Look upon my garden gate

Charleston, West Virginia - 3982.5 miles

"First, there is a mountain," observed Donovan, "then there is no mountain, then there is." It's a safe bet he wasn't thinking about West Virginia, but he could have been; there's always another mountain.

I wouldn't even bring this up except that I did the math last night, figured out I was about 1520 miles from home, and divided the distance into thirds. And not precisely equal thirds at that: the Delaware-to-West Virginia segment worked out to be slighly longer than the other two, which led me to reject the mapper's route recommendation (all the way up to Hagerstown, Maryland? I don't think so) and hack out my own route, which required a trip halfway around the Capital Beltway, the traversal of Interstate 66, and about 150 miles of mountain roads.

Virginia 55 jumps over the state line to become West Virginia 55 after about ten miles, and by then the rain was already coming down by the bucketful. (How come every time I'm in West Virginia, it rains?) The neat thing about 55 is that in about twenty years, if Robert C. Byrd lasts long enough, it will be a serious four-lane semi-expressway, but for now, eighty-five percent of it is the sort of overwound two-lane that is absolutely glorious when it's dry and genuinely scarifying when it's wet. Okay, I volunteered for this, but still, it was frightening in spots, and when I finally got to I-79, I was paid back by a shower twice as heavy.

Still, there was sunshine towards the end, and nothing compares to the southern stretch of I-79 when you can actually see it. Mountain people are legendarily unpretentious, and I believe it has something to do with living amidst all this natural beauty: you know there's always something out there that will likely outshine you and definitely outlast you, so you instinctively avoid hogging the spotlight.

I once said something to the effect that I'd like to retire in a place where the ZIP code starts with 0, 1, or a very low 2. Let's amend that to read "26999 or below". (Not to knock the Carolinas, which run 27000-up, but I've been there and I've done that.)

Oh, and my little shortcut saved a whole 30 miles and probably only took 15 minutes longer than the recommended route, not counting the 10 minutes in queue outside of Moorefield where one of the three consecutive 9-percent grades was hiding a wrecked truck and it took them time to clear off the roads. That smell of burned brake pad, I eventually determined, was actually the fragrance from Moorefield's poultry-processing plants. I don't care. West Virginia is like that; I can forgive them almost anything.

Except, of course, Robert C. Byrd.

Posted at 7:01 PM to World Tour '03