In West Virginia we’re staying at Elk Springs Resort & Fly Shop on the Elk River to fish for trout, non-native brown and rainbows most likely. When I called to book, I asked the reservations lady how far it was from the lodge to Washington D.C. . She didn’t know. However far it is, I suspect in some ways it’s further.
Virginia and Maryland share a lot of things, but most of all they share geography. Because of a compromise over the national bank that put the nation’s capitol in the South, they share Washington D.C.. On the east they share the Chesapeake Bay. Coastal Tidelands in each state rise from the Chesapeake and both states turn into a fertile Piedmont region above a fall line. On the west of both are the Allegheny Mountains, which are part of the Appalachian Mountains.
Interestingly, the Appalachians were named by a Texan, Cabeza de Vaca. Not really, but they were named apparently by de Vaca’s Narvaez expedition.
The Southern Appalachians, the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, are what I think of culturally as Appalachia, but who knows? Appalachia may stretch from New York to Georgia. I used to think of the area as isolated, violent, poor, and uneducated, with clan feuds and moonshining. Now I can throw in opioids, meth, and Trump voters.
Some of that stereotyping is fair, too. West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, became the bellwether state for articles on why white working class voters were voting for President Trump. And they did in West Virginia, by 67.9 percent to 26.2 percent. My guess is they voted for President Trump because they knew Mrs. Clinton thought them a basket of deplorables.
West Virginia had the highest rate of opioid deaths in the U.S. in 2016, at 43.4 deaths per 100,000. Actually, at 75.4 years, West Virginia has the lowest life expectancy of any state except Mississippi. The only measured category of death where West Virginia isn’t running with the front of the pack is Alzheimers, one supposes because people don’t live long enough to die of Alzheimers. You want to die by accident? Move to West Virginia. You want to die by suicide or gunshot or meth or black lung? Move to West Virginia. Your chances are usually right up there at the top.
Here’s the oddest thing about West Virginia: it’s 93.6 percent white. If someone told me that a state was 93.6 percent white, I’d assume we were talking about Idaho or Utah. Virginia is 68 percent white, 19 percent black. Maryland is 58 percent white, 29 percent black. West Virginia is 93.6 percent white. That’s a lot of white folk.
Settlement by whites was pretty thorough, but it didn’t really kick off until the mid-18th century. The French and Indian War was fought in part over the Ohio Valley, which stretches from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky, with West Virginia at its heart. After the release of claims by the Iroquois and Cherokee (surely absent violence), settlers started in. Ok, they started earlier, but they started in now with England’s blessing. First were Germans, and lots of Scots via Ulster, the Scotch-Irish.
From early on, West Virginia was different from the rest of Virginia. It was subsistence living that didn’t support slaves, at least until coal mining.
Louis Hine, 1911
During the Civil War there were two areas in the seceding states that were strongly pro-Union, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee. It was Lincoln’s dream that Eastern Tennessee would separate from the Confederacy, but it never did. West Virginia did. On Amazon you can still find books about why the separation of West Virginia from Virginia was unlawful and unconstitutional. Get over it.
Coal was the 18th century’s oil. It was the rural industry that turned us into a modern nation. It was and is a bloody, dangerous, unforgiving industry. Coal gave us some of the most violent labor disputes in the nation’s history: think machine guns mounted on train cars and fired into union strikers. Over 150 years coal gave us Mother Jones, strip mining and mountain-top removal and other ecological destruction, mine deaths, and a purchased West Virginia supreme court. it’s all Hatfields and McCoys, one way or the other. It’s always The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, but sometimes at the corporate level.
Hills and hollers. It’s beautiful, a friend said. People use words like hollers when they talk about West Virginia.
When I put together my playlist of songs for West Virginia, it wasn’t very long. There was one person who I greatly admire but didn’t expect, Bill Withers, and there was lots of Mountain Music. And of course there was that John Denver theme: take me home. It’s the most common theme of West Virginia songs: “My Home Among the Hills,” “West Virginia My Home,” “I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia,” “Green Rolling Hills.” In our minds we love West Virginia. In our minds West Virginia is the idyllic wildness we yearn for.
I also put Appalachian Spring on the play list, and Mark O’Connor’s brilliant Appalachia Waltz. O’Connor is from Seattle, and of course Copland was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. We all have our notions about Appalachia. Take me home.
***
I did finally get a decent photo of a bluegill, a tiny thing that hit a tiny yellow popper and as is their want hit it hard enough to take in the whole thing. Lepomis machrochyrus. I originally misidentified the fish because it didn’t look like the pictures of a bluegill on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, and maybe my fish is something entirely different. Sunfish are wanton little devils, spawning from May to August, and apparently they hybridize readily among species. This one has the wrong color fins and the colors generally seem off. It’s just as likely that this fish is the product of some unfortunate parental liaison between two breeds of sunfish.
I caught a nice bass on the same tiny fly, next to the grass in a pond backwater.
