Memory Lane Meanderings Continued - Between Kirby and Terra Alta

 One of the most integral things a person has is their memories.  I am going to spend a large part of the remainder of this year talking about some places.  I talked already about my early childhood in Kirby, and the Little Falls Chapel in Falling Waters my late step-grandmother attended, and today for some reason I wanted to just talk a little about my high school years in Terra Alta now.  This is a pivotal part of my early years, as Terra Alta was my high school period and I had a generally fond and memorable life there, including essentially adopting a whole new family (or, maybe they adopted me, who's to say?).  Any rate, I am also doing this because in a couple of years, I will be finished blogging and will be embarking on getting my life story project typed up (the draft has already been handwritten in several books so I just need to get it in print now).  One of the reasons I am doing it this way is due to a bit of uncertainty about the new chapter of life I am about to embark on - soon I will be starting a new position, and with that more than likely a move to somewhere else, so I don't want to do a whole lot with bigger projects until I eventually am settled into a more permanent place.  Where I am at now in Baltimore is meant to be temporary, as I came here to work for a season at a Jesuit high school in town and that mini-chapter of life has ended now.  As everything comes together in the coming weeks, I will elaborate more on what is happening.  But for now, we are just going to revisit some of my past years, and introduce you to some of the places I grew up.  I hope you can enjoy the ride. 

There is a bit of a back story on Terra Alta before I arrived there, and I feel that is an appropriate way to open this story.  In the summer of 1985, I had successfully completed what was two of the worst years of middle school I had ever experienced - I felt out-of-place, and faced a lot of harassment and bullying then both from popular kids as well as the more rough crowd, and I didn't feel like I fit in anywhere then.  Things had started to improve for me in the second half of my 8th grade year, but it wasn't much to really jump for joy over.  At that time, we still lived in Kirby, but during that summer after my 8th grade year completed, we faced a lot of things - bone-crushing poverty due to a drastic change in our life circumstances was a primary issue, and instinctively I started to gradually pack up stuff beginning in July 1985 because I saw the end coming.  For food during that particular summer, we relied on three things - I had gotten into making homemade drop biscuits from scratch that fed Mom and me, and supplemented that diet with food we got from the local church's food bank (thank God for First Methodist Church in Romney, as they really helped us then - I still want to send them a small financial gift one day for that), and then raiding the neighbor's gardens at night to harvest things like cabbages, cucumbers, ears of corn, and yellow squash, which we then would fry and have as a simple dinner - meat was at this point a luxury, as the store in town had cut off Mom's credit, and for some reason Mom did not even get SNAP benefits or the Community Action assistance that had helped us for many years. To put it plainly, we were suffering badly.  When you start looking at fried sliced cucumbers and fried cabbage as a feast, you know you are scraping bottom.  It finally came to a head in mid-August, when circumstances dictated a move for us, and we then moved back with my grandmother and step-grandfather, who themselves at the time were in the process of a move of their own.  We all ended up moving together to the nearby community of Baker in Hardy County, and my step-grandfather rented this really nice farmhouse from an old, cranky man.  The farmhouse itself was actually quite nice - it had a beautiful kitchen, and the upstairs was relatively comfortable too.  It was at that point I started my high school years at East Hardy High School, and come to find out, high school was much better than middle school.

The farmhouse that my step-grandfather Lonnie leased was located out a remote country road called Sauerkraut Road for some weird reason.  The house was on one side of the road, and across the way was a nice little cattle pond and a small barn where the landowner kept some cattle.  It was about midway between the towns of Rio and Baker, and it was remote from both although the surrounding countryside did have some fairly affluent houses of people who worked in DC but wanted a quiet country getaway on the weekends.   At East Hardy, two very interesting things happened.  For one, I had graduated from alto sax - which Mr. Foster had so graciously set up lessons for me - to tenor sax, and our band teacher was a very nice preacher's wife, Mrs. Funkhouser.  Her husband, interesting enough, was also my English teacher, and a Methodist minister too.  A few years back, Mrs. Funkhouser wrote her own book of memoirs about her career as a music teacher called Measure by Measure, and I have a small piece I contributed to it that she kindly asked for from many of her former students.  I also have one of my few early band pictures in there too - in the marching band then,  I played cymbals as I was still a bit rough around the gills as far as my saxophone skills went, but I did get to play tenor sax in the small studio band (a high school big band, which was heaven for me) the school had, and that was a blast.  A second thing that happened there was that I developed a massive crush on a girl named Holly - Holly was beautiful, and Mom kind of helped that along by talking her up to me because she worked with Holly's parents the previous year at a fiberglass factory there in Wardensville.   The crush on Holly had three reactions - first she thought it was cute, then she got extremely annoyed at me, and then after I poured my soul into a letter to her, we knew boundaries and respected each other.  I can't totally fault her reaction to me though, as it was to be expected, but man, did I have it bad for her!   However, I did make a close friend there I still keep in touch with today, and her name then was Michelle Gray.  Michelle was a bubbly redhead who really made me feel welcome in the school, and because we both played sax then in the band we sort of had a bond between us.  Although Michelle was a cute girl, I never had any type of romantic feelings for her as to me she was just a really good friend and I really appreciated that in a new school and all.  We continued to keep in touch for a few years after, but then just sort of lost contact as we embarked on our respective futures.  However, about 15 years ago this thing called Facebook came into existence, and we reconnected and still keep in touch even today.  Michelle I believe lives in Virginia now, where she is a happy married and successful real estate agent with a couple of grown kids of her own now.  I still keep up with Holly too on occasion - Holly married and has a nice family now, and I think she still lives in that general area.  I also think Holly has grandbabies now as well, although I could be wrong - that is hard to believe too!  East Hardy was overall a very good experience for me, but it was way too short.  There were three things that happened I will give detail on now that caused us to move, so let's get into those.

