Big Walker Lookout
Pillars of Salt, Post Twelve
There’s a little country story on Big Walker Mountain, just off a sharp bend in scenic highway 52. The store is well-known as a local music venue and offers a variety of classes on folk ways, like making soap or the basics of blacksmithing, and boasts a hundred-foot look out tower with a view of five states.
The location of the store and lookout precipitated a change in our travel plans. Originally, I had intended to take the 81 all the way north to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia and cut across just before reaching the junction of interstates 81 and 70. That would takes us around Paw Paw, through Keyser, and into Cumberland on the south side. But the lookout was farther north and closer to Interstate 77, which we could take through the heart of West Virginia, using route 19 to connect with Interstate 79 North, placing us on 68 East just outside of Morgantown, and arriving in Cumberland from the west, closest to my mother and step-father’s house.
The 81 is also notorious for heavy truck traffic and offered a less scenic route that went partially around the mountains, skirting the main ridges on the far east border of Appalachia. Sitting in the hotel room, Wendell watching some kids show on his tablet, Jessica and I looking at maps and photos and the location of the lookout, we opted to drive through West Virginia proper, the only state that lies entirely within Appalachia.
One of the things that caught our eye about the Big Walker Lookout was that it had been tagged on several travel sites as “LGBTQ Friendly”. I’m often not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I found it curious that a little country store at the top of a mountain would be explicitly labeled as such. Not that I assumed they wouldn’t be friendly either. Whatever the case, our interest was piqued.
We were greeting in the grey early-morning by an eclectic folk-art sign that spelled “LOVE” and a little free library box mostly filled with genre mysteries and romance. The was, as promised, breathtaking.
There was clearly a stage just beside the covered porch for local music, advertisements for which hung prominently behind the stage. There was a variety of old-time music, gospel, and bluegrass featured on the flyers fluttering in the slight morning breeze.
The store hadn’t opened yet. We had arrived a few minutes early. So, we milled about the parking lot looking at our surroundings, reading the various signs posted around the property, and taking in the view from the ground. We discussed whether or not we would climb the tower, if we would take Wendell when we did, and who would carry him up strapped in the Ergobaby. Ultimately, it was “yes, we will” and “Donovan will carry the kid.” We would have to pay to go to the top, but I was eager to see the promised vistas and take some photos. It would be thrilling.
I had thought maybe this was an old fire tower, but I’m not sure that is the case. It seemed rather a homegrown project of some possibly good ol’ boys who managed to construct a stable, 10-storey structure of wood and steel. This was exactly the kind of thing my maternal grandfather and his friends might’ve done, and so the whole scene was endearing to me.
As we sat talking and entertaining Wendell, who was in a pleasant mood, a car pulled in and an elderly woman got out to unlock the store. We waited, giving her several minutes to get inside and situated, while another car pulled up with a couple who got out laughing, looking straight up at the tower and their prospects.
The inside of the store was that rural combination of neat chaos as trinkets, knickknacks, and junk vied for space on shelves crowded with crafts — quilts, jars of jam and preserves, walking sticks, canes, dolls, surprise packages for kids of all ages. The door unfolded around a candy counter that boasts a variety of fudge, licorice, and hard candies. On the far side, tucked into a corner, was a little ice cream and soda station. It smelled like wood and coffee.
I still wasn’t sure what exactly was LGBTQ friendly about the place, and the proliferation of confederate branded merchandise raised my suspicions. But there wasn’t quite anything explicitly MAGA or too far reactionary. It is hard to explain the commonplace of confederate flags, not just in southwestern Virginia, but throughout Appalachia, even in places, like my hometown, which were never part of the Confederacy. Of course, West Virginia, just a stone’s throw north, broke away in order to be a free state in a contentious series of votes and conferences between May 1862 and March 1863. Nevertheless, the Lost Cause mythology surrounding the South and the Confederacy has taken a strong hold throughout the central Appalachians, and has been a contentious aspect of my changing intellectual relationship with people at home.
I picked through the quilts while Jessica eyed the fudge and jams. I saw one I liked, picked it up, put it back down again, and went to see what the fudge situation was. Jessica and I decided to go up the tower first, then come back to collect whatever wares we’d purchase. I paid our way up the tower in cash and we went back outside.
Wendell was still cooperating as I fastened him around me in the Ergobaby. He was on my back, facing forward, just barely able to peer over my shoulder. I began the ascent with Jessica following trepidatiously behind.
