2004-11-12 - 6:59 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Ask", The Smiths

What I Did On My West Virginia Vacation

Well, we're back, rather reluctantly. The trip was absolutely fantastic. I must have ridden over 60 miles, maybe as many as 75, over the six days we were there and it was just SO MUCH FUN. Before I bore you with trail descriptions, I wrote a long rambling entry about southwestern West Virginia and my impressions of it.

We rented ourselves some large Chevrolet pickup for the trip, because we needed a truck wide enough to fit three dirt bikes (Poindexter's new one, mine, and P's old one for Justin, who was driving up from NC to join us). It was huge. Poindexter was so far across the car from me that I couldn't reach him to tickle his neck while he was driving. On the other hand, it was quiet and incredibly comfortable and my butt did not start to hurt until after six hours of driving.

Around the time we got to I-695, I fell asleep for a bit. I woke up on I-70 before Frederick and Poindexter said, "I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you want to hear first?" I like to save the best for last, so I picked the bad news.

"The CD player doesn't work."

That was downright horrifying to hear. Music is what gets Poindexter through a road trip, and we were going to be in the mountains of West Virginia where the signal might not be so great. So I said, "Well, Frederick is sort of the end of the DC area, so let's look for a Target and buy a boom box before it's too late."

The good news seemed rather lame after all that -- Kerry had conceded and the election was officially over, much to our mutual relief after the stress of the fiasco in 2000.

We found a Circuit City and found a box we liked and were helped by a nice young man there. Since I was so excited about the trip, I babbled at him that we were going to West Virginia to ride our dirt bikes and needed music for the trip. Turns out the nice young man was from a town about a half-hour south of the trail system we were headed for. He asked if we had ever been there, and we said no, and he half-laughed and shook his head. He said that it was like stepping back in time to be there, like a time warp, and "It's ... it's ... you ever see 'Deliverance'?"

Poindexter started laughing so hard he doubled over and had to hold onto the display shelf for support.

I hadn't seen the movie, so I had no idea what he was laughing at, but Poindexter's impression of "Deliverance" can basically be summed up in a single phrase -- "Squeal like a pig!" -- hence the incredulous laughing. I still don't know if the guy was kidding around or if he really sees his hometown as being full of people like the toothless, uh, villains in the movie. (As freaky coincidence would have it, "Deliverance" was on the TV on one of our last mornings there, and was full of stuff that made me feel queasy for the entire morning. What a dreadful movie.)

So we got the box and continued on our way. If you are headed to points west from Maryland or Northern Virginia, I highly recommend I-68 between I-70 and I-79 -- that was the loveliest part of the trip. Cumberland, MD is adorable, too. And as it turns out, the radio reception is bad in the valleys but there are lots of good rock stations between here and our destination, so we didn't really need the boom box after all. It was great to have in our lodgings, though, and I will be using it at home in the kitchen when I wash dishes.

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I love traveling in this country. Every place is different. My boss complained once that places were getting too similar, because of chain restaurants and television homogenizing everything, but I think he's not looking hard enough. There are lots of regional differences and it's tons of fun to discover them. Traveling from one place to another within this country reveals enough uniqueness to be interesting without putting me into total culture shock.

In West Virginia, my favorite bits of local flavor were the geography and the regional accent/dialect. Some people find accents grating, but I love them all. I love the New York accent, Black English Vernacular, all of it. I love listening and watching and categorizing the differences. I've always been fascinated with language, and I worry sometimes that eventually everyone will just have a "television" accent and we won't have regional variances anymore, but that doesn't really seem to be happening yet. I'm still startled by the thick Philadelphia accents I encounter in the natives here.

One of the most amazing things about the county we were in is that most places don't use street addresses. People have PO boxes as their address. The streets do have names, but I guess they're not used very much. Because of this, we had to meet our host at a local restaurant right on the highway (not the four-lane) and he drove us to the rental (which was a cozy two-bedroom trailer). When you ask where something is, people tell you, "Next to the high school" rather than an address. When we were planning our trip, Poindexter called this restaurant to get an address to plug into Mapquest.

Poindexter: Could you tell me your address, please?
Fast Food Person (FFP): [good ten-second pause] Who is this?
Poindexter: This is Poindexter.
FFP: What d'you need an address for?
Poindexter: So I can get directions to your establishment.
FFP: We got a PO box ... well, where you comin' from?
Poindexter: North of you.
FFP: Well, when you get to the four-lane you'll come to a traffic laht at the bottom of the heel, and you make a lay-eft, and we're next to the bank.