The first thing that happened was the cranky old landlord of the farmhouse, a cratchety old man named Charlie, and he told Lonnie he had to move.  I would guess that a large part of that had to do with the menagerie of animals my grandmother and him had - a ton of dogs, and an assortment of poultry outside as well as I believe a cat or two.  Plus we had our dog Jill, my cat Dora, and my grandmother had parakeets.  All of that was slightly off-putting to old Charlie, and I think too he had friends who spied on his property back there (there was suspicion about the school bus driver, an older lady named Mrs. Leatherman, whom I believe was one of Charlie's longtime friends).  So, in early November, that facilitated a move, and two subsequent things happened that made that possible. 

The first was the death of Lonnie's older brother Lee.  Lee lived in Rowlesburg, and in almost every way he and Lonnie could have been twins.  Lee had a house just across from the cemetery there, and their sister Betty lived across the street in another house.  I cannot remember all the details of how it happened, but my grandmother and Lonnie somehow got the green light to move into that house, and this would be a huge adjustment for them - this meant they couldn't keep as many animals around, and therefore they had to ask a friend in Hampshire County to take all their poultry as well as a number of their outdoor dogs.  So, yes, I remember how that went, especially trying to transport a pickup truck with its bed full of cages containing cackling chickens, quacking ducks, and honking geese at 11 at night.  When the move finally came, that was challenging as well, given Lonnie and Mom went up to Rowlesburg first and my grandmother and I were stuck in a bare house for a night waiting for them to come back for us - I remember sleeping in two chairs pulled together while my grandmother slept on a cot that was left for us.  We made the best of it, and at some point I want to also devote a story to my grandmother too, as over the years our family dynamic was interesting to say the least.  To summarize though, my grandmother could be cranky, mouthy, and loud, but when it came down to it she always looked out for me, and I recall that with great fondness.  I was actually thankful that when she finally passed away in the hospital in Winchester, VA, in 2004, Mom, Barbara, and I were there.  However, my step-grandfather's brother paled in comparison to the next event, as it affected over one million people throughout the region. 

On November 5-6, 1985, an event happened that was perhaps one of the worst disasters anyone in our state had ever faced.  A particularly strong hurricane that had struck the Gulf Coast earlier - the hurricane was the fifth of the season, named Isabel - and sent rough weather well into the Ohio Valley.  According to Bob Teets and Shelby Young in their 1985 book Killing Waters: The Great West Virginia Flood of 1985 (Terra Alta, WV:  Cheat River Publishing), on page 5 it was noted that all of the previous four hurricanes of that active season caused a cumulative damage of around $2.5 billion and had so far cost 18 American lives between them.  Although Isabel herself would go back out to sea off the east coast of Georgia, a much more catastrophic storm called Juan was forming around the first of October, and it would hit the Gulf Coast between Pensacola and Port Arthur, TX, at around that time.  Juan was apparently only a Category 1 storm, and under normal circumstances it would give the Gulf Coast a bit of a beating and then be over.  However, a cold front from the Midwest would meet up with its remnants later, and that is what made it perhaps the most dangerous storm on record, doing almost as much damage far away from the ocean as Andrew would do later in 1992 and Katrina 20 years later in 2005. By the time the flood waters did their damage, the storm was not a hurricane anymore, and Juan had evolved into just a monster system of some other classification that dumped a tremendous amount of moisture over the Alleghenies and the little river towns like my hometown of Parsons and Rowlesburg would be hit hard.  Last year, 2025, was the 40th year commemoration of that horrendous flood, and what happened next was one of the most upside down years yet as we settled into Rowlesburg then. 

