Becoming Grateful After Leaving Home
When I was six years old, my family moved from the Kanawha Valley to the back end of Nicholas County. My parents dreamed of providing a refuge, a quiet place to rest and recuperate away from the demands of curious congregants and speaking engagements, for Christian missionaries on furlough. The plan was a huge, gorgeous house in the wilds of West Virginia that would perch on the top of a mountain ridge with vistas stretching miles into the distance. My dad spent months drafting his plans, reviving his old desire to study architecture as he carefully created the vision. The neo-brutalist structure took shape on paper in clean lines and carefully measured angles, the buttresses supporting a metal roof curved at two different radii, layered like a simplified Sydney Opera House, the interstitials of the first floor enclosed by immense windows that would provide unobstructed access to the view across the rippling hills of the Central Appalachian Range.
The house was never built. We poured the foundations, and my parents bent the rebar skeletons that would make the buttresses indestructible into shape with their own hands. Nearly half the concrete was poured, then a tiny disaster, the barest touch of it, halted the entire dream. The generator we used to power the well pump, along with the copper wire, was stolen one night. If my memories are correct, we never poured another load of concrete.
We moved from our rental house into two trailer homes, connected by a room built between them, and waited for the wind to change. It never did, unless you count the derecho in 2012. Over time, we reached a breaking point in isolation. Thirty minutes of back-road driving before we could even reach the nearest traffic light meant, in some cases, six or seven new car tires a year. Our community was a forty-five minute drive away in total, much of it impassable in winter without risking peril. Our power regularly went out, sometimes for days at a time, sometimes in the middle of winter with wind chill below zero. My dad once got stuck on the way home from his 24-hour shift with the Charleston Fire Department one morning, and waded through miles of hip-deep snow to reach us. He left at 7:30 that morning, and arrived at home after dark. He thought he would die out there, but by the time he was growing exhausted, he was already further from the possible safety and dubious warmth of his car (a tiny blue Suzuki Sidekick with a removable canvas-and-vinyl top that provided barely more than a windbreak) than it would take to reach home.
After we moved, it took a long time for me to recognize what we had there. I had to mythologize it in the moments where my life had a new gap. When I craved the clean, sweet, tart intensity of wild black raspberries, I remembered how easy it was to get them on the mountain. When I grimaced at the flavor of chlorinated municipal water, I remembered the deep cold of our well, the minerality of it, the way it tasted safe and correct. I’ve had to construct a gratitude for that place over years of separation from it. The other gratitude I feel has been a bit easier.
When I leave these mountains, I can feel the lack of them. It’s like knowing your face is dirty and not being able to clean it, that sense of something not-quite-right that you can’t shake. I feel it wash away when I step out of the car or out of the airport on my way home. When I start to wonder if I really belong here, I hold onto that feeling, of slipping back into alignment with my place in the world. I can’t say that I regret leaving the back end of nowhere, but I do sometimes miss it. I wish I could have both. The longer I live away from the rigors of that place, the more I realize it turned me into something unique. It tempered me, in a way. I find the things it showed me in small ways, the ways it shaped me. I find myself returning in my writing to the images burnt into my mind: the pink-gold of sunset on a rank of gray trees, a lacework of frost-white branches against an achingly blue sky, a hillside alive with goldfinches and indigo buntings. I mull my writing with that patch of land like spice in cider. I plant our neighbor’s hayfield in a fantasy character’s memory. I put another’s birthplace in an inaccessible mountain community so that I can write what I know. When I write the change of seasons, I write it through eyes that watched the summer haze fall out under an onslaught of autumn rain in mid-October.
It’s not revolutionary, realizing that you value things more in their absence, but I think we all have to experience it for it to ring true. Some of us fear losing the things we have, but I think that’s only the surface of the issue. It’s not about fear, or sorrow, or regret. It’s about the downstream effects. Every time I leave Appalachia, I feel the absence. I know what it means to be from here, because I know what the world looks like in other places. I learn from a flatlander that something I’ve taken for granted is exceptional. I learn that I live in the center of diversity for salamanders, a place wildly under-studied for the fungi it hosts, a place where trees grow meters in a year and no one thinks anything of it. I live in a place that climate change may turn into a rainforest. I live in a place that founded labor movements and fueled the midcentury’s cities. I come back here and peel lichen from a tree to crumble between my fingers, and I let the smell lift my soul out of my bones. I come home to the sound of wind roaring in the upper branches of a mixed mesophytic forest, and I feel like something is right about being here.
I want to share that feeling when I write. I want to make a place feel like it’s welcoming its children. I want to build spaces in my work that open their arms and tell the reader and character alike that they belong there. I’m not much on the notion of a life’s purpose, but if I had to choose one, it might be that. It gives me joy unlike anything else to watch others become entranced with this place I love so dearly. I think everyone deserves that feeling, and I’m grateful to my homeland for giving it to me. Every time I’m separated from the old rock and new topsoil, I remember what it means to be from somewhere. Losing it for a time makes the thrumming life that surrounds me at home feel that much more present. The feeling of good air after bad, of cool quiet after cramped heat, only exists in the contrast.
