For me, Appalachia always represented my less-interesting half.
My father grew up here, for the most part. He moved to Morgantown with his family from Rhode Island when he was eight years old, because his parents had some serious West Virginia roots. I didn’t realize just how extensive those roots were until I did a little research for my Appalachian literature class. My ancestors lived in-state before the state was a state. The earliest I could find were here around the 1750s.
From a pretty young age, I thought I knew what it was to be Appalachian. Appalachians were independent, but ignorant. They all played the fiddle and lived in the mountains, isolated from the rest of the world. Each and every family owned at least one gun. The women were tough and gritty as the men. The men had thick dirty beards. They were all backwards. Some still used out-houses. I preferred not to think about them.
Instead I chose to take pride in my mother’s ancestors: Irish and Italian immigrants who came to the states via Elis Island and made lives for themselves in New York and New Jersey. Automatically I associated Italian New Yorkers with the mafia. The mafia was awesome. End of story.
And so I blatantly ignored my West Virginia heritage and begged my parents to move us to New Jersey. We visited twice a year, usually, to be with my mother’s family for Thanksgiving and Easter. I had a host of cousins there that were very nearly my age, give or take a few years. They were fantastic playmates. The buildings were bigger and more abundant. There were people everywhere. It was more conducive to my fleeting, 7-year-old attention span.
For about four years after that, I requested the move at least twice a year, whenever we visited. And each year I cried when I had to wave goodbye to my cousins from the Subaru as we began our journey back home.
But rather suddenly, around age 10 or 11, I became a social-hermit. The quiet Morgantown, West Virginia I lived in was finally rubbing off on me. My cousins were great. I loved the entire New Jersey clan, but New Jersey no longer fit me. I missed the solitude of West Virginia. Relief struck me each time we reached Appalachia again. And it was easy to tell when we did.
The houses we saw while driving on the highway grew farther apart from one another and appeared more modest. Massive, protective walls suddenly sprung up around us, taking form of the Appalachian Mountains. Everything was so green, that is unless we were coming back from Thanksgiving, and if we were, the high elevations were blanketed with a thin sheet of snow or ice. Traffic, such an issue in New Jersey, did not exist. Everything was palpably calmer and quainter. And it was beautiful. It was home.
--Emma C.
