West Virginia, #48

Posted on April 17, 2023 by admin

One thing you’ll find in Moundsville, West Virginia, which is in the panhandle not far south of Wheeling, is a mound of impressive height – 62 feet. The Grave Creek Mound.

Look carefully enough and you’ll note that a footpath leads to the top. We were too tired for it at that moment, but it was a moot point anyway, since the Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex had just closed for the day when we arrived, though the gift shop was still open.

“The Grave Creek Mound is one of the largest Adena mounds and an impressive sight for any visitor to Moundsville,” says the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “A massive undertaking, the total effort required the movement of more than 57,000 tons of sand and earth. Construction of the mound took place from about 250-150 B.C. and included multiple burials at different levels within the structure.

“Although Grave Creek Mound is today an isolated feature on the landscape, the flat area now occupied by the city of Moundsville was once covered with small and large mounds and associated earthworks. Unfortunately, these structures and many others all over the region have been destroyed by treasure-hunters and farmers who plowed over these in the past.”

The complex takes up a large town block in Moundsville, but even larger is the West Virginia Penitentiary, which is across the street from the mound. I’d asked the clerk at the Grave Creek Mound gift shop about its hulking presence, and she told me it had once been a state prison, but was long closed as a prison.

I was reminded instantly of Joliet, and it seems that the state of West Virginia took direct inspiration for its new pen from the Illinois prison.

“No architectural drawings of the West Virginia Penitentiary have been discovered, so an understanding of the plan developed by the Board of Directors must be obtained through their 1867 report, which details the procurement of a title for ten acres of land and a proposal to enclose about seven acres,” says the prison web site.

No cons have occupied this particular stony lonesome since the 1990s and now the old pen supports a cottage industry of tours, many stressing the macabre or supernatural stories clinging to a place that saw the execution of dozens of men. Seems like a good use for the imposing old structure, whatever you think of ghost stories. We’d have been in the market for a daylight (non-spook) tour ourselves, but again the timing was wrong.

We passed through Moundsville twice.

Once on a cold, windy day, then a few days later when it was warmer, when we were able to eat at a picnic shelter in a small park along the Ohio River. The park has a view of the elegant Moundsville Bridge, which crosses to Mead Township, Ohio.

Officially, it’s the Arch A. Moore Bridge, named for the longest-serving governor of West Virginia, who also did a spell in stir for corruption. Moore was in office, still unindicted, when the bridge opened in 1986. He was a Moundsville native son, so perhaps a little corruption isn’t enough to scrub his name from the bridge – if in fact anyone calls it that anyway.

In the southern reaches of New River Gorge NP, near Grandview, a trail wanders through outcroppings of what I take for sedimentary rock.

Reminded me a bit of Cuyahoga NP, though that park’s rock formations seemed larger and more extensive.

Near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, and just off U.S. 60 – which follows the Midland Trail at this point, another lost-to-time road – is a wide place in the road that marks access to Cathedral Falls.

Easy access, since it’s less than a minute from the parking lot to a close view of the falls.

Nearby is a homemade memorial to one Hugh Rexroad, who is clearly this person. Did Hugh die here, say of natural causes while admiring the fall, or was he merely very fond of the place? Whatever your story, RIP, Hugh.

The channel takes the waterfall flow to the Kanawha River, which U.S. 60 follows into Charleston.

Kanawha was a proposed name for a breakaway entity from Virginia, but in the event the more pedestrian West Virginia was picked.

A number of memorial statues rise near the West Virginia capitol, but rain kept me from lingering too long. I did see the coal miner, dating from 2002.

Sorry about your mistreatment, especially before you were able to organize. Here’s your statue.

The industry has contracted in recent decades, of course, not just in West Virginia, but the entire country. Still, in 2020, West Virginia provided about 5% of the nation’s total energy, more than one-third of it from coal production, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reports.

“However, because of increases in natural gas and natural gas liquids production from the Marcellus and Utica shales in northern West Virginia, natural gas surpassed coal for the first time in 2019 and became the largest contributor to the state’s energy economy.”

After spending a couple of nights in West Virginia, it occurred to me that I now haven’t spent the night in only two states: Delaware and Rhode Island.

Ohio Timbits

Posted on April 13, 2023 by admin

Finally, a string of warm days here in northern Illinois, as in 80s in the afternoons. The grass is green and some bushes are coloring up, too. Trees are a little more hesitant, but it won’t be long. Of course, come Saturday, weather from up north will end our balmy run.

