Blue Highways: Judy Gap, Seneca Rocks and Elkins, West Virginia

Unfolding the Map

Twisty and spine-wrenching roads can often lead to interesting places.  What begins, in this post, as a reflection on winding roads at home leads to the realization and exploration of how two places can engender a feeling of connection and comfort.  All this takes place in the winding mountain roads of West Virginia.  (Note: William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) refers to "Mouth of Seneca" in his quote.  However, the town has since renamed itself "Seneca Rocks," and I use their current name throughout this post.)

Book Quote

"The road, a thing to wrench an eel's spine, went at the mountains in all the ways: up, down, around, over, through, under, between.  I've heard - who knows the truth - that if you rolled West Virginia out like a flapjack, it would be as large as Texas.  Where possible in the mountainous interruptions, towns opened briefly: Judy Gap, Mouth of Seneca, Elkins."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

Seneca Rocks, the geological formation for which the town (formerly Mouth of Seneca) is named. Photo by Aneta Kaluzna and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Judy Gap, Seneca Rocks and Elkins, West Virginia

I grew up in a small Northern California town, and the only way in and out of town is by one of three highways.  Either one drives Highway 20 from Willits over to my hometown of Fort Bragg, or drives Highway 128 from Cloverdale to the mouth of the Navarro River, and then north on Highway 1.  The other access into town was one we never took because we rarely went north.  That route comes south from Highway 101 at Leggett down Highway 1.

These roads run through the Coast Range and therefore, like LHM describes, are enough to "wrench an eel's spine."  Curves, and switchbacks.  Horrible drop-offs into valleys, rivers or oceans.  Rarely can one get enough speed to reach 50 miles per hour safely except on the occasional straight stretch that might run for a quarter mile or so.  While only 35 miles, it could easily take 45 minutes to an hour to traverse the distance between Willits and Fort Bragg.  Highway 128 was about 75 miles from Cloverdale to the coast, but the 35 mile stretch between Cloverdale and Boonville is one of the worst stretches of twisty road I've ever driven, until it flattens and becomes more straight in the Anderson Valley and along the Navarro River.

When I visited Appalachian Kentucky for the first time in my mid-twenties, and drove through the mountains of West Virginia in my late twenties and early thirties, I felt like I was home.  The roads twist and turn and often reminded me of stretches along Highways 20 and 128.  The sheer drop offs over valleys, like that of the New River, and the way that the curves stretch short distances into driving odysseys, made driving those areas an exercise in the awakening of memory.  Had I grown up in Appalachia I most likely would have gotten car sick fairly regularly in the first few years of my life, just like I experienced in my youth in Northern California.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that my biological mother's family was from a mountainous area of West Virginia!  I was recently talking to someone who posed the theory that we are a product of the places where we were raised, and that our connection to place might even be lodged in our genetic material.  Given the feeling of comfort that I had when in Appalachia, particularly in the pace of life, the people, the mountains and the natural beauty, I can almost believe in a genetic attachment.  How could I have felt so much at home there if some kind of genetic connection had not been passed through generations to my biological mother and then to me?

You may disagree, Littourati.  The similarity of the area may only have awakened deep-seated longings for home.  The mountains may have simply reminded me of the mountains surrounding my home town.  The way of life in rural areas may not be much different regardless of the region or area, and the people may have similar ways of looking at things.  I grew up in a blue-collar town, and a lot of Appalachian towns are mining towns and therefore blue-collar also.  Blue-collar people simply have a similar outlook on life regardless of where they are.

And you might be right.  But whether it is a genetic connection, or just reminders of home, I felt something driving through those mountains.  That feeling of home, whether I am in Northern California or 3,000 miles away in West Virginia, taught me that I never have to be homesick if I don't wish to.  Each time I am by an ocean, or even a large lake, I can find things that remind me of my beloved Pacific.  I was especially surprised to find such similarities once while driving along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.  Whenever I am in mountains, memories of my youth come flooding back, and I am always ready to explore a gulch, valley or holler, and to sit and dip my toes in a creek, stream or river.  The vegetation and animal life may be a little different, but I find that my connection always has to do with the feeling of the place, not the specifics.

