Similar to Trail By Error in the North Country, I’ve opted to treat this more as a series of vignettes from my most recent trip to West Virginia. Somewhat predictably, the loose plan I laid out in the first post of this series got significantly altered. Simple twists of fate.
I asked a question last post, and I unfortunately have an answer. At least a semblance of one.
“Will these towns be as I left them? Or will I see the slow death of streamlining in action, dirt taken from fingernails, color sapped from buildings, all the authentic charms of these communities systemically sliced and diced and replaced with a means tested facsimile of itself, offending nobody, appealing to nobody? Worst – am I part of the problem?”
Some background – instead of going to the New, we opted to start the trip climbing in Smoke Hole Canyon, with the hopes of finding my coworker Wyatt and his brother Jay, true climbing oldheads who know every crimp and crack in the area. More on that in a later post, chronological order is for the weak. Elaine and I barreled from the crag to Davis to meet up with Dennis and grab lunch before going on a backpacking overnighter in Dolly Sods. To my dismay, Hellbender Burritos had closed permanently. I’ve had a star-crossed relationship with them, every time I had been to Davis in the past they’d been closed whenever I was in town, and now I’ll never have the chance.
We parked on the opposite side of town from Dennis by accident, but fortunately the distance between us was maybe a quarter of a mile. We walked down the main street, Appalachian Highway, to reach him. I’d last been in Davis in October 2023 and was shocked to see luxury condos on what had previously been undeveloped land, built across the street from what were more or less shacks. Next to the condos was another shiny new building that included a new gear shop and bike shop meaning Davis, a town of 581, now has one grocery store and four separate outdoor gear shops. Something’s gotta give, right? Worse, despite there being multiple restaurants, only one was apparently open for lunch – the goddamned Big Belly Delly.
Every time I go to Davis, I want to eat somewhere that’s not the Big Belly Delly. Every time I go to Davis, I end up at the Big Belly Delly. I swear they must have blackmail on the other local joints to prevent them from being open at lunch hour. The past few times I’d been there, my order had been taken by a child no older than nine, but this time we had our order taken by a vain toothless curmudgeon. Out of all the random b-list characters we met this trip, he was truly the most… colorful. Elaine went to order for herself and missed a small basket with smaller menus in it, and ordered what was a pretty simple order. Instead of just asking what bread she wanted, he asked
“Bread?”
“…”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes… what bread is there”
“Square, oblong, circle, etc, can’t you read?”
“I didn’t see a menu..”
As a registered smartass, even I thought he was being a bit much. After he took our respective orders, he half muttered “well, I gotta go cut this turkey because apparently that’s popular today!” 45 minutes later we had our orders. Nothing big about the Big Belly Delly, I’ll tell you that much.
While we ordered, he ranted about how today’s youth are ruined, but the old folks are no better, essentially everyone is stupid except him and the world is a shit place. What a tiring way to view the world. I get it – there’s days at work where I max out on the amount of stupid questions I can take and I can feel my childhood training from Mad Magazine’s Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions kicking in. I can be a smartass with little patience for perceived stupidity, but it’s so much more relaxing to work off the assumption people are at least trying. Folks today are no smarter and no dumber than people 50, 100, 200 years ago. I might argue that there’s less incentive to be smart and more opportunity to be dumb now, but I digress. At the same time, I can’t totally write off his attitude. We were representatives of the death of Davis as he knew it – some assholes from the city just passing through town to go play outside while he’s stuck slicing turkey between snarky remarks.
I need to go back to Davis and properly investigate. Maybe this tourism boom in the area will lift all boats, giving the current residents of Davis a stable, booming economy in a newly thriving town. Or maybe it’ll just lead to their displacement as condo facsimiles of cabins slowly overrun the town with an economy based on transience, remote work and bike repairing becoming the primary occupations of those living there, killing off the original dirtbag charm of Davis. I don’t know. Success rarely exists without sacrifice, but a town is more than a name, it’s the people.
In the past, a tenuous equilibrium seemingly existed there between the outdoors dirtbags, tourists just wanting to see Blackwater Falls, and the locals. I wonder now if we’ll see a fight between those who want Davis to stay a sleepy backwater, sequestered from the world and those who want it to be the dirtbag capital of northeastern West Virginia, the port of entry for backpackers, climbers, cyclists, skiers, snowboarders, and paddlers alike. But is the victory ultimately for the dirtbags or the greedheads? Where does the line get drawn between the two? The outdoor industry is a lucrative business, with increasingly higher economic barriers to industry. As much as I’d like to think of myself as some anti corporate academic rebel, a modern Indiana Jones of American Studies or some bullshit like that, am I just playing into it? Many questions, fewer answers. Ain’t that just the way.