One thing I was glad to learn during our recent trip east was that Tim Hortons territory in the U.S. extends as far as Columbus, Ohio.

What is it about TH doughnuts that is so good, even in small form? The excellence of the dough, presumably, but that doesn’t really answer the question.

Another ahead-of-the-road-foodies discovery: Tudor’s Biscuit World. From a recipe dating back to the kitchens of Hampton Court Palace in the time of Henry VIII?

Of course not. The 20th-century founders were named Tudor. Though there’s a scattering of Biscuit Worlds in Ohio and Kentucky, and an outlier in Panama City, Florida, it’s largely a West Virginia operation. As we drove south through that state, we kept seeing them along the way. That inspired me, the next morning, to visit one and buy breakfast sandwiches for us.

Its sandwiches are much like McDonald’s breakfasts, the best thing that fast-food giant makes, except more variety, and Biscuit World’s various sandwiches were larger. Pretty much the same high quality. I can see why they can compete with McD’s.

The Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation rises over the small-town streets of Carey, Ohio (pop. 3,500). I spotted it as a point of interest on one of my road atlases.

I’ve read that a lot of people show up for Assumption Day, but in mid-March, only a few other people were in the basilica.

The next day, we saw St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Zanesville, Ohio, a handsome church that needs a grander setting, one not hemmed in by busy streets.

Zanesville is known for its Y Bridge, and I have to say driving over the thing was less interesting than driving down any of the other streets in Zanesville. As Wiki states: “It has received criticism for a tunnel-like effect due to its solid railings, providing hardly any view of the scenery.”

I agree. I know public budgets are tight in a place like Zanesville, median household income, $26,642. Still, there has to be a way that’s not too expensive to make experiencing the bridge genuinely distinctive, like the Tridge in Midland, Mich., except with vehicular traffic.

(Chin up, Zanesville. The Midwest is going to rise again, with its cooler temps and access to water. You or I might not live to see it, but still.)

West of Zanesville – where you can find the National Road & Zane Grey Museum – you can also stand in front of this pleasant house in New Concord, Ohio.

Behind the white picket fence, the John and Annie Glenn Museum.

Then.

Now.

Leaving that early sign outside is a nice touch. Not every artifact needs to be behind glass.

Both the Glenns and Zane Grey were closed for the season. I didn’t need a museum to tell me that we were partly following the route of the National Road as we drove on U.S. 40 in Ohio and more so in Pennsylvania.

Route 66 has had better publicity, but the National Road – the original stab at an interstate – now that’s a traveler’s road, a route to seek glimpses of a past remote and tough. Well, from the vantage of today’s macadamized roads.

A mile marker on U.S. 40 in Ohio, but only 25 miles from Wheeling, West Virginia – as the marker tells us, and the fact that Zanesville is 50 miles west.

At the courthouse square in Newark, Ohio, bronze Mark Twain can be found looking Mark-Twainy except – no cigar. Come now, he even smoked cigars when he made an appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or maybe this is the reformed Mark Twain, who promised to give up cigars after the 1910 arrival of Haley’s Comet. No, that’s not it. I made that last part up. But he did in fact give up cigars that year.

Outside the Ohio Statehouse, a couple danced and was photographed. For reasons, presumably. A spot of romantic whimsy, I hope.

The capitol grounds are well populated with bronzes, including from just after the Great War.

And a little earlier, historically speaking. Quite a bit, actually: Columbus, as in the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, in a 1892 work.

See him, and reflect on the vicissitudes of history.

Columbus (the city) has a good skyline, at least from the capitol grounds.

We had lunch that day in the Columbus neighborhood of German Village, or maybe more formally, German Village Historic District, which has the hallmarks of fairly far along gentrifying, an old ethnic neighborhood revived some years after its ethnicity melted into the population.

We got takeout from a small-chain chicken wing joint, which was packed with a youngish crowd at the brunch hour on Sunday, and ate with gusto in our car, out of the wind and collecting enough sunlight to warm the inside of the car.

Across the street was a sizable park.

After eating, I took a look around. Schiller is honored in German Village. Check.

Then there’s Umbrella Girl, a fixture in a fountain still dry for the season.

Instructions.

I’d say bilingual, but I don’t see that dogs have a lingua, as expressive as they can be.

The West Virginia State Capitol

Posted on April 11, 2023 by admin

But for an unfortunate fire a little more than 100 years ago, you might see this when you visit the West Virginia Capitol in Charleston.

