Accidentally on The Road

In Albuquerque Dad said I was talking too much. He suggested I get a nice New Mexico-based novel to read and pulled over at Barnes and Noble. Whenever I walk into a bookstore an overwhelming wave quiets me -- so many books to read and things to learn and not enough life to take it all in. I'm so behind!

The nice woman at the customer service desk pointed me to a bin of local authors. She suggested "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. I ended up getting it because being a paperback it was the only one Dad would offer to buy me. And the cover said "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize."

I started reading, guessing that it might tell a story of the harsh realities of border crossings and the desperation of illegal immigration. A few pages in I realized it was a post-apocalyptic novel. New for me. Actually it turned out to be the bleakest and most brutal book I've ever read. But it read like poetry, like I thought Faulkner would. It made me never want to write another word because I could never construct such lyrical, abstract phrases.

I finished it in two days. It was the most hideous, hopeless story I'd ever read, and I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked through the flaming golden Aspens in the Santa Fe Forest. But it was incredibly tender and touching in its rendering of a father and son relationship -- the love and the purity of it.

What if the world ended, but even a decade later some wretched souls survived? No trees. No birds. Nothing to eat or wear. Only dried corpses and ruined cities. Everywhere is cold and gray and the ashy air almost unbreathable. The blank-faced living envy the dead. "Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave," McCarthy writes.

The man tries to protect the boy from the deranged cults, violence and cannibalism that reign. "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, dont you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget."

If you think you can handle it, read it. Somehow it's beautiful.

Please don't stop the music

I bought tickets for another Mountain Stage concert to see Regina Spektor -- even though it was nearly three hours away in Morgantown, W.Va. A couple days earlier while listening to one of her new songs, Eet, I decided I'd regret missing the experience. I planned to spend the night with my gram and drive back in the morning. I headed up to the WVU campus, Google Map directions in hand. I made it downtown 30 minutes before the show, but I never came across the streets listed on my directions. I figured I'd find them if I drove around.

I didn't. Thirty minutes later, after nearly sliding back into the line of traffic behind me before I could switch from brake to gas at the stoplights perched on steep hilltops, I parked with hopes that I could ask directions and get there on foot. The first coed I solicited had no idea what the Creative Arts Center was. Of course only clueless freshmen would be roaming campus on a Sunday night. The next girl rambled on a five-minute list of muddled directions. She lost me after the third turn, when I noticed her tongue ring. Finally a guy with a backpack told me if I took a right and walked up the hill I'd come to the road listed on my map. I started up the hill. After 15 minutes of trekking, the sidewalk ended at a busy intersection.

By the time I made it back to my car it was dark. The concert had started 30 minutes earlier. I took out my contacts and put on my glasses. I thought about calling my parents and asking them to look up directions online, but they were at church. I drove back up the road I'd walked and found the road listed on my directions midway up the mountain. I turned onto the unlit gravel road and followed it deep into a hollow that dead ended by a trailer. By the time I managed to maneuver my Corolla around, I panicked when I saw that my gas gauge had dipped well below the E line. I was ready to call 911. Google had failed me. I'd even been extra responsible and called the venue before I left to get more specific directions because the website only listed a P.O. Box, but I only got a machine.

I made it down the hill to a BP, but I was sure I'd missed my show. I had to wait in line for a functioning pump and make an emergency run to the bathroom before I could ask the clerk for directions. How humiliating would it be to admit to my family that I'd driven three hours for a a concert and screwed it all up? I was disappointed to the point of tears. I knew the feeling well. Suddenly I was lost, frustrated and alone again in Europe.

I got back in my car in one last attempt to locate the building. I passed something big on the left and pulled in the lot. The doors were locked. I realized it was the stadium. A few minutes later I finally made it to The Creative Arts Center, more than an hour late. The box office was closed, but after 10 minutes a guy located my will-call tickets. I slipped in the doors and snagged one of the last open seats just before Regina Spektor took the stage.

