Day Three... Buffalo Creek

Perhaps it’s the rain’s lullaby that smooths out the second night’s sleep in the van or maybe Sadie and I are just finding our spots. There’s a bar in the foldout we both seek to avoid. She’s starting to get the rhythm of the fold-down triggering bedtime and the fold-up starting our day. I feed her pills wrapped in salami, one for her arthritis, one for her bladder control, and I mix a mushroom based powder for her immune system in with a can of dog food. She’s wise to the smuggling, occasionally rebels, I have to keep a step ahead. But other than the giant lump on her face you wouldn’t know she’s anything less than healthy or happy. Back in September of last year I took her to have the lump examined and possibly removed and a specialist shot x-rays of her chest even though I didn’t ask her to and she told me that not only wouldn’t she do the surgery, but that Sadie would be dead from lung cancer in 6 months. My regular vet looked at the films and concurred. We spent a day and a half curled up on the couch in silence, me and my dog, then I called up both of those doctors and told them to go fuck themselves. Not long after that we hit the road. Maybe when we get back to LA, I’ll take Sadie to see those doctors and we can celebrate the year anniversary of their death sentence. 

I finish my coffee and the skies finish their raining and I unplug and pack up the van for driving and take a look around the camp, but there’s no signs of life. I don’t see the girls riding the ATV to the laundry shed or Pricella’s second husband Mike at his spot on the big house porch. No one seems to be rockin’ Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego the three pint-sized trailers for rentin’ overnight. It seems without ceremony that we head back to Man, to walk in my father’s footsteps. 

I just go a couple stops on the four lane before I turn off and up Main Street in the Town of Man. A year ago I wouldn’t immediately know what a Main Street looks like in a small town in America. I wouldn’t be insulted if you told me I was in a bubble, although I might not have believed it. It’s not boarded up, it’s not the bleak misery of a Springsteen b side, there’s more of an air of surrender to it. To the unoccupied storefront and empty window displays and signage signifying something gone. Every other place is a place, a hunting supply store, a florist without real flowers, a Gino’s, every town has a Gino’s or some version of Italian food which passes for different than normal food. I park the camper at a headless meter and snap the leash on Sadie and we go for a walk. The most bustling building is a health clinic and as we approach a weathered man tilts his cracked face at us, his arm in a sling, nods at the dog. We stop to say hello and ask how he’s doing and he tells us in a voice hard to decipher, “I’m broken down,” but there’s still a glint of gleeful madness in his eye. I introduce myself and my dog, first names only, and he gives me his full name. Everyone give you their full name. I’m making myself stranger without realizing it. “Herb Staten,” he offers and my jaw drops. “You any relation to Roland Staten?” “That’s my brother,” he tells me. His brother, I tell him, played a central part in my father’s life. His brother lost his family in the flood, his little boy was ripped from his arms and carried off, his pregnant wife couldn’t hold on to their house after it was dislodged from the ground. Herb’s brother Roland was the reason my father could never let go of the case. I don’t know if I want to ask Herb’s life story or just stand here with him a spell, but there’s a woman, maybe his daughter, calling out impatiently to him to get in the car. “I’m in the book,” Herb tells me. “Which book? My father’s book?” I think he’s reading my mind. “The phone book,” Herb says, and gets in the car. 

These people are real. 

These aren’t characters from a book, they’re not even names from my father’s stories. They live. They live here. I want to see it. 

Sadie and I cross the street and head up the other side, peering in windows and admiring the little houses with red, white and blue bunting and flags and pinwheels in their tiny front yards. There’s a man stripping paint off brick and sealing cracks in the front step. Across the street, I spy a couple guys up on the roof ripping up old pieces and nailing down new ones. It’s hot. 90s easy. And humid. I’m sweating walking. These people work. I tie Sadie up out front the Dairy Bar and pop in for a soft serve chocolate dip, for breakfast, and get to talking with the young man and woman behind the counter. It doesn’t take more than a couple sentences for them to tell me about the flood. He ain’t got kin connected, but she do. On her husband’s side, he lost people. There’s a little memorial up the way a bit maybe a half mile, but, and this is clear to both of them, “It ain’t what it should be.” The Dairy Bar’s filling up with customers, a biker in a Harley shirt and jeans with his girl, a big black woman with glasses, an off-roader heading up to the trails. I don’t want to take no more of their time. 

