Leaving West Virginia, Almost Heaven

Leaving the hills was not something I every really saw myself being able to do without the certainty of leaving them for a job in my field. Life did not work the way I thought it would though. The dream teaching job did pan out and my husband is less stubborn than I am.

When there is a problem, when I am fixing something, or putting something together and it resists, I rush headlong into it and continue working on it even when I should I stop. It is just one of the many traits that make me, me. I remember when I was getting my Master’s degree, and one of my colleagues told me: Lisa, all you get by beating your head against a brick wall is a bloody head. I have been pondering that sentence since she spoke it, and it took about ten more years to realize how right it is. But, have I stopped this beating the head and this being generally stubborn about fixing things that just don’t want to be fixed? Of course not. I just needed her to remind me that I have this tendency not to stop when I should stop, so that I stop a bit sooner than I did in my 20s.

So, while I would have clung to the 4/4 teaching load that made me insane every October (midterm), December (finals and finals grade), January (evaluations), and Feb/March (midterm and receipt of annual review), May (finals), Summer (no income), and August (writing the annual review)--and, I worried about not having time to do research and squeezing in 500 job aps between Oct and March in between the grading—I would have kept doing it until I was 65 years old. Luckily, I met my husband, who can be more rational than me about these things, and he decided to change his life, which meant mine changes too. He decided to take the LSAT. And, then we decided to move to Iowa.

Iowa. I am from Southern IL originally. I know flat. I hated flat. I hate Winter. So, why did we choose Iowa? Family. We had lived in the hills, but we were far from our family and we missed them. This can happen as you get older.  I was scared to go back to Fayetteville, Arkansas. I loved Fayetteville. I love Arkansas. I don’t want to look for jobs there because I fear that that might ruin the place I love so much. I want to return there someday when I can enjoy it without fear and worry. And the law program at the University of Iowa is good. My husband loved received his degrees there in philosophy. He knew the city well and he has good memories of the place.

A part of me was ready to get back to the western, and right, side of the Mississippi River. I reason that I can tolerate the winter with family nearby and if I put my stubbornness against it, perhaps that would be a good outlet for it. And, Iowa City does have some hills. It is nice to be able to really see the stars from horizon to horizon, instead of hill to hill. There is so much more sky to see. I miss those hills, but someday, I will be back in hills, in Arkansas perhaps, back in a warmer place and ready to be there without a bloody head.

But, first I was moving to Iowa from West Virginia and had only a few weeks to say goodbye to one of the prettiest states we have. Camping was on the agenda. I wanted it on every day, but I had to pack too, so we only got out a few times that summer. I have written about most of them, but not these final weeks, so here it goes.

Ernani and I took off on day trips together and spent some nights in the woods alone, saying goodbye to the green hills. I love driving through a country that is hilly. All my stress evaporates. I cannot wait to see what is behind the next bend. It is the same on a trail, unless I have a heavy backpack, but those are different stories.

We found another swimming hole where we met a father who told us he came here as a boy to swim, his Mom and Dad came here as children to swim, and he was taking his kids here to swim. We all, even our returning friend, marveled at a house on the ridge above the swimming area that was new to us all and looked as if it could easily slid right down the cliff into the shallow water/river below it in which we were swimming.

We stayed at a place just inside the old entrance signs to the Monongahela National Forest. Our campsite was nestled in the trees off a paved road, but if we continued on the road and turned to follow the paved road, it dropped us into the valley and brought us to the swimming hole. If we turned off the pavement onto the gravel road, it twisted up and up the hills. We followed it and got to see amazing drop offs into deep and shallow valleys of green trees and ferns. We saw deer leap randomly out as we drove by those ravens. We climbed up and up and sometimes we saw a deep, open raven and the walls of the next hill not quite as close as those before were. We twisted up and up and around. The road seemed to go on forever and I really think it did. We never reached the end of it.

We did reach the top or a top of a hill really. Suddenly, we were in the open sky, a field cleared for a pasture. Ahead of us the road continued to snake slowly up a hill in the distance, but we stopped; we pulled off into the ruts of tractor and jeep tracks that marked an entrance into the pasture and a closed cattle fence. We shut off the engine. Besides the small clicks of the cooling engine, we heard birds in the trees slightly below us and in the grasses around the fence by which we stopped. We pulled on our hiking boots and climbed over the cattle fence.

We jumped from the top of the fence onto the grassy ground and started up the slight rise of the top of the hill. Rocks mixed in with the dirt and cow patties marked the passage of the cows, which we never did see. We followed the path, improvised road really, to the top of the hill and to the trough of water some park people must come by to fill every so often. I ran the last few feet knowing that what we got for our exploration was a reward—a 360 degree view of West Virginia. I turned and turned and in every direction I saw perfection: green hills whose ridges sloped jaggedly to pass in front of and behind the other ridges of other green hills.

Rarely did I see signs of people, except on the bald hill I stood on to see these other hills and the occasional radio tower on opposite hills. I did not care about people up here though. I breathed in the fresh air and feasted on the sights before me.  I could not see enough or stay long enough. I admired the circling buzzards Ed Abbey taught me to love and which I also see in Arkansas. I wished I had brought a telescope for later tonight. The sun was setting and the sky was turning pick and orange. The hills were getting darker where the sun could not penetrate because of the shadows of the ridges of the hills nearby. The sun was lightening up the trees it could reach. The pattern of light on the trees gave the hills texture and definition. When I was in the car, I was in that pattern on a road under those trees. Now, I stood outside of it and above it. I saw it again, but could not see the road, since it was high summer, where I had been earlier inside those trees. I lifted my eyes. The sun slipped behind a hill to the west. Stars started to appear above me.

The way back was easy and took what felt like less time than getting there, but we walked it together and pointed out the things on the ground we had noticed and meant to point out to each other before as we walked to the top of the hill—the rocks glistening with mica, the flowers embedded in the path where the tires and hooves and feet that had passed by before us had missed them.

Every so often I would glance back at the view, at the place where I had stood above the world in the sky looking down, but I was no longer on top, so I looked to the sides and said a mental goodbye to the valleys I could see. It was a perfect end to our time in West Virginia in a perfect place.