In history as it was, there was a fire, and West Virginia needed a new capitol, which was completed by 1932. Nice job. Design by none other than Cass Gilbert, whose body of work is astonishing.

“Like the predecessor capitols Gilbert designed for Minnesota and Arkansas, the West Virginia capitol is dominated by its dome, which rises 292 feet above a colonnaded drum, and is embossed with gold leaf,” says the Cass Gilbert Society.

“The design was inspired by that of the Pantheon in Paris. The main entrances to the building are through monumental pedimented Corinthian porticos, set below the dome. Shallow domes at the ends of the main capitol block mark the location of the legislative chambers. The interior walls are faced with Vermont marble. The floor of the rotunda below the main dome is of Italian and Vermont marble.”

We stopped in Charleston on our way out of West Virginia on March 24. The warm, sunny weather of the day before had disappeared into rain and cold wind, as happens in the spring. So a walkabout outside the capitol wouldn’t have been pleasant. As I pointed my camera at the capitol, I had to brush water off.

Inside was another matter, nice and dry. A spare but impressive design, owing more than a little to Greek temples.

Gold leaf outside the dome. Inside, coal black. At least, that’s what I see. Incidentally, the neoclassical West Virginia capitol dome is the last of its kind among U.S. capitols — or, put another way, the most recent one.

The West Virginia House of Delegates.

The seats were roped off, but you can get close enough to some of the backbenches – literally at the back – to take in some interesting detail. Nothing surprising is a U.S. flag or a cross or even a Don’t Tread On Me flag or what I take to be some coal – but what’s that earth-colored disk?

Does that particular delegate sympathize with flat-earthers? Seems unlikely. Also, if you look carefully at the wider shot of the House of Delegates, those blue disks seem to be on some, but not all of the desks. A sizable minority of the delegates are flat-earthers? No, I won’t assume it. People believe the damnedest things, or say they do, but even now that would be too far around the bend. Still, I wonder what that disk is supposed to mean, in its pride of place on the desks.

There isn’t a lot of statuary, but West Virginia could hardly forget Sen. Byrd, here in a Solonian pose.

Or that western Virginian, Stonewall Jackson. He didn’t quite live long enough to hear about the formation of West Virginia, though the estrangement of western Virginia was well underway in his lifetime. He probably had other things on his mind, anyway.

He doesn’t have a statue, but JFK rates a memorial.

A president, paying attention to West Virginia! Of course, it probably helped that the state was solidly Democratic in those days, but with a political history of more swinging than most of the states to its south.

Like many capitols, portraits of old ‘n’ moldy governors hang on the walls (and sometimes not so old). Here’s the first governor of West Virginia, Arthur I. Boreman, with that distinctly mid-century vibe (mid-19th century, that is), and Lincolnesque beard. Probably no accident.

Boreman pushed for the establishment of West Virginia, which by itself ought to be better known. After all, it was the only successful secession of the Civil War era.

Another gov: number three, William E. Stevenson, another member of the founding generation of West Virginians, which aligned with his pro-Union and anti-slavery convictions.

That’s a striking portrait, unusual among governors long gone but still hanging on the wall. Wonder if the artist took liberties, or whether the governor actually had movie-star good looks well before anyone saw any movies.

Fayetteville, West Virginia

Posted on April 10, 2023 by admin

Unlike the near-ghost town of Thurmond, the town of Fayetteville, West Virginia (pop. 2,700 or so), is alive and looks reasonably well. One thing to know is that you can get some delightful rice bowls (rice, protein, vegetables) for lunch there, at a place generically called The Take Out.

We didn’t take it far. The day was Thursday, March 23, clear and in the low 70s F., and so ideal for taking our food to the picnic table outside The Take Out.

The fellow who prepared the bowls, with an exaltation of light curly hair on his head and looking unbelievably young, came out to chat for a few moments and try to make friends with the dog. The restaurant is a post-pandemic venture, opening only a year ago, he told us. Rice bowls of that kind are fairly recent to North America (I think), which shows the speed at which food innovation spreads in our time. Next thing you know, Korean corndogs will make an appearance in small-town West Virginia.

Signs on the highway promised an historic downtown in Fayetteville, and I’d say the place delivered. At the very least, there’s a handsome courthouse, since the town is the seat of Fayette County. This shot is complete with an attorney (a safe assumption) talking with someone.

