A view of the Greenbrier River from Castle Rock, Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Photo by Doug Chadwick

Sometimes I like to look up words just to make sure someone agrees with me about their meanings.  The use of the word ‘pristine’ usually makes me writhe with exasperation, since too often I hear it applied to  Appalachian landscapes that may be beautiful but are anything but pristine.  Logging and mining companies of the early 20th century left very little untouched in the central Appalachian Mountains of the United States, so the word ‘pristine’ must be used advisedly in this region–unless you just like to see me writhe.

But, much to my delight, Doug Chadwick captured the textbook definition of ‘pristine’ from a Greenbrier County, West Virginia, cliff.  My favorite online dictionary, www.onelook.com, quotes the McMillion dictionary definition of ‘pristine’ as “completely free from dirt or contamination–’pristine mountain snow,’  or, ‘immaculately clean and unused.’

Onelook tells me that the word dates from the 1530s when  in Middle French it described something primitive, ancient, pertaining to the earliest period, and drew from Old Latin, meaning ‘before.’  Meanings of ‘unspoiled, untouched, pure’ date only to 1899, but, according to McMillion, ’are regarded in some circles as ignorant.’   They said it, not me.

2012 lies before us, as pristine as this Appalachian mountain snow.  Soon we’ll have to march out into it, tracking it up, leaving muddy footprints as we travel along.  But for now, it’s marvelous to catch a glimpse of a pure and timeless world, one we can pretend for a moment is pristine.

Find more of Doug Chadwick’s photography at www.theartstorewv.com

An ordinary autumn day in Appalachia

This is the nursery that reseeded the North American continent after the last Ice Age.  There are few other places on Earth as biologically diverse as our Appalachian hardwood forest.  Like all ecosystems, its intricate balance can be thrown off kilter by human action, but it can also be amazingly resiliant if left undisturbed.  Someone recently asked why some of us stay and fight so hard what often seems to be a losing battle against wholesale degradation of the land, air and water.  One of the answers is right before your eyes.

I don’t know who took this photo.  I found it on Jim Shaver’s Facebook photo page, but I think it may be another Troy Lilly shot, of ForestWander.com fame.

Long Point on Summersville Lake, by photographer Karen Underwood

This is the time of year when it seems that anyone with an eye in Appalachia is snap-happy.  Views like this are part of the reason so many of us are loathe to leave, and others who have left yearn to return.  Even if you live in a town, you don’t have to go far to get to woods and water.  The Gauley River, pent-up behind Summersville Dam, creates this lake in central West Virginia.  Just downstream, the river courses through a boulder-strewn riverbed made famous by the whitewater recreation industry as the Upper and Lower Gauley.  Every fall, the US Army Corps of Engineers draws the lake down to winter pool. This year, the Corps drained the lake lower than usual to inspect the dam, creating a longer and even more furious whitewater season.

Fayette County, WV, photographer Karen Underwood, who took this photograph, predicts that this weekend colors will peak here, just in time for Bridge Day.

A view from Cheat Mountain by photographer Troy Lilly

Cheat Mountain is not just one big hill in West Virginia, but a high ridge that snakes more than 50 miles from the southernmost tip at Thorny Flats in Pocahontas County, where Snowshoe Mountain Resort takes advantage of the range’s highest elevations, to a northern point near Parsons, in Tucker County.  Alpine and Nordic skiers know Cheat Mountain as Snowshoe, Elk River,  Timberline, Canaan Valley, and White Grass ski areas.

The region was once the  home of the largest red spruce forest south of Maine.  The area pictured here was still an unbroken wilderness until just before the Civil War.  It is still hardly populated, except for a few small towns and hamlets lining ancient Indian paths that are now two-lane roads.

West Virginia photographer Troy Lilly took this picture. Many thousands of people apparently know his work. I’ve just recently discovered him  via friends on Facebook.  I look forward to sharing more of his photos, as they come close to creating the feeling you get when you actually experience an Appalachian autumn evening.