And all my frustration was worth it. Soviet-born, Bronx transplant Spektor belted out the most gorgeous tracks from her new album, "Far." She's a classically trained pianist and singer who writes and arranges her own songs, all of which are distinctive with her pure, haunting voice and quirky lyrics that are both profound and funny. Some songs are abstract, and others tell stories. Sometimes she makes crazy noises with her mouth like buzzing or beatboxing and taps out rhythms on the piano. Her East Village-cultivated, alternative sound is far from the folk music I've heard on the Mountain Stage.

I was most looking forward to hearing Eet, "It’s like forgetting the words to your favorite song / You can’t believe it / You were always singing along." While she was on stage plinking the piano and belting into the attached microphone with her dark red curls and red lipstick, captivating the auditorium with her so-much-better-than-an-iTunes-track performance, I thought my favorite songs were Laughing With and Folding Chair. Sometimes a recording, no matter how professionally produced, pales after hearing a talented artist create it live. Listening to music like Spektor's gives me a particular sensation. I've read the quote "Good music makes people feel homesick for something they've never had." That statement is less inspirational than depressing, but it expresses exactly how I feel.

Shades of pumpkin

My childhood dream of experiencing the Pumpkin Festival came true last week. As a Halloween-obsessed little girl who got excited just thinking about the pumpkins of October, I never got a chance to go to the annual festival in Milton. I would have gotten giddier about the event as a kid eligible for the pumpkin painting contest, but I still appreciated the hay bales, scarecrows and piles of warty, hooked gourds.

Throughout the afternoon I paused to inhale the apple butter, pumpkin rolls and spiced fudge but passed by the tractor salesman and gutter-guard displays. I snapped a photo of the festival's winning pumpkin that weighed in at 1,140 pounds and took a smaller one home.

The fall kick continued Saturday with roasted butternut squash coated in crushed coriander seeds (the secret is to boil the squash before you attempt peeling and cutting it) and a leaf-crunching hike through the Kanawha State Forest. I further embraced the autumn season and its warm hues by dying my hair red. Yes, I'm a redhead, a full-blown ginger, nothing auburn or reddish about it. I've secretly always wanted to try out red hair, having long admired the locks of Debra Messing, Kate Walsh (of Grey's Anatomy) and Julianne Moore. I decided to try out the head-turning shade as I'm approaching my 24th birthday. I'm seizing all risk-taking opportunities in the face of my fleeting youth. Let me know if you have any daring ideas ...

Before corn flakes

I sat at a fold-out table holding a carton of vitamin D milk. I looked at my styrofoam plate stacked with buckwheat cakes, blackened sausage patties and a container of Motts apple sauce. The room had fluorescent lighting, tiled floors and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. The crowd wore WVU sweatshirts and jeans. I hadn't seen so many perms, camo hats and suspenders in one room since I was a little girl living in Scott Depot during the '90s.

It was a rainy Saturday in September in the little town of Kingwood, W.Va. We'd driven an hour through winding hillsides tinged with red, orange and yellow leaves and dotted with horses, hay bales and trailers on our way to Preston County for the annual Buckwheat Festival. My dad and gram had wanted to go in memory of my granddad. I liked the idea of eating buckwheat cakes at a fall festival in small-town West Virginia.

After our $7 breakfast served by the Kingwood fire department, we went to the basement to check out the arts and crafts. I spotted a couple of stands selling exquisite painted pottery, but it was far out of my price range. I settled for a chunky, Peruvian-esque bracelet. The long-haired Lewisburg artist called the pattern on the polished, burgundy stones tiger's eye. Outside I read the signs hanging over a row of food vendors: "Hot Delicious Fried Dough. 'Mountain Ears' -- Fresh Buttery Corn on the Cob. Fresh Fried Pork Rinds." The three West Virginia food groups.

