The Mountains Aren’t Calling Me, but They Were Fun: Michael and Dan in West Virginia
Daniel Emberley, June 2024
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Our friends John & David have been inviting us to visit their cabin in West Virginia for over a decade, and we took advantage of their offer. Michael picked up an SUV at DCA, and we were off due west on I-66, then across the Appalachians on the Robert Byrd Highway. Senator Byrd decided the way he could most help his state was to build freeways – they allowed folks to get out and around their mountains, and also invited folks like us in. They are amazing, like the Blue Ridge Parkway or Skyline Drive, with Appalachia spreading its beauty before you, but at 70 MPH and no traffic.
Our friends are outside of Moorefield, in the eastern panhandle one valley west from Lost River. Once you get off the highway the approaches are insane, steep twisting mountain roads that make you appreciate Byrd’s gift. John and David bought a log cabin kit house, had locals put in the foundation and erect the shell, and they then put in the interiors. It’s fantastic, a larger house than any of us have owned, on forest acreage that lets them garden and retreat where the most annoying neighbors are bears, who can be dissuaded with an electric fence. David was visiting family in Colombia, so we were there to distract John. He laid out a fancy happy hour, then prepared pasta salad and burgers on the Traeger. The latter is a pellet grill that connects to his phone, so it could guide him on perfect timing for the burgers and grilled squash. Peach pie from a local farmers market rounded off the meal beautifully. He then introduced us to the wonders of “Below Deck”, a Bravo series of pretty people working yachts that is both addictive and hilarious. Their cat Penny joined us; I’d been worried about my allergies, between autumn in the forest and the cat, but my antihistamine stayed in our suitcase. Penny is a Chartreux, a beautiful grey-lavender breed developed by monks for their silence. Penny never got that memo, but was never a bother, either. Her coat is so thick that it also, conveniently, seems to keep allergens/dander to a minimum.
Wednesday, September 4
Quiche for breakfast, then an adventure in the Tesla. The guys have used Elon Musk’s technology to get as far off the grid as they can. It’s pretty cool. Wifi via Starlink, solar panels on the roof, fueling both the house and the car. We had never been in a Tesla before, and were impressed. It took the roads easily, and was able to self-drive comfortably, competently and safely. John has named their car Stormy, after Daniels; their interaction back and forth was hilarious. My only complaint is that I ended up eyeing the dashboard monitor more than seeing the forest around us, but maybe that passes when you get used to the tech.
Our destination was Blackwater Falls, a West Virginia State Park, one of many that are well-maintained and preserve nuggets of virgin or re-grown wilderness. The “hike” to the falls is a flight of steps down, easy after our experience in Croatia. The falls are multi-tiered, full even this late in the season, with cool sprays bouncing off the foundation sedimentary layers in interesting ways. We got ribs and pulled pork in the Lodge, then headed back to the cabin.
After Rehoboth Beach became overpriced and re-colonized by straight people, gays went looking for our next vacation destination. Some chose Asbury Park and Virginia’s Northern Neck, but a lot have made Lost River their second home. You can pick up a small farm, or house in town, with views or land or both, for less than the cost of a condo in D.C. Restaurants, inns, and stores have opened to cater to us, although the season was winding down, so options were more limited than just a week before. John accompanied us for dinner at The Grille, an ironically-taxidermy-filled tavern where we got meatloaf and a massive chef’s salad. Then up the road to the Inn at Lost River. This former farm had been converted to an inn and yoga retreat by a pair of well-known-about-town lesbians, who sold their businesses off to different owners when they retired. High season was over, so we had the place to ourselves. Sort of like inheriting an 1850’s country estate, complete with staff. The innkeeper treated Michael to drinks in the living room, then I joined them for cookies (homemade chocolate-chip-oatmeal-peanut-toffee, massive and delicious) and reading. Relaxing, in a way we rarely allow ourselves. We recommend the Inn if you go exploring Lost River.
