The Mexico of Pittsburgh

Have you ever read a Cormac McCarthy novel?  His stuff is either maddeningly hard to understand, because he makes up words and never tells you what exactly he's talking about, or else it's brutally clear and written in sweet poetic prose.  It's got a dreamlike quality, but those dreams can become night terrors.  In his Border Trilogy, the main characters are always escaping across the border into the wild lands of Mexico, where they get chased by bandits, get into knife fights, shiver in the craggy mountain heights, and occasionally fall in love.  Mexico is nearby but so far away from the world they know.  I've decided that West Virginia is to Pittsburgh what Mexico is to a Cormac McCarthy novel: close-by but little-known, kind of foreign, a little dangerous, and adventurous, and romantic.  I mean, just look at this lonely farm sitting in its deep Appalachian valley.

Today I drove the back roads of Marshall County, the county at the base of the Northern Panhandle.  It was my destination of choice last week, too.  Actually, I do tend to obsess over things, and the question that's been holding my interest lately is whether someplace as close to Pittsburgh as Marshall County, West Virginia, can have a truly Southern feel to it.  Why?  Well, it's all because I visited a web site that treated that old 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter, as the quintessential "Southern Gothic Movie."  

The Night of the Hunter is set in Marshall County, West Virginia, and like a lot of Southern Gothic, it deals with religious hysteria and hypocrisy.  Another film from the 1970s that's based on a different novel by the same author, Davis Grubb, is Fools' Parade.  It was also set in Marshall County and filmed entirely on location.  I watched it for free on YouTube last night and decided to spend today wandering among the hollers of the place...again.

This is Graysville Calvary Methodist Church, a way out among the winding lanes and pastures of this place.  I have to say, it has a distinctly Southern appearance, doesn't it?  Even in far-flung places, most Northern country churches have a bit more decoration about the belfry, a bit more in the way of cornices, and capitals, and arches.  But more than that, there's an undefinable Appalachian quality to the scene.

The architecture is more Virginian than Pennsylvanian.

Fools' Parade  isn't a great movie, which is probably why you can watch it free and nobody cares.  It is Jimmy Stewart's last major motion picture (1971), and it also stars a 20-year old Kurt Russell.  It's mildly entertaining, especially after the first half hour or so, but it doesn't wrestle with any big issues or the questions of life.  It does, however, include a few glorious old farmhouses like this place--which sits just above the sensibly-named Fish Run.

Fracking?  Oh, there's fracking here aplenty.  Makes me CRAZY.

Another old Methodist church that has a Virginian air about it.

Fish Run is beautiful, shaded by sycamores, deep here, shallow there.  I wanted to sped a lot more time here than I had available to me. 

One of the stream's deeper pools.  In places it was just a rocky trickle.  In other place, like this, it looked deep enough to sink a car.  

What about Marshall County feels "Southern"?  The roads are narrow and without guardrails.  The roads have no shoulders, and in many, many places they're eroded away to almost nothing.  The buildings are mainly white clapboard with broad porches and a simpler kind of ornamentation than you see further north.  The barns are smaller and shaped differently from ours.  Whereas northern barns tend to have "mansard" style roofs, barns down here--and further south--are roughly shaped like chalets.  The churches, definitely the churches.  I have to say, the few folks I heard speaking did not sound like Southerners.  And I don't know whether they eat fried chicken livers.