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Merril
Gilfillan
Excerpts
Chapter
Two of Merrill
Gilfillan's Burnt
House to Paw Paw
The Ohio valley is astir with May. Farmers curry the wide, level melon
fields and Carolina wrens exhort from roadside shrubbery. I hit the river
at the hamlet of Fly and follow her downstream fifteen miles on the Ohio
side. She is a formidable river from first glance, as always, low-slung
and moody with a resentful, beast-of-burden cast to her even on fine days.
I smell her heavy scent of muck and catfish water as soon as I edge her.
On the far side the knobby green-up hills of West Virginia and a string
of fluttery mirage habitations, glimpses of coiled cable and the gritty
raw ends of riverbank commerce. A northbound coal train chugs export/import
across a narrow bridge.
I stop for gas near the foot of the big bridge spanning to St. Marys,
West Virginia, and go in to fill my coffee cup. The proprietor of the
station is shooting the vernal breeze with a pair of old cronies in tight
porkpie hats. I soon realize, as I sugar my coffee, that they are discussing
the disastrous collapse of the Point Pleasant-Gallipolis bridge wherein
some 50 people perished into the midwinter Ohio. That took place more
than twenty years ago and some 70 miles downstream, but they jab and tack
about the intimate details as if it were this very morning's news.
One old chap smacks his lips and declares, "There is a handful of other
bridges up and down this river that will be going pretty soon if they
don't watch 'em." I pay up and climb in the car thinking—"But not today!"
I cross into West Virginia and pass through the village of St. Marys and
up the long steep switchbacked hill behind her to the ridgetop, the first
of many hundreds, and drive south on highway 16. Five miles in, I pull
over at a high spot to let pushy traffic pass and to look off to the east,
off and over at the great secrecy and fertile closure of the mountains
and their hollows and runs, the soft hill upon hill, ridge after ridge,
all buffered and screened by the beneficent canopy of broadleafed deciduous
forest. It is always a surprise and an uplift, the first intimation of
the magnitude, of the vast continuity of the Appalachians, their thousand
miles of unbroken treetops bound and unified this very moment by the end-to-end
overlap of countless titmouse songs.
There is a trace of haze and a cool moist silence this morning that shifts
and sways like something palpable, adjusts with a slight flinch when a
woodpecker calls. The aspect is long and imposing, yet comfortable; there
is the knowledge that in the end these are traversable, walkable mountains.
Unlike the Rockies or the Sierras, these ranges are conceivably crossable
at almost any point, given the right shoes, a slicker, and a good snake
stick...
Already the driving rhythm is set, the swing of the plumb and the shift
and lean of the body through the curves. And already we are among the
beautiful Appalachian ruins, the old houses given up and left to moulder
on the slopes above the road. Ruins by tradition seem more poignant south
of the Mason Dixon; they seem "heroically abandoned" in a manner that
makes the sag of their rooves more eloquent and their broad porches loaded
with junk and racoon jetsam more reflective. Among the square and thrifty
frame homes with admirable two-story porches and spring houses off to
one side, their old unpainted barns starting to brown and curl, their
sheds and shanties full of briars, listing among sumac, there are the
classic mountain bungalows: one and a half story dwellings with house-wide
low-hung porches with white posts and a host of chairs and half a dozen
flower pots hanging from the eave lip. They are either white frame or
red/brown tarpaper "brick." Some stand on cement block stilts—one in a
creek bottom was set eight feet off the ground. All are tough and thin
and sometimes feeble to the eye, and yet—this is the Appalachian patina—always,
unabashedly, sufficient. And the many creekside housetrailers, even they
are set parallel to the road with the ubiquitous wide porch and roof rigged
to them such that the entire structure closely resembles the bungalows
of the preceding generation.
At the edge of Burnt House I stop for lunch, pulling up a sharp gravel
drive to a churchyard. A Methodist church, it says above the door, built
in 1889. It stands, painted neatly white, amid a grove of mature oaks
and commands a ort but handsome view: a brushy draw runs below, beyond
highway 47, and to the north a narrow dirt road disappears up the mountain
side, just eking out a path of least resistance through the trees. A small
graveyard lies on a terrace a few feet above the church parking lot, and
then a spanking white outhouse, its two doors labeled "Adam" and "Eve."