Photographer Troy Lilly's view from Spruce Knob, West Virginia

According to his website, www.forestwander.com, photographer Troy Lilly hikes the mountains of West Virginia with his young son, Rusty, taking photos that he then offers free of charge to webmasters and publishers.  This one turned up on the Facebook page of writer Jim Shaver.  I thought he had taken the photo since there was no photo credit, so apologies to both Troy Lilly and Jim Shaver, and a big thank you to Jim for straightening me out.

Spruce Knob is in the extreme southwest corner of Pendleton County and is the highest point in West Virginia.  What you see is the Spruce Knob National Recreation Area in the Monongahela National Forest, a favorite destination for hikers, mountain bikers, and seekers of solitude.  There’s plenty of it here.

Saturday afternoon at the movies, in Sutton, West Virginia.

The 12th Annual West Virginia Filmmakers Festival wound up today
in Sutton, after screening 30 new films, eight of them for the first public
showing ever.

Actually, most of the work was done on digital video cameras, putting the art and craft of making movies within reach of anybody with the desire, equipment as humble as a flip camera, and a computer editing program. Some of the work was, indeed, shot on flip cameras, and some of it on very sophisticated equipment that, in the hands of experienced videographers, yielded luscious images.

All the movies I saw were ambitious, from 15-year-old Jacob Schedl’s first
person short of how it feels to be 15 (Memory Trail), to three full length narrative features taking on the subjects of the struggle to maintain integrity in a foreign culture (Ai Means Love, set in Martinsburg), the ambiguities a race element can add when a relationship goes very wrong (The Deposition, set in New Martinsville area)  and the horrors of being cooped up for a weekend with three very unpleasant hare-brained women, three dopey guys, and one ingénue. Enter the wild-eyed guy with an ax (Year of the Donkey, location unknown). Sorry, I couldn’t stick around for the denouement of that one. It was after midnight, and I had been sitting in the Elk Theater since 1 p.m. Friday with nothing but a box of popcorn between me and starvation. (Note to next year’s schedulers: Leave a block of time, maybe 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., for folks to grab some dinner.)

Hundreds, no—thousands—of people missed the world premiere of Romeo Must Hang, a documentary about Harry Powers, the mild-mannered, bespectacled merchant of Quiet Dell, West Virginia, who turned out to be a serial killer. Festival planners no doubt meant well when they slotted it on Thursday night, but a cold rain drove away all but the most determined festival goers, who weren’t yet many on that first
night. The movie explores the social milieu of the late 1920s when the man born in The Netherlands as Herman Drenth set up shop in the Harrison County farm community and began corresponding under several aliases with ladies who responded to ads in lonely hearts club magazines.

Documentarian Bob Wilkinson did a good job of recreating the story visually, but it was difficult to hear well in the reverberating old church sanctuary that is the Landmark Studio for the Arts. I had the same difficulty with The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s chilling classic based on West  Virginia novelist Davis Grubb’s book that followed Wilkinson’s piece. I would like to have seen both in the Elk Theater, just down the street, where the sound for movies was excellent. The two were great companion pieces, as Grubb named his terrifying villain Harry Powers, and used his memories of actual mob scenes related to trying the case in Clarksburg to develop his fiction.

Festival planners were shocked at the turnout on Friday evening for Elaine McMillion’s documentary, Lincoln County Massacre. The theater swarmed with burly, bearded Brothers of the Wheel and their consorts, who came from West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky to see the story retold on screen of the time in spring, 1980 when a surprise 4 a.m. visit from the state police turned what the Brothers say was a simple family campout into a melee. McMillion, a journalist who has the advantage of being from Logan County, knows that people aren’t always what they seem. She gets beneath the surface that so often trips up outsiders to produce a thoughtful exploration of culture, image and prejudice.

Saturday afternoon, childhood’s golden hours for watching movies on a cold, rainy day, proved golden once more. Give Up the Fuzz was a blast of funkadelic fun that had everybody rocking out for a few minutes with Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins, the McDowell County boy who moved to New Jersey and national fame with George Clinton, The Parliaments and Parliament Funkadelic. Filmmaker Steve Schmidt pulled a few miracles out of the air to put the piece together, directed a group of friends to re-enact Fuzzy’s early days in West Virginia and on the road with the band, and deftly worked in TV footage, movie clips, still photos and old posters to pop everyone squarely in the eye and heart.

