The Ineffability of Home
creative nonfiction by Cat Pleska
Growing up, we never vacationed in exotic spots like Disney World or Niagara Falls. I don't know if it was lack of funds (likely), or it didn’t occur to my parents. My dad bought a “camp” in the 1960s and that became our vacationing mecca in eastern West Virginia. The camp, a three-room cinder block hut, sat a few yards from Williams River, close enough to hear the water rush over its rock-strewn bottom. It was a musical land: at night, the cacophony of whippoorwills, crickets, and tree frogs accompanied the song of family voices telling tales in dark so pitch only cigarette glow offered glimpses of briefly lit faces.
The drive to the camp was three hours from where we lived, but most often if I were along for the ride, it wasn’t with my parents; it was with my grandmother. She drove an old black pickup truck with a stick shift. On the way to the camp, my cousins and I would ride in the back. We would lie down in a row and pull a blanket tightly over us. The wind whipped against the cab, threatening to pull the blanket from our clutches. We’d giggle and talk about who knows what. The night sky, I expect.
Black and black and black, the sky twinkled with more stars than one could possibly count, no matter your arithmetic skills. And the Milky Way—oh, how it glowed on clear nights, winding its path across the sky, like a rip in the universe. We kids had no idea about galaxies, and the spiral arms of ours. We were hugged by our parents, our grandmother, and those were arms enough.
When we passed the chemical plant we knew we were half way. From our prone positions, we could see a column of flame leaping up from tall stacks. Over the edge of the truck bed sides, we glimpsed the glowing windows on the plant building’s top floor. We didn’t know who worked there, but we imagined it must be men, toiling in heat, sweating and shoveling, and never getting the chance to look out the many windows—we never saw any faces.
Finally, we rolled from side to side as my grandmother navigated the curves of Williams River Road. We knew we were close. We laughed and hung on to one another as we swayed—why, we thought we’d be pitched out on the ground!
The truck bumped us across a dry creekbed and then we were there: the camp. My grandmother unlocked the door, and we raced inside, whiffed the mildew of the closed little hut, but who cared? We’d jockey for the top bunk bed and pile in to sleep and dream about how we’d play in the river all day long.
In the morning, we woke to bacon and eggs frying on the cast iron kitchen stove. Our grandmother had fired it up with wood stored outside. The room was warm, chasing away the musty smell, the food aromas accompanied the feeling of safety and peace.
As we made our way down to the river, the day’s heat was encroaching. The music of summer continued in the day with the sharp buzz of jar flies and cicadas. The song from the low-flowing Williams River reached us before we glimpsed the water. In the dryness of mid-summer, the water was half way up our shins; we needed no chaperone. The sense of freedom filled us to busting.
The rocks on the river bottom ranged from small pebbles to large flowing boulders the size of houses. Their surfaces looked as if someone had smoothed them out with a spatula. On top, dips and sinks usually held water, and to us kids, these were bathtubs. We waded to the tubs and pretended to bathe, making a big deal of splashing one another and threatening to pee so no one else would get in.
Eventually, we’d spread out along the river, from one side to the other, spotting small fish we tried to catch with our hands. Each of us grew quiet as if alone in our watery world, watching for signs of life, for colorful rocks, letting the translucent water flow through our fingers, over our toes.
After an eternity in a child’s world, we’d hear our grandmother calling us in for lunch. At first her voice seemed to meld with the river’s swoosh and trickle. Then like the trill of the Pied Piper’s flute, we’d climb the bank and follow her music. We’d munch on fried baloney sandwiches or peanut butter on graham crackers and drink RC Colas. We giggled as she danced to “Hot town, summer in the city” on the radio.
That time, that place tethered us to magic and memory, awash in peace and love. Who would want to leave?
He swayed from foot to foot, looking down at the floor. I stopped moving, realizing he was nervous. I repeated softly: “What did you need to say?”
The young man stood before me, almost at attention. He whipped off his ball cap as if he suddenly realized he was wearing it in front of me, his teacher. He had asked me earlier if I would wait after class.
“What did you want to talk to me about, Jason?”
I moved to turn off the computers around us. We were in the computer lab for English 101, back in the day when we had students in class one day a week and took them to the lab the other day to write their papers, practice typing in Word.
He swayed from foot to foot, looking down at the floor. I stopped moving, realizing he was nervous. I repeated softly: “What did you need to say?”
He looked up and blurted out, “Professor, my parents want me to quit college and come home to work. To get a job in the mines.”
“Oh.” I sat down on a nearby chair. I motioned for him to sit in the one next to it, but he shook his head.
“Well, Jason . . . how do you feel about that?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t want to, but I don’t have no choice. I want to stay in college and study business.” I remained silent for a beat, trying to think of what to say.
“Why do your parents want you to work in the mines?”
“They say college is a waste of time and money. I need to be home and working. They didn’t want me to go but gave in ‘cause I begged. They figured I’d realize I hated college. They want me in the mines like my daddy and grandpa.”
“I see. So, they’re not going to pay for your school then?”
“No ma’am.”
“Jason, could you stay here, maybe get a part time job, maybe rent a small apartment with someone, perhaps apply for a loan for school?” I was ignorant then of what it took to get a loan, not realizing his parent’s credit was necessary.
“I thought of that ma’am, but I don’t know no one here. They said they’d take my pickup truck back, too, if I don’t quit and come home.”
