Coming Home to Gas Lines and Lumber Mills...

I want to tell you a story. It’s about coming home. Do they still say you can’t come home, or is it more like you shouldn’t come home? Home is never the same when you come back. It’s never how you left it, and for some that can be a difficult realization.

I was watching the news today and shaking my head over this West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. He is single handedly stopping our country’s efforts to address climate change in a responsible manner. I get it, for some reason, climate has become political. I could write something today about inspiration or motivation or personal loss and many readers would respond and relate. Talk about the climate, and I’ll see the popularity drop. Sad but true.

I grew up in West Virginia. A few years ago, pre pandemic, my sister and I decided to go back and visit. We still have cousins there and thought it would be great to catch up. It was a spontaneous road trip. For me, West Virginia holds a special place. There is a smell to the place, and when I catch a whiff of that in the air today, it brings me home and re-lights all those memories from long ago. I really wanted to re-ignite those. I was going back for another hit.

We lived on dirt roads, called runs. My great uncle lived on Riggins Run. My grandmother lived on Frank’s run. A nod to the old moonshining days. The rutted and dusty dirt roads hadn’t changed. Although things were a little more overgrown, I was happy to have my senses reunited with this magical place. We visited all of our old haunts. Our school was now an abandoned building. Chains wrapped around the door handles, but the playground was still a faint impression. Our general store was no longer a general store, but perhaps some kind of residence. We couldn’t figure that out.

When we visited the family plot to dust off headstones, we found something interesting. One headstone belonged to a vet who had obviously passed at a young age. His headstone said he was killed in a foreign action in Afghanistan. Next to the headstone was a wooden plaque. Homemade and loose in the ground. When I wiggled it, I found some memorabilia and several empty beer cans. It appeared this veteran has a loyal friend that stops by once a year to share a beer. We spent some time cleaning this headstone of dust and creeping vines and took a moment to thank him.

We decided to stop to visit a cousin still living here. On the way, we couldn’t help but notice the scars in the hillside, made from a natural gas pipeline. So many trees had been taken down, you stopped to look again, and they had been laid down in a makeshift road to make it easier for construction equipment to pass. We drove by a massive natural gas plant. Huge, industrial, and out of place. The smell of West Virginia, to me, had always been the smell of natural gas, always seeping from the earth. Now I could see they were finally taking it away.

We drove by my uncle’s old sawmill, quiet and peaceful, and came up on my cousin’s house. A long, newly paved driveway led to a sprawling, recently built house. In a turnaround sat a 40 some foot camper, bright and shiny. I was happy to see my cousin so comfortable in our old hometown. I sat with him while he told me about his job driving the school bus and his new business running a bespoke sawmill which provided local craftspeople with select cuts of wood. But what he was most proud of was his relationship with the TransCanada Pipeline. He was leasing parcels of family land for the pipeline, and it was setting him up for a comfortable ride into the sunset. He had one more parcel to lease and then he’d be all set. My uncle, his father, had bought all that land and had carefully curated what he took. Although he ran a sawmill, he did not clear cut. He carefully selected every tree he took. When I was young, I often walked those new land purchases with him, watching him take it in and appreciate what he had. Now those trees were being cut in quantity and laid down to make way for construction equipment. It was ironic that my cousin actually had a phone call come in from TransCanada while I was there talking. The more he spoke of working with them, the less he wanted to talk about it, and I think we both knew why. While my uncle had left his mark on this small town, running the biggest employer in Center Point, my cousin had left his mark on the countryside, and I guess that left us both a little bit sad.

I was glad I came home. I was sad I came home. I guess you can’t have it all. So while I know talking about climate change won’t make me more popular, I am hopeful that the more stories we can share about the effects of our reliance of fossil fuels, the more heads we can turn. Home changes. It gets smaller. Places get harder to find and people disappear. All of that is okay, but home shouldn’t sell out. It shouldn’t get slowly destroyed because we refuse to change. You see, that West Virginia Democratic Senator is a major recipient of fossil fuel money and has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires, but I don’t want to get political.