Re: Things to Come

As the photograph displayed on the sidebar of the blog claims, cold times are definitely ahead. The chillier days of autumn are pressing in on us, and as I type this the temperature is a mere 37 degrees Fahrenheit. The air is dry and people are gradually giving in to their winter apparel. A few flurries may be seen descending from above any day now.

Many people like me who are not fond of the cold may have a desire to move South -- anywhere South, really, as long as it's warmer. But of course the retired folk usually manage to buy up places down there, and residential areas are naturally going to be pricier there anyhow. So despite my dislike for cold, I probably won't get to be moving South anytime soon; it's when I force that fact onto myself that I'm a tad grateful for living in a place with definable seasons. Because I'm used to it. I'm going to be used to hazardous wintry roads and biting temperatures. I can't imagine it being the other way around: having to move from some nice Floridian paradise to somewhere in the mountains, completely unprepared for the colder days.

Driving on a snowy day once, my mother was frustrated by someone going exeedingly slow. The road conditions called for some caution, but this person was just overly paranoid. My mother said, "In the winter you can always tell who isn't from here."

And it's pretty true.

Taryn

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

Accepting it

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.

Wearing Appalachia

Appalachia.

One early memory the word "Appalachia" manages to take me back to is when I was in third grade. My class was learning about something I don't even recall, but it led up to my teacher telling us that we live in the Appalachian mountains. To intrigue us more or at least give us motivation to actually tell our parents something when they ask what we "learned today at school," she told us to go home and ask our parents where the Appalachian mountains are. She said to us to tell them -- assuming, I suppose, that they played along and pretended not to know -- that, "We LIVE in the Appalachian mountains!"

So I always remember that and await the day my younger sister comes home to tell us the shocking news, too.

Of course my teacher didn't delve any farther into the topic of Appalachia anymore than the mountains. But beyond the stereotypes that connect with several states, including one state that is seemingly unknown to the entire West, there's a broad history of people, culture, and geography just like anywhere else in the world.

Though it was long ago, Appalachians were once degraded by the outside world as "mountain people" that are barbarous and reckless; some of those ideas still linger today but are certainly not as prominent. Joining together in the past due to prejudice assumptions from others would have gradually built up a fiercely independent and possibly even proud culture.

In attempt to reflect what I wrote above onto modern day Appalachia, I will take West Virginia's sports' fan base and everyday civilians into account. They have pride, and pride derives from independence and of certainly not being ashamed. Many states would claim to have "pride," as well. But allow me to bring up West Virginia University. WVU attracts not only many West Virginians but college-seeking students in neighboring states still within the boundaries of Appalachia.

To any athletic event, most people wear accessories and shirts that support the team they root for. But WVU is known for being one of the few -- if not the only -- college where people wear West Virginia shirts outside of athletic events. And such is true and not limited to students of WVU -- there's always someone out and about wearing the famous blue and gold. Even when I travel with my family to Orlando, Florida, to visit Disney World, we will occasionally come across some West Virginians wearing their home colors. My outgoing father will give a shout out to our fellow Appalachians and they always happily return the greeting. I remember once a guy asked my dad if he knew the current score of the football game going on between WVU and some other state.

Little quirks like that added to my day while I'm away from home bring a dose of nostalgia of the mountains; it's nothing that would make me homesick while in Disney World, but something to at least make me feel like lifting my head a bit and think, "Heck yeah, that's right, I'm from West Virginia," even though most people around me couldn't care less.

We are planning a trip two weeks from now to Disney World to partake in one of Disney's Halloween events. Is it ironic we're planning to not dress in costumes but rather in Mountaineer fan gear?

Taryn

Voices from Appalachia --

-- coming soon.