Author: Elizabeth Gaucher

Waking Up with a Stranger

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 15 Comments

John Henry Fuseli The Nightmare

Immediate disclaimer:  I’ve never literally woken up with a stranger.  Not my style.

But I am pretty sure I know what it would feel like, which again goes to why I’ve never allowed it to happen.  This week I had the bizarre feeling it had happened, but not in any way I saw coming.

Perusing a social media site, I found a comment by an acquaintance about the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Her comment boiled down to, “Get a life, get a job, and stop irritating those of us who are trying to spend our hard-earned money on vacation.”  Discovering this comment was like opening a door into a lot of similar feelings expressed by people who I assume are decent human beings.  Some people who see the protesters this way are even my friends and family members.  It was like rolling over all warm and sleepy and realizing that head on the pillow was not any one I recognized.

This is bigger for me than individuals.  Everyone has a bad day, or says a dumb thing, or just needs to blow off steam sometimes.  If we all isolated ourselves from everyone who makes a frustrated comment we don’t agree with on Facebook or Twitter, we wouldn’t have much of a network.

The Stranger, it turns out, is the social mood, priorities, and values of my own country.

I have a three-year-old child, and am only just now emerging from what a friend calls, “The Baby Tunnel.”  The tunnel is  a place you enter about the time you realize you are pregnant, and you only go deeper, darker, and quieter for about 4 years after that.  Eventually, you see the light and begin to re-emerge, but the world and the people in it have changed while you were away.  I was born in 1968, and when I was in college I relentlessly quizzed my mother about Vietnam, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Beatles.  “What was it like?  Did you love them?  Did you march?  Who said what?  Did you go?  Were you scared?”

For years her answer was the same:  “Sigh.  Honey, I don’t know.  You had just been born.  I wasn’t paying attention to anything else.”

How is this possible?

Well, now I know.  And a deep description of The Baby Tunnel is more the purview of a true mommy blogger, so I’ll not go there.  But it is a real place, The Tunnel, and it can distance you from important cultural shifts.

Somewhere in the past 4 years, we lost a core shared vision as a nation.  Clearly, the roots of the loss go back much further than 4 years, but my experience indicates that the cement on this really started hardening between 2007-2011.

There seems to be an honest-to-God belief system that having a job is a reflection of a moral or ethical state.  Being employed is now a character trait.  But it’s weirder than that, it’s not enough to be employed.  It’s not even enough to have more than one job.  If that job or jobs does not pay enough to feed your family, then YOU are a failure.  YOU are at fault.  And if you feel differently, then YOU do not have the right to express those thoughts and beliefs because, well, YOU are the problem.  The problem is not allowed to speak.

Get a life, get a job, get out of my way.

No one wants to be on the outside.  It’s cold out there, and the kids are hungry.  It is not a complicated mystery that more and more people are growing anxious about how close they are to the edge.

But what is mysterious to me is the glaring refusal to acknowledge that the crumbling social architecture is not the fault of those most at-risk.  The closest thing I can piece together as logic is that if you are a guilty party — if you are part of the industry or power structure that has benefited from that which has hurt so many — you are pretty anxious yourself.  I keep seeing the prison warden in The Shawshank Redemption when he reads his own cross-stitched wall hanging:  “His judgement cometh, and that right soon.”

Those on the edge want an assured place inside.  If you want to be inside, you listen to those who already are.  They are the ones who, allegedly, allow you to stay safe.  If you are guilty, you want as many on your side as you can get.  You tell those who are trying to stay inside that those outside are wrong, evil, The Problem.  Don’t listen to those people, they just want to drag you down.  We want to keep you safe.  THEY are why everything is a mess.

I don’t feel good about waking up with whoever this is.  He needs to get his pants on and get the hell out of my house.  No pancakes, no coffee, no early movie.  Get gone.

Now, those faces in Occupy, for better or worse, they are familiar.  You folks, come on in.  I’ve got a pull out couch.

