Flicka II Ready for Action
Close to Beckley, we passed the exit for Pax WV, the coal town where my mother was born in 1930 and lived with her sisters Janet, Louise, Edna Mae and Helen Jean and their brothers, Willie, Buck and Joe. They grew up in a shabby but quaint little house on the railroad tracks. Well, Helen Jean was actually not a sister. One of the other for real sisters who shall go unnamed was raped at a very young age by someone in the community. Helen Jean was the result. Family history is sketchy on this tragedy. Some have said that justice was done but not necessarily in the court systems. If there is a silver lining in a story like that it’s that Helen Jean was raised and loved all of her life as one of the sisters. And these sisters and brothers were loving people, each and every one.
One hundred and sixty-seven people live in Pax today, probably about the same as when my mother lived there. Her father and brothers, other male relatives and neighbors were hardscrabble coal miners or heavy equipment operators. Many drank hard in the off hours. Most smoked. Many ended up with emphysema and black lung disease. Some died in the mines. Many were disabled in mining accidents. A brother’s son lost a leg in the mines.
When my mother was thirteen or fourteen, the railroad took their house to expand their tracks. After that they lived in a series of trailers and other small homes. During this time, her father committed suicide leaving their mother, Cassie, and the children to fend for themselves. Joe, the youngest brother was killed one evening with a friend while crossing or sitting on the railroad tracks in an old Ford sedan. Details are scarce but I have heard more than one relative say alcohol was involved in that tragedy.
Many of the women in the village married miners. Some got out. First chance they got, my momma and her sister, Louise split for Staunton Virginia, where they got jobs as telephone switchboard operators. My mother met Kenneth, Louise met Melvin, and that was that.
My mother’s sister Janet, a saint on this planet, was married to Jim, a hard drinking, heavy smoking, equipment operator who worked for the mines in many capacities. In later life, he developed emphysema and black lung and spent much of his time under an oxygen tent. Not daunted by physician admonishment about smoking in an oxygen tent, one day he lit up, set himself on fire and, as they say, that was the end of
Jim.
Jim and Janet had four children, Scott, Greg, Donna and Eddie. Eddie, was born with spina bifida, a congenital condition in which the spinal cord fails to develop or close property. In Eddy’s case the lower spinal cord was open which required daily wound care to prevent infection. Most spina bifida babies are paralyzed as was Eddie, from the waist down. He was also hydrochepahic, a condition in which the deep structures in the brain accumulate fluid and cause the head to appear and in fact be enlarged. Eddie lived in a wheelchair for his twenty-six years.
In spite of his physical abnormalities and limitations, he was cheerful, smart and well-read for a ‘shut-in’ in those days in West Virginia coal field towns when home health services were meager at best. He was a loving soul with kind words for everybody, simply beside himself with joy when we showed up for a visit. He had quite a collection of 45rpms from the thirties and forties. It pretty much fell to Janet to take care of Eddie for his entire life. Being paralyzed from the waist down, among other maintenance health tasks, every day for his entire life she had to gently knead his stomach to facilitate bowel movements. Eddie died just about the time Jim went into his oxygen tent. So, Janet got to shift her caregiver skills from Eddie to Jim.
In my early years once every so often my father would clean up our 1957 Chevy Bel Air, load us in and away we would go on a ten-hour trek on Route 60 from Staunton through Lexington and over to Pax to visit the West Virginia clan. No interstate roads then.
During one of our visits Jim decided to pack us all into two cars and drive to Gallipolis, Ohio to attend an old timey, riverboat minstrel show. Gallipolis has a very fine city park right on the river. Imagine a sultry August night in 1962 on the banks of the Ohio River with hellgrammites and luna moths flying about. Hot dogs and hamburgers, French-fries soaked in vinegar, cotton candy, snow cones, cherry cokes and homemade ice cream. A magnificent paddlewheel steamboat docked on the banks, and after some necessary speechifying by local officials, a very fine theater company offers a minstrel show, complete with white folks in black face, singing gospel songs mixed with show tunes. It was marvelous, especially to a kid from Staunton, VA who had never seen such a thing as a paddlewheel steamboat. I will never forget than night and will be forever thankful to Jim for that evening. Rest in peace Jim.
So that’s why I wanted to revisit Gallipolis, Ohio.
But our first destination was a US Corps of Engineers lock and dam just outside of Belleville, West Virginia. A free camp site with bathrooms, just a few roaches, mostly dead, and a commanding view of the river and dam and lock through which barges are pushed and dragged by magnificent tug boats. Besides a few fishermen who left just after dark there was no one else there. It rained, we ate and hit the sack early. But not before watching a few barges and tugs negotiate the lock. The Ohio River lserves as a vital commerce artery for cities and towns along its course.
Mighty Ohio River, Belleville, WV USCOE Lock and Dam Barge Traffic
The next morning after coffee we hit out for Gallipolis for our visit. Not much has changed in Gallipolis. If anything, it seems smaller. Today about 3000 people live there and it’s seen better times. The park is still there and I’m told they still have occasional riverboats that come to offer shows, probably not white people doing blackface though.