By the time we had finally moved to Rowlesburg, the town looked like a war zone from the damage the flood wrecked on the town.  While we were still in Wardensville when the flood had hit, the only thing that impacted us was the cattle pond overflowing into the road and not much else, as the farmhouse in Baker was far enough away from major rivers to not be overly affected (although many towns nearby were - Romney, Wardensville, Moorefield, and Petersburg were all hit hard).  But, we moved during the time the aftershock was still evident in Rowlesburg, and moving there meant a lot of adjustments.  For one, there was no drinkable water, and thanks to the generosity of Anheuser-Busch and other companies, water was distributed for free at the local Southern Baptist church in town.  The water itself came in six-packs of white cans, and each family in town could get a few cases a week based on family size.  The house my grandmother and step-grandfather moved into was thankfully far enough away from the river to not be affected, as it was at the ridge on the southern edge of town on 72.  However, the magnitude of the damage to the center of town was astronomical - whole streets and whole houses were completely flattened, and a deep, thick blanket of mud submerged many places then.  Being the Baptists and Catholics in town had the best resources, they worked together to help the town recover, and to this day both churches are talked about with great respect.  The other churches in town - the Methodists and a tiny Church of Christ near the railroad - were pretty much destroyed, and the only other church in town - the tiny Pentecostal church nestled in the hills just north of the town on Salt Lick Road - was cut off and had to rely on the nearby town of Terra Alta for what it needed now despite the fact Rowlesburg was normally literally in walking distance.  The damage the flood did to the town would take literally years to completely recover from, and even today it is fresh in the memories of many people there.  Perhaps the most shocking adjustment though was school then, so let's talk about that now.

In the early 1980s, every major town in Preston County had its own high school, as the schools in the county had not been consolidated like they were elsewhere then.  I want to say that pre-1985 there were five high schools in the county - Central Preston in Kingwood, West Preston in Reedsville, East Preston in Terra Alta, Bruceton High School in Bruceton Mills, and Rowlesburg High School which served the southern part of the county then.  After the flood happened, school had to resume somewhere, and by the time I got there, Rowlesburg School was meeting in the fire hall of the Buckwheat Festival grounds in Kingwood.  Although Central Preston was literally just at the end of the street then, the Rowlesburg School was small enough (around 300 students) to set up in the fire hall.  Our classrooms consisted of partitioned walls, and the principal had his office in the back of the building while the Buckwheat Festival kitchen served lunches.  Gym class was conducted at the Civic Center at the other end of the festival grounds, and there was no more band at that point.  If we needed a library, that was located on the next block in Kingwood, or students were allowed to use Central's library down the street.  And, that was the rest of my freshman year.  Interesting story about that was a few years back, in 2018, Barbara wanted to go up to the Buckwheat Festival, and that was the first time I had been in the old fire hall in 32 years.  If you ever have a chance to go to that, the Buckwheat Festival in September merits visiting - those Preston County buckwheat cakes and that sage sausage are worth the trip alone.  When we went to the festival in 2018, surprisingly we actually sat at a table in the very area my homeroom/History class (Mr. Cassidy was a great teacher then) used to be, and that was a surreal feeling too.   Also during that year, we had a long bus trip to school.  The buses picked us up in downtown Rowlesburg then, and we would have to go south on 72 to Macomber, and then climb the mountain on US 50 to Fellowsville, before turning onto SR 26 to go to Kingwood via the community of Tunnelton.  North 72 ran by the Cheat River, and large chunks of that road were destroyed by the floodwaters so no one could access it for months.  The bus ride was long, and I think it also altered the school schedule then somewhat then too. To complicate things more that year, Mom and I would move in early March 1986 across the river to the community of Mannheim, where Mom secured a live-in caregiver position for an 88-year-old man named Webby.  A short couple of months later, Webby would actually pass away, and then our move to Terra Alta would happen, which is the subject of another story later.

Living in Mannheim was not the worst condition I had ever been in - I mean, after all, I actually had lived in a flood zone all that winter!  But, it was an adjustment.  While I had a room to myself upstairs, the conditions were very sparse living there - Webby could only eat boiled stuff, so my heavens, we had a lot of boiled pork chops with onions!   If you have ever experienced those, I feel you - while they were edible, it was some of the most bland, depressing food I think I have ever eaten.   Mom seemed to thrive on it though, and come to find out later Mom was exercising a bit of extreme altruism living there and come to find out she could have easily varied the diet a bit.  Problem is though, my mom could not cook - she was never all that good at cooking.  Thankfully, I discovered ramen soup then so I also ate a lot of that too.  It was also during that time I became a born-again Christian too, as I had accepted Christ when Pastor Olen Phillips prayed with me on a cold January night and I was baptized two weeks later.  But, I felt truly like I was encountering spiritual warfare at that time, as I was not content, and I felt very depressed a lot of the time.  There were bright moments though, such as fishing in the Cheat with my good friend Jack Schaeffer then and catching the occasional hellbender salamander, as well as harvesting a ton of broad-leafed wild garlic in a meadow just beyond the house.  Moments like that, and a lot of prayer, kept me sane then.  Of course, once we did eventually move to Terra Alta and I started my sophomore year, I would soon find my own niche and settle into it well, but at this point it was still a time of upheaval for me.  When I do the next part of that story, I will talk in more detail about how that went.

The year beginning in August 1985 and ending in June 1986 was a rough intermediate period for me, and it was literally a year of transitions - I went from a dorky middle school student living in Kirby to becoming a fairly secure high school student in Terra Alta by the time July 1986 rolled around.  There is a lot about that transition year I would love to forget, as it was rough, but at the same time I also grew too.  As I continue the second part of this later, you will see how I sort of came of age in Terra Alta as I began to find the person I truly was, and that would shape me as I grew into adulthood later.  Thanks for allowing me to prattle, and will see you next time.