West Union, WV to Marietta, OH, 3.7.26
On the way to Marietta I stopped by the libraries in Ellenboro and Harrisville, WV. One distinct difference when it comes to doing business in this transition zone between the Midwest and the South is that commerce is easy and pleasant, as opposed to the reserved tighwad Pennsylvania Dutch / Urban Yankee approach.
Down here when you ask to have a look at any books in storage, they say sure, have at it. Back east and up north they fastidiously keep their stash under lock and key for their formal biannual sales. They want to wring every penny out of you or they don't want sharks cherry picking their stock? Along the Ohio river they're happy to make a buck whenever from whoever shows up.
Of particular note was Berdine's Variety 10 cent store, a delighful spot packed with curiousities and antiques. Of particular note was the glassware – Fenton, Tiffin and Moon & Stars, among many others – which was produced from the late 19th Century until perhaps the 1980's, when deindustrialization began to bite.
The fine workmanship originally wrought in Bohemia / the Sudetenland was imported by immigrants and recreated in the Upper Ohio River Valley. Today these factories are but a memory. But their wares are strewn all over every antique store, flea market and variety store.
I had a notion Marietta would be great, as I turned into the Laffayette Hotel on the waterfront. Right to the busy bar where service was hard to get, as a convention was in town and drunken golfers were vying more successfully for another Bud Light. Brief chat with one of these drunken professionals, but he was off just as quickly to break up a budding adulterous chat his buddy was having with a barfly. 2 and 2 smallish lime gimlets were duly consumed in a leisurly fashion.
The scene was subpar at the bourgieist overnight venue in town, with one exception. A gaggle of Amish had occupied a nearby table, and I resolved to chat with them. The gimlets were a bit on the light side, so I trusted myself that the interaction would be correct.
I made some remark about being from Lancaster County to break the ice and a pleasant 10 minute conversation ensued. Most of them were laughing at my patter, so I approached the patriarch at the head of the table with some quips which he parried with succinct ease. A wise man indeed.
I headed out in search of 'The Gator', a local dive recommended by back bar staff. On the way, I stopped in at 'Dead People's Stuff', another antique shop. This was my kind of place. They knew what they had, so the shopping was light, just a curious Zippo lighter. The ZZ Top bearded co-owner told me he had a storage space full of books, which I'd intended to follow up on. He tartly observed that he couldn't sell them locally because "hardly anyone can read".
The Gator did not disappoint. Grandmothers dolled up and drankin'. It was somebody's birthday, so I was plied with a pimento sandwich, corn chips and a delectable buckeye for dessert. Bud bottles were $2.75. Most folks here now work in the fracking business, so I learned some of the details of that line of work from a couple friendly fellas.
Later on, I discovered the smoking deck and chatted with a checkered crowd, including ex-cons of the opioid variety, who were loudly complaining about their fate. It was here that I discovered the scarcely concealed desperation and sadness of young men, at least at this bar on that evening. All it took was posing a couple open ended questions about life in Marietta and the not-that-drunk guys poured out their sadness and frustration.
It's possible my affect played a role in this. I do know that people were very nice to me. It was to an extent that surprised me, a happenstance that would come to be a virtual constant. It was some combination of Midwestern Nice and Appalachian familiarity. I began to slow down my cadance and twang up my accent, at first unconciously and then judiciously.
Sure, it was the usual things that bedevil many men, in this instance – girlfriends, work and family: in that order. But it seemed so surface here that it was kind of shocking. There was next to no patina of humor to mask the discontent. No city or Yankee reserve to conceal sadness. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this.
It dawned on me that in just trying to understand what life was like here I was doing anecdotal qualitative research, and the sad results for the remainder of the trip would be replicated again. And again. And again.
Perhaps the sample sizes were too small to be significant. Perhaps the venues biased the results. It was all getting to be too much, so I returned to the cushy confines of the Laffayette.
The bar was winding down and I was full up enough to have taken the edge off and precious little more. Turned out I hadn't paid my tab. The bartendress beckoned me over and made some appropriately chiding crack. They had some cockamamie scheme to bill the room, but I hadn't filled out the card correctly or some such. All in all the pattern was set on the second day – a working vacation to later finance the trip and nightly socializing research into life in this strange borderland realm.