Luckily the night before we'd gone to the Provence Market Cafe in Bridgeport for casual French cuisine. Gram asked me if I was going to brush my hair before we left for dinner. She's from a better kempt generation unfamiliar with today's bed-head waves. She commented on the laurels and mums around the porch on our way into the restaurant. I think that skill's been lost on my generation. To start I ordered the soup du jour, butternut squash. It ended up being a bisque, something I'd never order as I'm unable to justify the drinking of cream. Thank goodness for my ignorance because the sweet and spicy recipe was to-die-for. I ordered one of the specials for my entree, fire-roasted red peppers and tomatoes with mushrooms over homemade linguini.

I shared a bed with Gram that night. She likes to talk to me in the middle of the night. When I'm asleep. "Don't you worry Rachel," she said at 2 a.m. "It will all work out. My mother asked me if I'd ever end up getting married, but when I met George it happened so fast."

The next evening we bought her a DVD player so we could watch "Mona Lisa Smile" (love the red lipstick, synchronized swimming and bicycles with baskets). She insisted we leave her handwritten instructions so she could turn it on once we left. That night she declared the television set broken several times and told us we better fix it before she had to call the cable company.

I remember my granddad exhibiting similar frustrations with electronics. I've never been mechanically inclined either -- I still struggle with my iPod wheel, and the real reason I don't watch TV is that I can't figure out all the remotes. I started thinking that if my academic grandfather and crossword-whiz grandmother had the same problem, maybe such skills (or the lack of) were hereditary. "Technology intimidates them," my dad said when I shared my observations. "It's a fear thing." I'll take that. So I'm not too slow to work a Playstation. I have a phobia.

Mountain Stage

Last night I went downtown for the Mountain Stage, a live radio show aired on NPR. I drove the 25 minutes to see The Indigo Girls at the Clay Center hoping that I wouldn't regret parting with my $20. "One ticket please," I said at the box office.

"Someone left an extra ticket here," the woman at the counter said. "They told me to give it to the next person in line if the seat's okay with you."

I reveled in my luck as I walked toward the front of the auditorium to row A, seat six. I suffered a rush of empathetic stage fright for the host and performers when the "On Air" lights flickered on. Gary Jules opened the evening at 8 p.m., singing and strumming his high-strapped guitar alone on stage. The Asheville resident wore a fedora and cuffed jeans that revealed the red socks under his loafers. His songs were so simple yet lovely that I wished I had a smartphone so I could download them from iTunes on the spot. I'm a sucker for haunting melodies (and listening to my favorite, "Horses," on MySpace right now).

Billboard Magazine profiled Jules when his song "Falling Awake" broke the top 100 despite being only available on iTunes after it played during a dramatic episode of Grey's Anatomy. "I actually wrote it as a happy song about my son being born," Jules said of the tune, which played in a scene where doctors pulled the life-support plug on the father of one of the lead characters.

Then another lone guitarist named Chris Smither took the spotlight, looking like a '70s photograph with his shagged hair and button-up shirt tucked into slim-cut jeans. The story-telling musician has released 11 albums over the past 40 years. I liked his song about the constant questions his three-year-old adopted daughter from China asks. The audience laughed to lyrics like "Were you as big as you are now when I was born? I been this big a long time, that's why my face is worn / But were you ever little, and if so where was I? Yes I was, but you weren't anywhere or anywhy ..."

Next a woman with an actress-lithe body and toned arms stepped on stage carrying a guitar. Turns out she was Jill Hennessy, the eponymous lead of Crossing Jordan, a former Law and Order cast member and a Broadway veteran. So not only is she a beautiful TV star, but she also writes country songs that she sings with her deep, powerful voice. "I sang for money on the streets of Toronto 20 years ago," she said. "The Indigo Girls had a show one night. By the time I made enough money for a ticket, they wouldn't let me in."

After Hennessy came one of the world's best banjo pickers, Alison Brown. The Harvard grad said an astronaut took her new CD on a recent Hubble mission. He wanted to listen to it for the first time in space. I expected to see a woman rocking out bluegrass on the banjo, picking the life out of the strings and breaking into wild, spontaneous jigs. But Brown moved nothing besides her fingers as she played a set that reminded me of elevator music, making it look like she could strum in her sleep.