The area where we stayed has a geography I've never seen anywhere else. There is a river flowing through the mountains there, and the river valley goes for miles and miles in length but is rarely more than a few hundred yards wide. Somebody with a good arm could probably throw a baseball from one side of it to the other in most spots. In these next two pictures, I am standing on the hill on one side and looking at the hill on the other side of the valley:

The car in that picture is driving alongside the river. I also got a picture of the fog lingering on one of the hills:

The entire population is crammed down into this valley, giving you the impression that there are a lot of people there with a high population density. In reality I suppose there aren't that many people at all; certainly not relative to anywhere else I've lived, even in the suburbs. The houses are usually right next to the road, sometimes separated from the road by the river. In some places there are railroad tracks:

As you might expect, there are lots and lots and lots of trailer homes. People talk a lot of shit about trailers but the ones I've been in are really nice and I think I'd be quite happy living in one. I did not see much in the way of apartment buildings -- I think most people live in their own trailer. Seeing a "real house", particularly one made of stone or brick, was a bit of a surprise, and usually only happened in incorporated towns. There are dozens of small unincorporated towns all along the two-lane highway, populated almost entirely by people in trailers.

The vast majority of the roads in the area are two-lane double-yellow roads, squeezed between the mountain and one side of the river. There was only one larger road that we saw, the road leading up to Charleston. The locals refer to this road (or any other similar road, I'm told) as "the four lane". Somebody was telling us not to use the internet directions and to "stay on the four lane". This was our favorite West-Virginia-ism of the trip, and we will never again refer to a four-lane road in any other way.

I was completely charmed by the accent. I love listening to people who never bother to pronounce "-ing" as anything other than "in'". People in the area are also very chatty -- if you get them talking, they're not likely to stop anytime soon. Poindexter tells me that people tend to repeat themselves a lot -- telling the same story but using different words. This was particularly helpful for me, because I was having trouble deciphering the accent sometimes and having the story repeated meant that I had multiple chances to hear it.

The neighborhood where we were staying has no leash laws, so there are dogs running around everywhere. I have never experienced this, and it was frickin' awesome. As we pulled onto the street, our host's dogs were waiting on the corner for him, and then began running after his truck and barking. We got to meet them right away, and they were frequent visitors during our stay, and when I took a couple of walks around the neighborhood they came with me for a while. I met other dogs while I was out walking around a bit the one morning.

There are fences around almost every yard and a good quarter of the houses have "no trespassing" signs, usually more than one.

Our host said that he has lived all his lahf in this town, and his family is all there, and his family has lived there as far back as anyone can remember. He ain't never really been nowheres else, and he's satisfahed right where he is.

This is very similar to the stories I hear from Philadelphians. There are many, many people here who have lived in the same neighborhood all their lives, and their parents are on the next block and their kids two streets over, and the farthest they've traveled is "downashore" to the Jersey beaches or maybe up to Manhattan. At this point in my life it's hard for me to imagine. I've lived in the Northeast, the edge of the South, the Left Coast, and the big huge melting pot that is the DC metro area. I've visited the Southwest and the Midwest and Florida. The idea of never having seen these places is very hard for me to imagine, since I value those experiences so much and they have given me such a broad sample of what the US is like. But there are people in my family who haven't traveled very far, either, so if I hadn't started the ball rolling by going to a college six hours away, I might never have left New Jersey myself.

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Poindexter and I noticed right off that we got stared at a lot. Every time we walked into a store, people would look. It wasn't a malevolent staring, and didn't make me uncomfortable, but people were always looking. We speculated that there was something about us that gave away that we weren't natives. Poindexter said, "It's like we're walking around with signs over our heads that say 'foreigners'!" The town gets a lot of ATVers from all over North America so I'm not sure why the 4351st and 4352nd dirt bikers would be all that interesting.

After a day or so of this, I started to wonder. The town isn't really all that small -- the high school has around 400 students, which is half the size of my high school, and I didn't even come close to knowing everybody in my town. And we were dressed just like everyone else. So then I wondered if they do that to everybody, foreigner or not, because they're just keeping tabs on what's going on. Poindexter liked that idea. "Yeah! It's a development! A developing situation!"

I still don't know what the reason was -- next time I'm there I'll ask our host.

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Other little bits I noticed:

- People put up flyers everywhere to advertise social events. The vast majority of the ones I saw involved church activities, stuff like special worship services or church suppers.

- It seems like 50% of the people, if not more (who knows what people have in their locked sheds behind the "no trespassing" signs) have an ATV of some sort. From what our host said, there are miles and miles of trails that aren't part of the official trail system.

- People were already putting up Christmas decorations on their houses.

- Wal-Mart in West Virginia is a wonderful, wonderful place. I wish the Philadelphia Wal-Mart were that nice.

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Next entry I'll post pictures of me on my dirt bike and talk about the trails. That's a whole 'nother entry. :)

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