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(written May 2003)
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WV |
Welcome to Morgantown,
the gay capital
of almost Heaven, West Virginia:
the state that put the "pork"
into barrel.
West Virginia used to be place
where the rich of Eastern Virginia
earned their bucks by sending
the locals down mines, etc. West
Virginians got sick of that and,
come the Civil War,
took the chance to break
away from those darn lowlanders.
 Cooper's Rock.
WV has some cool views (this is from Cooper's Rock)
but surprisingly few parks.
That puzzled
me for a while till I realized
that state used to make
its $$$ by massive mining; i.e.
a place where "nature" is a resource
to be renamed "slag heap", not
"park".
 These days, the story is different.
The biggest employers now
is higher education
and health care- this town is STUFFED
full of hospitals. (Oh, this pic is the cathedral of trees heading
towards Cooper's Rock).
You can tell a lot about people by their myths.
The West
Virginian mountaineer is the great local myth-
a loner; a hunter, a survivor against the odds,
and a man reluctant to abondon the old ways for the new
(check out the buckskin
and the buckshot rifle). A man that is companionable, able to
raise tatters and hell when required, but strangely
reserved (see him looking
away from us) and polite (he's not gonna mention to that pesky
city fella on the right that he ought not to be messing with the
pointy end of the gun like that).
 Helen's 2nd favorite house
in Morgantown (and the most favorite? home with me- of course!).
 Ever seen such a serious bridge? Its I68
over Cheat Lake, just east of Morgantown.
 Pretty back road, ten minutes drive from
our place.
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Work |
Strange to say, the reason we live here is that I can leave it every
day, and travel 30 minutes south, deeper into WV.
Each morning I hop in the Jeep, cruise through some sweet little
back streets,
 to
the mighty American
freeway system,
 which takes me miles and miles
past rolling hills,
 to the NASA
Fairmont Software Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) facility.
Some cool people work there and I call it
research heaven.
Every evening I drive back. Here's my favorite view on the way back-
a little farm valley which, comes XMAS, has the most beautiful
dusting of snow.
 Then there's this strange
sign for the "Outback Steakhouse" selling some mythical Australian
dish: the "Blooming Onion". Humph- never heard of it.
 Then I do this spiral in towards home.
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Home |
Me and Helen live on
the very
steep James Street where people
stress their brakes- whether they
had planned to or not.
Our house
is the gray roof to the left
of the huge pine tree.
It's a cool house- real roomy
for the two of us, big inside,
wooden floors, though
maybe a little dark. Here's
the garden.
More garden. Show's
Helen's nature
reserve, a.k.a. the flower beds.
Inside the house, we find
Helen in her natural
abode: surfing web and cable TV,
all at the same time.
Often, her and me camp on this
couch,
taping away on our
laptops, sending
email to each other because we
don't want to interrupt the other's
concentration.
(The blue cable is an historical
relic. About the time of this
photo, we went wireless- no
more cables! Hooray!)
Helen's other natural abode, a land where
I do the cooking and she does the eating and the washing
up takes care of itself.
Here's Helen's old
house, where I first knew her
(it's actually about 100 yards
away from our current place).
The tree in front is a sacred
site- where we first kissed. Well,
maybe not but the very first kiss but certainly
some of the first kisses.
That first
summer when fell for each other,
we'd often be found
laying around under this tree staring at the stars
and at each other.
Here's looking over
the vacant lot between
us and the neighbors.
Officially, this house owns
half that lot but the paperwork
was all screwed up at purchase
time (er, 1930?) and the mess
is too complicated for any
potential buyer to sort out.
These days most folks want to build
new homes out of town, away
from municipal building regulations.
Neighbor Buffy (not the vampire slayer).
 This line of dead grass is all that is
left of the mid-winter pipe explosion. Imagine the scene: dead
of winter, ground frozen, snow everywhere, a whole lake of water
bubbling up, and a crew working like demons to dig down to the
broken pipe. Inside: no water, no shower and every
toilet full of nasties (Don't blame me- they told me
it would take a day or two to fix! Not 5 days!).
I had to shower at the landlords for days and days and days.
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