At 10 p.m. The Indigo Girls took the stage. Unlike most musicians I see in concert, I wasn't taken aback by how attractive, stylish and slim they were. But I couldn't get over their dream-like harmonies, solid acoustic talent and poetic songwriting. I wanted to call someone up and tell them to turn on their radio. I didn't want songs like "On the Way to Fine" and "Sugar Tongue" to end, but even when they did they kept replaying in my head the whole drive home.

So I guess you know you're from Appalachia when you're into folk music, even though you've never been able to develop a liking for country or Southern rock. Come to think of it, the Mountain Stage fit my mission of embracing my West Virginia roots while I'm stuck here. And I wouldn't have minded parting with my 20 bucks one bit.

Fall with it

This is the first week of fall, my favorite season. There’s something about that smoky scent in the air, the crunch of leaves beneath your feet and the pumpkins on porches. I’m ready to pull on a pair of knee-high boots, wrap a scarf around my neck and zip up a jacket to head outside on a crisp evening. Oh, to live in a Land’s End catalog.

The season brought new beginnings when I was growing up. Fall meant first days of school with new classmates, teachers and locker numbers. It was a time for blank notebooks and sharp pencils stuffed in fresh backpacks. Back-to-school-shopping for corduroy and tights made me giddy.

My birthday comes in autumn, as does Halloween, one of my favorite holidays. I cut felt leaves and hot-glued them to myself then stuck a wreath on my head and called myself a tree when I was nine. Another year I hung a white box I’d painted with black dots over my shoulders. I tied fuzzy dice around my ponytail and convinced a friend to join in the project so we could be a pair of dice. The next Halloween I cut a picket fence out of a box and made construction paper flowers and a pipe-cleaner butterfly headband for a garden costume. My last year going door-to-door I painted my hair pink, dressed in black and pulled on a knit cap for an Alias spy inspired get-up.

Now that I’m graduated from school and trick-or-treating, fall makes me want to go pumpkin picking, carve a jack ‘o lantern and roast apples and squash. I have berry lip stain, September fashion issues and cozy sweaters on my mind. I want to drive down an interstate curving through hillsides igniting into oranges, reds and yellows.

If I weren’t all grown up I'd jump in a pile of leaves and knock on doors trimmed in scarecrows and skeletons, carrying a big bag and chanting “trick or treat.

On the Gauley: Braving my Mountain Roots

My father handed his waiver to our whitewater rafting trip leader, a red-haired giant with waist-length braided pigtails and mutton chops that spread across his neck who referred to himself as Dougie-Doug. He paused, giving my dad a double take. “Hey bro,” he said, leaning in to whisper. “You got your wetsuit on backward.”

I came around the corner. “The knee pads go in front, Dad,” I said, pointing to the legs of my own Star Trek jumpsuit.

While he returned to the locker room, I explored our whitewater outfitter’s base camp in The New River Gorge of the Appalachian Highlands. The unfinished wood and vaulted ceilings made it feel like an oversized hunting lodge. I felt out of place among all the grizzly guys. The few other women on the campus were sinewy and makeup-free, sporting ball caps and Patagonia duds

Our trip marked the first day of Gauley season, the three weeks when the Summersville Dam releases a torrent of water that roars down nearly 700 feet of rugged canyon to create 28 miles of raging rapids. Whitewater enthusiasts from all over the world flock to West Virginia every fall to paddle the river. The rapids rank one-five on a scale determined by force and risk. A six indicates a 50 percent survival rate. A seven is suicidal.

As newbies, we’d be rafting the less intense Lower Gauley rather than the brutal Upper Gauley, which has five back-to-back class five rapids. If Dad had his way, we’d be going down the mild and scenic New River. However, we’d received an involuntarily upgrade when the company canceled the trip he originally signed us up for. The high school age limit for this more intense excursion explained why beer-guzzlers outnumbered the church youth groups.