There are a few notable people from the town, including a couple of professional football and baseball players, the usual mix of politicians, country music singers and artists. Two people of particular note in my view are Skip Battin, a musician and former member of the Byrds, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Now that’s something. Who among us has not listened to one of these groups. Raise your hand. If you haven’t, get a life.
The other is Bob Evans, noted restauranteur. You know those Bob Evans restaurants. To honor Mr. Evans Emily and I decided we should eat at one of his restaurants while in Gallipolis. That’s what we did. I had sausage gravy and biscuits. Emily her usual scrambled eggs and toast. After our meal as we were leaving two waitresses came bouncing out because they had seen our little trailer and were duly impressed. They demanded a tour which we delightedly gave them.
After that away we went, on Day 2 of our journey, across Ohio, through Chillicothe, around Dayton, staying well south of Indianapolis, onward through Champaign, Illinois and all the while, Mr. Evan’s biscuits and gravy were churning and turning and fermenting and fomenting a noisome concoction in my stomach. By the time we got to our next destination, a very nice public park in Gibson City Ill, I was running a fever, experiencing nausea and cramping and generally feeling lousy.
Gibson City, as we found many mid-American small towns do, runs a pretty cool operation when it comes to traveling campers. For ten bucks, you can stay in the small but pleasant city park. At dark the town shuts down so you pretty well have the park to yourself. The ten bucks includes access to very clean and pleasant bathrooms and a shower. That’s a good thing because I visited the bathrooms about a dozen times that night. I’m not sure I have even had food poisoning before, but I suspect I did that night thanks to Mr. Evans. No fan no more Mr. Evans. We shared the campsite that night with a thirty-something, tent camping, pleasant young lady riding a 500cc Kawasaki motorcycle from Florida to Portland, OR, by herself.
The next morning, we ventured forth on Day 3, bound for the Mississippi River. We crossed over at Burlington into Iowa, passing great soy bean and corn fields growing in the black fluvial Mississippi flood plain soils. On to Fruitland, Iowa, population 173, where we camped on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River at an abandoned US Corps of Engineers recreation area near the Port Louisa NWR. No one else there. No facilities. Emily got to use her brand new Luggable Loo, or as we call it, the Lug-a-Loo. I’ll let you guess what that’s for. It rained in the evening, making for very gooey Mississippi mud. Watched two red-headed woodpeckers chase one another around a tree.
Day 4. Thursday, June 22. We drove to Muscatine passing river levees and more great corn and soy bean fields. Then crossed Iowa on secondary roads, avoiding Des Moines, generally on Route #92 to Council Bluffs, crossing the Missouri River at Blair, NE, then on to Scribner, NE, population 857 where we found the magnificent Dead Timber NE SRA just north on the Elkhorn River. The landscape changed considerably on the way across Iowa and into the Nebraska, getting more arid and open. The campsite and facilities were immaculate. One other camper. We ate and went to bed at dark. Later I got up to take care of business and was astonished to see literally tens of thousands of fireflies at work. The trees were lit up with them. Combined with the thousands of stars and the milky way on that clear night it was heavenly. God’s finest light show.
Dead Timber Nebraska State Recreation Area, Elkhorn River
Day 5. Friday, June 23. Drove across Nebraska on Route 91/92 through towns like Clarkson, population 650, Humphrey, population 750, Burwell, population 1,200, and Dunning, population 103, finally arriving at the Bessey Ranger District in the Nebraska National Forest, near Halsey, NE, population 76. From the entrance station we drove about twelve miles on pretty rough road to the backcountry Natick campsite where we found five people and eight horses. Gained about one thousand feet elevation. A gem of a camp site. In high and dry country. Clean vault toilets. So, what is a vault toilet. Well, basically it’s a big concrete box in which one provides donations of natural waste products. I’ll leave that to your imagination. We grade the toilets we use crossing the country according to condition, odor, cleanliness, etc. This one gets an eight. We had good water from a shallow well with a hand pump and lots of poison ivy to avoid. Ponderosa pines and killdeers accented the landscape.
Good Advice
We have now crossed the one hundredth meridian, that longitudinal line that splits North America roughly into two regions. To the east where average annual rainfall in above twenty inches and to the west where its below twenty inches, some places substantially below that. Life out here for plants and animals starts to become a matter of managing a scarce resource – water. To the east, generally folks can grow most crops without irrigation. To the west, to reliably grow hay and other crops, one must irrigate. This spot marks a transition for us to hot, sometimes very hot, days, and cool nights. More on western water resources later.
A sign in Cozad, NE, just to the south of Halsey marks the spot where the one hundredth meridian intersects the routes of the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express, the transcontinental railroad and the Lincoln Highway. We are getting into big time cow country. Most people out here, in one way or another, work or support agricultural enterprises.
In Natick, we met Sue and Mike who had hauled their two quarter horses, Rough and Tough up that long road from Omaha for a visit and some high-country trail riding. They have been coming here for years. Cheerful folk living cheerful lives. They love their horses.
Landscape, Natick Campground, Nebraska National Forest
So that’s a recap of our first five days. Another story coming soon.
Thanks for reading and adios.
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