We hadn’t quite recovered from The Fuzz when we were abruptly transported to places in Morocco where westerners are rarely welcomed. Robert Peak of Berkeley Springs used the universal language of music to work his way into the confidence of fellow musicians in a coastal walled city, a village of cave dwellers, and a town in the Atlas Mountains. It was somewhere close to astonishing in Musicians of Morocco
to see players cast the same spell with an assortment of stringed instruments that you sometimes encounter in a place like Clifftop, during the Appalachian String Band Festival. Peak frames their beautiful faces and enchanting music with expert skill.

Then we were off to northern California with writer/director Laura Holliday, who told us the story of a 16-year-old boy who yearns to be famous. Rockstars: The Pete Weaver Experience has funny, perfect pitch dialogue and a plot that is only implausible when a real rock star makes Pete’s dreams come true, but the piece is otherwise so well written, directed and acted I was willing to forgive.  I expect we’ll see much more from Holliday, who, we were told, was 17 at the time she created this piece. I didn’t catch her connection to West  Virginia, and it may only be that a festival juror saw the piece at another festival and liked it. I was happy to see it, too.

There was an entertaining piece of claymation, a funny little film ballet of a pair  of OCD hands shaking pills in a plastic bottle, a few heartfelt and informative docs, a couple of scary pieces, one goofy feature, and several pieces that I didn’t see, as my time was up in Sutton.

The newly crowned West Virginia Filmmaker of 2011 and winners of $2,000 in prizes are announced on the WVFilmmakers’ Festival site.

Laurie, who has been marketing her extraordinary handcrafted textile creations for many years under the label of Appalachian Piecework, expertly directed her in pulling it all together. “She helped me sandwich the layers together on her dining room table, and showed me how to baste it in preparation for tying and binding,” Colleen says. “Since I hadn’t done this before, Laurie taught me a lot. She also did about half of the basting. Working together, we did that part in about two hours. Then I did the tying and binding on my own.”

Your $5 check buys you a chance to own the quilt. $25 buys six chances, so feel free to lavishly increase your odds. Trusty Aurora board members will receive the checks, which must be in by Wednesday, October  12, and will draw the winner’s name on Thursday, October 13. The winner will be notified by phone or email no later than October 15.

Colleen assures all potential quilt owners that their email and mailing addresses will not be used for any purpose other than notification.  Who can you trust, if not a poet?

The Aurora Project is worthy of your attention and your financial support. Artists and philosophers have been drawn to the location since the late 18^th century, when white European settlers first put down roots there. A colony of writers, painters, and photographers settled there in the late 1920s, and when the Great Depression hit, several of them rode out the storm there in their hand-built houses. The vibes are great there, the  conversation is engaging, but best of all, Aurora offers as much solitude and support as an artist needs to get his or her work done.

To buy your raffle tickets, send your check, payable to The Aurora Project, with your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to

The Aurora Project, 25208
George Washington Highway, Aurora, WV 26705

Free shipping to the winner, of course. If you win it, send me a photo showing how you use it.

Knapps Creek in Pocahontas County. Much obliged for the photo, from Google Images. I'll be happy to attribute it if someone knows who took it.

I could scarcely contain my joy and amazement when I read on the front page of the Sunday, September 25 Charleston Gazette-Mail  that the Pocahontas County Commission has “raised major questions about the potential impact of Marcellus Shale drilling”  in that rural, remote county famous for some of the best downhill and cross-country skiing in the mid-Atlantic region, nationally ranked mountain bike terrain, clean air, and as the headwaters of no less than eight rivers, including the Gauley, world-famous for its whitewater.