After we buckled our helmets and life vests (which the staff referred to as pfd’s), we filed into a blue and white school bus for a one-hour ride to the Gauley River deep in the mountain gorge. Doug started the ride rattling off a stand up routine of farm animal jokes.

We stopped smiling when he transitioned to the safety lecture. He warned us of the importance of holding our paddle grips during even the most aggressive of rapids. “Let go for a second,” he said, “and that hard plastic handle will knock out your teeth or bash in your face.” I imagined my new braces lacerating my lips when we hit a violent wave.

Then he ordered us not to swim upright if knocked out of the raft. “The river’s 500 feet deep in some spots, but other times we’ll be grazing rocks,” he said. “Tread water, and your feet will hook between rocks or an ’86 Chevy. You’ll be snapped while we’re reeling ya in with the rope or the waves are pullin’ ya.”

If we fell out and our guide motioned us to come on but then turned away to lead the raft in the opposite direction, it would be because his responsibility was to pull the crew to safety first. “That’s when you do your best impression of an Olympic swimmer,” he said. “And remember, when you hit a rapid never stop paddling.” He closed his speech with an offer to bus any of us who’d changed our minds about the trip back to the parking lot.

I stared out the window the rest of the ride. I had begged for this trip, insisting that I couldn’t leave West Virginia without rafting its world-class rapids. Dad was quiet too, looking like a petrified, nerdy astronaut with his retired ‘90s eyeglasses and white helmet sitting high on top of his baseball cap. What had I gotten us into? It would be my fault if the rapids knocked one of us unconscious, pinned beneath an undercut boulder in what Doug referred to as the washing machine of a monster rapid. I pictured a split helmet and ripped life jacket spewing out four hours later.

We met our guide Ray when we arrived to the river. He’d waited in line at dawn in hopes of surfing on our trip. With hopeful guides from all over the world heading to the Gorge, snagging a gig can get competitive during the 20 days of Gauley season.

After we shoved our raft in the water, short, buff and bare-chested Ray told us get off the middle cushions, which he called ejector pads. Instead we had to sit balanced on the raft’s outer edges, bracing ourselves with our feet. “Three paddles forward. Break,” ordered Ray as we set off on the big-water river. “Now four paddles back.”

Before each rapid Ray instructed us where to swim if our brace failed and we fell out. “Don’t go left — there’s a gnarly rip current by that third rock over there,” he’d say. “But don’t veer too far right either or you’ll get caught in that twisting hydraulic.” Soon my calves cramped from the ferocity with which I sandwiched my feet in the crevices of the raft.

I sat behind Tim, staring at the XXL scrawled on the collar of his too-short wetsuit rental. Tim was about 6-foot-seven and provided commentary throughout the trip, with statements like “I learned to tell time with my thumb” and “When Ray says technical he means difficult.”

I clenched my paddle grip with white knuckles as we bounced through our first class five rapid. The rest of the group hooted while we pounded down the steep run. “Woohoo!” “Bring it on!” “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” they shouted. When the waves splashed my face I squinted, lips pursed in silence, paddling for dear life and squeezing my legs to the raft with all my might. “Stop hollering and start paddling!” I wanted to scream during the aquatic roller coaster. I kept rowing even when the water launched us so high that I paddled air. I remember my dad waling “Ride ‘em dogies!” when he surfed the waves on a boogie board during beach vacations. Not now. Not a peep out of him either.

We crashed and swirled through rapids dubbed Pure Screaming Hell (which included two deadly holes called Purgatory and Hell Hole), Heaven Help Us and BFR (an acronym standing for your first guess). When not maneuvering the torrential chutes and their ferocious waves, we coasted by waterfalls and boulders through a tunnel of rock wall and forest.

“Come on,” Dad said to me when we floated to a less turbulent pool that Ray declared safe to swim. Without thinking, we jumped overboard to flail down the Swimmer’s Rapids. I yelped as soon as I hit the 50-degree water. “It’s cold!” I shouted. I tried to keep my toes in view as I glided down the river. Dad fought to swim to our boat as the current swept him toward craggy ledges. He felt panicky and hypothermic, he later told me. Jim, one of our crewmates who’d also gone for a swim, suffered an asthma attack as the chilly waves pounded his face. That’s why Ray left me floating out there on my own. I feared he’d deserted me to body surf the next round of rapids.