Thursday, September 5
Breakfast at the Inn was brilliant: baked oatmeal, local sausage, fruit, and a tomato galette. The Inn runs a well-regarded store (check it out in the August issue of Southern Living), part local production, part antiques. Our innkeeper was our
chef and also worked the register, a man of many talents. He suggested we break for lunch in Buckhannon, at regional chain C.J. Maggie’s. We zipped west on the highway, and were surprised by how much we liked Buckhannon. It has a sweet downtown, with interesting stores and art galleries. Maggie’s is a burgers-and-fries college (WV Wesleyan) town kind of place, decent. Through Monongahela National Forest, which was like driving the pine tree tunnel of any eastern state, to Weston.
West Virginia has had an important glass industry since early settlement. They have the Ohio River sand, silica, and natural gas to make it, and got immigration from places like Germany and Austria that brought the knowledge. The river made transport of the product simple and safe (as Josiah Wedgewood discovered in England, water transport and fragile objects are a good combination). Most of the glass was industrial, bottles and windows and such, but as the industry has grown and left the state, a strong craft scene remains. The Museum of American Glass, in Weston, commemorates this world. It looks like the former town department store, filled with aisles of the kind of glass cases you would see in the vase department of a Macy’s, each case packed with examples of great glass from around the U.S. Okay explanation, but we were glad we knew what we were looking at before we looked for wall text. Best of all, lots of people donate grandma or gay uncle’s collections to the Museum, and after accessioning the best pieces to the collection, the rest is sold to the public. Sort of a thrift shop for great glassware. We loved it.
West Virginia American Art Glass is a studio further down Main Street; they have a hot shop where you can watch artists blow glass and teach you the skill. Sadly, it was closed, but staff at the Museum recommended we try Appalachian Glass, a little further out of town. This was great, the place where they make the witches’ balls you see in crafts stores across the MidAtlantic. The hot shop is part of the store, but was not active when we were there. Fun to shop, though.
From Weston I-79 takes you southwest through rolling mountains past wind farms to Charleston, the state capitol. We checked into the Holiday Inn Express, and got dinner in the food court of the adjacent mall across the street. That was an error. Charleston tried to replace its downtown with a mega-mall in the late 1980’s. It is now in Chapter 11; Covid, Amazon delivery, and the death of retail in general having done their damage. All of the anchors are gone, and many of the parking structures being demolished. City and state offices have filled some of the retail spaces, enough to keep the food court alive, but not enough to make the mall seem anything but a failure. Perhaps they’ll be able to turn it around, but we are skeptical.
Michael needed some supplies, so we headed to Kroger, where it was Florida Night. Not intentionally, but the same combination of belligerent people making wrong choices, and a poor selection of items for sale. Lots of folks blocking aisles, going the wrong way through entrances and setting off alarms, self-involved and not caring. The capper was the old woman in front of us in line. The belt was empty, so I put our items on it to be checked out. Then she started pushing our goods back on the belt, as if it was going to stop moving them forward. I saved our produce and figured out that no, she had not yet checked out; she had not even put her own food on the belt, but no one else could use it, either. She was blocking the line until a clerk unloaded her cart for her, as if that was normal and she did not have to ask for help (if indeed she needed it). The staff, fortunately, figured out there was an issue; one helped her unload while another took us at the adjacent line. Crazy behavior, but of a kind we started watching out for. We had worried that people would harass us in West Virginia. They never did, and indeed, most folks were Southern friendly and often kind. There is an underlying meanness to folks, though, like they’re expecting you to cheat them. Maybe it comes from original Scotch-Irish settlers, maybe from generations of being poor and made even poorer by outside companies taking their lumber and coal. Political power is still in the hands of the Byrd, Randolph and Carter families who owned the state when it was an English colony, and held on to the land when the state went independent during the Civil War. Probably a combination of the above. My mother’s parents had been to America several times independently before they married, but when they came from Sicily as a couple their first stop was West Virginia, where my grandfather worked as a strike breaker for one of the coal companies. My grandmother gave him a year, saw how things worked, and delivered the ultimatum “You live in mine, you die in mine, I’m taking the children to live with my sister in Massachusetts”. Suspect it sounds more vicious in Sicilian. She moved, he followed, and thank God for our opportunities that they did.
