Don't know what you got 'til its gone...

Fallen Twist  by   

'Don't know what you got 'til its gone,' is a phrase the everyone knows, and at some point realizes in their life.  When I left West Virginia, I was filled with hope of success and contentment, and for all intents and purposes I had found it.  I finished an education and was lucky to find a job right out of graduate school in the field I had spent eight years studying.  North Carolina is not so bad, I thought at first, it is not like I am moving across the country, working a job with a salary only large enough to make ends meet.  With a job in North Carolina, I could start saving, work on a retirement, etc., and so I have...  I met a man, fell in love, got married, had a baby, and grew up.  Gone were the student days of partying in Morgantown, tailgating at WVU games, smoking cigarettes, and being getting by on caffeine alone.  I was a grown woman, I was married, I was a mother, and now, sitting at my computer in North Carolina, you would think that I found the life I had wanted--a grown up life with grown up concerns.  I am happy, for the most part, except for one small thing.

There is a hole in my heart, a heaviness in my lungs, and a grime on my face.  I live in a city, that being, a city compared to what I knew in West Virginia.  In the city, the air is thicker.  In the city, you cannot be carefree, trusting that if something should befall you, someone would help.  In the city, no one knows you, cares about you, thinks about you...  Anonymity can be a blessing, yet, when you grow up in a place where people know your name, know your family, there is a connection, a security, and a motivation to keep living a clean life.  Growing up in Webster County, West Virginia, there is little that goes on that someone does not know about.  In a county of approximately 10,000 people, high unemployment, rough terrain, and isolation, gossip is rampant.  All the same, people take care of each other, although stubborn pride may get in the way.

People in Webster, as locals all it, are proud--poor, but proud.  Thirty-two percent of the 10,000 people in Webster County live below the poverty line, and a good number of those people are elderly.  I could go on about numbers and demographics for Webster, even West Virginia, but the fact of the matter is this:  we are poor, but we are not beaten.  These are families of coal miners and loggers, mainly, and that is what many of these people will be for the rest of theirs and their children's lives.  Working in the dark of the earth or in the trees has been generational work, and as long as there is a demand for coal and timber, there will always be people living in Webster.

As for me, I am part of the first generation not to work in the mines or woods in my family.  Working in the mines now, most of the fellows who ride the man trip in or drive up the mountainsides to the strip, are older and veterans of the mining profession.  It is hard to get into work in the mines now--now that production has been scaled back and moved away from Webster.  There are no community college classes on how to be a miner, it is experience, a type of apprenticeship, coupled with trial and error that makes a miner and miner.  Most of the young guys do not want to learn, or cannot learn due to how these companies want to hire miners.  Yes, it is a generational profession.  Fathers teach sons, fathers 'have it in' with operators and get their sons hired, and when a mine blows, a whole family dies...

The same goes with working in the woods, and the trees fall and the mountain sides ring with the sounds of chainsaws and the engines of cherry pickers at load points, taking logs to the saw mills in and out of the county.

This is Webster, and this is only a taste of what I came from, but there is so much more to Webster than mining and timber, poverty and isolation.  There are the mountains and the rivers, the soil and the sky, the harsh winters and mild summers, the smell, the sight, and the sensation that is home.

I spent my teenage years trying to get away from the close-mindedness, the poverty, and the pain associated with it.  I wanted anything to get away from the gossip and the tedium that were the people of Webster.  If I could escape and never look back, I would have considered myself lucky.  Unlike most people in Webster, my family is small and not nebulous like many others there.  I could get away from Webster, or, at the very least, avoid seeing people there by staying at my parents house and never going into Cowen or Webster Springs.  I could forget and be forgotten by the kids I grew up with, and I could come and go without notice if I pleased.

Not so.  The sense of community that exists in Webster is a strange thing.  Though I did not know it at the time, everyone knew when I was home from school.  My family's church knew, and from the point of a congregation about about twenty, most of Cowen knew that I was home from school.  Now, whether that made for much gossip or not, I do not know, but it was something to talk about.

Moving away from West Virginia was new and exciting for me.  The furthest I had ever been from home had been a summer spent in Italy, studying history and Italian, and that had been the first trip I had ever taken on a plane.  The culture shock was nearly crippling, and by the time I was flying the nine hours back to the US, I was an emotional wreck.  I was so homesick that I was, in actuality, physically ill.  Granted, the stay in Italy had been in the north, in the Dolomites, the mountains, with the people very similar to those in the Appalachians.  It was not home, not in the least.  After that, I had flown as far as San Antonio, Texas, taken trips to New York City, Baltimore, and Boston, but home was home, and upon returning from these places, I was content to sit on the porch swing of my parents house and stare up into the trees and to the impossibly blue sky.

There is no place like home, and you cannot appreciate it until its gone.

So, I write again, here I sit in North Carolina, a hole in my heart.  I am homesick for the mountains and the air.  The city is stifling, the people so disconnected from each other.  The air is loaded with car exhaust and the stench of garbage.  Everything seems so dirty, and unsafe.  Suspicion abounds, and yes, you better remember to lock your doors.  People are different, unfamiliar, and unreliable. 

There are pros and cons about all things, but recently, with the birth of my daughter, I have really been weighing the pros and cons about living in the city.  My homesickness for the familiar mountains has been a factor of weighing these pro and cons.  I want to move back to West Virginia. 

Why would I want to do such a thing?  Well, that's a complicated story, one I hope to tell in this blog.  I will not be able to go home any time soon, and so I live in my memories and dreams.  I delve into the history of Webster County, and have found, to my surprise, a wealth of culture that I never knew, or took for granted while I lived at home.

Yes, you will never know what you got 'til its gone...