A Long Walk in the Snow by Roger D. Johnson

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 4 Comments

I don’t know Roger Johnson, but he left this fascinating story as a “comment” on the blog A Better West Virginia.  I am not sure it is truly an essay, but it is an interesting story that raises questions about how adolescents make choices, how strangers change our destiny, and what it can be like to grow up in a place like the one and only West Virginia.

I hope to learn more about Mr. Johnson someday, but for now, please enjoy this reflection on how a young man’s life was saved one cold and wintry night by two coal miners who stopped to help.  Young people sometimes make bold decisions that later turn into life-threatening situations.  To me, this story speaks to the kind of people who make West Virginia a special place — people who know when and how to intervene, and who often just as quickly as they materialize disappear forever to remain mysterious and life-changing memories.

A Long Walk in the Snow

In the late Fall or early Winter of 1961 when I was a Junior at Nicholas County High School, my cousin, who was a Senior, and I caught a ride from Dille to Summersville to go to a basketball game at the high school.

We went to the game where he met his girl friend and I hooked up with a girl I knew. After the game we fooled around outside the old main building for an hour or so, then the girl I was with had to leave with her parents.

It was a warm night as we walked his girl home through town. Just outside of Summersville he told me to wait while he took her home down one of the side streets.

I waited for an hour and it was getting cold, so I started walking down the road. I figured he had decided to spent the night and I guessed I could catch a ride to Birch River. I was dressed in a light weight white coat with no hat and cheap shoes but it was getting colder and starting to rain lightly so I kept walking.

About midnight I was below Muddelty where there was a sawmill and a fire was burning in some old slabs. I walked in there and built up the fire. I sat on the ground as I warmed myself for about 30 minutes and began to doze off to sleep. As the rain turned to snow, I started getting home sick, knowing my Mom would be worrying about me.

I left the warm fire and walked down the middle of the road in a gently falling snow. By the time I reached the foot of Powell’s Mountain the road was covered with snow and I was pretty much soaked. It was a slow walk up the mountain and the snow was 6 or 8 inches when I reached the top.

Cold and tired I crawled in the old bus house that someone had turned over on it’s side. I was trying to decide whether to take the dirt road across the mountain to Dille. They now call that the Henry Young Memorial Highway. It was much closer to home but I knew it was wild with very few houses on the road.

Curled up in a cold ball in the bus house I was just going to sleep when I heard a truck coming up the hill from the direction of Muddelty. This was the first vehicle I had seen all the way from Summersville to the top of Powell’s Mountain. By the time I could crawl out of my shelter the truck had reach the top and pulled off right in front of me. I walked around and knock on the window of the drivers side. The poor driver nearly jumped out of his skin when he rolled down the window and saw me standing there in my white coat with ice crusted on my hair. “Where the hell did you come from?” he finally said.

The man who picked me up was on his way to work in the mines and said he pulled off to see how bad the road was before he went down the hill to Birch River. It was a slow slippery ride but I only cared about being in the warm truck. At Birch River he let me out on the corner because I was going to Dille and he was going to Tioga, I think. I never did get his name.

Slightly warmer, I stood there for half an hour before a car came along headed my way. I stuck out my thumb and another miner picked me up and took me all the way to my house. I walked up the hill in a foot of snow and into the house which was never locked. It was 4:30 in the morning.

Mom got up as soon as she heard me come in. She saw the shape I was in and put on a pot of coffee. While she found me dry clothes I drank two cups of hot coffee. I went to bed about 5:30 that morning and didn’t get up until the following morning. I had to go buy a new pair of shoes because there wasn’t any sole left on my old pair.

I thanked the 2 coal miners who gave me rides that long night but I have often wondered what would have happened if that man hadn’t pulled off before going on down Powell’s Mountain and I had gone to sleep in that old bus house.

I think my history would have ended at age 17.

Image credit:  Elizabeth Gaucher