We get back on Dumbo so I don’t have to death march my girl up and down this hot trail and we drive the next half mile until we spot a Historical Marker by a small park alongside the creek. I grab my sister’s good camera and jump out to take photos. It’s a creek, I mean, it’s really a creek, no more than 10-15 feet across at the water level, a few feet deep maybe. It’s hard to picture enough water coming through there to crest its banks, to rise up over the bridge crossing from the two lane into the neighborhood, high enough to reach the walls of the valley on either side. It’s hard to imagine, I know, because I’ve read the description dozens of times and even looking at it in person, I find it hard to imagine. Across the way, a shirtless white man my age pauses on his riding mower, gives me a wave. You hold eyes more than a beat round here, you get a wave, so you give one. I do, with my camera, and he nods, and I shoot a couple shots of him then I leave Dumbo running with the A/C on for Sadie and I cross the bridge to make a friend.

Alex Kelly grew up in the next valley over, played semi-pro ball in Florida and Georgia and Carolina until he blew out his rotator cuff and moved back here to this double wide trailer on a concrete mooring next to the football field. First thing he done was build a deck up so they could watch games from the house. There’s an empty mooring right next door where he keeps his pontoon boat. Possible once upon a time it had a company home on it that got swept up or demolished in the flood. Alex works as a driller up for Greenbrier who runs the mines now. Like the historical marker tells you, it was Buffalo Mining Company back in the day that my Dad got to pay up 13.5 million to the families to help rebuild this valley. That was 1976 dollars. Alex has got six kids, his oldest is gonna play tight end for Eastern in the fall. His girls all love gymnastics, every one’s a jock. He asks me what’s brought me round here and I tell him and he gives me a good handshake and directs me how to find the memorial and the mural and that it’s about 12 or 13 miles up the road to where the dam was. “Stop on by, bud,” he tells me, “If you need anything.” Everyone calls me bud. They call Sadie pretty. 

We roll out and it doesn’t take long to find the Mural and I pull over again. It’s beautiful, faded and remarkable. Houses and crosses washed and tossed in a tempest in the corner, a mother in the foreground clinging to her child. I don’t know their names. It’s painted on the side of a brick building standing tall next to a crumbling junkyard. Just up a ways is the Memorial, a fenced in piece of land off the road maybe 10 feet long and 8 feet wide. It’s got flowers setting in a vase, but they’re not real, and a bench in front of what looks to be a wooden pulpit. The primary feature is a grey marble slab etched with the names of everyone lost. I stare and read. I recognize a few, famed from my father’s pages, a few others famed from their surnames Hatfield and McCoy. I spot two who share my first name, Jesse, which has no origin in my family lineage as far as I know. For the first time in my life I wonder how it came to be mine, considering my father was on this case from 1972 until after I was born in late 1975. 

We drive on. 

Up the valley where the town names are etched in my memory, Anondale, Londale, Lorado, and Saunders, they took the brunt of the devastation. An old man and his son, both walking with canes will pause to tell me that it “rearranged everything.” Anything you see is new since then. Every church, and there’s every variety, has been rebuilt. Every house whether tin with a wooden apron or the big brick what you might call mansions in another setting, it’s been put back and put up. Every house with a star on it and… fortunately it hits me before I embarrass myself with ignorance by asking, it hits me. Some of the houses have one star, some up to five, some are blue or white or black or plain, it hits me what they may signify when I walk past the one house with a Gold Star. These people serve. You gotta put your feet on the ground if you wanna get your mind right sometimes. 

The towns are settled on the creekside of the road, while on the opposite there’s a few modern service stations to cater to the coal trucks and off-roaders filling up the traffic. There’s closed up restaurants and closed up tackle stores and closed up just about anything that once was a local. Seems you need a national chain hanging on a plastic light up sign to stay in business. The Exxon’s got a Subway attached. My thoughts drift to the inhumanity of mass production and then, of course, to politics and unchecked margin-driven consumer capitalism. I turn that volume down lower and follow the coal parade up to the tipple. There are giant conveyor belts and metal tubes towering over the landscape, connecting the holes in the mountains to the dedicated rail cars and trailers that haul black dust all over the country. This is what the land has offered. This is how these families were raised, how these buildings were built, how these towns were formed and it’s not in the past, it’s happening right now, every day, and they’re hiring. Truck drivers, drillers, machine operators and even those crazy or brave enough to actually go underground past the first cut. 

