Hinton, West Virginia

 

I concluded my ten days in Kentucky riding along the Ohio River for over one hundred miles looking across its expanse at the state bearing its name. The river also provides the divide with West Virginia for a spell.  I crossed over the Big Sandy River, one of its many tributaries, into West Virginia and  followed my companion for the past day-and-a half for another ten miles.  I bid farewell to the Ohio when the road branched off to follow the Guyandotte River, then the Mud River.   Roads follow rivers in these parts as they provide rare stretches of somewhat flat land.  I was riverless for a  twenty-five mile stretch crossing a high ridge, then linked up with the Kanawha River for forty miles. 

The terrain had been pleasantly undulating along the rivers, but not so pleasant for riding in West Virginia, as the river valleys provided rare corridors of terrain flat enough for habitation and were crammed with traffic.  It was hard to believe that a state with less than two million people could have such a non-stop torrent of traffic and so many businesses crammed along the road for miles and miles.  

It seemed that whatever flat land there was had been built on.  It was a challenge finding a place to camp my first two nights in West Virginia, as so much of the land was vertical.  I was forced up steep rocky four-wheel drive side roads to find almost flat spots among the trees.  A Walmart could only find a suitable spot past a train yard that required a one-mile detour from the highway to reach.  All had to drive a mile in, then a mile out unless they were prepared to walk across several sets of tracks as I saw one guy doing lugging an armload of bags of food.  

The traffic finally thinned when I left a river valley and began a long steep climb that was preceded by signs warning that the road ahead was steep and twisty and not fit for larger trucks.  At last, after one hundred miles, I was intruding upon the real West Virginia.   I was flanked by the tightest yet of vertical terrain thick with trees.  This semi-canyon had been carved by a stream, rather than a river.  The road leveled here and there, allowing for small clusters of homes that constituted towns.  After twenty miles I came to another valley that was wide enough for a four-lane highway and lots more people, enough that after ten miles I came upon another Walmart.  

I had to endure another twenty miles of mind-numbing traffic before I turned onto another tributary of a road that led to Hinton and a Carnegie, one of just four in the state.  I’d visited one of them in April of 2011 on a ride from Washington D. C. to Chicago via Winston Salem in North Carolina, where I attended the River Run Film Festival and met up with long-time friends Lyndon and Tomas.  

The Carnegie was in Huntington, which I passed through once again on this trip fifteen miles after crossing into the state.  As then, it continues to provide offices for the local community college.  The nondescript replacement library faces it from across the street.  The two couldn’t be a greater contrast.  The Carnegies are all solid, statuesque edifices built to last, built for the ages.  All the other nearby buildings in the center of Huntington looked mundane and disposable.  Among the extra notable features of the Carnegie was the inscription of Socrates, Plato and Homer below its roofline and a poetic cornerstone paying tribute to Carnegie and future generations.

The Carnegie was easily the most striking building I’d come upon for miles and miles until I reached Charleston, the state capital, along the Guyandoote.  Its domed capital was the equal of any state capital.  A statue of Lincoln stood in front of it, the second I’d come upon in these travels, the other in Leavenworth, Kansas, where Lincoln had kicked off his 1860 presidential campaign.  He was honored here for having created West Virginia in the middle of the Civil War.  Virginia was very much divided.  In the 1860 election only two thousand people in the state voted for Lincoln, and mostly in the western portion of the state.  

The sprawl of Charleston included a quarter million people, though the city itself contains twenty per cent of that.  Dual paths ran along the river, one up high along the road and another narrower one below closer to the river.  It was a sunny day, but I had it all to myself other than one lone jogger. 

The route to Hinton took me over a three thousand foot ridge with grades of nine and ten percent and then a four-mile descent to 1,500 feet and the New River.  As I approached Hinton surrounded by high ridges I thought I might be entering a Shangri La.  The central district of this town of 2,200 had been placed on the Registry of National Historic Places.   

The Carnegie was a few blocks away in a residential district and was now a Veterans Memorial Museum.  The replacement library took over an old bank in the center of town.  The old vault was shelved with Classics.  I asked the librarian if they were locked up each night for extra safe keeping.  She said no, that locking the front door seemed adequate.  

With the Kentucky Derby this weekend it has been a topic of conversation on some of the sports podcasts I listen to.   It is significant as the fiftieth anniversary of Secretariat winning the Triple Crown, all three races in record times that still stand. He was included on many of the end-of-the-century lists of greatest athletes of the century.

A guest on the Tony Kornheiser show actually mentioned the mural of Secretariat I had just seen in Paris, Kentucky, near the stables where the horse lived out his life until 1989.  The three-story high mural had been unveiled last November.  The artist, Jaime Corum of Louisville, specializes in horses, though she had never done something of such magnitude.  She spent five-and-a-half weeks working on it. At the unveiling she said she had greatly enjoyed painting it as many people stopped by to tell stories of the horse.  His grave at Claiborne Farm has become a pilgrimage site.