Prologue: Planet West Virginia

Back in 1994, before I blew out of town to begin my sabbatical leave, I had informed my bemused dubious academic colleagues that I intended to disappear into the hills of my home in West Virginia, immerse myself, as it were, among the lives of mountaineer characters, both the quick and the dead, among both my family members and strangers, whose stories I wanted to write, fascinating, famous brave survival tales I tended to portray as being so wrenchingly parallel to my own. I planned to converse with my people in the secret old language of the mountains, wherein the ancient word for “bone” and “seed” was the same. I intended to bear holy witness to their magical everyday world of devils and angels. Mountain incantations, spooky spells, moany keens, the musical sighs of hill spirits, and the abiding ghost hymns of Hank Williams and Saint Elvis would inform the soundtrack for my twangy tall tale, I would mention. I would mention that my stylistic mode would be oracular in nature and pure High Hillbilly.

I found myself prevaricating mightily like I hadn’t done since my Stanford days about my simple but stouthearted coalminer-cum-moon- shiner-cum-mountaineer roots, and announcing to any interested ear that I had only been disguised as a deputy professor petrified with longing as he taught at a city-campus university and wrote artsy-fartsy fiction all these lost years. Where exactly had I been derailed in my quest to be bolder and more famous than my old Dad? was one big question I hoped to answer back home, I told folks. Boldly I quoted Flannery O’Connor to those sophisticated, citified, politically correct, deconstructed, Frog-thought theorymongers: “To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.”

Let me say a few things straightaway about that wild, wonderful world called West Virginia, gentle reader.

For one thing, West Virginia is populated by regular, respectable, upstanding, hard-working, everyday folks just like the folks you can find in any part of America. And West Virginians become defensive when outsiders characterize them as ignorant, incestuous, dangerous, armed- to-the-teeth hicks and hillbillies. West Virginians want the world at large to know they can be as bland and boring and ordinary as anybody else in this television-leveled land called homogenized America. But there is little romance, not to mention mythos, in the mundane for me, and this is, after all, my book about West Virginia and how it shaped my own rise to fame and final exile.

My own personal sense of that fabled place called West Virginia is admittedly a folktale state of mind, a mostly imagined interior landscape populated by mythic beings: legendary mountain dancers, moonshiners, stupendous marijuana farmers, snakehandlers, blood-feudists, mystery midgets, mothmen, horny space aliens who drop into my home state as regular as clockwork in order to engage in extraterrestrial sex with a multitude of juicy West Virginia majorettes and to purloin farm animals for bizarre mutilation rituals, and other interesting folk of that ilk. In my admittedly melodramatic, renegade vision of West Virginia, what interests me are the bloody mine wars, the ritual disappearance of revenuers and scabs, unsolved mountain murders, mysteriously vanished hitchhikers whose body parts are found scattered beside twisty backcountry roads, jailbirds, jailbreaks, outlaws on the run, doomed and despairing barroom brawlers, deep mine disasters, and the souls of lost buried miners rising like smoke from mine-ventilation holes in the hills. The lonesome whistles of coal trains passing forlornly in the night figure prominently in my personal romantic sense of West Virginia, as does white-line fever, roadhouse romance, the sad slow dance of jukebox heartbreak, the high-lonesome sounds of old Bill Monroe, George Jones (the old Possum of Pain), Patsy Cline and sweet dreams, the buttkicking ballads of Johnny Paycheck, and, of course, the essential songs of Saint Elvis and Uncle Hank.

What interests me is that haunted West Virginia, famous for howls of loss and longing and hoots of otherworldly laughter that are known to descend from the hills during nights long enough for two or three moons. Not to mention wild, albeit beloved, legendary hogs running in the woods, storied witches in the woods, the ghosts of beheaded coeds stumbling blindly in the woods, ghost lights on forsaken ridges, sacred spectral animals once thought extinct that come down from the hills on full-moon nights.