Just past the guard gate entrance to the mines is a town with no name, as if it was built on a parking lot, on a leftover piece of clearing no one reckoned with. It’s maybe a dozen houses on either side of a dead end street. Car parts and machine tools strewn on overgrown lawns. Kids splashing in an aboveground pool. Probably the first sets of suspicious eyes, knowing I don’t have any business here and knowing before I do that there’s no passing through. I turn around and head back down. My head is spinning at the prospect of living here. You don’t have to live here, I don’t think you have to, but you can. 

I roll all the way back down the hill and stop one more time on Main Street in Man and as I’m getting out there’s a U-haul in front of me with a few people unloading boxes. A big jovial man with fading hair and glasses comes rolling up and asks me if I’m going in this shop where I’ve parked. I look up. It’s Ken’s Flowers. And this is Ken. And that U-haul is filled with cardboard boxes of plastic flower arrangements and Ken and his partner Diane, who does the town’s event arranging, are picking out prized pieces. Sadie and I walk into Ken’s shop thinking maybe there’s an actual flower arrangement in here that might make the van smell nice and Ken tells me, “I got a plastic wreath you could strap to the hood.” Ken’s a doll. He doesn’t really try to sell me anything more than conversation. He was a nurse in Charleston for 19 years until his Mama thought she was dying sick and he come home about a year and a half ago. Turns out it wasn’t lung cancer, just a growth that probably ain’t killing her, but he’s still got too much guilt to leave. He’s 50 and the flower shop’s done alright for him, if you notice every gravestone on the hillside is pretty much permanently decorated, but he’s got that feeling, you know that feeling? “That you’re not in the right place?” I laugh and cock my head at Dumbo idling curbside and my newfound mobile homelessness bound for Texas and eventually California. “California,” he purrs, “Oh, I love it there. That Napa Valley? Maybe that’s where I oughta git.” He stoops down to pet Sadie and smiles happily for a picture. Not everybody likes their picture took. Ken does. A 50 year old gay man selling plastic flowers in a coal valley in West Virginia. And I worry I’ve got challenges finding true love. He shakes my hand gentle and Sadie and I walk on down to the hunting store for a look around. 

There’s four men working the hunting supply store, sitting really, jawing, two young white dudes, an older white man, and a young black guy with the air of the manager. The packs of bowstrings and accessories on the walls are yellowed with time, but the guns are polished and new. “Can I help you with something?” the younger mustache asks, and I tell him, “I need a hat.” What kind of hat? I don’t know. They’ve only got one kind, though, and it’s fluorescent orange and that doesn’t ring my bell so we browse and check the pawns and a smile comes across my face in the video game section. There’s a Playstation copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I worked on that. It’s a message in a bottle from me that’s reached their shores long before I did. I don’t know why, maybe it’s cause my head is spinning, maybe it’s cause I’ve spoken to a couple dozen strangers and heard their stories and shared mine over the course of a single afternoon, but I find myself staring at a fishing pole. If the old man hadn’t asked after Sadie, I probably woulda pulled the trigger on the spot. “That’s a nice color she got.” “Fawn, they call it,” I tell him. “Don’t see that much."

My mouth can’t make words anymore. I don’t know whether to move in or move on, but I start to feel like I’ve got unfinished business at Paradise Island so I head back there. On the way, I stop at Man High, Home of the Hillbillies, and pop in to buy a t-shirt to replace the one my brother had when we was kids. I meet another big black lady with glasses, Patricia, at the school counter. The school itself is being used as a staging ground and housing center for an Appalachian construction program, hardhats and contractors building and re-building all through Logan County. Patricia remembers at me when she was a little girl and the high school was used as a base of operations after the flood. That Buffalo Elementary that I may have passed up the valley, that’s been rebuilt, my father will later inform me that his lawfirm contributed their part of the settlement to the health clinic and the fire station. I take a last lap around Man High where the houses are fancy and the yards are neat and I follow the ATV trails back to Mingo and find the Guyandotte. Before I know it, I’m pulling in to Paradise Island. It’s after 5 and work shifts are over and the place is populated again and Mike waves me in and I pop inside to find Priscella. “I wondered what happened to you!” she chimes, and I tell her I went exploring, but I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye. “Aren’t you a dear,” she wraps me up in a big hug and asks where I’m heading next and I tell her I’m gonna make a run for Kentucky. She says I should head up the road to Matewan and I’ll be forever grateful for her direction. She hands me a tomato out of a pail, some guests from Ohio got the whole bucket for 4 dollars. Everyone does anything for her from driving up an excavator to dig out a new bridge to leaving boxes of diapers for the seniors on her doorstep. Go see her. And leave something in the donation box. It’s good for your soul.