Friday, September 6
Architecture does not exist in West Virginia. Residents have spoiled the gifts God and nature gave them with standard American houses, factories, and parking lots from the ugly end of the spectrum. The one exception is the West Virginia State Capitol, designed by Cass Gilbert (Woolworth Building in Manhattan, Supreme Court in D.C.) in 1922. This gold-filigree-domed jewel rises on the banks of the Kanawha River. Nice guards laughed at the idea of tourists and sent us to the 3rd Floor to start in the State Supreme Court Chamber, from where we worked our way down. The legislature was not in session, so most of the building was open to our wandering. Some amazing interiors, with especially nice alabaster and glass lighting fixtures. Very beaux arts, as one expects from Gilbert, and decently maintained after a century of use.
Sadly, the West Virginia State Museum was closed due to a burst pipe. The atrium was filled with great-looking quilts, we were disappointed to miss it. The Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences down the road is really a children’s museum, with some nature and a small art collection thrown in. Overpriced for what we got, and the only place we had to pay for parking on the trip. Lunch at Tudor’s Biscuit World, a WV fast food chain themed around massive, flaky, delicious biscuits. I got ham and bacon-egg sandwiches, Michael the big breakfast. Wonderful, completely unhealthy, without a vegetable to be seen. If they had served Diet Dr. Pepper I would have thought I was in Texas.
Down the Kanawha ten minutes is the J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works. This is wicked cool. West Virginia has natural salt springs, which Native Americans concentrated into salt by putting boiling rocks into the brine. Today they pump it onto rubber-lined trays in greenhouses, where it concentrates through evaporation into savory flaky crystals. We walked into the shop, said we had no idea what we were doing there, and the nice woman gave us a full tour.
Blenko Glass is famous in the Mid Atlantic craft scene for their hand-blown refrigerator pitchers. The Visitors Center, twenty miles northwest of Charleston, allows visits to the hot shop, and a museum of stained, blown, and cast glass they have made. Walking into the shop is like diving into a rainbow of colored light.
We were going to blow off the Capitol Market, but we had time, so why not? We are glad we went. In their former train station, there is both a farmers’ market outside, and specialty stores within. Only a couple of restaurants, it’s mainly places where you can buy food from knowledgeable purveyors to produce a great meal at home. The Holl chocolate shop is worth it on its own, selling confectionary made by a Swiss family in Parkersburg.
Not having the necessary kitchen, but now desperate for vegetables, we got dinner across the parking lot from the Holiday Inn at … Shoney’s. Don’t laugh, yes, a corny all-you-can-eat buffet, but with tons of raw veg. Our stomachs thanked us.
Saturday, September 7
We had been warned that the south and west of West Virginia had been spoiled by lumbering and strip mining, so not to expect much. At worst, though, it looks like the forest has recovered, at least within sight of U.S. Route 60. We took it southeast from Charleston to Hawks Nest State Park, another WV gem. 1930’s CCC lodge and activity buildings, and short hike to a fantastic view of the New River. There is a tram to take you down riverside, but it was out of order.
Hawk’s Nest is the top of the park preserves along the New River. Most of this is now in federal hands, as New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. Not sure why Hawk’s Nest wasn’t conveyed over, maybe the state liked it too much, or had too many local commitments, to give up control. The New River is, despite the name, one of the oldest rivers in the hemisphere; it’s carved its gorge through several iterations of the Appalachians rising through continental drift, eroding into hills, and rising again. Could have given the effect of the Grand Canyon, but the eroded soil is too rich and climate too wet to have allowed desert to show the layers as well. Unlike most of the western parks, it’s too disjointed to drive through, so more like the Smokies, you dip in and out of it from various highways and private landholdings. One of these is Canyon Rim Visitor Center, near Hawk’s Nest, with a killer view of the 1977 New River Gorge Bridge. This is the longest steel span in this hemisphere, so high that people base jump/parachute off of it into the Gorge. Lots of outfitters here offering whitewater rafting, ziplining, hiking, yawn … oh, did I doze off? My brothers would love this stuff, but we caught the view, hit the visitors center museum and shop, and were off.
