rhythm in the trees and a beat in the streams: on westvirgina, pt. 1

(for Katherinevalentine and everyone else) 

If you have read this and are unaware, I am in westvirginia. 

If you have read this and are unaware, I am in shock.

Every single day, driving and walking, is Caspar David Friedich, is Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, is Clyfford Still, is Andreas Gursky, is Hanna Liden, is so wide open and full that the days before are a thousand miles passed. Today there were mountains sandwiched between the clouds and below the road, the earth letting out a thousand puffs of smoke from the midnight drag. Fog and clouds rolling into one and the court house 45 miles off. Every day is sky and mountains and every night is stars and lights. 

Saturday, Glenn and I walked on an old rail bed and in an older riverbed. Standing on rocktops in the middle of a three-way stream, only a friend in sight and god to know, I was amazed at how new this old, old world can be. This is not the only experience worth sharing, but it is the only experience worth sharing first. The trail starts two hundred yards from the riverbank and right next to the Cass water treatment ponds. The beginning would seem to promise little, if not for the 8 two-story whitewashed kit houses set just off the road before the start of the trail. Cass was a town once owned and operated by a long left lumber company, is now a ghosttownstatepark with rows of old worker's quarters all connected with wooden boardwalks and disconnected from everything else. These 8 houses, though, sit alone, outside the town proper, perhaps the prize resting places for foremen or those gifted few who fell an oak in just two strikes. They are the gravestones of sweat and blood pored and poured for the resources of this wealthy land. Covered by the mighty shade of oaks not touched by the hands once there inhabited, the roofs are empty nests and all the doors are nailed shut or rotted open. The whitewashed boards that have not yet fallen have been left wanting and the road passing through the middle of the ghostly outcropping has grown over, is now a meadow. "The only thing unsettling about those houses is that there are no ghosts," Glenn said as we parked the car and walked toward the beginning of the Greenbrier River Trail.

We walked for a mile or so and passed through 17 different climates. Asking ourselves, where are we? where have we gone? where are we going? We are in westvirginia, we are in vietnam, we are in mozambique, we are in the northwest territory, we are in northcarolina, we are in westvirginia. We saw all the foothills of all the world at the beginning of the trail, swampy and dry, huge white pines and tiny flowering shrubs. A mile in, we left the gravel path of the old rail bed and took to the small boulders of the river. The water was warmer than the cool waterfallshowers we had taken the week before, but made for easy entry and soon my toes and his shoes were under to not come up for the rest of the day. We saw a goose and her goslings and deer by herself cross the river. Nothing else. No people. No cars. No buildings. No planes. No lights. No naturalgas. No money. No terrible thing. Standing on rocktops in the middle of a three-way stream, I am amazed at how new this old, old world can be. and how smooth these hard, hard rocks can be. and how wonderful this only life can be. 

we swam for a while, for smooth skin, for warm water, for large rocks on the other side, and went back to the top of the world where i got sick and have been for three days. 

i'll be home thursday.

(photo: cass schoolhouse)