Country Roads, West Virginia

None of my in-laws work in the coal mines anymore but they all live in or are emotionally connected to West Virginia and are deeply concerned about the mine blast and deaths today.

I have a soft spot in my heart for West Virginia, seeing it for the first time through my husband's eyes. He introduced me to Meadow Bluff, Bad-Off Mountain, Rainelle, Beckley, the New River Gorge. I was pregnant with Megan and I felt like I was at a Baptist church picnic, everyone blessing me with their words and their kind eyes. No hail Jesus or real God-talk but the personable faith of country folk.

I met Lacy and Bill and Tommy and Grandma Berry and mean Uncle Oakley and more. We shot old pump shotguns and made cast-iron skillet berry pies and hiked up through the family cemeteries, learning the stories of all those who came--and died--before us. I walked with Lacy; he hitched his broken body up and through the stepped ridges of the lines of headstones. When I asked Ken's dad what had happened to Lacy, he just said, "the mine." An accident with a cart and a plunge down the mine shaft. Lacy lived on whiskey and painkillers.

Our next trip, years after Megan was born, we took the four-wheelers up the mountain backing against Ken's parents' place and explored the terrain of an abandoned mine, land stripped, lots of erosion and tumble-down parts leftover from the rigs. I took a steep bank too sharply and tipped my four-wheeler on to two wheels and the young teen who had led the way was immediately by my side, holding back my fall like Hercules in the cartoons.

It's easy to make jokes about West Virginia, the old couches and velour recliners on the porch, the welfare whites and Oxytocin epidemic. Jamie Oliver decided to kick off his Eating in America series in West Virgina, focusing on the community with the nation's worst obesity rate, I believe. When you think about the constant threat of working in the mines, you can see why people might not button down their health habits. The Irish depended on the mines, too, and yet we cut them slack for poor drinking and eating--it's almost romantic--but the West Virginnies are mocked.

But like any impoverished or marginalized community, you really can't speak the truth of it unless you get inside it. And the thing about West Virginians, they'll definitely let you inside. C'mon in, door's open, they say.

My husband likes to tell the story of how I went to pick wildflowers up on one of those ridges after a couple of big swills of neighbor Herb's clear moonshine. I came back scraped and scratched and all the kin who had come over for the Sunday picnic were concerned until I laughed and told them that I "fell right off the side of that mountain," tipsy as I had felt from the strong brew. They all laughed but only after I had laughed, and one auntie said, "Well at least you got yourself some flowers."