Soon after we’d bought the farm, my father called and said, “Whatever you do, don’t buy a farm in the country. Buy a house in Charleston.”
It took me a few months to get up the courage to tell him that not only had I bought a farm in the country, I’d bought a farm in Stringtown.
And really, it was his fault.
I didn’t grow up there, but I was indoctrinated in the West Virginian’s reverence for roots by my father, who not only took me “back home” every summer of my childhood to the old cabin and Ruby’s Slanted Little House, but told me the stories as he did it. Here is where your great-great-grandfather hid his horses from the Confederate soldiers, here is where he built a log cabin, here is where he is buried.
When I was growing up, I can recall the occasional resentment of my mother for the emphasis my father placed on his family’s roots as opposed to her own.
She would sometimes stamp her foot and say, “I have a family history, too.”
But she was from Oklahoma, and the same way a Texan swaggers into a room with the confidence that everything is bigger in Texas, a West Virginian quietly and yet emphatically lets you know there are no roots like West Virginia roots. My father, who frequently repeated, “I got out of there as soon as I could,” was a West Virginian to the bone nonetheless. I’d grown up on the tales of Stringtown, and now I was moving there.
52 came up with the farm’s new name, Stringtown Rising Farm. Stringtown would rise again! I felt an immediate, intense sentimental attachment for the property, located as it was in the midst of my family history and childhood memories.
There was a two-and-a-half-mile unpaved road between the Slanted Little House and Stringtown Rising. The road was icy and barely passable in the winter (and certainly not without a four-wheel-drive). There was no U.S. mail, UPS, or FedEx delivery. No cell phone, cable, or DSL service. No school bus. No trash pickup. And, as I later learned, no local television satellite service. Stringtown Rising was hemmed in by three creek crossings in one direction and a river ford in the other, but it was directly across the river from my great-grandfather’s old farm, across the road from our old family cemetery with its beaten-down tombstones, and within a mile of the house where my father grew up and the old cabin where I had spent so many of my childhood summers.
Not only that, but my grandmother had lived on this farm in one of the oil company worker houses that once lined the road, and she had later taught in the little white church that doubled as a one-room schoolhouse that had once stood on the farm. My father attended that little community church throughout his childhood and went to school there to first grade, after which a new school was built across the river.
I wrote sentimentally about the road to our new farm on my website, not yet smart enough to fear it.
“There are no guardrails, no pavement beneath your wheels. It’s a hard road to travel. You can’t speed down it even if you want to, but there are things to discover along the way, and something beautiful at the end.
“Many of the people on this road are passers-through. The road is scattered with weekend cabins. They come in the fall with their orange coats and their deer rifles. They come in the summer with their ATVs and their beer. If you wait long enough, they’ll go away.
“The handful of people who stick around for the isolating snows of winter and the pounding rains of spring are an optimistic bunch. They put out mailboxes at the ends of their driveways as an affirmation to the universe that someday the post office will deliver mail down this road. They know anything is possible if you believe. Even mail.
“Don’t be scared by the first creek. The creeks get bigger. Keep going. You’re not going to drown. Don’t forget to look around. You might see a black bear or a wild turkey. Or maybe the first sweet pea leaning its pretty bloom over a fence post.
“Some people want to stop at the second creek. But you can’t turn around. There’s no place to go but forward. Do you see a bunch of abandoned vehicles? People have gone down this road before you and they made it.
“Look around and see the foundation stones of the old gasoline plant that employed fifty men a century ago in the gas and oil heyday of this now-deserted area. They didn’t have cars. They had to walk this road every day.
“The last creek is the biggest. Flash floods can make it temporarily impassable, but if you just wait a little while, the water will go down. If you can get past this final obstacle, there are better things ahead. Maybe even a brand-new farmhouse.”
52 and I had decided not to marry, having both experienced divorce, but we had few qualms about going into a property purchase together—or at least few that we discussed. I was, in truth, afraid of tackling a farm on my own. I knew nothing about farming, and I’d spent most of my life being taken care of by other people—first by my parents, then by my husband, then, in a sense, by my cousin Mark. I was having a hard time breaking that habit and was only even vaguely aware that I was, again, counting on a man to take care of me. Defying a marriage certificate was a false independence to which I clung.
We hired a builder and began construction. The property boasted no remaining structures, but it did have a nice meadow bottom large enough for a pasture and a barn (in my imagination), with a creek winding along the foot of the hillside. The new house was built on a plateau halfway up the hill, accessed by a driveway carved into the hill by loggers a few years earlier when the property had been selectively timbered. The loggers had also created the plateau where the house was built, which provided enough semiflat space around the house for a vegetable garden, chicken house, duck pond, and a few small fields to keep animals, but building a house in such a remote and inaccessible location created one obstacle after another.
One day, an 18-wheeler from Ohio arrived at the Slanted Little House, where the kids and I continued to live during the construction, with the kitchen cabinet delivery for the new farmhouse. Two big men got out of the truck and one of them said, “I stopped at the little store in town and they told me we’d have to drive through three creeks to get to your farm.”