A number of repurposed buildings are near the courthouse, including a bank turned town hall. Not the first time I’ve seen that.

Actually not an ex-bank. Still a bank.

Plus history on plaques and signs.

The Battle of Fayetteville was part of the Kanawha Valley Campaign, which has to count as a lesser-known incident in that sprawling war, unless you’re in Fayetteville.

Eastern Virginia got most of the attention then, as now. Whether part of the Old Dominion or not, western Virginia has a long history of being ignored.

Which might account for the enduring popularity of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in West Virginia. Here was a song that actually paid attention to the state, with “West Virginia” being the third and fourth words of the lyrics. The first two words made an arguably bigger impact, however.

That display of West Virginia regional pride was at an odd angle next to a building across from the courthouse, neither in the sidewalk nor on the wall. Odd for a slogan, as I forget which comedian pointed out: you mean Heaven is only a little bit better than West Virginia? Or maybe the joke went like this: you mean Heaven is only a little bit better than West Virginia?

Thurmond, West Virginia

Posted on April 9, 2023 by admin

I was thinking ghost town, but the data says otherwise. Someone lives in Thurmond, West Virginia — five people as of the 2020 Census. They must be in the few houses perched on the enormous slope over the historic core of the town, which is formed by a string of commercial buildings and railroad structures at a flat place next to the New River.

Thurmond was a small railroad town at a waystation, back when that meant coal-burning giants among locomotives, which came to pick up shipments of coal, or acquire coal, water and sand for their own use. Maybe the shades of long-gone people wander Thurmond, if you believe that sort of thing, and if so, the rattle of pouring coal, the venting of steam, the screech of metal on metal, are echoing on as well.

What does every railroad town need?

The National Bank of Thurmond failed in 1931, but there were successor banking entities of some kind in the building into in the 1950s, when the town essentially shut down. The fact that the last bank paid 3 percent reminds me of a shorthand for the way mid-century savings and loans did their business: 3-5-3. Pay 3 percent to depositors, charge borrowers 5 percent interest, and close up to go play golf at 3 pm.

Other commercial buildings fronting the tracks, with the river just a little beyond them.

The mostly hidden ruins of a grand hotel on the slope. Burned down.

The bridge that brings trains and motor vehicles to Thurmond over the New River. One track, one lane.

The station. I thought it was merely for tourist use now, but no: it’s an active Amtrak station, reportedly the second-least used, after one in West Texas. So not that active.

The steam went out of Thurmond pretty much when the steam went out of Thurmond. That is, coal-fired steam locomotives disappeared, replaced by diesel, and the contracting coal industry as natural gas gained a foothold nationally probably didn’t help either.

Trains still transit Thurmond, but the land around — most of it, anyway, as boundaries are invisible — belongs to the national park. The star of modern Thurmond, I believe, is the ruin of the coaling tower.

Near the coaling tower. Maybe where the crew boss stayed, and members of the crew when no trains were in town.

Both are full of the ravages of time, but still standing. Barely? I’m not engineer enough to make an assessment, but my layman’s opinion is that chunks of stone drop off the tower now and then, so watch out.

A selection of graffiti.

Bleak, O.G. Bleak.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve: The Vistas

Posted on April 6, 2023 by admin

Late morning on our first full day in West Virginia, we found ourselves at the Endless Wall Trail. It’s not only a place for horizontal walking motion across the landscape, but the vertical motion of rock climbing too, as the park sign points out.

How we got there (that is, besides driving in our car to the trail head) is best characterized as a misreading or misunderstanding of a map on my part. So the trail wasn’t the one we’d been looking for, but it seemed like a good trail, so we headed in, with a place called Diamond Point as the goal.

Not a particularly difficult trail, for the most part, though there were roots and rocks and mud patches, but they never rose past the level of sometime annoyance. Nowhere was it steep, but the trail rose slowly in elevation much of the time.

It takes a fairly healthy old man about 30 minutes to get to Diamond Head. I mean, Diamond Point. Odd the things you think about sometimes, such as a land form in the tropics while tramping through some temperate zone mud, just because of a coincidental name.

Close to the destination.

Some of the glories that were Diamond Point.

There isn’t agreement on the exact age of New River among scientists, but it is measured in the hundreds of millions of years. Guess it was worth climbing a slope to take a look into deep time.

