1 October, 2007 – Lewisburg, West Virginia

…guess I’ll take my time…

Miles From Nowhere has been rattling around in my head for days now, so I’m going to keep following it, to see where it leads me as we journey. Cat Stevens was with me all through high school and into college. He sang what my heart was singing, in words I could not have spoken myself. Not at the time, at least. His songs are old friends now. These days, those old friends bring me great comfort. Hymns from a simpler time, perhaps. A time when the future looked like a distant green mountain blanketed with vibrant life and wreathed with clouds of possibility.

Those mountains look very different these days. I’m in West Virginia now. The mountains themselves are being destroyed here. Mr. Peabody’s coal company is hauling them away.

It has been a time for taking my time. Our tour started with a seventeen-hour leg. Up at 2 AM to drive to Greensboro to catch the Crescent out of New Orleans. Three hours to Charlottesville for a seven-hour layover spent sipping at a coffee shop, eating breakfast in a restaurant, walking a long walk, and lying in the grass under a tree near the train tracks, stretching my hamstrings on a chain-link fence. At 2 PM the Cardinal rolled in and whisked us away, depositing us four hours later in Hinton, WV, where we were met by our hosts, John and Lynn. They guided us to the place we’d be staying, a cabin on a mountain overlooking the Greenbrier Valley. Then we went back down for some dinner and conversation before hitting the sack. I find it almost impossible to sleep on the train. I was ready.

On Monday, we took our time, rising late, sitting on the deck and drinking coffee as the sun peeked around the corner and through the trees. We read. Sally journaled (I notice that my Apple Dictionary does not want to accept “journaled” as a verb…). I napped in the sun. We made breakfast and took a walk and watched as the coal trains pushed on through the valley below. At one point, on our walk up an old logging road at the top of the mountain, I broke down. Looking forward, out across the coming six weeks, knowing what it would take me to show up and say what I’ve come here to say, I was struck with fear. “I don’t know if there’s enough of me,” I said. “I never imagined it would be this hard.”

Sally thought for a while. “The only way to do this tour is one day at a time,” she replied. Right then, in that moment, all was well. It was that moment I had to be in, and that moment I had to stay in, and that moment that I have to be in now. And now. And now. It’s the only way. The moments themselves are mostly quite wonderful. And they’re the only thing that’s really real. Guess I’ll take my time.

Four o’clock came and we met John and Lynn. We drove to Lewisburg, a lively, funky little town one county over, to a beautiful old theater where the screening would take place. Trays of finger foods were brought out. Tables were set up. Somewhere in there we walked across the street for a quick meal. And somewhere in there the projector and screen got set up and adjusted and made ready. By seven, the lobby was full of conversation and greeting. The house was opened. About seventy-five people took their seats. Sally and I made our introductory remarks and John hit “play”.

Sally and I snuck in and out, sometimes watching, sometimes just resting in the lobby. I got a deep hamstring stretch against the wall. I ambled down the main street with my laptop, looking without success to dip into someone’s open wireless network. Sally moved chairs into a circle for our discussion afterwards. I ate some cookies. Sally came out to report that the audience was laughing in the right places. Always a good sign. Sometimes, given the subject matter, people don’t know whether it’s OK to laugh. As far as I’m concerned, it is. We need to laugh, I think.

This entry is going on for a while. Guess I’ll take my time.

Twenty-five or so stayed for the dialogue afterwards. People told their stories, how they got to the area, why they were there, how the movie moved them, what they want and hope for and need in their lives, in their communities. We were mostly boomers in that circle, children of the huge post-WWII demographic bulge, that last-lap reproductive sprint toward the finished line. Many had been trying to find their way out of the mainstream culture for some time. Many were in this corner of the world to do just that. And it is sobering, I think, to stop and see just where the world is now, and how desperately we, as a culture, need to find our way out of the present delusion, and back into some semblance of sanity. With an entire global industrial culture poised to collapse, is there really any getting out?

The evening ended and we returned to the cabin. The next day we moved very slowly, sitting in the sun on the deck, debriefing and processing and drinking in the quiet air. We’ve been going “like lizards drinking”, as my friend Robert says, flat out for so many months that we’ve begun to unravel a bit ourselves. Placing our lives in service to the community of life, we find that we’ve neglected our own bodies and souls, back-burnered some basic needs, consigning them to that dangerous mirage called “when the doc is finished.” Sitting in the sun, we began to uncover that neglect, to sort our way through the mistakes we’d made and the needs that have gone untended. We can see now, I think, a true turning point, as this tour comes to a close, and a next phase begins, a time for hunkering down and balancing service with self. A time, I guess, for taking our time. The work of that began on the deck, in the sun, with a downy woodpecker nearby, hammering it all home for us.

Later in the afternoon we headed into Hinton, where Sally did a line of wi-fi at Micky Ds. We walked through town a bit, then got in our borrowed truck and headed out to the Sandstone Falls, a beautiful spot (of which we’d been told) ten miles down the New River. We walked the trail and sat by the falls, tasting unripe persimmons and surprising a mink.

At six we met with some friends of John and Lynn’s who had attended the screening the night before, for an evening of wonderful food and drink and great conversation. We spoke of rescued raptors and Wilson Pickett, of dying oceans and Scots-Irish heritage, of mountains decimated by coal companies and people destroyed by drugs and hopelessness, of failing health and failing economies and failing ecosystems and failing insect populations, and of strength and resolve and service in the midst of it all. Great people.

Two of them we saw the next day, Wednesday, our last day in West Virginia. Wendy and Ron own and run the Three Rivers Avian Center in Brooks, WV. They work to rescue, heal, rehabilitate and, when possible, release back into the wild, the many non-game wild birds that come into their corner of southern West Virginia. We got to visit their many friends, the resident owls, falcons, hawks and eagles that accompany them on their many educational adventures. And we got to watch the release of a pair of wide-winged hawks that were judged “ready to fly” and anxious to begin their migration to South America. One hawk circled high overhead about three times before taking off, as if to say, simply, thank you. It was a moving and inspiring experience. Ron and Wendy are smart, thoughtful, and deeply caring people, full of stories and anxious to share what they have learned from their birds. The work of saving these birds, and in so doing maybe saving entire species, is an unquestionable good, in my mind. Those creatures that are alive today can still be alive tomorrow. Once they are gone, they are gone forever. It is holy work, I think. Holy work. And they do it on a shoestring, as a non-profit with unpaid interns and volunteers. Donations to them are tax-deductible. Visit their website at www.tracwv.org and send them some support, if you are so moved. They are deserving of all the support they can get.

We had to say goodbye and meet up with our host John again, for one last sweet bout of conversation and a meal before we got on the train. John and Lynn took incredible care of us. Above and beyond the call of duty. They nurtured us at every turn, and organized a larger and generous crowd for our screening, above their expectations. We cannot thank them enough.

The train is here. Six PM. Off to Chicagoland.

Tim