older than the trees, younger than the mountains

So now that I have significantly bored you all with my a-little-too-enthusiastic babblings about US Highways and Interstates, I'll tell you about what it's like to drive them.

Last any of us cared, I was on US-19 in West Virginia. I stopped occasionally along the road to stretch my legs, but none was as enjoyable as the town of Fayetteville. In 2006, the town was named one of the Coolest Small Towns in America by Budget Travel. (Then again, one of BT's coolest "small" towns of 2010 had 110,000 people, so we kinda wonder how they define "small." Fayetteville has fewer than 3,000 people, so it is indeed small.)

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 12: Fayetteville, West Virginia).

I took a detour into Fayetteville and found a teeny little main road strip with a theater, many shops, restaurants, antique stores, historic old facades and a stately courthouse (Fayetteville is the Fayette County seat). I wandered around and took some pictures, and chatted with a few fellow travelers who were lounging in the shade outside the Fayette Theater. I drove up into the hills a bit and came across the Wild, Wonderful 24-Hour Adventure Race, where mountain bikers were emerging out of the woods to the cheers and whoops of a group of folks holding stopwatches. I wandered around the parking lot of the trailhead and it was as if I wasn't there; they were all so intent on the race that nothing else mattered. Adrenaline blinders.



After setting out from Fayetteville, just north on 19 I came upon the New River Gorge National River, which is part of the National Parks System. However, by the time I arrived, the Visitors' Center had closed so I didn't get to have my passport stamped. Oh well, guess I'll have to go back! I stopped by the Canyon Rim Visitors' Center, which is most directly off US-19 (I would have explored the whole park, but I had told my family I'd be in Pittsburgh that night), and got a load of the New River Gorge Bridge, which US-19 crosses.


Edit: Images for this part of this entry are grouped along with the Fayetteville images, linked above.

The bridge is 876 feet tall and more than 3,000 feet long, which makes my stomach do a flip-flop even while I just sit here in my desk chair. It's the third-largest arch bridge in the world, and the largest in the Western hemisphere. I only got to glimpse it for a few moments while strolling the Canyon Rim Visitors' Center, but it was a truly awesome sight (I'm a sucker for rustic feats of engineering). There is also a steep, rocky trail down the side of the gorge from the visitors' center, but since I had my dog with me and it was way too hot to leave him in the car (not to mention way too hot for me to be scaling the side of a mountain), I opted to leave that for next time too.

After Fayetteville, the rest of the ride to Pittsburgh was generally uneventful, except for the Greene County Coal Miners Memorial in Kirby, Pennsylvania along I-79.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 16: Greene County Miners' Memorial - Pennsylvania).

I've always had a fascination with coal mining, so I knew I had to pull off the highway to check out this marker, which is at a welcome center along the interstate. The marker's inscription declares:

On December 6, 1962, 460 feet directly beneath this site, 37 miners lost their lives in the U.S. Steel Robena Mine's Frosty Run Explosion - one of the worst mine disasters in Greene County history.

What stood out about this to me was that it was "one of" the worst disasters "in Greene County history." That means that there have perhaps been worse disasters, and it only speaks for that one county. The dangers of coal mining are such that when 37 men die in one explosion, there are worse things that have happened perhaps even on that very spot.

I don't know. I have tried to write creatively (poetry, nonfiction, what have you) about coal mining in the past, and I can't bring myself to properly say what I want to say, so I should just stop trying for now. There are places where there are literally fires burning underground for decades. There are steel lunchboxes full of scraps of paper penciled with last messages to wives and children. Most of the mines in the world are some sort of tomb or another; and now, with mountaintop removal mining, perhaps men aren't dying, but the ecosystem is facing certain death for the sake of America's demand for electricity.

Yeah, as I said, perhaps I shouldn't even try any more. Words can't do these thoughts justice.

I'll write more later about my weekend in Pittsburgh, not to mention what comes next.