But you don’t need to walk that far to see a sweeping vista at Grandview, in a part of the park that’s some miles south-southeast of Diamond Point. We went there toward the end of the same pleasantly warm day, driving on local roads through Beckley, as well as short stretches of I-64 and West Virginia 9, to get to a large NPS parking lot, playground and ball field, occupied that day by small groups of parents and kids.

A walk of five minutes or so led from the play area to Grandview overlook. It is.

Nothing like a horseshoe bend, large or small.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve: The Bridges

Posted on April 5, 2023 by admin

I didn’t appreciate the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia until I’d driven across it more than once, and more importantly, seen it from a distance.

A handsome design for a magnificent setting. Elegant. Sturdy. Spanning the gorge spider-web like. Imagine a species of large, intelligent arachnids that can extrude metal and spin webs of steel across the many gorges on their forested planet. Artful shapes like the New Gorge River Bridge, maybe.

Even better, such an artful shape was made by us clever apes here on Earth. Within my lifetime, completed in October 1977. If I’d been in that part of West Virginia then, I could have driven across the newly minted bridge carrying my newly minted drivers license, obtained in some haste that summer to take a girl I’d recently met on dates. But I wasn’t anywhere near the bridge in my South Texas adolescent driving days, and never heard of it till much later.

“The bridge reduced a 40-minute drive down narrow mountain roads and across one of North America’s oldest rivers to less than a minute,” the park service says. “When it comes to road construction, mountains do pose a challenge. In the case of the New River Gorge Bridge, challenge was transformed into a work of structural art — the longest steel span in the Western Hemisphere and the third-highest in the United States.

“The West Virginia Division of Highways chose the Michael Baker Co. as the designer, and the construction contract was awarded to the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel. In June 1974, the first steel was positioned over the gorge by trolleys running on three-inch diameter cables. The cables were strung 3,500 feet between two matching towers. Cor-ten steel, with a rust-like appearance that never needs painting, was used in construction.”

Good to know, but if anything, the experience of driving across the bridge is too detached from the sense that you’re passing over an 800-foot void. The opaque fences along the edges of the bridge obscure the drop, though you do get a glimpse of the far-away cliffs of the gorge.

The bridge transits New River Gorge National Park and Preserve land on either side. A few minutes walk from the park’s visitor center takes you to a view of the bridge, which we saw on the morning of March 23, the brightest, warmest day of the trip.

The gorge, looking away from the bridge.

The old way to cross the gorge by vehicle involved spending 40 minutes or more on small roads that switchbacked their way down into the gorge, to just a few feet above the river, where there’s a much shorter bridge.

Stop there and you see the postcard-Instagram view of the New River Gorge Bridge in all its glory.

We drove down to the river the morning of March 24, the day after we’d seen the bridge from near the visitors center. Cold rain fell periodically and clouds clung to the side of the gorge.

A small aside. I saw that a number of things are named after Sen. Byrd in West Virginia, and I’m sure if I’d stayed longer, I’d have seen more. Why not this grandest of Mountaineer State bridges? Than again, maybe the thought of it being the “Byrd Bridge” has given policymakers second thoughts on a renaming.

The bridge down near the banks, where a few generations of West Virginians before 1977 made the crossing, does have a name: Tunny Hunsaker Bridge.

I had to look him up. I thought, local politico? A local man who didn’t return from a war? No, he was a prizefighter who later was police chief of nearby Fayetteville, West Virginia (d. 2005). I’m not up on the history of boxing. Now I’ve read that Muhammad Ali’s first professional win, in 1960, was against Hunsaker.

The current bridge dates from 1997, built to replace an earlier iteration. You can’t walk across the New River Gorge Bridge (except on Bridge Day), but you can walk across Tunny Hunsaker any time. So we did in turn. When you can cross an interesting bridge in an epic setting, you should.

The Palace of Gold

Posted on April 3, 2023 by admin

What do you know, today’s the 141st anniversary of the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. We happened to watch the movie of that name over the weekend, and found it slow-moving but impressive. Nothing like a high-verisimilitude work of historical fiction to take you into the past, especially if there are no outrageous anachronisms.

Frank Lloyd Wright on Monday, Hare Krishnas on Tuesday. That’s possible in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Some years ago, I was poring over a road map in anticipation of a road trip that didn’t happen. Looking roughly where we eventually did go last month, I noticed the Palace of Gold at a spot in rural West Virginia, in the odd northern panhandle of that state. Such a thing cannot go un-looked up, so I found out that it is part of a complex run by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

We’d been to ISKCON Chicago. Time to drop by the Palace of Gold, I thought, as long as we were in the neighborhood. The palace is part of a larger settlement known as New Vrindaban, which was founded during the heady early days of the Hare Krishna movement in the New World, namely 1968. You know, when the Beatles were hanging out with sect founder His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, or vice versa.

