Appalachia

I’m missing something today. A place I guess.  An idea of home.  A region familiar to me.  A familiarity that only comes from knowing something so well you have a hard time describing it.  Something or some place from childhood.  West Virginia’s unofficial anthem, Country Roads, evokes all the images and nastalgia of a greater region that is close to my heart.  A beautiful and unique place I like to think of as my home.       

Appalachia, which is comprised of parts of the states of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, (small and isolated bits of Maryland and Pennsylvania), Kentucky and Tennessee have much more in common than people living there realize.  I’m a Virginia/Maryland boy myself who grew up on the doorstep of what is truly Appalachia. The state of West Virginia that Denver sings of and the state of Virginia where I grew up conjure quite different ideas and stereotypes to those who were brought up in the Eastern States.  However, as I spend more and more time living away from that greater region I see the similarities more than the differences.  Similarities like long, twisting mountain roads, accents, bluegrass music, little mountain churches, long rolling rivers, small houses with big porches, little snow covered mountain towns, a lack of skyscrapers and busy streets, white fences that seem to stretch on forever separating fluorescent green pastures and strong horses, a people that know what hard living really is, little hollers, snow-tipped mountains, foggy valleys, tradition, waterfalls, small colleges, over-alls, co-ops, poor people with big hearts, the untarnished view of a few billion stars, dirt roads that aren’t on any map, generations of families, stone walls, long driveways, pride, a slowness to a thing called time, forest trails, moonshine, festivals, a history, tobacco fields, lakes, a lack of pretension and the common idiosyncrasies that make the people living over a huge swath of mountains and valleys one community.  

I moved further and further away from Appalachia after high school and ultimately outside of the U.S. altogether.  And now I find myself  longing for the Shenandoah Valley and the Appalachian Mountain range that were such a ubiquitous part of my upbringing. 

This idea of ”country” that Eastern Americans imagine is very specific.  It has its own peculiar identity.  It doesn’t exist anywhere else.  The mountain cultures and “country” areas here in Canada have their own uniqueness, much different than that of the eastern United States.  Appalachia is a special part of  the U.S worth preserving.  The geography and environment there have made this particular culture special.  And this culture will probably have a hard time surviving a nation’s countinuous homogenisation. Living here in Atlantic Canada’s maritime culture listening to John Denver’s Appalachian anthem I easily drift off to special time in my life and memories of a precious place. 

Sadly, I’ve spent most of my adolescence and adulthood speeding away from that place I probably ought to be….a little dirt road on the doorstep of a distinct culture.