Wednesday, 06 August 2008 | West Virginia in sepia

My dad's parents still live in the region where they grew up: "wild, wonderful" West Virginia. They've lived in several parts of the state, besides spending a good portion of their lives traveling elsewhere (mostly by American-made car throughout the U.S., visiting relatives and friends). For as long as I've known them, their home has been in Parkersburg, a small-to-medium-sized town near the Ohio border. They're big fans of the place, and my grandfather owns several WV-stamped hats and tie pins just in case you don't believe him.

Last Thanksgiving Todd and I drove down from New York in a borrowed car to spend the holiday with grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I insisted on driving rather than going by air, as I missed the drive through the mountains that I used to take with my family every year as a kid, and I wanted to point out all the truck escapes to my captive in the car. Truck escapes have always fascinated me, because it feels sort of like a crime scene, like the eerie spot where something bad might've occurred. (I feel the same way about collapsed mountain tunnels and broken bridges, and, for some reason, long-ago closed subway stations.)

Todd had already met my grandparents, but my other relatives were new to him, as was West Virginia. He was kind of wide-eyed throughout the experience, not unlike the way a cat behaves when it's set in a new environment. (He did just fine, by the way.)

It was particularly nice sitting around my grandparents' wood-paneled living room with several of my relatives, exchanging old stories. It had been a while since I sat around with people doing nothing but talking, without the any distractions or social lubricants at all -- no music, TV, alcohol, or additional entertainment. It wasn't boring or exhausting, and I didn't even really notice that any of those things were absent.

In many ways I turned out pretty differently than my relatives (politics is just one way), but I love that it doesn't matter, really, and that we like each other anyway and get along easily. There naturally isn't any passive aggressiveness, competition, drama, or narcissism in the room, and my family is remarkably un-superficial. (Perhaps to a fault, as I grew up without a firm idea of certain social rules and traditions. I have naively worn my share of inappropriate things on formal occasions, and it's taken me a while to develop a keen sense of what "underdressed" means to other people. If I felt like it, I could totally sit down to Thanksgiving wearing sweatpants and no one would notice. Wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt might be another story, however.)

Since I'm rarely in West Virginia with a car, one of my goals that trip was to drive through some dilapidated mining towns, both to satisfy my nostalgia as well as my affection for show-and-tell. Before we left for New York, Todd and I asked my grandparents how to find these ghost-like towns, and they did their best to help. They gave us a West Virginia map, and pointed to some oddly named places, saying that many of the towns and roads we wanted weren't even marked. They said they could drive us to these places, but telling us was another matter, as the roads are often differentiated by landmarks rather than signs. So they provided us with West Virginia-style directions anyway, leading us to various crossroads in the vicinity of Clarksburg ("At the end of the dirt road, take the left fork up the mountain, and look for signs for Killarm...") and we set off.

We didn't really get to see what I recalled from childhood trips, but we did drive down some dead-end roads and saw lots of detritus-filled front yards and even a pile of (what looked like) coal on the side of the road. We came across some deer hunters, we had a puppy dance around our car, and we got lost more than once. When we stopped a man to ask him for directions, he asked, "Well, where exactly do you want to go in Killarm?" We didn't know how to answer him, as saying "we want to see a crumbling shell of a town" didn't seem appropriate. So we just shrugged and said, "I dunno, the main street?"

A couple weeks ago my mom and dad were back in West Virginia for another visit. (Visiting West Virginia is the extent of what they do; my dad used to playfully suggest that they move there, and my mom used to playfully respond, Hell no.) While there, they found some awesome antique cake plates Todd and I can use for the wedding (West Virginia has an abundance of that sort of thing), and my grandmother combed through her jewelry box for pieces I might be interested in wearing. (Some of them are really pretty. I'll be wearing some of it for sure.) They all also looked through old photo albums, as I wanted to somehow incorporate old wedding photos of my and Todd's relatives at our reception.

Not only did my dad send me the wedding photos I was hoping for, but he also found lots more, pictures of people I've known only as older adults, and people who died well before I was born. He scanned them all in, and since returning to North Carolina, he's been emailing me a "photo of the day" of people from the past, along with descriptive details of their personalities, locations, and relationships. I'm enjoying getting to know them via their frozen expressions and gestures, and seeing my grandparents' personalities still present in their younger faces.

I'm really glad my relatives took (and kept) so many pictures. I think my distant cousin Babe would've liked to been added to Flickr, so that's what I've done. (You can see all the photos my dad has sent so far here.)