This isn’t the Palace of Gold, but it is a major part of the New Vrindaban complex, Sri Sri Radha Vrindaban Chandra Temple (RVC Temple).

ISKCON had a lean period after its counterculture heyday, but someone is paying for the vigorous reconstruction at the temple, as well as plans to restore the Palace of Gold.

Maybe Alfred Ford kicked in some dosh. I didn’t know till our visit that a great-grandson of Henry Ford, also known as Ambarish Das, is a member of ISKCON, and is a major donor for a major project in India.

You can’t go too far in the temple without encountering Swami Prabhupāda.

Many depictions of Krishna and his flute.

The centerpiece. At least, that’s what I assume; it was front and center.

I heard the story of the founding of the ISKCON from two different Anglo monks, two of about 200 people who live in the settlement, one young and at the visitors center, the other old and at the Palace itself. Their stories had a mythical quality to them, emphasizing the travail of the founder of the sect, especially his sea voyage from India to New York by cargo steamer, under hardscrabble circumstances, age nearly 70, to bring Krishna consciousness to the West.

Swami Prabhupāda thus brought one of the many branches of the massive flowering tree that is Hinduism to America, and at an auspicious time – 1965. Not only had U.S. immigration laws just been loosened, one of the periodic effusions of bohemianism was just then under way in the West, making for a receptive audience. Double good fortune for the swami, or perhaps the timely intervention of Lord Krishna, made exponentially greater when he caught the attention what we would now call influencers.

The founder did not, however, live to see New Vrindaban come to full fruition, since he died in 1977 – cast off his body for another, presumably – and his followers took up the task of developing the place. As you’d expect with a new religion, any religion really, not all went smoothly. Violence, murder plots, a racketeering conviction. New Vrindaban spent a period in the late 20th century excommunicated from ISKCON, but it is back in the fold now.

The grounds of New Vrindaban are extensive, including a pond and other structures, such as a dorm and cabins for monks and visitors. And a concrete elephant and cattle.

Krishna consciousness gazebos, by golly.

These are Gaura and Nitai, I‘ve read, but I can’t pretend I understand their function or which is which. The one on the left, recently refurbished. The one on the right, awaiting new paint.

The Palace of Gold itself is on a slope overlooking the rest of the complex, and looks to be on one of the higher points in this part of West Virginia, surrounded by the sect’s roughly 1,200 acres. Why West Virginia? Cheap land would be my guess. The monks had a story about that, too, formalized in its details as much as the story of the swami’s passage to America. Something about answering a random ad in a newspaper. Anyway, here it stands.

“Palace of Gold Leaf” might be more accurate, but also an exercise in literalism.

Nice detail.

A sign at the entrance says that restoration will soon be underway. The palace needs it.

We did our little part for the restoration, each taking an $8 tour in turn. No one else was on either of our tours, since even at New Vrindaban, mid-March would be the slow season, though a few other people were visiting at the same time as we did, including a sizable, multi-generational South Asian family.

The interior is as ornate as the exterior, even more so, with crystal chandeliers, mirrored ceilings, marble floors, stained-glass windows and plenty of gold leaf and semi-precious stone accents. Not bad for a structure that is entirely nonprofessional architecture.

No photography inside, except I took some pictures in the lobby waiting for the tour.

“I’m old enough to remember Hare Krishnas at the airport,” I told my guide when he asked whether I knew anything about ISKCON.

“Yes, we used to do that,” he said with what I took to be a wistful smile.

My guide was an old hippie. That’s probably unfair to the fellow, a lanky gentleman perhaps in his early to mid-70s, dressed in the Hare Krishna robes we’re all familiar with, head mostly shaven. Who would want to be described by stereotypical youthful attributes more than 50 years out of date?

Still, as he told me about his wanderings as a young man in the late ’60s, and his discovery of ISKCON – he was happy to say that he’d taken classes from Swami Prabhupāda himself – the thought kept occurring to me.

Tri-State Appalachian Equinox Road Trip

Posted on March 26, 2023 by admin

Old Chinese proverb, I’ve heard: even a journey of 1,000 leagues begins by backing out of the driveway. That we did on Friday, March 17. We pulled back into the driveway on Saturday, March 25. In between we traveled 2,219 miles, using the ragged marvel that is the system of roads in the United States.