An extraordinary filmmaker named Jacob Young, who made the famous prize-winning “Different Drummer” series of documentaries featuring weird West Virginians, has suggested that one reason why West Virginia is so famous for its congregation of eccentrics is because of the nature of the people who originally settled in those hills. They were, Jacob Young asserts, . . people who simply wanted to be left alone. People who were outcasts, totally individualistic, totally nonconformist, the rugged individuals who say: ‘We don’t need no neighbors. We don’t need no fucken town.’ ”

My own bald bizarre ugly brother-in-law is in many ways typical of the often-weird inhabitants of West Virginia and their ragged hopes. Once he mailed me an item he had clipped from the local paper about what it meant to be a Real West Virginian.

The piece was entitled: You Might Be A Real West Virginian If. . . (and listed several clear qualifications). You might be a Real West Virginian if your front porch collapses and more than six dogs are killed was one clear qualification; or if you consider a six-pack and a bug zapper quality entertainment; or if your wife or mother has ever been involved in a fistfight with an official or another spectator at a high school sports event; or if your wife or mother keeps a spit-cup on the ironing board; or if your wife or mother doesn’t remove the Marlboro from her mouth when she tells the state trooper to kiss her ass; or if you prominently display the gift you bought at Graceland; or if there is a stuffed possum mounted anywhere in your house; or if you think a Volvo is a part of a woman’s anatomy. You might be considered a Real West Virginian if you had a toothpick in your mouth when the wedding pictures were taken; or if you’ve ever carried a bottle of beer to a job interview; or if most of your Saturday nights end up in a famous parking lot fistfight.

I had decided straightaway that I, for one, met enough of the qualifications to be certified as a genuine West Virginian-American. But I wondered about some other folks who laid claim to being bona fide citizens of my home state, outsiders who had crossed the state line and for curious reasons of their own attempted to reinvent themselves as one of us, as though our captive land was a miraculous catchall place where you could always land on your feet. “Lord Jesus, save us from them fucken outsiders,” is one common prayer in my home state.

There’s the famous former Governor and current Senator Jay Rockefeller, for instance, who had come into West Virginia several decades ago as a Vista Volunteer, and had lingered to get into politics. Now Jay Rockefeller passes himself off to the world at large as a genuine West Virginian-American, and on numerous occasions over the past thirty-five-plus years he has spent conspicuous fortunes convincing mountain- state voters to tell him ceremonially his reinvention is really so, pumping a reputed record cool ten million into one campaign alone to roost and rule. And, speaking of famous parking lot fistfights, I’ll tell you more about this seemingly feckless, four-eyed, prep-school, rich-boy, New York Yankee Jay Rockefeller character directly.

West Virginia reinvented its-own-self as the thirty-fifth state of the Union on June 20, 1863, two weeks before the battle of Gettysburg pretty much settled the issue of that war, when it seceded from the Confederate state of Virginia to rejoin the Union, a secession within a secession, a sort of opening of Chinese boxes of rebellion. It wasn’t so much that West Virginians sided with the dour righteous Yankees, as that they did not approve of those lowland, rich, racist (to put it mildly), prissy plantation owners dictating who they should rebel against. Besides, mountaineers, being mostly a fierce, wilderness, warrior people prone to independence and hardheadedness, held little sentiment for the lazy decadent institution of slavery.

Geographically and historically, West Virginia defies easy classification. On the map, West Virginia’s amoebic squashed road-kill shape can put one in mind of any number of unusual things, depending upon the hour of the long night, and what manner of chemicals are raging through one’s bloodstream. Sometimes, and don’t ask me why exactly, when I gaze at a map of West Virginia at maybe three or four in the morning, I think of a more or less anatomically correct representation of a lumpy, damaged human heart, its superior vena cava a panhandle jutting sixty-four miles due north of the Mason-Dixon line, further north than the Yankee stronghold of Pittsburgh, in fact, its eastern panhandle a pulmonary artery running almost as far east as the nation’s capital, its rounded southern boundaries not unlike the dual ventricles of the human heart (or perhaps a soft underbelly, or scrotal sac, say, depending . . .), hanging deeper south than even the old Confederate capital of Richmond.