I remember that my wife and I went to visit some friends in Hazard, Kentucky before we were married.  It was a late afternoon and I was sitting on a porch of a house that looked very much like the cabin where I spent my summers in my youth.  I used to sit on the deck by our cabin in the late afternoon, listening to the ball game or maybe the lonely wail of the approaching train from Willits.  The sun, as it lowered in the sky, shone through the leaves of the oak trees that bordered our deck.  The light diffusing through the leaves gave them a brilliant green hue that often struck me dumb with amazement.  I also remember the scent of the afternoon forest, the music of the river over its rocks, the soft rustle of the leaves as they in a late afternoon breeze, and the sound of insects that pervaded throughout.  My father, often very Buddha-like as he sat in shorts, bare-chested, with me on the deck sometimes would say "Listen, Michael.  Listen to the trees.  They are telling you something, if you just listen."  On that day in Hazard, Kentucky, in the late afternoon, I had the same kind of feeling and I smelled a similar scent in the forest.  The breeze through the trees, and the sun shining through the leaves, was very similar to that of home.  Even the insects seemed to sing the same song.

I told my friends to be quiet, and listen to what the trees were saying.  They thought it was weird, and soon went back to chatting.  I just smiled, and enjoyed a warm and familiar feeling, because I knew what the trees were saying...

Peace, they rustled, as the sun slowly sank behind the mountains.

Musical Interlude

I always liked this song, Peaceful Easy Feeling by The Eagles, though the subject of the lyrics is a little off the topic of the post.  I used to imagine lying with a girl under those same trees I described, in the afternoon sun, looking up at the brilliant green leaves offsetting with the brilliant blue sky, amid the dappling of shadows and sunlight on the ground.  I thought that there could be nothing more romantic.

If you want to know more about Judy Gap, Mouth of Seneca and Elkins

City of Elkins
e-WV: Judy Gap
The InterMountain (Elkins newspaper)
Virginia Wind: Seneca Rocks
Wikipedia: Elkins
Wikipedia: Judy Gap
Wikipedia: Seneca Rocks (geological formation)
Wikipedia: Seneca Rocks (town

Next up: Buckhannon, West Virginia

Blue Highways: Mount Pleasant, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Sometimes we need guidance - a little helping hand to get us where we need to go.  Often we seek guidance or signs but cannot find them.  Sometimes we don't recognize or even ignore signs we perceive and guidance we receive.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) asks for guidance and gets it from a deaf woman in Mount Pleasant.  It will determine his next destination - the Thumb of Michigan.  To place Mount Pleasant on the mitten, put your fingers on the map.

Book Quote

"Across her T-shirt was SKI.  She leafed through Stalking the Wild Asparagus in the college bookstore.  I was in the middle of Michigan and looking for a place to go next, so I asked whether she lived in Mount Pleasant, but she didn't look up.  I tapped her arm.

"'I'm from Missouri.  Traveling.  I'd like to find a good place to visit in Michigan.'  She watched but said nothing.  'Maybe you know a nice spot.'  She just stared.  Northerners really carry taciturnity too far, I thought.

A clerk came up and said, 'She's deaf.  Probably having trouble reading your lips.'  He repeated what I'd asked.

"She said, 'Oh,' and put the book down.  Holding up her right hand as if to say 'How' in Hollywood Indian fashion, she said, 'Dumb.'

"'Dumb?' the clerk repeated.  I didn't know whether she meant me or herself.

"'Dumb Miss Ginn,' she said and wagged her right thumb.

"'Thumb of Michigan?' the clerk asked.

"The girl smiled, wagged her thumb again, and nodded.  'Berry bootful.'

''It's very beautiful,' the clerk translated.

"Looking at her SKI T-shirt, I said, 'Do you ski on the Thumb?'

"'Dumbs due plat.  By dames car water ski.'

