I've forgotten if it was in the years before or after the ’72 election that A. James Manchin was running the West Virginia REAP program. Manchin was an ambitious politician out to make himself thoroughly visible in the state; his career peaked at the office of West Virginia Secretary of State. As for the REAP program, it was designed to make West Virginia’s plethora of abandoned cars less visible – by hauling them away to the crusher. Manchin had it going full bore one of those years, and if I knew which I might be able to tell you whether my little rendezvous with the past happened in the spring of ’71, ’72, or ’73.
I can tell you that I was driving a ’67 Ford three-quarter ton pickup with four-wheel drive in those days. The truck, or at least its four-wheel drive, was part of the story – but that’s getting ahead of myself. I can also tell you that on the morning of my little adventure I saw a field with about a dozen REAPed cars sitting waiting to be hauled away, among them a couple ’52 or ’54 Fords and the burned body of a third of the same vintage. Just like the one … well, that’s getting ahead of myself, too.
I was exploring the Appalachians that summer, my camera, my truck, and I ranging about the roads, former roads, and old rail beds in the general vicinity of Job and Whitmer. Folks, and I am not the first to say this, four-wheel drive was invented to allow people to get their vehicles stuck in places they otherwise could not have reached. My truck and I would have been rather better off if I did more walking and less driving. I’d camped the night before near the Sinks of Gandy. I rose in mid-morning, breakfasted on sausage, eggs, and a warm beer, stowed my gear, and pointed my truck south, or maybe east, on the dirt and gravel road that winds in the direction of Spruce Knob. As I passed the REAP cars something caught my eye, probably the same kind of something that has always left me staring at junkyards and wondering if rusty metal cars develop souls over the course of their lives. “What adventures have you lived, cars? Is it easier to find yourself sitting, done in by neglect and old age, in some farmer’s field? Or do you gain the soul of a phoenix if you go up in flames? Is it the recycler or some machine-age deity that sees to your next life?”
The mountains offer more to do than look at REAPed cars and contemplate machine-age metaphysics. I found the abandoned lumber mill I wanted to photograph, ran through several rolls of film, and decided to do a bit more exploring before heading home. About two o’clock I located a shady spot along the road and pulled off with the intention of enjoying my two sandwiches and maybe another warm beer or two. Then, behold! I discovered that my little turn-off led somewhere. A grassy, treeless ribbon ran straight (well, straight as anything in West Virginia) back to the mountainside, then appeared to curl around it. Not a road, I decided. An old spur line from a railroad. I envisioned a log train chugging up the mountainside, disappearing into the fog of time, even as I turned my truck onto the spur and locked my hubs. This, I told myself, could become a very productive afternoon. There could be anything from bits of track to scrap equipment up that line.
If there was anything to discover on that mountainside, I never reached it. I made it around that big round railroad curve, but my truck was still sitting on that old right-of-way, its frame resting on a couple stumps and its wheels touching nothing but soft mud, as the yellow ball of the sun approached the horizon. After taking a moment to admire that setting sun, I kicked my truck in an ill-tempered gesture of surrender and abandoned it to the hillside that had claimed it. I started walking back toward the road. Having spent some hours trying to free the truck, I was tired, mud-encrusted, and thoroughly hungry. It would be twilight by the time I reached the road and I was already wondering if I would see any traffic on that dirt road, or if I would find myself with the choice of banging on some farmhouse door or trying to walk the several miles to the highway.
And that was before I realized just how far I’d driven up the spur line – the stars were visible by the time I emerged from the woods. I grumbled a curse word or two as I reached the bare dirt of the secondary road. I continued walking, wondering if I would even find a vehicle on the highway to Elkins in the night. Since I preferred not to be mistaken for a trespasser and filled with buckshot, I chose not to chance beating on anyone’s door, I steeled myself for whatever hours of walking and of waiting at the roadside I had ahead of me.
