Appalachian Contrast

It was fifth grade when I moved to West Virginia from Denver. The differences I immediately noticed were of the environment:

1.       There was so much more humidity.

2.       There were so many more trees.

3.       There were so many more hills.

I remember Denver’s winters being blizzard-ridden, cold, and dry. In as long as I’d lived in Denver, we’d only had one day off of school due to the snow, probably because of ease of transportation in a city built on flat terrain. Here, it’s so plagued with hills and curvy roads that a thin sheet of ice on the street is a life hazard in some parts of town, and the humidity here makes a lovely blinding veil of fog in the mornings. I was ecstatic when I’d had my first West Virginian snow day off from school—and almost awestruck when it lasted three consecutive days.

But in terms of the people, I didn’t notice much of a difference in the accents of West Virginians compared to the accents of those in Colorado, and even today when I visit Colorado I can’t pick out too many differences. But the people here—the feel here is much different to that of Denver. Even my Dad, who still lives in Colorado, commented on the people here when he was visiting. “People wave to you from their cars!” he’d marvel. “And they smile at you from the sidewalk!”  And it’s true, it’s an obvious difference between the two cities; Morgantown is a generally friendlier place than Denver. But another observation about Morgantown’s people is that the white and African American ratio is skewed. The African American population at my school is probably outnumbered by whites in a 50:1 ratio, in the most honest estimate I can provide. Whereas, in Colorado, the numbers are very different—for example, my fourth grade class (in the private school that I attended) had eight children in it, and from those eight children, four of them were African American and one was Hispanic.

I never really knew much about Appalachia until I’d moved here. The first time I'd heard the word, "Appalachia," was in my fourth grade class in Colorado. It was just a name then—the Appalachian Mountains, which, at that time, was just an inferior mountain range to the Rockies. Never had it occurred to me that Appalachia was a region until I’d visited it. Upon hearing that I’d be moving here, I had no idea that I was supposed to be expecting uneducated, moonshine-guzzling, overall-wearing gun-huggers in log cabins. Which sucks the fun out of it. Everybody visiting Appalachia should expect that :]

Haley