"'Thumb's too flat to ski,' the clerk said.  'Her name's Karworski.'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Reflections of Mount Pleasant. Photo by Tom Kimball and hoted on the MtPleasant.com website. Click on photo to go to host site.

Mount Pleasant, Michigan

Sometimes, we need a guide, and we can't find one.  We cast about, looking for the right way or the right path, and no matter what we do, we can't distinguish which way to go.  We even ask those we see around us what way might be the right way.  Sometimes they are just as lost as we are, and we are frustrated because we want the answer.  Sometimes they appear to know exactly where they are going and what they are doing, and we are frustrated because we feel we should know.

For example, my wife has been looking for a sign or a guidepost or an actual guide to give her some indication as to what path her life should take in her middle age.   It has been very hard for her.  No stroke of inspiration, no accidental dropping of words that gives her a great idea, no light shining out of the grayness of the clouds that illuminates the forest path down which she should tread.  She often feels on her own.

In a way, waiting for a sign or a guide to step forward is like waiting for lottery ticket numbers to come up with the multi-million dollar winner.  Lightning will strike very few of us, and flashes of inspiration and insight will come infrequently.  A guide will step out of the trees only once in awhile.  Mostly we are on our own and have to make our own way through the world, relying on our own senses to get us where we need to go.

That's small consolation when you're waiting for that guiding hand.  Humans have created religion to provide us with direction, and over the millenia we've prayed to a myriad of gods to provide us with what we need, and we wait.  And wait.  And wait.  We go to psychotherapy in search of the answers, and are frustrated when the therapist asks us a simple question:  "What do you think you ought to do?"  If you're like me, your first response is often just as direct:  "Aren't I paying you to tell me?"

There's a joke I heard once about a man stuck on a roof as flood waters rise about him.  He is a deeply religious man, and he begins to pray.  After a while, a man comes by in a rowboat, and asks if he needs help.  The man on the roof says "Don't worry about me, God will provide."  Later, as the water is rising higher, another boat comes by the praying man, and the rower asks him if he wants to get in.  "God will provide," says the man.  As the man continues to pray, the water rises until it is almost covering the roof.  Another boat comes by, and they really want to pull the man in but he resists, strongly saying "God will provide!"  They go away and by and by the man drowns.  As he is being conducted by St. Peter through the pearly gates, he exclaims "I don't understand.  I'm a pious man.  I pray every day.  I prayed throughout the flood knowing that God will provide.  Why didn't he save me."  St. Peter turns and says, "Well, God sent you three boats.  What else were you looking for?"

I'm learning that inspiration and guideposts must come from within as well as without.  Here's my theory.  Inspiration and guidance consist of two things: action and recognition.

Nothing will happen if the person seeking guidance doesn't take action.  This could be choosing a path or asking for help.  Robert Frost provides an example in his great poem The Road Not Taken.  He chooses the road less traveled, which has made all the difference, knowing that he may lament not taking the other road.  However, this involves action.  If we come to a crossroads, and there are no signs, we have to choose or we will remain stuck.  Who knows - the signs may be over the next hill, but we have to keep traveling down the road.

We also have to recognize signs and guidance when it is being offered.  How many times have I blown off somebody's advice, because I knew better, only to learn later that the advice was correct?  How many times have I ignored what my conscience or gut feeling was telling me, only to pay later for ignoring my instincts?  Sometimes guidance comes from people or things we don't expect.  Literature is rife with people ignoring advice or signs at their peril.  Shakespeare made the fool an important part of many plays, and his heroes that didn't pay attention to their seemingly foolish but challenging and wise words often suffered.  I think that in most cases, we instinctively know what is true and right but we don't trust ourselves enough to follow our senses and ultimately be our own guides.

In the end, signs can point us to things, but we move past them.  Guides usually are with us a short way along our journeys, but not throughout life.  They may point out a path or a place we should go, or they may accompany us a short way.  Virgil served as Dante's guide through The Inferno, but after the tour was over, Dante had to move on.  Our lives are our own, and ultimately, we are responsible for our paths.