She was not a fan of heights, but not so scared that she wouldn’t venture to mountaintops and rooftops and oversized lookout towers built by who knows who probably without expert supervision. The wind picked up as we climbed and the tower gently swayed.
It’s fair to say that I am out of shape and my calves began burning as I pushed up and up with Wendell laughing and kicking at my back. I turned to look. Jessica was lagging behind, but making steady progress on her own. I emerged into the top platform with a sense of vertigo. The landscape spread and rolled all around as the platform shifted to and fro with the wind. The sun had come out from behind its grey clouds. It was warmer, both because of the sun and my own body heat, generated rapidly as I had worked to get us to the top at as fast a pace as the sometimes rickety stairs would allow. I had noticed marking spray painted on some of the more worn planks of wood. This must have been a system for tracking needed repairs, planks slated for replacement or reinforcement by the people maintaining the tower.
Looking all around, I felt my own smallness at once and reached weakly for the railing that held visitors back from the precipice.
I have been in this moment before. It is one I try to cultivate. I have written before that, walking up to a precipice, I am seized with a self-awareness that initiates my inquiry into the ontological I. From the vantage a great height, the only meaningful ontological question, becomes the question of the I — not because only because I am seized by self-awareness, but because that self-awareness suddenly grasps that it might fall, indeed, that it might throw itself freely from this height. I am, and in my very being lies the potential for self-annihilation, inducing this vertiginous feeling. In purely formal terms, for instance those used by Emmanuel Levinas, the question is framed in terms of totality and infinity. Here, infinity indicates the Absolutely Other — that which breaks with the totality by exceeding it and laying always beyond it in an asymmetrical relation that does not permit the derivation of the infinite’s definition from an antithetical description of the totality. Totality, therefore, is being as the same, a being revealed by war wherein the individual is given over to and acts as the bearer of a force that commands them without their knowledge, sacrificing the unity of their present to a future that will determine each individual’s ultimate meaning. In the totality, the final act alone constitutes the meaning of a person’s life — each is given as a pawn to the epic narrative of history. refers to the historically situated facts which are seen as determinative of being.
In my own encounter on the precipice, I experience the ontological question, initially, as a silent question. The silent question, rather than being paradoxical, is really a question I ask of myself. It is not some question I pose, or oppose, to another within the totality. I ask it of myself in silence, to myself as to another in silence, and thus do not break into this silence with the historical weight of my words. My words, once verbalized, historicize. I treat my silence, however provisionally, as some pre-historical moment wherein I am invited to speak. To speak for myself, and, perhaps, for some other that is myself, or would be. I find my question, qua this silence, is not yet properly verbalized. Because the question of the I has yet to be adequately verbalized, the answer I give on the precipice is one given in response to a silence that invites me to speak. It is only later, after I proclaim myself to be, that the question becomes clear to me. When I answer this question with “I,” or call out “Here I am!” and hear its cavernous refrain, I must admit that the floodgates of memory are opened and my being is then constituted in terms of history, in terms of how I came to be there on the precipice. The encounter with myself can be seen as a transitory suspense between forgetfulness and memory wherein I must forget myself in order to remember who I have become. The same tension between that magnitude of the infinite and the finitude of the finite are then played out in my own being as the tension between my determinate past and my indeterminate future, or, rather some future which I have yet to determine. Thus suspended in this transition, I find myself always in motion, always engaged in some movement both away from and towards myself. In a sense, I discover that I am mediated to myself by something other than myself. I become, in self-recognition, other to myself in order to apprehend what I myself am.
Wendell giggled and kicked. He pointed out, past me, over me, beyond me, to the horizon, blue, grey, clouded, blending at last into the green hills running up against the periphery of my vision. Jessica’s head appeared in the opening as she emerged onto the platform. We stood there together, one and another, another as one, as the wind creaked and groaned through the structure. It was time to head back down.
We went back inside to pick our fudge. I got a jar of boysenberry jam, Jessica got some pear butter. She waited as the woman weighed out some classic chocolate fudge and I went back for the small quilt. We were charmed, explained our trip briefly to the woman as she smiled and arranged our things in bags.
Then, we left, packed back into the car, and headed north toward Interstate 77. In a few hours, we’d reach Cumberland, Maryland. But first, there was all of West Virginia in its glory.
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