WV-39, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Being Lost
Some trips are about the journey. Some trips are about the destination. Some trips are about managing to drive five and a half hours in the wrong direction until you lose yourself among the cranberries.
I don’t remember the first bit of this misadventure well because I wasn’t there for it and I don’t know who was there. I can tell you we started the day in Charleston, West Virginia. We rolled out of bed way later than we planned to, frantically pulled all bloodstained clothing and 3D printed fictional drugs into our suitcase, sprinted to the check-in desk, and headed to our car to drive to Roanoke. It was going to be a short driving day. We had plans in Roanoke. They were good plans.
Roanoke ETA: 2:30 PM, justabouts
We couldn’t get over Wasteland Jamboree being over (excellent event, by the way), so we decided to swing by Sutton one last time. We got a mac and cheese burger and a thing of s’mores dip, which we ate while sadly staring at the WELCOME WASTELANDERS! written on the specials board. They told us they were out of ramps. I think this is the third time we had been told by that specific restaurant they were out of ramps, a food item they had not had since Friday night, when six thousand people in blue and yellow jumpsuits beat down their front door demanding sweet allium goodness. The ramps had not reappeared as if by magic. This is probably a good thing.
Figure 1: A Message To Us
Figure 2: Really Too Much Chocolate, Probably
After the extended discussion of ramps and our food that could have both been a whole lot better and a whole lot worse, we chucked some axes at a wall for about 15 minutes before wandering off to Sutton Dam. Sutton Dam was beautiful, had a paid day-use area, and made a great Fallout related photo op. We should have turned around and headed directly back to Roanoke after we verified the dam was indeed a dam. We didn’t. We punched Warm Springs, Virginia into our phone, intending to go there for another Fallout related photo op. Our phone told us it would only take us 4 hours and 11 minutes to get from Sutton to Warm Springs to Roanoke. Our phone is a lying liar that lies.
Figure 3: A Fucking Axe
Figure 4: A Dam Good View
Mood: Bittersweet, but ready to drive
As we pulled out of Sutton, we quickly came to the first of many realizations.
REALIZATION #1: The fact our commute to and from the convention was almost entirely on the Interstate had given us an inaccurate view of what driving in West Virginia entails
We’ve driven in West Virginia a few times, right? We go to Roanoke a few times a year now for various familial relations / look at a big rock for a while, and going to Roanoke from the direction we are in requires driving through West Virginia. This is the route we usually drive through West Virginia. This is a perfectly normal thru route that takes perfectly normal highways, unless you have an ideological objection to toll roads.
This is the route we drove from Sutton to our next notable stop we remember the location of. This is not a normal route to drive unless you live there, apparently. We expected to encounter generalized shenanigans on unnumbered roads, and these expectations were proven correct almost immediately. We just. Stopped? In the middle of the road? For 20 minutes? There was some service vehicle or other that parked there, did nothing, occasionally moved forward about two feet, and continued to do nothing. I guess it reached its daily quota of nothing eventually, because it moved on leaving no trace at all.
Mood: Frustrated
Roanoke ETA: 7 PM, justabouts
Turning around, getting on the Interstate, and immediately driving to Roanoke would have been a good idea right about then. The traffic problems were an omen from our gods. Like how Hellenistic pagans can divine the future from looking at the local birds, we can divine the future from how fast car go. Fortunately or unfortunately, we had read a Tumblr post sometime in the last week that said that the only things people regret on their deathbed are things they did not do. Genuinely believing we would regret turning back with our dying breath, we pressed on.
REALIZATION #2: The fact that it is significantly more vital to fill up at half empty in the middle of West Virginia, driving through towns named Muddlety and Raintown, than in metropolitan Detroit
We did not get gas in Charleston because the original plan for the day probably didn’t require us to gas up. We didn’t get gas in Sutton because we are lazy and I wasn’t here. I gas up all vehicles I drive at half tank, though I’d prefer three quarters if that didn’t mean we’d have to go to the gas station literally every day. (We drive a lot.) Whoever was in the drivers’ seat at the time just… assumed the future availability of gas. They kept right on assuming that until they drove past a gas station on 1/8th tank, which prompted an anxiety attack. Then we lost cell service and panicked again! About when we were starting to plan out how to ration the snack food in our car and use our costumes to provide shelter from the elements (which was mental illness talking, to be clear), we pulled into a gas station.
This gas station was run by the man who had the least fucks to give of anyone we had ever met in our life. I think we could have come in in my bloodstained cosplay shirt and he would not have cared. The bathroom asked us not to flush our chewing tobacco. We could have purchased mothman chips and soda, but we chose instead to feed my car and press on. Our phone decided to scare the loving shit out of us by taking a while to pull up the directions, but I got them eventually. When we pulled out of the gas station, we saw a billboard for the…
REALIZATION #3: YOU ARE FUCKED
Pocahontas County Health Department.
