred.

Hundred also boasts the birthplace of Edward King who played Major League Baseball for seven years and drove in the final run in the 1922 World Series while playing for the victorious New York Giants.  You learn something every day.

Before I left home, I learned some West Virginia history in preparation for the trip.  In the run-up to the Civil War, a portion of the state of Virginia broke away and formed a new state, West Virginia.  I never knew the story.  Retirement is handy for filling in the gaps.

The land that is now West Virginia was taken from indigenous people in 1607 when Britain claimed to own both it and present-day Virginia.  That action formed the Virginia colony.  In 1776 when thirteen such colonies declared their independence from Britain, the hills and mountains of Appalachia stayed part of the state of Virginia and remained so until the state sharply divided over the question of slavery.  

I think we ignore the significance of slavery not only to our country's history but to its identity.  How Americans living in the land I was driving through felt about the moral question of slavery and wished to define their community created West Virginia.  

In 1861, at a convention in Wheeling (then Virginia) a convention of Northwestern Southern Unionists voiced support for repealing Virginia's ordinance of secession passed in April of 1861. Secession ordinances were boilerplate resolutions circulated among southern states who wished to retain the legal right to enslave black people brought from Africa and keep their status as chattel property of white owners.

After Abe Lincoln's election as President of the United States, secession began with South Carolina and was quickly followed by ten other states and one territory (Arizona).

Two states, Kentucky and Missouri, failed to formally secede but were considered by the Confederacy as southern states anyway.  Two states previously considered southern, Delaware and Maryland, rejected secession and remained in the Union.  No other states acted n the question of secession until, following the Wheeling Convention, a Unionist government formed from50 counties in western Virginia.

That state, West Virginia, was admitted to the Union as a U.S.state on June 20, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War.  Its borders reshaped the demarcation line those famous surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, laid down to separate North from South and divide our country on the question of slavery.  

But those events are over and done.  I was looking to be in the moment with people in West Virginia, to learn about their present reality and maybe ponder their future.  That started in Cameron.