Country roads take me home...

Sooner or later I had to use that title, if for no other reason than that it is the first thing most people think of when one mentions West Virginia.

The second thing many people think of - notwithstanding it being filmed in Tennessee and set in Georgia (neither of which borders WV, by the way) - is the movie "Deliverance". I have - a few weeks ago, as it happened around Christmas time - finally watched that movie and while I guess it may be more applicable to swathes of southern West Virginia, it really doesn't strike me as anything representative of Morgantown and the one time I did go wild water rafting (admittedly just across the border in Pennsylvania) I didn't feel the least bit worried about anything Deliverance-like happening to me.

Of course, when debunking Southern stereotypes, one should really bear in mind the closeness of Pennsylvania and - consequently - the Mason-Dixon line (which is supposed to be the official border between North and South). It is exactly 6 miles from my doorstep and so I'm far, very far away from the "deep South".

I've been here for 12 months now (a year and a day to be precise) and I've come to appreciate the frontier-like quality of West Virginia in general and Morgantown in particular. The edge of the midwest (aka Ohio) is less than 2 hours from here, the south has officially just started, the north can be reached on foot and the North-East isn't really that far either. This means you get to meet people from quite a few different regions and as such get a fairly varied view of a substantial part of the country.

I've also grown a liking for the small-town sides of Morgantown. While my first few months were mainly spent overcoming the culture shock that the move from a big city to a small town (which is officially a "city" regardless of my opinion) inflicted, throughout the year I've discovered some nice corners and interesting sides to small-town life. And I've grown some sort of connection to this poorest of states (depending on the metric you use, though I haven't found a metric where Mississippi doesn't come below WV so probably it's more correct to state "second-poorest"), which is partly because it has a beautiful landscape that is being destroyed for the sake of development and economic progress. Partly also because I feel bad for the state - I feel like it must have heaps of potential because of it's beautiful nature and its central location - the only problem seems to be that those in power either don't want to or are uncapable of changing things - in his State of the State address late last month, the governor didn't copy any of Obama's rethoric about investments in high-end communication and transport infrastructure, but went rather the opposite way: he hailed coal as "the future".

There is an adage that goes "People elect the leaders they deserve." I'm starting to suspect this may not apply to the poor and weak. (And while we're on the subject of politics gone wrong: the supreme court has recently ruled that corporations may spend basically as much as they like on political campaigns. Between that and the two useless and counterproductive political parties that hold the strings in this country, a pessimist might claim all hope is lost.)


The reason for this somewhat retrospective post is, of course, my impending departure from this state. While there are of course reasons to look forward to my move to Bonn and Europe, leaving is always a sad thing and so for this last month I'm planning on giving a sort of hit list of the things I like most about Morgantown and West Virginia. I imagine it will be quite different from any of my previous posts, but maybe you'll like this little look at life in a town somewhere in between the Midwest, the South, the North and the Northeast.