Oh, we know that name.
Well, we don’t know its health department, but we know Pocahontas County a bit from our time spent obsessively refreshing the list of counties on Wikipedia, hoping that more extremely thinly populated areas started existing in the past 15 seconds.
Pocahontas County is entirely within the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area where all radio broadcasts of any kind are restricted so we can look at stuff with a really big telescope.
62 percent of Pocahontas County is public land.
Pocahontas County has a population density of 8.4 people per square mile.
Pocahontas County is not where we are supposed to be.
REALIZATION #4: The fact that when one embarks on a journey, one should not only research the starting point and ending point, but also all points along the way
Pocahontas County is actually not where we are. We’ll be there in a little bit, but we’re not there right now. As I sit in my bed in the city and type this post on my now-working cellphone, I’m wondering why the loving fuck there was a billboard for the public health department of a specific county located somewhere that is not that county. When we were driving along WV 39 with no cell reception and no real ability to figure out where we were, we were wondering how the hell we were going to get ourselves out of there.
About 5 minutes after I pulled out of the gas station, I ended up in a little town called Richwood. Remember the tragic dearth of ramps in Sutton? There was not a dearth of ramps in Richwood, and that’s the main thing I remember about it. They were having some sort of ramp festival later in the month. There were ramp banners on the streetlamps. I would have investigated the ramp situation further, but I couldn’t use the Internet.
In the interest of remedying my lack of Internet access, I pulled into the Richwood Public Library. It was open, which was a minor miracle. Everything has weird hours in the middle of nowhere, and we took this trip on a Monday. This is a quick synopsis of the conversation we had in the Richwood Public Library:
“Hi, I know this is a weird question, but where am I?” “You’re in West Virginia!” “What part of West Virginia am I in?” “East!” “No, I mean, what county am I in?” “Nicholas!” “Do you have an Internet connection so I can go find out what that means?” “Yes. Go buy ramps.”
After explaining at length that I am a tourist and will not still be in town in two weeks when downtown Richwood becomes an international ramp convention, I got the Wi-Fi password and managed to get an idea of where I was. I was still on course to get to Warm Springs, thankfully, and the librarian confirmed that if I didn’t get off 39 I’d be there in a couple of hours. I managed to get some messages out to my friends telling them to call my family for help if I didn’t turn up in Roanoke by 8 PM and then headed off. On my way out, I was once again asked to buy ramps.
Figure 5: A Library Really Leaning Into The Whole Books Are Made From Trees Thing
Mood: Apprehensive
Roanoke ETA: 7:30 PM, justabouts
It didn’t take much more driving until I hit the edge of the Monongahela National Forest and Pocahontas County. This is about where all other cars on the road very suddenly dropped off. The whole way up until the east end of Richwood had been pretty quiet, but I could usually see another person. There wasn’t anyone driving through the forest on a Monday afternoon at the start of May. I’m pretty sure I switched in when we drove past the sign, I pretty reliably turn up when we see signs for parklands. By this point, none of us were feeling well. I’m by far the guy here most equipped to handle being way out of his depth in rural America, but it’s still being out of my depth, you know? This would have been my dream trip if I had any idea where the hell I was. If I knew where my West Virginia highway map had ended up in our way-too-large automobile. If I had any contingency plans for things going wrong. If I didn’t have somewhere that at this point I really, really wanted to be. If I wasn’t half asleep at the wheel. If I knew where to get some more fucking gasoline.
The woman at the library’s advice seemed solid to me, but I was a neurotic wreck at this point and I wanted to get a second opinion. Even now that I had some idea of where I was, I wanted to hear a local answer “where am I” with more precision than “a state”. Or less precision, maybe. If I heard “the planet Earth” or “A mountain”, that would at least divulge useful information about the type of area I was in (one that should be swiftly driven out of). As I drifted along the road, I ran into a sign for the Cranberry Mountain Nature Center, and decided to pull in.
Figure 6: Someone Who Is Not Supposed To Be There
REALIZATION #5: The fact that a traveller should take advantage of all help that is offered to them
I’m pretty sure the US Forest Service is staffed by angels or some shit. There were three people at the information desk and each one of them was delightful to me. When I asked where I was, I actually got a useful answer from them! I was in the absolute middle of nowhere, apparently. They described how remote the place was, which didn’t really sink in for me until I was going over the trip to write this and found people online talking about how it’s some of the last quote-unquote real wilderness in the Eastern US. They thought it was really funny that I had managed to get to a place that isn’t all that easy to find on purpose totally by accident. It turned out we had managed to drive straight without asking too many questions directly into a National Forest, full of wilderness areas, containing the East’s largest black bear sanctuary. We had been wandering around our car with a bag full of convention-sustaining granola bars. Whooooops.
