Night Two... Paradise Island

I babied Dumbo down the Mingo Highway and then along the Guyandotte River for about 5 miles hoping that the temp would stay even and the clamp on the radiator would hold. I’m trying ‘Dumbo’ on for size cuz the van’s got extenders on the side view mirrors that make it look like big ol’ ears stickin’ out and cuz I keep trying to make this elephant fly. A sign jumps up on the riverside that says Paradise Island and we slow down to a crawl and turn in crunching over a gravel bridge to an entrance loop loaded with pickups and workmen in coveralls with reflective strips. I’ll come to realize as I see more and more of these that that’s the uniform of a miner. A couple of 'em throw me a greeting hand from their shaded seats underneath a giant tent loaded down with donation boxes. Piles of clothes and shoes and whatever you might not need anymore or might desperately need now depending. Paradise Island isn’t just a campground, it’s a ministry.

I hear a jackass braying in the distance as I park and climb out into the half-built, half-finished log cabin looking project tucked under the trees by the riverbed. It’s dim inside and overloaded with couches and a keyboard and an impromptu jam spot up near the front door. The ceiling appears held up by polished cherry columns which I’m admiring when Priscella appears from her kitchen around the corner telling me, “Them’s bedposts! I had to make a couple headers to prop ‘em in there. See my tv? That’s the bedframe.” Nothing goes to waste around here. And everything is labeled with the words and names of the bible. I hear the jackass bray again and she tells me, “That’s Moses.” Elijah the cat hops up on her desk and computer while she fixes a plate for a silent guest. The first thing that jumps off Priscella is the gentleness of her joy, I’m on my best behavior, admiring and absorbing her life’s work, careful of the fragility of what she’s built around her and inside of her. She’s a strong woman in a small package, curly black hair, round beaming face, I wouldn’t of guessed 60 years, but she told me. She feeds thousands of people a month under her tent, turned the campground non-profit a few years back to gather support from the government, fills out the rest of the bill from her own pocket. I read the words of God on the tile as I gladly hand over cash for the night. She finds a five dollar bill for my change and marks it with a red cross and a dash of anointing oil, I have to ask twice for her to repeat what it is, “anointing oil” in a holler drawl is too advanced a challenge for city ears. “I been marking every dollar that goes out of here like this and I ain’t never run out of dollars since,” she tells me. I feel compelled to say, “I feel compelled to say I’m a Jew.” Priscella smiles, “So was Jesus,” and she shoves a styrofoam plate of chicken chow mein in my hands. 

It tastes terrible. 

I don’t tell her that when she asks, I scarf down what I can of the watery possibly freeze dried greyness on the small area of the porch that’s not covered with hanging plastic sheeting or being used as storage for folding chairs. After getting permission, I let Sadie out the van and she joins us sitting at our feet while I struggle to eat. Sadie stares off with Elijah the cat and the skies open up and the rain pours down on us. We’ll be together until the good lord decides it’s clear, I suppose. Priscella tells me this place come to her in a vision when she was a girl. God told her to clean up this land. It was stacked in garbage six feet high in some spots and it took years to find the ground. Heaven helped her. The neighbors in the holler helped her once they saw what she was about. The ravine between us and the road and the river on the other side makes it an island, but she was determined to make it paradise. She took care of her mother here for 23 years until Alzheimers finally claimed her home to be with Jesus. They almost met again a few years back when Priscella got the hankering for travel of her own and tried white water rafting. She got thrown into the rapids and a class 5 went straight into her lungs and she died she says. She was calm and confident in the Lord and went right along and didn’t feel no time pass at all until she opened her eyes again in a hospital bed. She doesn’t even know how to swim. I’m between a laugh and a cry and her eyes are misting either from the rain or from meeting her momma again and I look over at the river she watches all day from either the office building or the trailer stacked on rocks next door and I ask her if she wants to learn. To swim? Naw. She’s got her van for travels and that’s enough.

“You got Facebook?”

That’s punctuation. If a conversation goes right, if someone wants to know you again or find you again or maybe wants to show off what they’ve built, that’s the punctuation. You got Facebook? It’ll take me a couple of days to learn to just say yeah. Look me up. 

The rain lightens and Priscella grabs an umbrella and guides me to a spot right next to the river at the mouth of the Jesus Walk she’s built to His Life, a ways off from the roundabout filled with trailers and haulers and fifth wheels and pickups and ATVs. This is off-road country, the Hatfield-McCoy Trail, the daytrippers are racing the rain back to their campers after a day of mudding. I get a taste when I scramble underneath the van to slide the power cord across to the hookup so that I can park with my rear to the water. I plug in and settle in and lay back tired on the foldout and listen to the rain gently tapping the roof. There’s a passage in my father’s book that talks about the aftermath of the flood that wiped out Buffalo Creek on a Saturday in February, 1972 after four days of nonstop rain busted the makeshift dam at the top of the valley. A wave of 130 million gallons of black sludge water and coal refuse shot through that passage like a bullet. Churches and cars and tin trailer houses ripped up and destroyed town after town, life after life until the wave spread out enough to slow down around the town of Man that I just drove past five miles back. There’s a passage in the book that talks about how for years afterwards the sound of rain on the tin roofs would trigger flashbacks and fear and paralysis and depression. They didn’t quite know the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in 1972 the closest term they had was shell shock, but that was just for the boys coming home. That’s what that case was about. That’s what my father spent four years trying to put together. Lives lost, communities destroyed, minds shattered, and he tried to put them back together. He’s told me the stories since I was old enough to understand them. I’ve read his book countless times. Tomorrow, though, tomorrow I’m going to the real place. The rain on the roof puts me to sleep.