Last weekend, I listened to this song while painting the study in our house (my Christmas gift to my parents), valiantly failing to ignore the fact that Shepherd students were about to begin another semester in my most recent "Current City" while I remained at home. I spent two years leaving a very special person behind in this town while I flocked off to college, and this semester, I am the one that remains behind while my new friends continue their education (may their degrees prove to be more useful than mine has thus far). As I listened to this fantastic song whose lyrics describe both small towns I traveled between for four and a half years, the reality of this most recent shift in my life really hit home. It took over a month, but I finally got there.
The lyrics to this song bring out the Appalachian spirit that I've nurtured since I discovered it hiding in the depths of my soul shortly after my arrival at Shepherd. Here's a look:
"We know all the mountains and the roads that lead there,
Over and yonder till they vanish into air,
Weeks lost on the highway seems nowhere bound,
By God, we know this town."
I traveled the roads to and from Shepherdstown quite a bit in my four and a half years, and there was one road that always felt like I was really coming or leaving home. It was a highway about halfway between the two towns, and at one point it really did feel like the highway vanished as the mountains loomed either ahead of me like friendly sentinels or in my review mirror patiently awaiting my return.
I traveled these roads in a time where I had no idea where my life was going (hell, I still have no clue). Nowhere Bound, which is the name of this album, seems an ironically appropriate title for the time of my life I'm currently living. For now, I will only travel that road to visit my friends. And that I most certainly will do.
"We know what time the bars shut their doors,
Start puttin' up chairs, moppin' their floors,
It seems we've been traveling strange roads all around,
By God, we know this town."
I was not a bar person until I returned from Costa Rica last spring. During that trip, we spent a fair amount of our evenings enjoying the dancing, the drinks, and the company of one another. I've never traveled with a more interesting group of students. After that return, I still don't "frequent" bars, and most certainly not the bars in Elkins, however, in this last semester The Meck has become a favorite haunt for my college friends and I. So many deep conversations have been had within The Meck's little rooms and in the gardens. Conversations about life, what the future holds (a spectacular topic my last night in town, when I congregated with my friends in the back room of our favorite place in town), what we wanted in life, and most importantly what we've learned from life thus far. These strange roads brought us all together that night, and we've been the ones learning from and leaning on one another as we continue through this unstable time in our lives.
The final verse of this song is what calls up the past for me in a way that it would for very few.
"We know all the shortcuts to the river down the road,
Been to that bridge, water below,
We know all the train tracks we used to walk down,
By God, we know this town."
Both Elkins and Shepherdstown have rivers that feed the life of the people around it. In Elkins, it's the dirty Tygart River, a shallow river through town that grows and becomes wild and dangerous (and for that reason it inspires wonder) as it reaches Arden in Barbour County. Once a river that was important to the timber business in neighboring counties, this river was a favorite place for me to go watch bats fly on summer evenings and snow fall on winter nights. Today, for the first time in a long time, I crossed one of the few foot bridges with a friend, and the memories literally came flooding back.
In Shepherdstown, it is the mighty Potomac that surged alongside Shepherd's campus. For four and a half years, that river and the trails along it were my companions-- I could always escape to them when things became too overwhelming at school. A few hours of night fishing, biking nine miles on the trails, studying the water and the plants for my ecology classes, having nature at my backdoor while at school was a blessing. It was fitting that I'd spend part of my last night on her banks, discussing the same topics that were touched upon at the bar. This semester the great bridge that connects 480 in West Virginia to 34 into Maryland has become a very unnerving and unfortunate place in my mind after the awful loss we experienced.
Those train tracks....oh, those train tracks we used to walk down. Some of my best thinking occurred on those tracks in both towns, though I'm less frightened by the ones in Elkins, which are used by slow moving scenic trains. The tracks in Shepherdstown are more often traveled by high speed freight trains that are magnificent to watch as they rumble across the bridge over the Potomac. I spent many summers in Elkins scrambling across those train bridges, walking those tracks, discussing everything with friends and significant others. Those memories aren't likely to be forgotten any time soon and have certainly been times I've longed for recently.
Word for word, this song represents the two West Virginian towns that have stolen my heart over the years and left me in a crisis that I recognized fully today as I followed my old paths through town, along the train tracks and the river in Elkins- while I live in one town, I will constantly be longing for the other.
For my Shepherd friends that are one week into their next and, for a special few, their last spring semester, best of luck. Enjoy that town while you can, my loves. After our adventures there end and we move on to other places, we'll still be able to look back and say, "By god, we know that town." (how about that for a tacky ending?)
:)