They really wanted to know what in the world brought our obviously not from there self out to West Virginia. Most people we’d run into were aware of the Jamboree, including the staff at the state capitol building, but the news didn’t manage to amble its way up to the woods. I tried to explain to them what on earth a Fallout 76 was (they’d never heard of it, but I think they looked it up while I was talking to them because by the time I left they knew they were an in-game location). They didn’t seem to think wandering around the mountains with fake guns and foam armor while yelling at each other was all that strange an activity.
When I told them our travel plans and asked for directions, they let me know that we were absolutely not ready to head for Warm Springs. In our haste to get the hell on the road, we had forgotten to give the path ahead even the most cursory glance. It turns out that the directions our phone had spit out would have taken us down a switchback-heavy mountain road for about an hour before dumping us on a one-lane gravel road that we would have become promptly and irreversibly stuck on. In the wilderness. With no way to call for help. Close to absolutely nobody. The highway map they handed me with the correct route highlighted and instructions to not leave Route 219 FOR ANY REASON might have actually saved our life.
Figure 7: We Really Should Have Used This The Whole Time Huh
We talked a bit about park service work, shared some stories about the struggles to get access to the Internet while on the job. They helped us get a message out to our family by turning every Internet-capable device in the nature center onto airplane mode so we were the only ones drawing from the connection. Back at our job in Ohio, our workplace is in pretty much the only cell dead spot in 40 miles, so you have to go stand outside and wave your phone at the sky to try to catch a signal. Some things never change, I guess. They couldn’t help but laugh when I told everyone we managed to get lost in the National Radio Quiet Zone.
The place was supposed to close about 15 minutes after I got there, but they let me faff around until well after they were supposed to be off work to decompress. We all headed out to our cars together, so they got to see the writing we’d done on our car windows to celebrate the trip. They got a kick out of our list of West Virginian destinations and asked to be added. We really should have put them there.
On my way out, they asked me if I could get other Fallout fans to come visit. They’re not near much of anything, so I told them it’d be difficult, but that I’d try. If any of you end up in the Monongahela, tell them a Fallout fan sent you. For me.
Mood: Happy, once again.
Roanoke ETA: 8:30
The rest of the drive home was relatively uneventful, honestly. I felt a lot less downtrodden after stopping in with the Forest Service, so I was back to enjoying the open road. The road from the nature center back to the major highways was curvy and at a steep grade. I got to try out throwing the car in neutral and coasting down the mountains, which made me feel really cool. Why waste gas when the hills will do it for you? As I left the forest, I learned that a lot of the economy of Pocahontas County seems to revolve around cattle ranching. I didn’t expect any crops growing there, it’s way too rugged for cornfields, but I didn’t expect animal based agriculture either. Nope, instead of old mines there were significantly more cows than people dotted around clear-cut mountainsides. It felt kind of sad to start rolling into towns again and see my phone pick up reception. It felt like a transition back to reality I wasn’t ready for.
Oh, we did make one more stop! Once we were solidly out of the wild, we saw signage for The Greenbrier resort. That’s also an in-game location and the site of a real apocalypse bunker for the federal government. That’s a story for Atari to tell, not me, but it’s there and I’m sure ey’d be happy to write you all a post if you’d like one.
REALIZATION #6: YOU BELONG
Despite how terrified I was as I rolled on out of Richwood, ever since I’ve been back in the city I can’t stop thinking about the place. This trip felt like taking the image that we present to you all online and making it into reality. I hate to say it, but there’s a tangible difference between our internal identity as a traveller and us actually driving around. Going out there, getting lost, and engaging in my various shenanigans brought what I already know I am on the inside to the outside world, where everyone can perceive them. I got to interact with strangers in a way that felt correct to me on a really deep level. I got to know just how quiet this world can be if you step away for a little bit. I got to be in a place where I felt like I was truly a part of this world, even if only for a few hours.
There’s a few specific social roles we slot comfortably into, right? Not all of them are accessible to us here at all. Nobody has any idea what a Desert Ranger is. There is not a current social framework for post-apocalyptic anarchist doctor librarians. Very few people here are accustomed to interacting with dead people. We are all those things (well, I’m not, but I share a life situation with them), but nobody here will have any idea how to treat us as if we are those things unless we ask them. Most people have an idea of how to interact with a wandering tourist over a hundred miles off course who really wants to see every single thing this land has to offer. That’s a social role that exists in this world outside of us, but it’s one that’s difficult to achieve for us usually. Travel is expensive and our part of the country is very… full of people and fenced in. Appalachia gives us room to breathe, room to exist, room to meet this world halfway. Out there, we fit in perfectly. In two years, we plan on retracing our journey and making it all the way to Warm Springs. I can’t wait to lose my way and find myself in the hills again. Just, perhaps, on purpose next time.