| ORDINARY FODDER FOR COMFORT
By Bob Weaver
Everyone wants their place on earth to be better, but fewer show up to get the task done.
There is more interest in being entertained, life in front of a screen.
Volunteerism, except for a dependable few, has fallen from grace.
While we say American Democracy is the greatest thing on earth, it seems to be getting wobbly.
The foibles of our faded-from-glory county seat are not unlike many mountain towns,
no longer business centers with populations barely able to support a local
government.
Small town life is a dream of what life ought to be.
Most everyone complains about
the problems, but it is the conventional and quiet that appeals to most folks who enjoy life in the hills, while others just struggle to survive.
Routine matters.
It seems that most people just don't like to be bothered, a well described Appalachian trait, while many
complain about not having conveniences or some good people to straighten out the problems.
Life in Calhoun County takes some getting use do, particularly if you're not an original.
Simon Stinson, the church organist in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," had been drinking when he said, "Some people ain't
made for small town life."
His drinking was a protest against commonplace routines, and yet, ironically, his drinking had
become routine as he played the church organ.
Could it be that ordinary human events really are the fodder of comfort?
Aunt Gladys Stump, when asked what residents do for entertainment in
Grantsville's days gone by, would always say, "We go over to Stump's (the funeral home)" to see people we haven't seen for a long time.
A line from "Our Town" says,
"Gracious sakes alive! Of all people! I should'a knowed you'd be back for the funeral."
The greater world might think it troubling that Grantsville and Calhoun have lost half its
population, the demographics having changed since the
hey-day in the 40s, 50s and 60s.
In the big world, they would think it never mattered much to begin with.
Some people enjoy blaming local leaders, but the causes holding back the rural WV counties is set in place by the economics of consolidation, merging, centralization and globalization. It could be virtue from the wildly greater world.
Much like the political, religious and cultural divisions going back thousands of
years in the Old World, the resentment and distrust is still kicking around 150
years later between northern and southern Calhoun.
Virtually every politician worth his or her salt has tried to use the north-south
division to their advantage, convincing voters they favor one section over the
other.
For most Calhouners, it has always been difficult to trust what is happening on the other side of the mountain.
Outsiders are startled by our backwardness,
steep hills, narrow hollows and crooked roads - a rough terrain that is covered by a great forest.
Frankly, driving around the county, one end to the other, it still brings me great joy, as I continue to revel over the place.
Grantsville sits patiently at the crossroads of two crooked and narrow state
highways (Route 16 and 5), a far piece from Interstate access.
For years this rural county tried to obtain an improved highway like the Little Kanawha Parkway, now totally faded.
More recently, a nearly 40-year-old idea called the Blue-Gray Trail would have connected Ripley's I-77 to I-79 through Sunny Cal. That too has faded.
Some businessmen who held political domain back in the 1960's, opposed the
construction of I-79 through the county, although it was the original straight shot
on the map.
Who knows, maybe there is virtue of being off the beaten path and its commercial development, more fodder for the commonplace and routine.
Now we struggle to be part of the 21st Century with high-speed Internet service, hundreds of TV channels and social meda.
Grantsville and Calhoun, for the most part, is more about what it use to be, with nary a stoplight. Maybe that is good.
The town will be remembered as a bustling little place
with people-filled streets, talking and visiting until late at night, going to the
Kanawha Theater for a picture show and drinking sodas at the drug store.
The only businesses left from my early days in the town are the J & B Drug Store, The Calhoun
Chronicle and Stump Funeral Home.
Nearly 25 other businesses listed in my high
school yearbook from 1958 no longer exist.
Much of the town sits on the flood plain, with replacement housing or new
construction difficult to finance.
There is little flat land.
Emily Gibbs ("Our Town") discovered after her life and death in Grover's Corners, that the living really have time only for themselves.
The
inability to see life beyond death seemed ironic to Emily, whose town's central activity was to focus on church and the commonplace.
"Yes, now you know! Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and
down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million
years," Emily said.
It is likely when the sun comes up tomorrow, most of us will be concerned about potholes, the failures of others, water and sewage problems, or wrongful people being in charge -
dreaming of the way things ought to be.
And some will continue to utter the well-worn phrase, "Somebody ought to do something about..."
Meanwhile, for many who find grace in this backwoods existence, some will sleep well for yet another night.
It's a pretty safe place to be, even very few of Mother Nature's natural disasters, a very little crime.
It is my place, and as each year goes by, I know I belong here.
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