My fanciful name for the trip refers to three states that were the focus: Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We actually passed through seven states, also including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and very briefly, Maryland.

We saw a lot of places, but two in particular motivated the trip as a whole. One was Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright sculpture – I mean, house – perched over an irregular drop on Bear Run, a creek in rural Pennsylvania. Visiting Fallingwater had long been an ambition of Yuriko’s, maybe since before she lived in this country, since FLW is known far and wide; but I needed no persuasion to go myself.

The other was New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in eastern-ish West Virginia. This was my suggestion, since I keep up on national parks. But I’ve wanted to go there a good while, long before Congress promoted it to national park, which only happened in 2020. Besides, it was high time I spent a little more than a few minutes in West Virginia which, for whatever else it has, is known for its surpassing scenery. This reputation, I can confirm, is deserved.

Weather-wise, spring travel is a crap shoot. The day we left a cold, unpleasant wind blew in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, and it followed us under the same gray skies and at temps barely above freezing the next day, into central Ohio.

By last Monday, in southwest Pennsylvania, temps had moderated with the appearance of the sun, and each day was more pleasant than the last as we headed south into West Virginia, where the grass had greened and some bushes had too, though most trees were at the barely budding stage. Thursday, March 23 proved best of all, with sunny skies and temps in the 70s, allowing us to enjoy the best meal of our trip — ricebowl meals — at a picnic table in Fayetteville, W.Va.

A cold rain came calling on Friday as we headed from West Virginia back to Ohio. On Saturday, again in central Ohio, it wasn’t bitterly cold, but the wind was so strong at times that it jostled my car as I drove and my body as I walked. Rain squalls came and went, with a spell of sleet I actually enjoyed, sitting in our parked car listening, knowing that the ice was too small to do any damage. Returning home yesterday, Illinois was pretty much as we’d left it, chilly and not-quite-spring.

The upshot of it all is to pack for the weather variety you’re going to encounter, and I was more than glad – as I returned to the car in a stiff wind, crossing a green field in small-town Ohio, feeling wind chill that must have been around zero (and I mean Fahrenheit) – that I’d brought the coat I use most of the winter.

We brought the dog. We don’t want to leave her at a kennel any more, and no one was at home to mind her. Having your dog along is something like traveling with a small child you can’t take into restaurants or a lot of other places, but we don’t regret a bit of it. Long drives in the car don’t faze her at all, since after the first few minutes, that’s like lying around the house and, as the comedian said, a dog’s job is lying around the house.

She had her energetic moments too, more than you’d think for an ancient dog, such as walking the trail to Diamond Point overlooking the New River Gorge, with its smooth straightaways through forests giving way to patches of mud, large rocks or tightly packed tree roots underfoot, sometimes all of those in a single stretch. Our reward for the sometime-slog was a vista of rare beauty. Her reward? I don’t think it was anything so visual. Maybe following the pack is its own reward for her.

Companion dogs also mean you acquaint yourself with the look and feel of the front office and main entrance of limited-service hotels during the empty early a.m. hours, well lit as a Broadway stage but without any players. Except maybe for the night clerk, just outside the door, who is peering into his phone, cigarette in other hand. Probably our dog, as any dog, could be trained to pee on a disposable rug in the room during the small hours, but somehow we’ve never wanted to do that. There’s something appealing somehow about the ritual of dressing as simply as possible a few minutes after waking at 2:30 or 3, or 25 or 6 to 4, hitching a leash to the dog’s collar and repairing to the first patch of green, or pebbles ringed by a curb, outside the hotel door

Take me home, country roads. I’ll say this for West Virginia, it’s got some crazy-ass serpentine roads through its ancient and forested mountains. The Laurel Highlands in southwest Pennsylvania was no piker in that regard, either. You need to keep an intense focus on the road as it winds this way and that, rises and falls, and passes ever so close to boulder walls, massive trees and wicked ditches. If you don’t mind thinking about your mortality every now and then, that’s some good driving.

Mostly good driving. There are moments when a red sedan, or a black pickup truck, decides that tailgating you at roughly the speed limit as you wind around and navigate switchbacks, is a good idea, and blasts around you at the first marginal opportunity, double solid stripes be damned.