“Jason . . . I’m so sorry. I know you’ve been enjoying your classes.”
He smiled. “Oh yes! I kinda like writing. I didn’t do well in high school. The teachers didn’t seem to care. At least in my school. I really like your class. You make writing fun. You let me write about football!”
I smiled. Many of my men students, a few women, liked to write about football, basketball, soccer, tennis. Most chaffed at writing about anything else, though Jason hadn’t seemed to mind.
“Well, I hate this for you. I wish I had an answer to your problem. I know that coal mining is a strong tradition in many families. I also know it’s a way to make good money. Is it possible you could work in the mines to save up for school?”
He looked away from me then answered, “If I go into the mines, there won’t be no way out.”
~
I never saw Jason again. He quit mid-semester, and I supposed he went home to Southern West Virginia and into the mines. It’s been 25 years since that conversation and in my classes, to this day, I hear something similar to it: Can’t leave ‘cause my family doesn’t want me to go away; I have to stay and support my mom because my dad overdosed last year; I have to work and help pay for food; my grandparents need me; I don’t want to leave my state and if I get my degree there are no jobs here.
Reasons abound now.
~
West Virginia is rife with the idea that coal mines are everywhere and we all work in them, always have. That is not the truth at all yet the attitude persists. The marketing idea resounds like this: coal provides your power and more cheaply than anything else.
The economy of this state has been formed under many governors and legislators, whatever party they represented, but all kowtowed to big extractive corporations. Money flowed, lots of it—outside this state. Change comes exceedingly slow here, economic-wise, but there are clear signals that it is shifting; however, the poverty persists, and the family bonds are weakening as we suffer a lost generation to drugs. Futility is often the sensibility in much of our region. Economic colonization has remained for the past 150 years, and the long-time citizens are convinced through constant rhetoric that it’s all our fault, a mantra reinforced generation after generation. And recently, it has become further entrenched through national politics, berating us for not only our own misery but of the nation’s.
This was the spider’s web of misinformation and realities that captured Jason all those years ago and many people now. Why educate when you don’t need a formal education to operate within various industries, the work environment still most prevalent?
Information, false or true, spreads like despair, like hope. It flows in and out of our lives and floods us with so many contradictions that it is hard to find answers. Many are working on untangling us, of restoring flow: of money, of hope, of opportunities, of dreams. But their voices are lost in the cacophony of a ruling roar and fear deliberately spread like a virus.
If Jason were standing before me now, and I am still a writing teacher at a university, his laments about leaving college may still be plausible. The reasons may differ slightly, but the pull of family, of familial responsibility, of working in industry still dwells in our experience, what we see; what we know. Maybe we are reluctant to protest because love has been denied or not easily accessed when faced with so many personal troubles.
I don’t have any easier answers for the Jasons of now. I might say to them:
“Jason, there are ways and means to help you stay in school, but I understand that familial pull. I am here because of it. I found a way to make my stay here in this state work, but I will never say it was easy.” Maybe such decisions are not so challenging elsewhere in this country. But another truth, my parents, all that time ago, were dismayed with the way college changed me. I spoke differently; I knew things they didn’t even know to ask questions about. But I learned to come back to them and speak with them in the language they gifted me with when I was born. I laughed with them and listened to their stories. I came to understand the pull and undertow of family and how they also remind you to recall the softness of clear cool water and the clarity of who you are.
I want the Jasons of this region to sail away on the dreams education can build, but when you weigh anchor realize you can return and anchor again and again at home.
~
My dad sold the camp in the ‘80s, not too long after a flood ravaged the area, destroying much of what was inside—the cast iron stove rusted; the bunks were moldy, mud filled the fireplace. But the cinder block hut remained. I was not able to return before the sale, but I have since been back one time, 20 years after he turned over the keys to a new owner.
I crossed the creek in my car, not a pickup; I stepped out and heard the rush of the Williams River. A well-worn path led me to the water. Pebbles and rocks still littered the river bottom. The bathtubs were still in place. Memories surfaced of my grandmother, now long gone, and her pickup truck, shifting gears like a pro race car driver. Her dancing in the kitchen on a warm summer night listening to rock and roll, not the music of her youth. My parents are gone, and I admit it was far from a perfect life, or a perfect family. Alcoholism and clinical depression abounded within my relatives, close and more distant, problems not unlike what many youth face now. Nor is the Williams River a perfect river—sometimes there is a ravaging overflow.
It is as if the water holds our memories, reacts to our thoughts and feelings, helps us recall what it is like to live here. And in the same way, home holds an ineffable meaning that we struggle to understand why we don’t just leave, make our way in the world. We do. We can. But for me, the memory of my grandmother’s voice mingling in among the chirps and whirrs and calls of a beautiful night or day in the mountains of West Virginia will never, ever change, like the Milky Way. She is still up there, though most of us cannot easily see her now. That ineffable quality manifested through the voices of belonging. We will carry it always.
Cat Pleska, a native West Virginian, is an award-winning author, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by West Virginia University Press. Her current memoir is My Life in Water (Uncollected Press). Cat edited four anthologies and her stories and essays have appeared in The Anthologies of Appalachian Writers, Still: The Journal, Heartwood Magazine, Change 7 Magazine, and many others. She teaches in Marshall University’s English Department and in the Graduate Humanities Program. She is happy to say she no longer fears bathtubs.