I’d taken maybe fifteen steps, staring into the gathering darkness, when a miracle occurred. Car lights appeared. I didn’t stop to think why the lights were such a dull yellow in the clear night; I thought only of rescue: some farmer on his way home, someone with a farmhouse and a telephone or, even better, another camper, some good soul who would probably drive me into Elkins. I waved my arms.
The car approached rapidly, as though the driver failed to see me. Then it braked. Abruptly. A cloud of dust flew around it. I found myself standing beside one of those yellow headlights, dim yellow because someone (presumably the driver) had smeared yellow paint over the glass of the headlight cover. The car appeared to be an old dirt-track stock car racer from the fifties – a ’52 or so Ford with its grill removed and the front bumper painted the same deep green or faded black as the car. I stepped back to the open window to talk to the driver, noting the ‘66’ painted in yellow on his door and the ‘Boxcars’ scrawled ornately across the rear fender.
“Need a lift?” he spoke first.
“Yes, I got myself stuck …”
“Hop in,” he pointed across to the passenger side. I walked around the car, seeing nothing unusual about his crewcut that was almost as short as the stubble on his face. This was the West Virginia mountains. It was the age of ass-length hair and peace signs in the rest of the world, but locals still wore their hair like it was the mid-fifties. And I didn’t ask what the twenty-odd year old driver was doing in a stock car three-quarters as old as he was. There was no purpose in asking such a thing.
As I opened the passenger door, a bluish-black door evidently salvaged from a different stock car, I saw that it bore a painted ’12,’ the fender behind it also bearing the word ‘Boxcars' -- 66, 12 -- boxcars no matter how you count them.
I slid in and sat down, doing my best not to transfer mud from my clothes to the car.
“Don’ worry about the mud,” the driver half-mumbled. “Live close?”
“No, I really need to get into Elkins …”
“Take you there,” he cut me off. “I got to make a delivery first, then I’ll drop you about Main Street.” He stared at me intently for a moment. “Whatever you are, you ain’t a Fed. Here, have a snort.”
He handed me a Mason jar and I drank a long burning sip of West Virginia’s finest. I thought that trade had gone out of fashion, but I guessed I was wrong.
“And buckle. You seen them things? They’re a racin’ contraption called a seat belt. Just hitch it together – ah, you know how. You may need it.” I was more than a bit puzzled by his offering such instructions, as seat belts had been standard in passenger cars since about the early sixties. He hit the gas and boiled down the road, peering into the darkness far beyond the reach of those paint-dimmed headlights. He skidded over the curves and nearly left the ground crossing the bumps and chuckholes. The road seemed to have deteriorated between the time I’d driven it in the afternoon and this night, but I marked it off to his driving and the car’s suspension.
Abruptly, somewhere along this desolate old road he slowed – slowed the same way he had stopped for me, half-turning the car sideways and raising more dust. He killed his lights completely, turned down another narrow road, drove a short distance and stopped beside a building I thought I had passed that morning. I recollected it as a boarded-up ruin. This night bright light shined through its clear glass windows and half a dozen cars, the newest a ’54 Pontiac, sat in the front.
“Right back,” he mouthed. He disappeared. I heard the trunk pop open, then caught a glance of him carrying something toward the rear of that old roadhouse.
A moment later he was back. “Okay, Elkins bound, buddy. I got a hot date there in the big city. No roadhouse trash for me tonight. You just caught me on the perfect evening.” He leafed his hand through a roll of cash, as though he could count it in the dark, then stuffed it in his pocket. “Another snort?” he offered the Mason jar in my direction. A moment later he gunned the car engine. Half a mile down the dirt road he turned on his lights – such as they were.
Allow me to suggest, folks, from my viewpoint here in 2006, that driving 90 on the Interstate in heavy traffic is significantly less frightening than riding at a top speed of 60 on a dirt mountain road in a car with blacked-out lights. And let me also state that, to my knowledge, there was no way to get from Whitmer to Elkins in the 1970’s that did not involve driving on some paved road.
