West Virginia is, in a lot of ways, just about everything you might imagine West Virginia to be. It’s beautiful. It’s economically depressed. It’s intriguing. It’s repellent. The same is true of the town in which my brother and his family live. Between a large university (by the standards of one who went to college with 450 people) and the remnants of a once thriving steel industry, there are plenty of hints of promise and hints of past grandeur.
I’ll miss coming here, for sure, when these folks move. They’re going to East Lansing, which is not so economically depressed itself. You don’t have to go too far to visit depression though. In any event, it will probably be harder to visit on a regular basis and to project all sorts of fantasies on that town. The fantasies which I project on this place would probably be hard for it to live up to, given the challenges that the region faces.
Still though, they have overcome worse. This is the land of the Thundering Herd, after all. This is the place that they make movies about. As hard as it may seem to imagine this city regain the vitality that built the brick homes with gabled roofs that now sag, it is just as hard to not imagine. The bones are too good, and I will miss imagining them rising to the voice of Ezekiel and one again shine in the light reflected off the Ohio River.