COMMENTARY: West Virginians’ resiliency made me a West Virginian

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — I’m not a West Virginian.

Or, at least, I wasn’t this time last year.

Despite having lived in the state for nearly 9 years, having lived in Morgantown, Clarksburg, Summersville, later Fairmont, and now Morgantown again, I never considered myself a West Virginian.

It was my adopted home, but for how long? No journalist can ever answer that, especially working in a smaller market; especially serving a community far away what is considered “home.”

Between June 23 and July 1 last year, that changed.

I was taking a break when the second heavy morning rain hit southern West Virginia this time last year. It was almost noon. I had recently taken over for Aaron Payne as the morning news anchor for the AJR News Network, and I still wasn’t completely accustomed to waking up at 4 a.m. for work.

Fortunately, I lived mere feet from my office. I walked into my apartment, sat down on my futon, and started playing video games. I figured a half hour break from the office would do me some good. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last break I would have for a very long time.

Richwood on June 23

The reports started coming in faster than we could count. White Sulpher Springs, Richwood, Clendenin. That was just the beginning. That day, I did the best I could traveling, but the weather made traveling difficult. I acquired what information I could, and I filed my stories for the day.

As the results became clear of eight inches of rain in a four-hour span after what had been an already wet week, the orders started coming in from all across our statewide network. Hoppy Kercheval asked me to be the network’s man on the ground in the northern part of the flood zone. That was easy enough, or so I thought.

Living in Summersville, I could easily get to where I needed to get to in Nicholas, Webster, Fayette, and Greenbrier counties. My colleagues in Charleston — Jeff Jenkins, Chris Lawrence, Shauna Johnson, Carrie Hodousek and the rest of the team — could handle the southern portion.

I was wrong about how much was ahead, though. There was nothing easy about this assignment. Roads had been washed away — enormous chunks gone. And when I did finally find where I was going, I was completely surprised by what I discovered.

I was a kid from New Jersey seeking stories from people who had just lost everything. I had been expecting people to turn me away. As a journalist, you become accustomed to rejection. It’s part of the job description. But almost no one turned me away in the days following June 23, 2016.

Charmco, Greenbrier County on June 24, 2016.

The first day after the floods, I tried to get into Richwood. Route 39 was completely blocked in by a combination of downed power lines, trees, and rock slides.

I reversed course. I found myself over the Greenbrier County line and in tiny Charmco. The Post Office was still under close to 5 feet of water. Cars were still mostly submerged. A few dozen people were standing outside where Route 60 met Route 20. To their right, the road was impassable — still completely flooded. They feared for their friends and neighbors in Rainelle. To their left, the road was impassable — still completely flooded. They feared for their friends and neighbors in Rupert.

They could see, in the distance, first responders in small boats traveling over the flooded road toward Rupert. For all intents and purposes, they were stuck. The only way out was Route 20 to Route 39 and back toward Summersville.

The local church remained under water. The day was beginning to grow hot and sticky. It was a terrible combination.

Two days after the flood, I found myself at a church in the Fayette County town of Ansted, but it no longer looked like a church. Though I’ve never seen one in person, it looked like my mental image of a small refugee camp. People were still being bused out of the hard-hit Greenbrier County town of Rainelle. About 200 people, with nothing but the now-worthless clothes on their backs, had been rescued by first responders in a daring overnight operation. They needed medical assistance. They needed food. They needed shelter. They needed peace of mind. That last one likely wouldn’t come for a long time.

Dozens upon dozens of donations have turned Ansted Baptist Church from exclusive shelter to the region’s distribution center for those in need.

A few people spoke to me in an off-the-record capacity. They didn’t want to reveal their stories. It was probably still too close for comfort. This is West Virginia, after all. One of the things that I had learned, at that point, was that West Virginians usually had an intense love for where they grew up — no matter how small the town.

That concept was foreign to me. I grew up in a town a little bigger than Morgantown. We knew no such pride. Mostly, people just kept to themselves in the quiet, well-kept community where I was raised. There was very little sense in my hometown of what I’ve discovered throughout West Virginia.

Now those people, the ones with intense pride in their town and their ancestral homes, had been evacuated en masse — like they were refugees. American refugees. West Virginian refugees. That’s what they were, but I couldn’t focus on the horror that came with that realization. I needed to press on.

Still, there was no bone in my body, no experience in my life, that could help me relate to someone whose entire life had just been unceremoniously uprooted. There was only one thing I could do.

I listened. It didn’t work at Ansted Baptist Church, but it did work everywhere else.

