Some of My Best Friends Are From Cumberland
Pillars of Salt, Post Twenty-two
It’s easy to be pessimistic about Cumberland. I am guilty of periodic cynicism toward the place. It’s easy to poke fun at Cumberland. At its occasional self-seriousness. There is a constant temptation to play into that regional caricature, especially when you’ve been away from it for a while.
There’s the fear, sometimes warranted and others not, that people who move away think they’re too good for Cumberland. That they are better than the people who stay, or can’t get out or won’t. When you start to talk about home, as someone who left, there’s a certain level of suspicion about your narrative. If you have left, then be gone. Stop sticking your nose in other people’s business.
I understand this. I understand local suspicion of people telling stories. Controlling the narrative of a place is a special kind of power. The stories we tell, what we put into focus and what sinks into the background, reflect judgments about our subject and suggest actions to be taken. Behind even the most abstract considerations of history there lurks an implicit practice.
There has been a long fight over the narrative of Appalachia, and Cumberland is no different in this regard.
In some ways, I too have chosen a convenient end-point. The industrial flight at the end of the twentieth century. The job loss. I didn’t mention the prisons coming in. Changing demographics. A growing Hispanic and Latinx population. More immigration from south east Asia. The current population identifying as “white” is 88.2% in Allegany county. People claiming Black or African descent make up 8.3%, while Hispanic or Latinx make up 1.9%. Historically, this is not so unusual. I suppose it sounds more drastic to say the Hispanic population has doubled than to say that it grew from 1% to 1.9%. But some people do worry about demographic change. Or white genocide.
It’s easy to pick at the underbelly. The darker side of the hollow.
I was able to see some of my friends from high school, just a day after I arrived, in the early evening, after we arrived back in LaVale from my grandfather’s. It was a strange shift from melancholy to joy.
Some of the best friends I’ve ever known grew up in town. We went to high school or middle school together.
Being a bit of an underdog, prone to misrepresentation, people from Cumberland tend toward defensive measures. A stance of suspicion. We stick together. There is a kind of fierce loyalty that is certainly peculiar to the region.
Places that have seen hard times I think encourage a loyal streak because, in the end, all we have is each other. If you can’t be materially wealthy, if employment is precarious or business prospects not so great, there is always family. Without it, one is really lost. This translates, in my experience, to chosen family. Perhaps even more strongly because it’s chosen, because we’ve made the decision to cast our lot with this crew and so the die is cast and we stay fast.
It’s true even when we leave. Or, maybe it’s more true when we leave.
I’ve seen local drama tear apart friends I thought to be inseparable. The ones who leave leave, in part, to be done with local drama. We forget, of course, that everywhere is local at the end of the day and we choose to embroil ourselves in dramas no less trivial or banal than people in Cumberland do, but we think ourselves smugly entitled to a sense of superiority simply for carrying on our own mediocrity somewhere else.
A few of my closer friends, when we’re feeling intimate and our guard is down, have confessed they entered as players in my own drama because it was a challenge to them. Because it was something different, gave them a glimpse of something different, even if we weren’t different in exactly the same ways, associating with me, nevertheless, had broadened their horizons.
Like everything about home, I both love and hate this. I love the openness of friends. I love that they changed because of me and they think that change is for the better. I wish sometimes they could see more clearly how they changed me as well. How I became more comfortable with myself and the world because of them. But I don’t want the responsibility of changing people. It is bittersweet to see your own pain or the things you don’t like about yourself being the instrument of another’s adolescent enlightenment. Then again, aren’t we all little lights from time to time?
It’s harder to be pessimistic when you’re face to face. When the analysis becomes granular enough that you see individuals in the flesh, introduce them to your son for the first time, and they say, “You always wanted a family.” They remember, even when it surprised everyone else.
So we meet. We reconvene. We won’t talk for months, but then pick up again. Jessica tells me, “I like how you sit in silence with Slem.” It’s hard to convey how significant that was, just having someone it was comfortable to be around, without pretense.
What changes then? These friendships cannot really be the same, can they? These are not relationships maintained out of nostalgia, though we sometimes get nostalgic. These are not frozen things.
We started off on a road together. There are many branches, byways, loops going round and away and circling back. There are intersections dotting this road. Paths converging and separating again. Looking back, we see where we’ve been and can’t help but draw a through-line to where we’re going, where we hope to be, hoped to be. If we are lucky, we won’t forget. The people we share these places with are a part of us. Friends are another self, according to Aristotle. A true friend, a friend of excellence and virtue, is a friend because of their character, because of who they are and the decisions they made and will make if habit holds. They are necessary to life.
I see my best self in my friends. The version of me that they see. I try to hold on to that reflection, take a little of the virtue they’ve found along with me. I fail, of course, but I only need to see again the image they keep alive. Something to aspire to. Something I have been and so can be. Friends make it possible to be ourselves. Without them, we aren’t even nothing. Nothingness is possibility. May we all learn to relish the nothingness of friends. They throw the future open to us with an invitation, with recognition. They are and so we are and so I am. Even in Cumberland. Especially in Cumberland. It’s home. It’s where we’re from.
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