U.S. Route 19 skirts the western bits of the Park to Beckley, where WV recently built Tamarack Marketplace. This is an arts and crafts center, with open studios where you can watch craftspeople make their work, galleries to show the best, and a circuit of shopping for you to buy pieces to take home. Some of the best t-shirts of the trip were here, also the widest selection of Fiesta-ware we’ve seen outside the original factory in Ohio. They also operate a decent restaurant, where we got lunch of fried trout and green tomatoes, hot dogs WV-style (red meat chili and coleslaw), and peaches and cream. We feared the latter would be canned pie filling and Reddi-Wip, but they had stewed fresh peaches with minimal sugar and topped them with real whipped cream. Delightful.
The southern Visitors Center to the Park is at Sandstone Falls, a building with a great inlaid stone floor mapping the river and gorge. A short drive took us to an overlook of the Falls themselves, longer than Blackwater Falls, and probably higher, but descending in more sets of rapids over similar sedimentary rock shelves. There is a longer drive that takes you south, across, and back north to a boardwalk along these Falls, but we did not have the two hours needed to make that drive, hike, and back before dark. Schedule that in if you go, it looks like it is worth the drive.
But, we had to turn homeward. We headed east on I-64, another Byrd gift, then into Virginia and up the Shenandoah Valley on I-81 to Staunton. We skipped the Woodrow Wilson birthplace, library, and memorial, but made it to Art Hive before they closed. This is a crafts recycling center, where people can learn crafts and trade in materials; cool. Dinner at The Shack, a fantastic restaurant in a former garage by chefs who bring culinary artistry to sustainable, locally grown produce. Fantastic shishito peppers topped with wild herbs, giardiniera with prosciutto, Caesar salad, mushroom pizza, gnocchi in garlic butter, and an affogato for dessert. You can reserve, but we didn’t and didn’t need to; they’ve also recently opened a second place, Maude and the Bear, in the same town that is supposed to be even more high end. Or at least, lets them cook in a less-cramped kitchen.
Sunday, September 8
Home by way of the Costco in Harrisonburg (on the campus of James Madison University, who knew?) Lunch at the brilliant Blue Winged Frog in Strasburg, where they make their own condiments (get something to dip into the ketchup). Finally, back onto I-66 and home via the Fairfax Whole Foods. A successful, safe, and fun trip around the state. Thanks, John and David, for getting our butts in gear!
Also worth checking out, mainly along the Ohio River where we did not venture:
Seneca Rocks, Monongahela N.F.
Blennerhassett Island State Historical Park, 137 Juliana Street, Parkersburg, May-Oct Tu-Su 10-5
Oil and Gas Museum, 119 Third Street, Parkersburg, M-F 11-5, Sa-Su noon-5, $7
Julia-Ann Square Historic District, Parkersburg
Heritage Farm Museum & Village, 3300 Harvey Road, Huntington, May-Sep-Oct FSa, July-Aug Th-Sa, $15
Ritter Park Rose Garden, 1570 McCoy Road, Huntington, daily 8am-dark
Huntington Museum of Arts, 2033 McCoy Road, Huntington, Tu-Sa 10-5, Su noon-5, $5
Jim’s Steak & Spaghetti House, 920 Fifth Avenue, Huntington, Tu-Sa 11-8:30
Hanging Rock Raptor Observatory, Waiteville, wooden viewing platform on a mountain top
The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, bunker tour $40, rooms $660 for two night minimum
Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, Hillsboro, carnivorous plants, daily 6AM-10PM
West Virginia State Wildlife Center, 163 Wildlife Road, French Creek, daily 9-5, $4