Staff writer Paul Nyden quotes a letter from the county commissioners to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, stating their grave concern about the impacts to their pristine environmental and rural culture from the impending possibility of hydrofracture drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

“As a governing body, we do not want our local rights on this very local issue usurped or diminished by state governemnt,” Nyden quotes the letter as saying. “The  commission views the present proposed rules as grossly inadequate and failing to speak to our county’s unique needs.”  Martin V. Saffer, a lawyer and county commissioner, said the county’s environment benefits its people and all West Virginians, and that the county’s pure water, recreation, flourishing tourism industry, farms and timber will sustain its people for many, many future generations.

Pocahontas County residents Cyla Allison and Beth Little have helped to organize a grass-roots group called the Eight Rivers Council, according to Nyden’s article.  They and other members of the group are worried about the impact of fracking on their farm water.   “This is the way of life I chose,” says Allison.  “Many other people have lived here all their lives.

“The gas companies talk about all the jobs they are supposed to bring in. But when they set up wells, they bring in their own people from outside,” Allison says in the article.

No drilling permits have been issued in Pocahontas County, but Saffer says a “blizzard” of leases were obtained by gas companies in the fall of 2007 and winter of 2008, accounting for approximately 40,000 acres, a substantial percentage of privately held land in a county dominated by national and state parks.  Landowners will be faced with important decisions in 2012 and 2013.

It’s not often that elected officials in this most Appalachian of all American states take a stand to protect private citizens’ land, or express a mentality in favor of long-term sustainability over short-term greed.

Hooray for Saffer, David Fleming, and Jamie Walker, the county commissioners who took the time to travel to Wetzel County, West Virginia to see for themselves how the drilling business affects land and landowners.  Now let’s hope brains and guts not only prevail in Pocahontas County, but set an example for others.

The stark world of Camino, where nothing is easy. Photograph by Paula Ries

I saw a powerful new play on the evening of Friday, September 16, at the Dance Alloy Theatre in Pittsburgh. It was opening night, and tonight  is closing night.

The show has had a seven-performance run, and when it’s over, fewer than 700 people will have seen it.

The Hiawatha Project crew turned a dance rehearsal studio at 5530 Penn Avenue into a black box, built a set that folds up and fits into a closet, lined up about 75 chairs for the  audience, and, with a 12-member ensemble, proceeded to mount a show as good as any I’ve seen. Anywhere.

Contemporary theatre fans are accustomed to the risk one takes with a new play. The promotional materials may look great, the advertising blurb may be fetching, but the product always runs the risk of failing to satisfy. I was delighted that Camino exceeded my expectations in every way.

It’s a technically complex production, using video projection on a large screen to help advance the story of a young undocumented Honduran immigrant who gets lost in the U.S. for-profit prison system. Anyone who has ever received a computer-generated letter that seems to be in error from his insurance company and has then tried to navigate the labyrinth of recorded messages with endless instructions to press one or two or three or four has had a tiny foretaste of what it might be like to be friendless in an institutional system that makes more money every day that it detains a prisoner.

The glimpse Camino gives the audience of an illegal alien’s experience in this country is uncomfortably familiar as we watch a young wife fight a faceless bureaucracy to find her husband. She struggles with machines and machine-like people who have
no empathy for the situation she faces. But it wouldn’t be a good play if it were all grim. The drama is heightened—and highly comedic—when a young, fair-skinned, all-American couple gets tangled in the same web, and experiences the same dehumanizing treatment. There are beautiful poetic moments that only theatre can deliver, and hilarious if chilling moments when the irony in the situation is nearly unbearable. The story of a flock of migrating birds that has lost its way is a bit of theatre genius woven into the narrative.

The play is even more compelling when you learn that it’s based on the real experiences of two Pittsburgh residents who met playwright/director Anya Martin several years ago when they were high school students working with her on a play about Pittsburgh’s Latino youth. The real Milton Mejia, 23, is now in Honduras, unsure if he will ever be able rejoin his wife in theUnited States.

In this case, the promotional description of Camino can’t begin to convey the impact of this piece. You have to experience it. And unfortunately, unless you can get to Pittsburgh by tonight, and talk yourself into what is no doubt a sold-out show, you’ll have to wait until it comes to a theatre near you.

Hey, Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Why don’t you give Anya Martin a call?