Many Yankees and other assorted outsiders have formed their mostly misguided impressions of West Virginians, and hillbillies in general, for that matter, from movies such as Deliverance, which starred the famous Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, and was based upon a novel written by the famous late neo-Beowulfian poet James Dickey. The film concerned these four fellows, basically southern, moral-flotsamy, town-boy types, who decide to canoe down a wild whitewater river back in the mountains before it is dammed up, in order to test their rather dubious, idle, civilized concept of real manhood before it is too late. The hillbillies they encounter in those isolated, plum-scary mountains have clearly been inbreeding for generations, judging from their banjo-plucking but crosseyed, drooling, idiot children, and the perverse propensity of their menfolk to capture outsiders back in the woods in order to encourage them to participate in such activities as anal intercourse at gunpoint.

That purported propensity for forbidden hellish backwoods embrace notwithstanding, bona fide West Virginian-Americans (at least the ones who interest me the most) may be better characterized as basically folks who have come to more or less relish what they can’t help being anyway, namely fugitive survivors who dwell in a sort of perpetual dream of siege and populate the closest thing to another planet you can probably find in America, and who inhabit the sort of life that just seems to keep taking on a life of its own, no matter how eccentric or crazy or dangerous or dead-end, or just plain old fun.

You can imagine West Virginia as one of the final frontiers, I informed clearly bored and mostly besotted folks at a faculty cocktail party I attended just before my departure from Pittsburgh back in 1994. My colleagues rolled their eyes and chuckled as they attempted to politely duck and dodge and just generally distance themselves from my presence at that party. Where even today, I maintained boldly, there is a great nostalgia for the habits and customs and old ways of life in the mountains, which, like life on the old Western Frontier, were often crude and violent and utterly carnivorous, with a great predilection for drinking to excess, and fighting and feuding and fornicating to excess, not to mention dancing wildly until the cows came home at dawn, and risking all for love or revenge, and discharging guns into the air simply to express feelings of arrogance or despair, confusion or joy, or simply for the general old-timey luxurious frontier fuck of it. I was going back to that land where I truly belonged, where I fit in, that country which quickened my hillbilly heart. That country where that old-timey free, wild-as-the-wind, rough-and-tumble, fun-loving, sexual spirit survives deep in the scary hills of West Virginia, lingers there yet to this day in pockets peopled mostly by my own rowdy relatives. I, for instance, would forsake my university professorship in a heartbeat if I thought I could make a decent living grazing hogs in the woods. And I drink whiskey, I reminded those city slickers, following them around the room if necessary to make my points, as they scurried away from me like right-wing Republican rats utterly uninterested in rational Democratic discourse.

I intended to rent me a furnished doublewide in a trailer park by a creek in a hollow near Madison, or Milton, or Welch, or Williamson, or Wherever, West Virginia, I further informed one of my erstwhile colleagues I cornered by the refrigerator in the kitchen, an attractive, untenured young thing with short pinkish punk hair and multiple piercings, who was basing her academic career on the legitimacy of those idiotic French theories concerning the nonexistence of the author. A trailer park just down the blacktop two-lane from a friendly little tavern by the river, I added. And exhausted in the evenings after slaving since the crack of dawn over the stories I had stolen in my frequent forays into the hills of my home state and was making my own, and exhausted also after struggling mightily to set straight all those personal stories that made up my myth of self as I relentlessly wrote my meta-memoir and mythopoetic travelogue to Almost Heaven, I would amble on down to purchase me a possumburger with fried sweet yeller onions for supper at the bar, and drink exactly three long- neck bottles of Budweiser (I’d be locally famous for drinking until I dropped only on Saturday nights) while I listened to the half-hour of country tear-jerkers I’d punch on the old jukebox by the door.

As this attractive pierced young assistant professor ducked under my arm and flung herself to my mind in exaggerated panic from the kitchen, I barked at her lovely bare and exotically tattooed back that when I’d pass by the pay phone in the hallway on my way to take a leak, I would not break down and call anybody long distance no matter how much I missed them. Whereupon, after jawboning briefly with my new best Saturday-night barfly buddies, I would stroll through the rainy night back to my old dented trailer where the tiny black-and-white television didn’t work and the only station I could get on the ancient radio was purely gospel, and I would lie down on the creaky bed in the dark and sip smokey moonshine from a mason jar and listen to the melancholy escaped sound of rain on the metal roof, while just trying to imagine a better life than that, a sweet miracle of calm resolve and remembrance.