I Watch Prosperity Slip Away - The Great Unwind - CycleBlaze

May 11, 2017

I Watch Prosperity Slip Away

Kristen and I are both tired from yesterday's climb over the mountain. The promise of a big country breakfast in Honaker ten miles down the road gets us up and going.

Getting there isn't so easy. The roads are full of cars and trucks headed for work or school. The drivers are not interested in patience.

Heart 2 Comment 0

The cafe calls itself the home of the liars' table. The first thing we see when we walk in the door are eight old guys in ball caps sitting around the longest table in the middle of the room. That must be it. It's the kind of place where the napkin dispenser sits in the middle of the table with a 9 written on the top in black permanent marker. On the back wall, the TV plays the Today Show to an audience of none.

I go with the biscuits and gravy. When it shows up, there's a deep bowl in the middle of the plate that takes up two thirds of the space. There's no shortage of vitamin G around here. There's also no shortage of interested questions and well wishes and stories about life out in the far western corner of Virginia from the old timers who pass by our table and the women running the kitchen.

Heart 1 Comment 0

Beyond town, the three of us start the climb up and over Big A Mountain. The name means just what you think, at least according to the guys at the liars' table in the cafe. It's a place of grazing cows and run-down car repair shops and old guys weed whacking the steep slopes, always one misstep away from tumbling down to the bottom. During one of our breaks, I watch a car pull to a stop just ahead of us. A hunched-over guy with a thick, unkempt beard and dirty clothes gets out, a case of Milwaukee's Best tucked under his right arm. He gives the driver a wave, walks over to a decaying mobile home, and disappears inside.

Heart 2 Comment 0

Little by little, I watch prosperity slip away right in front of me. This morning near the church it was wooden picket fences and nice brick houses and dogs watching us with vague interest. By mid-day — only a few hours later — it's crooked wire fences or no fences at all. Every house is tired and most were built somewhere else and arrived here on wheels. Dogs roam freely in yards and at the road's edge.

Heart 1 Comment 0

The pastoral, idyllic, colonial countrysides of Virginia are a distant memory. Now it's pickup trucks with the back windows all busted out, closed country stores, lots of roadside garbage, and accents thicker than thick.

"I couldn't find a bathroom," Kristen says to me at the mini-mart a few miles down the road. "There are just tanning beds back there."

The easy thing to do is to look at the change, compare it against what came before or what you're used to seeing where you live, and either make fun of what you see or think to yourself What's wrong with this place? Why would anyone live here?

But the look of a place is only part of the story. And out here, the people are what fill out the picture. We can't stop for more than two minutes without ending up in some kind of conversation. Each one puts a smile on our faces and leaves us feeling better than before.

Not everyone in these parts is a saint. I know that. But the people we talk with today are without exception kind, curious, humble, and proud of where they're from. I make it a point to tell them how much we're enjoying our ride through their part of the world, because we are. The countryside is rugged and textured and rich with beauty. The roads are wonderful. But it's because of the people that we feel safe and welcomed and appreciated. It makes all the difference.

Heart 0 Comment 0

This is not, however, an easy place to live. My crank bolts are still making noise, so the three of us stop into a truck repair shop in a tiny town named Bee to see if they have a wrench I can borrow. As so often happens around here, it turns into a twenty-minute talk with the guy who owns the place. At one point, I ask him what people do for work around here.

"Well, for a long time it was coal," he says. "But there ain't hardly any coal work left 'round here anymore. Loggin' used to be big, and I mean, there's still some a that around, but not like it was. Some day it'll be gone too. We did some long haul truck work for awhile, but it didn't pay that good, and you'd waste yer time waitin' around for a lotta nothin', so we don't have that now neither."

"What happens when the logging goes away?" I ask. "What do you do then?"

He sighs and pauses for a moment.

"I don't kindly know. I ain't ne'er been in that a kinda position befoah."

Heart 1 Comment 0
Heart 0 Comment 0

We eat lunch next to one of the many boarded up buildings in Haysi (pronounced hay-sigh). The climb out of town is steeper than steep. The air is thick and sultry from the inbound thunderstorms. The first hill is followed by a second. And then a third. Near the top of the last, the trees to our left open up and reveal the massive, gaping maw of the deep split in the earth that people around here call The Breaks. Hawks circle in lazy arcs on the updrafts. The air is so quiet that we can hear a river howling and screaming as it rushes through the rocks at the base of the canyon more than a thousand feet below.

Heart 0 Comment 0
Heart 4 Comment 0

We end up there a few miles later. That's when we cross into Kentucky. After fourteen days of riding from one end of Virginia to the other in about the most indirect way possible, we're moving on.

Heart 3 Comment 0
Heart 3 Comment 0

But not by much. We get only as far as the next town before stopping again. That's because Elkhorn City has a place that's a bicycle traveler's dream: a pizza restaurant you can camp behind. And so the three of us sit down, order a pizza that's almost two feet wide, and don't leave our corner table for another four or five hours.

Before.
Heart 0 Comment 0
After.
Heart 0 Comment 0
Heart 0 Comment 0

We hang out inside until the vicious thunderstorms have taken their onslaught of rain and lightning to the east. Then we walk down to the riverbank beyond the back porch and settle in for the night. Crickets chirp; cars rumble over the bridge; a couple of teenagers get high on the porch up above us and then split; the river hums and swirls.

Goodnight Kentucky.

Today's ride: 51 miles (82 km)
Total: 593 miles (954 km)

Rate this entry's writing Heart 4
Comment on this entry Comment 0