I get out of the car to stretch and make a sandwich on the hood and quarter
a big dill pickle lengthwise. There are crows yelling away up that enticing
little dirt road and the bluejays in the church oaks cock an ear to listen.
When I turn back toward the church I discover a man peeking at me around
the corner of the building. A tall pale man of 60 in Oshkosh overalls,
he bends timidly from the waist, out from behind the corner, his head
under a navy blue ballcap waggling with a will of its own over his hesitant
frame. He is possessed, it appears, by amentia; maybe a caretaker at the
church: pew-polisher and fly swatter. I take a step in his direction,
thinking to say hello, explain my presence, but my sandwich-in-hand does
that, I guess, and the fellow shrinks, and the waggling intensifies, so
I stop and turn back to my car and finish my lunch trying to make myself
unobtrusive and harmonious, gazing off into the upper oaks.
Chapter
16 of Merrill
Gilfillan's Burnt
House to Paw Paw
I pull into Paw Paw, West Virginia, about noon. The day is overcast and vaguely expectant. Deep within, I realize I was headed for Paw Paw the entire trip; it has been an unspoken but persistent destination by virtue, pure and simple, of its name glowing on the map beside the upper Potomac. The past several days, whenever the traveling grew tiresome and the look-see thin, it was Paw Paw that loomed beckoningly on the horizon.
I had envisioned a bright, breezy day with good, tonic sunlight on the trees—but this will do. I make a brief swing through the residential part of town—old neighborhoods up and away from the river; neighborhoods of well-built, classic Appalachian houses set close to the street and low to the ground. It is a standard enough village; I like the way her railroad tracks swing with the curve of the river.
Then I drive back to the main street and stop at a cafe. It is a converted frame home, apparently, sooty white and listless—but I can't rush through Paw Paw after all that subliminal beckoning.
There are two women in the place, a clammy old cook and a young waitress. I am the only customer, again. I order cherry pie and black coffee and scan the bulletin board near the door. "Chihuahua Puppies for Sale—Father on Premises." The pie is not good, but I finally manage to interrupt the women's desultory talk and get the young one going about the block-long, acned cream-colored factory sprawling in desuetude just across the street. It was the Vesuvius Crucible, she tells me, until that business dried up some years ago. The last she knew someone had converted its windowless metal halls to a mushroom nursery. And nowadays most everyone in town travels to work way down in Winchester, Virginia.
From the cafe I drive down to the Potomac and off on a dirt road to a little boatlaunch area below the new bridge. I get out the binoculars and amble downstream, through a narrow little grove east from the bridge. Bait litter and beer cans are strewn along the bank, but no birds show themselves at the moment. Ornithologically, this is on the edge of legendary territory. The three counties immediately east of Paw Paw—the three counties comprising the jagged beak of the West Virginia panhandle—were the original sites of one of the famous American mystery birds, the Sutton's warbler. This creature, suspected of being a hybrid between the Yellow-throated and the Parula warblers, was discovered in May of 1939 on Opequon Creek over toward Martinsburg. Only another half-dozen or so have been seen in the ensuing half-century, all but one in the panhandle. The bird has taken its furtive place alongside the Carbonated Swamp warbler (collected, described, and painted by John James Audubon in May 1811 and never heard of since); the Blue Mountain and the Cincinnati warblers, neither bird seen in over a century; and Bachman's warbler, the rarest songbird of late 20th century North America.
For a moment I consider the possibility of loading the daypack with peanut butter and striking off downriver to loiter at likely intersections and test my bird-luck. (Twelve years ago I spent ten high-adrenalin days on the banks of the Suwanee River looking for—in a rhapsody of naiveté—Bachman's warbler: up each morning at daybreak to brew a rank cup of instant coffee with tepid water from the Manatee Springs campground tap and off into the burgeoning late-March woods along the river to sweep in vain the budding treetops like radar.) But no, the rain still lurks in the upper hills and the odds are way too long. I spend ten minutes along the Potomac, idling out to the large sycamore leaning at a 45 degree angle over the river, before turning back to the car.
So it seems it wasn't the Sutton's warbler that beckoned from Paw Paw all through the preceding week, if one can track such things. There is no feast in the streets of Paw Paw or sudden full-moon epiphany; no grail it seems but the river scent. Just the katydid-green toponym aflutter on the south bank, the sweet double-thump of the spondee, with hot black day-in-place coffee and a low basket full of Chihuahua pups shivering in their nest like little birds.
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