Yet I only got the smallest sampling of the twisty roads. No roads without pavement this trip, though plenty enough didn’t bother with details such as guardrails. Another, entirely unpaved and mostly unregulated network of roads and tracks, many perhaps pre-New Deal, must exist in West Virginia. Out away from the nearest town, while we were parked a national park site on a small paved road, three ATVs buzzed past, each with two people. They were headed toward town after emerging from the woods, their vehicles streaked with mud. I was just close enough to see in their faces they’d had a fine time out in the unpaved network.

Also, if you really wanted to get home to West Virginia, wouldn’t you take the Interstate?

We made stops in Ohio going and coming.

On Saturday, March 18 we made our way south from Ann Arbor, where we’d spent the first night, to Columbus, Ohio, to spent the second. On the way is the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, a Byzantine edifice rising in a small town, which we visited, but also sites associated with Warren G. Harding: his memorial and burial site, and also his home, in the large town of Marion, Ohio.

Our return home, beginning on Friday, March 24, took us back through Ohio, to Columbus for the last night of the trip. Saturday morning, after takeout breakfast at Tim Horton’s – for that part of Ohio is in the Tim Horton’s orb, we were glad to learn – we visited downtown Columbus and the Ohio Statehouse in a howling cool wind. Ate lunch, Korean-style chicken and salad, sitting in the car in a clearly gentrified neighborhood, the bricked-streeted German Village. We spent the rest of Saturday driving back, via Indianapolis.

On the morning of Sunday, March 19, we left Columbus and made our way east through the remarkable town of Newark, Ohio, then Wheeling and Moundsville, West Virginia and from there to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized far outer suburb of Pittsburgh. Or at least it will be in a few years.

On Monday, we paid our visit to Fallingwater, taking turns on tours, after which we had lunch in a low-season tourist town and took an impediment-rich hike in Ohiopyle State Park, along the rocky shore of the Youghiogheny River, at that point boasting a highly picturesque waterfall. That was enough for one day for Yuriko, who napped in the car (along with the dog) as I walked the much shorter and smoother path to Fort Necessity National Battlefield late that afternoon.

On Tuesday, we made our way back west a short distance, to visit the Palace of Gold in rural West Virginia, in the peculiar north panhandle of the state (which I’ve long thought of as a conning tower). We returned that day to Uniontown by way of Moundsville, W. Va., home of an ancient mound of remarkable height, a former penitentiary of remarkable solidity, and a bridge across the Ohio River of remarkable elegance. Those things, and some tasty if not remarkable barbecue.

The next day, we left for West Virginia, but not by the most direct route, because I wanted to see the Flight 93 National Memorial in deep rural Pennsylvania. Progressively smaller roads lead there, including – as we traveled it, which I figured would be the quickest route – a short stretch of I-68 through the oddity that is the Maryland panhandle. Late that day, Wednesday, we arrived in Beckley, W. Va.

We spent almost all of Thursday at the national park, at one sight or another, driving and hiking and pondering historic and sometimes crumbled structures. But that wasn’t quite enough. On Friday morning, before we left for Ohio, we went back to the park. Around noon, we headed west, passing through Charleston long enough to visit the West Virginia State Capitol and eat Chinese takeout, though not at the same time. A little north of Charleston, we crossed back into Ohio after gassing up near the small town of Ripley, West Virginia. Believe it or not.

One other thing: this was a vacation from the news, which following is part of my job. Except for the briefest snippets on the radio, when sometimes I didn’t change stations out of habit for some seconds, I ignored the news of the world, or even smaller parts of it. I think that’s a good thing to do.

But of course, a few things got through. I heard the opening bars of The Dick Van Dyke Show theme on a news program one day, and I jumped to the conclusion that he had died. That isn’t a big jump, since he’s 97. But no, merely a one-car accident.

Image being that well regarded, that your minor auto accident as a nonagenarian is national news. Anyway, glad not to say, RIP, Dick Van Dyke.

The Latest NP

Posted on January 11, 2021 by admin

What, another national park? Don’t we have enough? (This makes 63.)

I’m referring to New River Gorge National Park and Reserve in West Virginia, which sounds like a fine place to visit, including the bridge. But does it need to be a national park? Wasn’t national river good enough?

The new designation was tucked away in the latest omnibus federal budget, a document probably as sprawling and wild as some of the larger national parks. Maybe there’s also something there about a new park on the Moon, though I expect that would go against the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Then again, could be that the treaty is silent on that question.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: West Virginia