When the boat made its way over to pick me up, Dad leaned overboard to thrust me up by the armpits with all his might. When that didn’t work, he held onto me and flopped himself backward. I shot into the air and slid across the floor of the raft to land on top of him.

Not long after our slapstick performance we parked ashore to end our 12-mile, five-hour run. I shivered in my soaked layers, dreading the hour-long bus trip back. I had jumped in the river wearing my jacket, wetsuit, long-sleeved Under Armour tee and swimsuit under my life jacket. I couldn’t imagine peeling all that off to use one of the portable toilets. I curled up in a cold, wet ball against a window in the middle of the bus. Sputter. The bus didn’t start.

Our bus arrived more than an hour later. Doug felt responsible for the holdup and entertained us on the way back with stories of the local Fayetteville police force, more Dukes of Hazzard than Mayberry according to him.

Back at base camp, Dad and I met outside the locker rooms ready to drive the 20 minutes to our campsite at Babcock State Park. He already had his headlamp strapped across his balding head. I wonder what Doug and Ray thought when he tipped him while wearing the contraption. That night we roasted hotdogs and then crawled straight in our sleeping bags.

After breaking camp the next morning we headed back to the whitewater outfitter for our Treetop Canopy Tour. Outside a group of tattooed guys in board shorts smoked cigarettes and spoke to a couple of park rangers holding clipboards. “Must have gotten busted for something,” Dad said. Then our zip line guide Heath informed us that their friend had died rafting the Upper Gauley an hour earlier. The 40-year-old man had fallen into the water and suffered cardiac arrest.

I couldn’t stop contemplating the sobering scenario as we geared up in our harnesses and helmets before hitting the new, state-of-the-art course. We began by perfecting our technique on a zip equivalent of a bunny slope. Then we moved up to the platforms built around Eastern Hemlocks and White Oaks connecting the network of cables. The real zips were long. And fast. And high. And as we proceeded they got longer and faster and higher.

We assumed the jokester guys in our group were ball players on a team-bonding trip with their coaches. Filming the perfect YouTube documentary interested them as much as the thrill of whizzing along at 30mph while hanging 110 feet in the air. They surprised us when they revealed they were a bowling team from Raleigh.

Our guide Heath the wild-haired mycologist and Dad the doctor bonded over Latin terminology. They pointed out the red fungi crawling across the trees and the lethal white Amanita Verosa Destroying Angel mushrooms sprouting below as we wobbled across Indiana Jones-style bridges. My apprehensions eased after getting double clipped to double steel cables. I focused on sitting back in my harness and tucking my legs into a cannonball to increase my speed like Heath suggested. Dad maintained a death grip on his trolley that slowed him down. His fear of heights kept him from appreciating the sweeping views of the rocky Mill Creek and rhododendron patches below the forest canopy. I found swinging my body around the platform edge to rappel to the ground at the end the most nerve-racking part of the three-hour tour.

That weekend Dad kept pretty quiet. I fretted that he regretted letting me drag him on the extreme adventure. But after he bought the DVD of our whitewater trip and compulsively checked to see if our zipping pictures had appeared online, I realized I was in the clear.

As for me, revealing I’m a West Virginian is easier now that I don’t have to sheepishly admit to incredulous audiences that I’ve never rafted my state’s world famous whitewater. After trekking the Andes, wandering Tuscan hillsides and hiking through Argentine rainforest, I’m getting around to conquering my own state.

On the way home from our weekend adventure we stopped at the Tamarack Best of West Virginia restaurant for pan-fried fillet of rainbow trout, kale and fried green tomatoes. I strutted in smelling of campfire, rocking river-water waved hair and wearing Vasque hiking boots. And for once, I felt like a native mountain woman.