I said, “Oh. Yeah.” Well, he wasn’t so sure about that and decided he’d better hop in my SUV and let me take him out there for a look-see.
We didn’t get a quarter of a mile down the road before he said, “I’m not taking my truck down this road.”
I said, “That’s okay. You can just go around the other way. That way, you only have to drive through a river.” That last sentence seemed to disturb him.
I tried to convince him it was only a small river, but by the time we got to the Pocatalico for a look-see there, he was shaking his head, no, no, no, he was not crossing the river. I said, “It’s only like a foot deep. It’s got a rock bottom. I’ve driven through it lots of times. It’s hard road all the way if you go this way except for when you cross the river.”
The farm borders the river, so from that direction, all you had to do was drive through the river—and you were there. There was no convincing him.
In the end, the two men and their truck drove around to the ford, and our builder, Steve, made repeat trips across the river in his pickup to off-load the cabinets one truckload at a time and take them back across to the house. Meanwhile, the two men in the 18-wheeler stayed on the hard road across the river. One of them got out a video camera and took footage of the ford to take back home to Cleveland.
I went home to the Slanted Little House and told my cousin the story of the two big men in their big truck who wouldn’t cross the river. I said, “Well, you know, they were from the city.”
Mark said, “You really are a country girl now.”
This wasn’t entirely true, of course. In fact, while the house was under construction, I’d totaled my previous SUV by driving across when the water was too high. I learned to respect the river and not take crossing the ford for granted. The Pocatalico River, which finds its source in Roane County not far from the ford, is a long, narrow river that flows eventually into the Kanawha River. The old-timers called it the Poky, and a lot of the new-timers call it a creek. It’s a river by length, not width, and in many spots really doesn’t look like much more than a big creek. The ford, in common use for horse and vehicle traffic for at least a hundred years, was usually no more than six inches deep and safe about 99.9 percent of the time. But right after a heavy rain, it could kill your car and possibly you if you didn’t pay attention, and, as I learned after living at the farm, once or twice a year the Pocatalico floods, transforming it into a truly terrifying force of nature. I was really glad to have a house halfway up a hill the first time I saw that happen.
The ford was, and is, the beating heart of old Stringtown. In the old days, when my father was growing up, there was a swinging bridge across the river near the ford for foot traffic. Not far down the river from the ford is a deep spot that has served as a swimming hole from before my father’s day to today. The one-room schoolhouse was across the river, the little church on this side of the river. There were stores and a hotel and a gasoline plant not far down the road. Men congregated at the river to shoot marbles in the evenings. Women gathered to talk.
In what remains of Stringtown today, neighbors still gather at the banks of the ford. There was a lot of talk when the new farmhouse was built.
“Who knew there was that much room to put a house up on that hill.”
“They should have made that roof red.”
And my favorite one: “It’s that romance writer, you know.”
A few years earlier, when I was still a summertime visitor to the Slanted Little House, Georgia had engineered an article in the county paper about me. I’d written a novel set in West Virginia, so she used that as a springboard to talk the editor into doing a piece. She’d set up a book signing at the one-room library in town and got the high school principal to bring me in to talk to a few classes about writing. Georgia was a one-woman promotional machine, and people still remembered that I was “that romance writer.” If that wasn’t enough, now I was building a house in Stringtown, and everybody knew it.
I was at a school function with Morgan one evening when a massive man wearing a flannel shirt with sleeves torn off at the shoulders and tattoos on his bulging biceps approached me. He didn’t look like a West Virginia mountain man. He looked like a West Virginia mountain.
“Are you Suzanne?”
A number of possible responses ran through my mind, including, “No, I’m her twin sister,” and, “I think she moved away.”
Morgan said, “That’s her name!” I gave her the evil eye.
The man said he was a friend of my cousin’s, which might have made me feel better except my cousin was an attorney, so he knew a lot of criminals. Then he asked me if he could have my derrick.
Oil and gas exploration in the 1890s in this area of West Virginia made Beverly Hillbillies out of countless families—including my own, who were so overcome by their surprising wealth-from-nowhere that they threw their clothes away after wearing them to buy new rather than trouble themselves with laundry. One would think they could have set aside some of their loot for their descendants. My great-grandfather, at least, spent a good portion of his oil dollars buying up land. It wasn’t his fault that his descendants sold out, leaving nothing for my generation. All that remains today of Stringtown’s gas and oil heyday is its historic junk, covered in grapevines and multiflora rose. My favorite pile of junk was the old oil derrick on our new farm. It was situated up on the hill, not far from where we were building the house. It soared through the trees, a testament to a different time in that old place.
Flannel-and-Tattoos said the former owners of our farm had promised the derrick to him.
“I’m going to tear it down and sell it for scrap metal,” he explained. “They said I could have it.”