LHM ends up on the Thumb of Michigan because he takes action and asks for some advice from a young woman.  She was his guide for a short moment in time, and he followed her advice.  Occasionally, guidance comes, sometimes even in the form of a young but friendly deaf woman in a bookstore in Mount Pleasant.  We just have to recognize the signs.

Musical Interlude

This Ace of Base song, The Sign, is probably one of the last true pop songs to which I paid some attention.  It wasn't long after this came out that I stopped listening to pop music entirely.  I know I've probably missed a few signs, but I believe I've gained in understanding by broadening my musical knowledge base.  That being said, this catchy tune is about recognizing signs and going with it.  The best line, if a little grammatically awkward, is "No one's gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong."

If you want to know more about Mount Pleasant

Central Michigan Life (student newspaper)
Central Michigan University
City of Mount Pleasant
Downtown Mount Pleasant (blog)
Isabella County
The Morning Sun (newspaper)
Mount Pleasant Convention and Visitors Bureau
Wikipedia: Mount Pleasant

Next up: Midland, Michigan

Blue Highways: Somewhere along Highway 2, Montana

Unfolding the Map

Happy New Year!  January 1, 2012 finds us with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) in the middle of Montana with a bad case of highway hypnosis.  What do you do on lonely roads?  If you can, you try to achieve enlightenment and transcendence.  But, most of us won't so we do what we can to make the lonely roads interesting.

Just a warning - I'm making a complete, utter guess (here's where I'm guessing on the map) about where LHM might have stopped on the Hi-Line.  He mentions stopping somewhere after highway mile marker 465, but I couldn't find where that was, including trying to track it down through Google Earth.  I don't think that I'm off by more than 50 miles, but it's more about keeping in the spirit of LHM's words.  And, to be honest, I will guess again in the next post, when he stops again along the Milk River.

Book Quote

"Pock-pock went the tarred road cracks.  Pock-pock.  The day remained dark, showers fell and stopped and came again, the uneven roadway collected water, the van hydroplaned every few minutes.  The clamor of wind numbed my ears; the fever made me woozy.  Pock-pock.  First the highway held me then it entered me, then I was the highway.  Pock-pock, pock-pock.  Prairie hypnosis. I drove miles I coudn't remember, and the land became a succession of wet highway stripes, and I wished for a roadfellow.  I sat blindly, dumbly like a veiled stone sphinx.  Finally, to dispel the miles, I stopped, got out, and held my face to the rain.  I shook myself.  But, once more on the road, I again became part of the machine: generator, accelerator, humanator.  I  knew nothing.  A stupefied nub on the great prairie."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 6

Abandoned schoolhouse along the Hi-Line near at Savoy, Montana. Photo by Todd Klassy and seen at his Flickr photostream. Click on photo to go to host page.Somewhere along Highway 2, Montana

LHM is in the middle of a long stretch of driving a lonely highway.  There is a kind of a pleasure in driving at such times.  The miles stretch on endlessly and time seems to lose itself.

If you're an extravert, and you need companionship and stimulation, such drives shouldn't be undertaken alone or perhaps at all.  You will go a little stir-crazy in the car.  I'm not suggesting that you can't do it, but I'm just suggesting that unless you really need to drive over long stretches of lonely road alone you might consider doing something else.

If you're an introvert, like me, the alone time in the car is a time to recharge, to think and reflect, to simply enjoy the stillness in an increasingly loud and busy world.  There is a Zen quality to driving.  The highway sounds, particularly the sections of the roadway that create the "pock-pock" that LHM writes about, are white noise.  When you're in such places, even if you want to find a radio station to fill the empty air, you might be out of luck.  A radio scan might just scan through the entire FM spectrum and find nothing.  The AM spectrum is better, especially at night, but it might have a tendency to fade in and out.  In the times I drove in empty spaces, AM radio became just another part of the white noise, combining with the rush of air over the car frame, the sounds of the tires on the road, the occasional "whoosh" of a passing car, and other sounds from the car itself (the annoying rattle on the dashboard, for instance) in a barely recognizable symphony of the road.

