Episode 3: West Virginia
I would say that this is kind of the point where I started to recognize my own tendency toward not taking pictures, and where I started to try to actively remind myself to work on that. As such, there will be more to see here, but I don’t guarantee that the pictures will all be good, or even worth it.
The portrait of a man who knows he has no one to blame but himself for being outside a closed Radio Museum, because he didn’t think to check what days they’re open. The graveyard is just behind my left shoulder.
When I was disappointedly driving out of Huntington, I turned a corner and right on the side of the road, I spotted a miniature Arc de Triomphe. After my first episode involved a small Leaning Tower, I couldn’t resist pulling over and getting a look at this mini monument. As it turns out, this is a landmark dedicated to the West Virginians who died in WWI, which was as good a reason for it to be there as I could have hoped to find.
At the foot of the mini Arc de Triomphe, there was a buried time capsule, which made me realize that I fucking love time capsules. Everything about them are great. They represent a belief in the future, and a desire to be generous to the people of the future. They also recognize a deep human need to be understood, in how people often put thing in time capsules that they think will help future people get what their present day was all about. Further, even though they are meant to be opened in the future, they have a deep respect for the present, because the very existence of a time capsule implies that there’s something about this present day that is worth being rediscovered in many years. Oh man, do I love a time capsule.
An abandoned church that I found in Wyoming, WV.
I walked up to the door, but decided against going inside. It was partially out of a fear of mold or falling debris, but also out of a respect that I didn’t have permission to enter. I was struck by the scene, how it was in complete disarray, but one pew remained standing probably pretty close to how it always was. It felt like there was a visual metaphor in there somewhere.
A sign for a completely different church in Wyoming County. I chose to take a picture of this because there weren’t a ton of buildings that said “Wyoming” on them, and also because that angel statue kind of looks bored. Like he’s waiting for a ride to come pick him up after Sunday School.
I took a hike in Chief Logan State Park, and came across this statue along the way.
The plaque on the Chief Logan statue definitely got my attention, and a fair amount of time after the hike was spent looking into this guy’s history. It’s an amazing story of a guy who tried to coexist with white settlers, but eventually they killed all of his family, so he decided that maybe he’d been too nice. Obviously, his speech that’s quoted on the plaque is powerful, but there is a tragic element to it, which is that Logan blamed the wrong guy. Colonel Cresap was a real asshole and a murderer, but he did not carry out the Yellow Creek Massacre, as Logan asserted. That accusation was repeated by Thomas Jefferson in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, and because of the high profile this gave the claim, it was denied which led to Jefferson investigating the underlying crime. It appears that Cresap himself was uninvolved in the actual massacre, but that the men who did the killing were his associates. Jefferson added a correction to his book, but honestly, he probably didn’t have to. Maybe technically Cresap didn’t carry out that massacre, but Logan’s also not wrong.
A picture of the river at my campsite that I was able to take in the approximately 90 seconds I had between arriving and the torrential rains beginning.
