The Yeager Road Diaries: Thanksgiving at the speed of Dunbar

The truck rumbled out of the complex at 8:06 AM on Wednesday, we stopped for coffee, medicine and the bank. As we approached I-85 North, the radio warned of traffic ahead and we sidled onto Peachtree Industrial an circumvented the backup...

The Journey


The drive to West Virginia would take eight hours, Interstate to Interstate to Interstate. Shell and Heather were the best of traveling companions (as they always are). We laughed and smiled all the way: Through the Hardees that couldn't get breakfast right, through the mountain passes and the long dark tunnels and across the river bridges that made Heather wince.

Eight hours into the trip, we hit the outskirts of Charleston, WV. The coal barges made their slow winding way down the Kanawha River to the train yards. The train cars were loaded and made their way north and through the mountains. Heather and Shell watched with rapt attention as my mind slipped back to the last time I was in those hills...

1981

In 1981 I was 16 years old. I was working at Six-Flags over Georgia. My grandmother had just been in the hospital with a heart attack. She was doing well by all accounts and I visited her just before they released her to go home. I just wanted to see her and tell her I loved her. Two days later they found her in her chair at home the victim of a stroke.

My ma-maw was everything to me. At the funeral I wailed like an infant as my father crushed me to him while he shook with tears for his mother-in-law... We all loved her so much. Then they flew her home.

Home for her was West Virginia, a place I had spent holidays as a child, it is a place I loved and that carried fond memories. Her funeral was another memory added to those mountains.

The laughter and the joking brought me back to the here-and-now as I told my wife and daughter about my youth in Dunbar. I told them how the place had broad streets and about the trees that hung across them. I told them of the gigantic house my Aunt and Uncle had owned when I was very young and the massive steps that led from street side to their yard.

We exited the interstate at Dunbar and into a ghost town... 22 years had not been kind...

Hotels and the Twilight-Zone

The Hotel was what you'd expect for a ghost town in the high valleys of West Virginia. It was old, with scratchy sheets and a hard bed, but the staff was willing and kind. We met my Mom and her boyfriend (a childhood crush that has lured my mom's heart back to the land of her younger days). We secured our rooms and I heard the tale of the town and where my childhood went.

The people who had been the residents of the town when I was a child were still there. In their 60's and 70's, this geriatric gentry still owned their own homes and their children had moved away. A town of 20,000 people had shrunk to 8,000 and the economy with it. Ghost-town indeed…

An attempt to find a meal in Dunbar at Six O’clock at night is more like one of the more derivative episodes of the Twilight Zone. We drove west on the main drag, it circled the river slowly and crossed it twice… up ahead was a Shoney’s… the Shoney’s that sat next to our hotel… we had made a complete circle without changing roads…

We struck out in a different direction again and again… with the same result. All roads lead to Dunbar it seems.

The biggest house on the block

In 1971, I made my first trip to Dunbar. It was a snowy wintertime and we stayed at my Aunt and Uncle’s house. The house was HUGE on a long narrow lot and a massive backyard. Huge trees hung over the wide street and my cousins would drag me on a sled through the snow the long-long journey to the post-office (a mile at least).

Thursday morning came and we headed out to the church for our Thanksgiving feast. On the way we stopped by the house from my childhood… It shrunk. The house was small and the massive flight of steps up to their yard was only a foot and a half. The mile long journey to the post-office was only two-houses down… The world was bigger when I was small.

Thanksgiving dinner was in a medium sized church that backed up against the Kanawha River, the river trailed slowly by, deceptively deep and wide. I squinted my eyes and imagined those by-gone days when wig-wams were clustered along that bank and canoes plied its waters. I watched the low-lying clouds brush the mountains just beyond the river. My daughter and I stood and watched the ripples go past as a fine mist of rain descended.

Inside the church they were burning the rolls and reheating all the dishes brought by my cousins and their cousins. There were 80 of us (or more) sitting at tables in the auditorium; people queued up to the makeshift buffet (from oldest to youngest). There was turkey and ham, three kinds of dressing, gravy and potatoes, pies and desserts of every sort and it was all very good.

We played bingo. My Uncle Bill was the ‘caller’ and he kept us in stitches. I was a complete failure at the game and was awarded a pity-prize *grin*. There was karaoke, where the signing was both beautiful and amusing, lovely and absurd.

The introspective properties of triptophan

I smiled and laughed and applauded these members of my family and near family. The ones I knew were older, but no less dynamic or joyous than I remembered them. The ones I met were kind and loving – loving, that isn’t a word we use much anymore, yet it’s the best word for this group. I and my tiny corner of this family were included and loved and wanted in a very old-fashioned way… in a way I remembered from my youth – in a way I had forgotten

We cleaned the church and gathered ourselves to go visit at my Aunt and Uncle’s house. Their five children were there and their spouses and children… all-in-all there was about 30 of them and such a family they are. We broke off into groups, sports and history and religion were discussed, and family members were remembered… those who had passed were happy ghosts in our conversations and memories.

Friday was much like that previous night, we ate and then devoured each other’s company. Many of the women went shopping, the younger people went to a movie. Heather connected with cousins that I had (through negligence) denied her.

Friday night ended quietly with snow falling, snuggled in the sheets that weren’t that itchy after all, on a bed that really that hard, cuddled up to my wife and remembered those wide streets and huge houses and the loving nature of my family so far away.

Saturday morning we headed home with a silent promise on my lips that I wouldn’t forget this trip, that I wouldn’t neglect this part of my life again and to slow down from the lightning speed of my life; that, at least during the holidays, we could move at the speed of Dunbar.