My latest experience of drives over vast amounts of nothing when I was alone in the car was on my frequent trips back and forth between Albuquerque and Lubbock when I was teaching as a visiting professor.  Each weekend, I would make a five hour drive on Friday to see my wife, and return to Lubbock on Sunday evening in another five hour drive.  About two hours of the drive, roughly from Santa Rosa, New Mexico to Clovis, New Mexico, was through very sparsely populated areas.  The drive between Santa Rosa and Fort Sumner, New Mexico was miles and miles of on unpopulated expanse.  I must say that even though at first it was a weekly chore to get in the car and drive so much, I began to look forward to those times.  I like driving in the first place because for me, the car is a place to relax, and I looked forward to the subtle changes that would occur along the road week after week.  Perhaps a business might open in what was a vacant storefront in Clovis.  Maybe I might notice, in the winter light, a geographical feature that I had missed in the late summer light.  On one particularly windy drive, I dodged tumbleweeds all along the road.  On another, I took a new route through even more remote territory than I usually drove and stopped, like LHM, along a grassy, treeless stretch of road to listen to a silence so complete that the small breeze brushing past my ear sounded like a freight train.  Speaking of freight trains, one night I saw what appeared to be shimmering water pouring out of the side of a freight train on tracks parallel to the road far ahead of me.  As I caught up, I realized that it was an immense shower of sparks from the wheels of the freight as it braked hard for some reason or another.

In those driving moments, when I did listen to music, I usually brought my IPod and I played songs on random shuffle, and I would often note an eerie convergence between the music and drive.  Perhaps it was my overactive imagination, but at times I felt that the universe aligned.

A number of years ago, I made a few long car trips and was drawn to taking rural routes rather than the interstate.  Driving through rural West Virginia, I allowed myself to listen to the radio and made the amazing discovery that I could handle country and bluegrass music, a genre that I had never really been drawn toward before.  As I drove through small Appalachian towns, it seemed to fit and it reinforced that the musics that we create and listen to really are products of our place.  To listen to rap and hip-hop in rural West Virginia, to me, would seem as disjointed as driving through an inner-city neighborhood and blasting out the latest Nashville hits.

The road, especially the lonely places, can bring such insights grounded in reality, and also flashes of inspiration and brilliance, such as the poem that came to me at a stop along the New River Gorge in West Virginia.  It can also be dangerous.  One's mind can be lulled into a Zen state of concentration and inner awareness, but it also can be lulled to sleepiness.  There have been many times when I drove alone that toward the end of a long day behind the wheel I was biting my hand to keep myself awake until I came upon a motel I was willing to use.  Especially in the lonely places, that might be a long time coming, yet I was never comfortable pulling off the road and sleeping.  I learned to give myself breaks, break up the "highway hypnosis," and end my trips more fresh.  I also made the discovery that the amazing amounts of junk food one can get along the road can make one sleepy while driving.  By eating better, less sugared stuff, I could keep myself more fresh longer.

In that sense, LHM's description of a "stupefied nub on the prairie" is only part of the story to me.  Yes, I've been a stupefied, sugar-filled, tired nub behind the wheel, but at other times the road has led me to awareness and even occasional transcendence.  I don't have as much opportunity now to go out on the road alone, but sometimes, especially on the loudest, busiest, noisiest days, I miss it.

Musical Interlude

I'm not a real big fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but occasionally a song catches me.  Running Down a Dream is one that I like, and it's lyrics are pretty compatible with the post.  Turn it up and rock along!

If you want to know more about Highway 2 along the Hi-Line

Hi-Line (film): I don't kow anything about this movie, but it is a road film set along the Hi-Line.
Montana Hi-Line Photographs
Montana Highway 2 Information
Wikipedia: Hi-Line
Wikipedia: US Route 2

Next up:  Somewhere along Milk Creek, Montana