That day, I was finally able to make it to Rainelle to see the town that lost four people to the floods. There are very few words to describe what had happened in Rainelle. The town plaza when you enter the city limits looked like a military command center (or, again, what I imagine one would look like).

That was my first impression of Rainelle, a town that under normal circumstances would be quite scenic. It’s tucked away in between the mountains. Unlike the region I grew up in, the skyline wasn’t one of enormous buildings like Philadelphia, Camden, or New York (all less than an hour from my home town). The skyline was mountains — for as far as the eye could see.

Main Street was passable, but virtually every side road was mucked by mud. A number of people were beginning to dump their possessions, now worthless, into their front yards. Businesses downtown smelled like fish and mildew.

Rainelle, Greenbrier County, on June 25, 2016

Over the next few days, weeks, and months, I’d travel to communities with fewer than 100 people (again, I grew up in a town of about 35,000) and meet some of the most resilient people I could imagine.

I watched West Virginians, so many already living paycheck-to-paycheck, take extended absences from work to assist with flood clean-up. I watched a half-dozen supply hubs materialize organically–run by cafeteria workers, probation officers, local small businessmen, and retired volunteers. I watched restaurant owners run food and supplies to these hubs, traveling from Summersville to Ansted and up Gauley Mountain — all to try and reach tiny little Belva. It was a journey they couldn’t make efficiently because the Route 39 bridge near Swiss had been destroyed by the floods. A 35 minute trip turned into a 70 minute trip. They didn’t care. It needed to be done. It would need to be done for a long time.

At a supply hub in Dixie, an unincorporated Nicholas County community near the Clay County line, the recently shuttered Dixie Elementary School had become one of the most important supply hubs. It was there that I met 89-year-old Ruby Lee Woods. That was June 30. I was supposed to move to Fairmont the next day. Ruby approached me, thinking I was a volunteer. She asked if she could take two mops. I told her that wasn’t up to me, and I explained who I was and why I was in Dixie. She promptly invited me to her home in Brownsville, Fayette County for a chance to see the devastation caused by the floods.

I promptly called my landlord and asked him for a few days extension on my lease. He happened to be a volunteer firefighter in Nicholas County and had been in Richwood all week. He had no tenant lined up, and he agreed to my request. I cancelled my U-Haul and prepared to spend my entire Friday in Brownsville.

That was the day I nearly had a breakdown. It was too much. I was losing my cool. There was too much destruction; too many horror stories. I hadn’t lost anybody. I hadn’t even interviewed anyone who had lost anybody. But livelihoods? Homes? Memories? Gone. All gone. How can you not be moved when a woman, in tears over the destruction of her childhood home, tells you that she’d move to avoid putting her kids “through that” again? That was one of many stories I heard in the week after the floods. It was beginning to take its toll.

But I composed myself. I arrived in Brownsville two hours late. The community itself is so small that Google Maps doesn’t even recognize its existence. It wanted to take me to Lewis County — so I navigated manually.

Ruby was 89, but when I arrived, there she was in a light sweater looking through her possessions to see if anything could be spared. Everything on the first floor of her home was strewn across her front lawn. She was organizing them. She was going to ask the Health Department if there was any way to sanitize and save some of the smaller items. But there she was — simply going on about her day. She would occasionally take a break for a water, or to sit on her porch.

The possessions of Ruby Lee Woods on July 1, 2016

I was heartened. She had lost seven decades worth of memories, but she wasn’t going to simply collapse and call it a day. Ruby Lee Woods was going to continue to fight for her home — the home where she and her late coal miner husband had raised their children.

I had never met a coal miner, retired, laid off, or otherwise, before I moved to Summersville — before I covered those floods. I had never had a fresh pepperoni roll — literally right out of the oven — before 2016. I didn’t know how to identify a holler. I always knew a “holler” as someone yelling, or perhaps someone with an accent trying to pronounce Challah, the bread of my lightly Jewish upbringing. I didn’t drive on dirt roads. I didn’t truly understand the horror of potholes, at least not West Virginia potholes. I didn’t fish. I didn’t hunt. I didn’t own a gun, or shoot at all for that matter. Most of the experiences that my readers and listeners probably had were things I couldn’t claim to have in common.

In many cases, most of those things are still true. There’s one difference. I’m now a West Virginian. Adopted or not, West Virginia is now my undisputed home.

June 23 will never be just another day to me. It’s now steeped into my being. That’s when I saw the resilience of my fellow West Virginians.

And, whatever else anyone may think of this state, that’s something no one can take away. It’s why I’m now calling West Virginia home. For how long, who’s to say?

But, wherever I go, it will always be a part of me. This state is now part of me. I can only hope I’ve absorbed some of that resiliency.





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