The derrick came complete with a flywheel and a gearbox that would have transmitted power to the walking wheel. The gearbox is inscribed with the forging date of July 18, 1898. The walking wheel ran the beam and rods that pulled the oil up out of the ground. A wire line wheel held cable that drew various tools in and out of the well.
The well was lined with wood and was open when we found it. We’d covered it with a board and a heavy rock for safety.
All this huge, heavy equipment had been hauled to Stringtown down narrow, rocky back roads and over countless hills by teams of horses and oxen. I could hardly imagine the event it must have been to construct that derrick on our hill.
To me, it wasn’t scrap to be sold for dollars. It was history.
“It’s not their derrick anymore,” I said firmly. “It’s ours, and I like it right where it is.”
He looked disappointed, and I worried about whether he might sneak out to the farm and take it anyway. I mentioned him to my cousin.
“He won’t take it if you told him no,” Mark told me. “Everybody knows it’s your farm now.”
So many people knew about our new farm, in fact, that they became a nuisance. The builder put up a gate on the driveway to protect the materials and tools at night, but sometimes he had to lock it during the day to keep people from driving up, taking his work time to gawk and gossip. Then they’d drive real slow up and down the road in front of the farm and look up through the trees. They even sat on the hill across from the farm with binoculars.
Then there were the people who couldn’t even find the farm.
The electrical inspector called me at the Slanted Little House, lost on his way to inspect the electric at the new farm.
I said, “Where are you?”
He told me he’d gone past where the hard road stopped and then it had turned to hard road again. After a few more questions, I figured out where he was, which was about three miles past the river ford. He’d found a bar of cell service there.
He said, “How do I get to your house from here?”
I’d already learned that people didn’t react well to being told to drive across the river, so I said, “I’ll be right there.”
When I found him, I rolled down my window, and he said, “The map doesn’t show this road even going to your farm.”
I said, “Yes, it does. It’s just kind of like an adventure.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just follow me.”
Sometimes it worked better to lead people across the river and let them see me bring my car out on the other side. Then they knew they would survive.
The road in the other direction was no easier, stretching for two and a half miles of unpaved, steep, rocky terrain. There were a handful of residents on the first half mile, close to the hard road. Once you got past that, heading out toward the ford and our farm, there were just a few scattered hunting cabins until you reached a small trailer and then Stringtown Rising Farm and the ford. I came from the rocky road direction most of the time since the Slanted Little House was just around a few bends once you hit the hard road. Between that first half mile and cluster of homes and the ford, there was little regular traffic.
Since the woman who lived in the trailer near our farm drove her kids to the bus stop at the hard road every morning and went out again in the afternoon to pick them up, she was one of the first Stringtown neighbors with whom I interacted. She was a plain but attractive woman with three young children. She looked to be in her early thirties, her brown shoulder-length hair often pulled back, her body sturdy—neither thin nor fat—and an air of stubborn self-reliance that permeated her every expression.
The first time I met her, her car had broken down after she’d picked up her kids from the bus. I was on my way out to check on our under-construction house and I took her and her children home in my SUV. My second interaction with her, months later, was when we met on the road, going in opposite directions. We met at a wide spot where I was able to pass. I happened to have my window down and she rolled her window down to tell me that I drove too fast on this road and she didn’t like it. I thanked her for letting me know and went on. Having been stuck behind her on the road a few times already, I knew that her idea of fast was anything swifter than five miles an hour.
Sometimes three.
There were no posted speed limits on the road, though I’d been told it was commonly considered a twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit on unpaved roads in the area. It would be difficult to go any faster than that without careening over a cliff, and I supposed no sign was posted because the rough, winding road formed its own limit and for much of it, even twenty-five was too high, but creeping along at five miles an hour or below wasn’t necessary unless it was winter. Two and a half miles is a long way to go at creeping speed. There were various points along the road where I could go around her if she stopped or even pulled over just a little, but she refused, leaving me to creep along behind her.
If I had to pass her on the road coming from the other direction, it was always me who had to move over, not her, even if it was harder for me and sometimes required backing up to find a place wide enough. One time I came across her and she stopped her car in the middle of the road when she saw me. I waited for her to move over at least a little to help me pass her. She didn’t move. Eventually, she got out of her car, marched up to my window, told me I had four-wheel drive and she didn’t, so she wasn’t going to move over and I’d better just figure out how to get around her. I asked her if she could move over just a bit since there was a cliff there and she was in the middle of the road. She refused to budge.
I sensed her resentment. I was an outlander, “that writer” who was building that house on the hill to pretend to be a farmer. I was an oncoming blight upon the community, and she let me know, in her way, that I wasn’t welcome.
In the house where this woman lived with her husband and young children, they had electricity, but little else. At the time, they had no phone service and no satellite TV. Their house was made up of two old single-wide trailers put together, and there was mildew almost completely covering the outside of the trailers. Their living situation was the classic image of stark Appalachian poverty.
I was appalled, fascinated, and a little bit scared of her, but I soon discovered she was the least of my worries.