Appalachia, In Fog

I wish you could see it.

Here – take my shoes. You’re about eight years old, on a hilltop farm in West Virginia. You’ve stayed up too late reading The Cave of Time, and still haven’t chosen the adventure that gets you to that one good ending. It’s a school day. The 7am walk up the winding driveway is dappled dark green, spangled with gold. At the bus house, huddled with your sister and brothers, you can breathe deep and smell the living earth, the damp, watchful woods. The pasture is silver with cobwebs on the fingertips of the uncut grass. The sheep call to each other in their guttural crone voices, plodding to and from the barn.

Unless there’s fog. The fog becomes everything.

​School bus number 47 emerges from the netherworld like a ghost ship, lights beating flat palms on the gray air. Outside its windows, shadows pass. There, the scarecrow in the garden of your grandfather's brother, with a real crow strung to its wrist, in warning. There, the big cemetery squeezing tight on either hillside around the gooseneck turn. No one on bus 47 speaks a word, and you know for a fact you’ve all become imaginary; if any one of you left the bus now, the fog would wash you away.
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You’re afraid of disappearing. 

​Already, you know how easy it is. You're only eight, but the message comes through. On TV, the hero's accent is never a mountain accent; the hills are only backdrops for histories or horror. The very ground you stand on, the very state you’re from, goes unnoticed, a gray spot on the map. You want to be a writer, but writers don't really visit schools where all the words - from the textbooks to the graffiti on the auditorium chairs - are ancient. You know people think there's nobody important here - nothing to see. 

Of course, that's not true. The gardens themselves, the curve of land and the bones of barns, show artists at work. Each tradition of survival is beautiful – the quilts, the tending of animals, the music, the pantries glittering with jars of preserves. And although you haven’t seen them yet, the college campuses and city streets overflow with poets, artists, engineers, thinkers. Everyone in these hills is a maker, and everyone on this bus is dreaming. 

But if The Cave of Time has taught you anything, it’s that one wrong step, one bad choice, can erase you from history. And there are bad steps lurking everywhere. It’s so easy to get sick and never afford to get better, have a child too soon, need money badly enough to make one horrible choice. It’s easy to be angry, desperate, misled.
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Already, the older kids in the back seats are beginning to whittle themselves thin enough to slip through the cracks and into the gray morning. Here and there, through breaks in the mist, you see them – alone and lost and everywhere – flinching in the lights of number 47.
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But the wild old hills are also out there, steadier than the dust of crumbling houses and dead storefronts. Each bend in the road pronounces a lasting landmark; sway right at the hayfield your father mowed last summer, sway left at the pasture where cattle’s dewy heads watch the bus pass – all there, alive and real, even if you can’t see them. 

​And you – sitting so still and quiet – are alive and real, too. Hold on a little longer. Something’s coming; you have to be ready, nose to the glass, as the bus crawls around a cliff’s edge.
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Now, hurry, look. Here’s the hilltop.

The fog is broken. 
​See the ochre horses, beating the solid earth with their steady hooves. See the gardens growing, the bulbs your neighbors saved up for and ordered months in advance. Down over the cliff, the fog bowls in the valley’s sunrise, a ruby blush in a white sea. If the cafeteria doors are left open later, you’ll be able to watch ribbons of mist breathe from the hollows all morning, fingers releasing their grip on the hills.
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Up here, you can see for miles. The world is still there. You’re still part of it.

Photo credit: Rick Barbero/The Register-Herald

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Remember that. Hold it tight, when dimness blurs the way forward. 

When, years from now, you navigate past the military recruitment tables to search for the scholarship application folder. When the Recession stalks your graduation year, and arson eats a church, a store, a row of houses.  When jobs vanish, and friends trade their dreams for food. 

In the coming time of fear, shame, and sickness without aid - remember the sunrise, the horses, the girl with her book.

Can you see them?
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Grip that vision like a bright brand, like the hand of your little sister, like the strap of the backpack you’re too cool to wear on both shoulders. Remember, there's more to this place than anger and lack. So much more.

The good ending is possible.

Just keep heading for the next hilltop. You already know the way.  ​

Pictures: The pictures above are mine, unless otherwise credited. All rights reserved by the artists.