Well, the car didn’t touch pavement, and I didn’t either until I walked the half-dozen steps from the alley where he let me out in Elkins to Main Street. I started toward the green Sinclair dinosaur that marked a gas station on the far side of the street, glanced back -- and blinked, for the car seemed to have disappeared in a moment’s haze. I turned my eyes forward and continued toward the gas station which now clearly bore an ARCO sign. I shrugged. The gas station had a phone booth; I was satisfied. I glanced down at my watch. Eleven p.m. – earlier than I had feared, but still past the time when a town like Elkins rolled up its sidewalks. I was pleasantly surprised when a balding, fortyish guy opened the station’s office door and spoke, “What goes, buddy?” He rattled a set of keys in his hand –evidently he was the gas station’s owner and was locking up late.
“Need to use a phone. I got myself stuck outside of town and hitched a ride in ..”
He looked at me a bit strangely, then half-mumbled “Ain’t I seen you before?” in a voice that sounded just too much like the moonshine runner who’d just given me the ride.
I started to mouth some nonsensical answer but he stopped me with a shake of his head, “Never mind. I think it’s my mind playin’ tricks on me. Now where you stuck?”
I spent the night in the utilitarian comfort of an Elkins motel, rose early the next morning and met my new friend from the gas station promptly at 8:30. He was happy to be my very good friend after I paid him a small fortune to drive his ‘new toy,’ a 4x4 tow truck with a front winch, out past Whitmer and up an old railroad spur to rescue my truck.
“Yu’ know,” he told me after pulling me out, “I'm almost sorry to take your money. You got to be real careful runnin’ up these abandoned right-of-ways. Back in the fifties there was a fair number of folks had stills up on the mountains. And they’d set booby traps on the roads up, to keep the wrong sort of people from followin’ them in. Not much work, just collapse a culvert and set a couple wood posts in the wrong place and you had a nice Jeep-trap.
“Reason I hate to charge you is what happened to you is kind of my fault. You hooked that truck on a booby trap I laid on that spur line nearly twenty years ago. Back in about ’54 or ’55, I was runnin’ shine and a buddy of mine had a still up that mountain. He made some fine stuff, I’ll tell you.
“Course I ain’t tasted whisky in years. Gave up runnin’ shine and I gave up drinkin’, in about ’57, right after the night I ran my old Ford off the side of the mountain. That's a story. You ever seen an angel, or a ghost?"
He spoke as though he wasn't sure which he'd seen, or if it had been something else entirely. I smiled and leaned back against the tow truck fender. This could be worth hearing.
"Well, one summer night about this time of year I was making a delivery," he started. "It was deep twilight, just gettin' dark, an' I saw somebody trying to wave me down. I stopped. He told me he needed to get to Elkins. I motioned him in and offered him a ride. Just some mud-covered tramp, looked like he'd been doin' some walkin'. The funny thing, he had long hair kind of like yours. Now you know that nobody wore hair like that in 1957. I looked at him and that hair and the only thing I could think of was the pictures of Jesus they had on the wall in Sunday School. Well, he weren't too holy to take a swallow or two of the 'shine I offered him, but then I guess Jesus drank wine.
"Anyhow, I dropped him off in Elkins, watched him start across the street, kind of blinked a minute, looked again, and he was gone -- just disappeared. Left me with the weirdest feelin' imaginable. I wondered if I should take it as some kind of premonition or something."
Was there some kind of joke going on that I wasn't in on? Did the kid I'd ridden in to Elkins with help him set up this yarn?
He continued talking, ignoring my scowl, "Then, three nights later, I spun out on a curve and slid off the mountain. Did a little bit of air travel by car, but landed soft. The car went crashing through some pine branches and finally got stuck in the trees, a little ways off the ground at that. I crawled out the window, fell about six feet to the ground, slid a ways and started runnin’. The car caught fire and, well, I was carrying some potent stuff in the trunk – I was afraid between the gas tank and that alcohol it might produce a pretty good explosion -- they did -- and maybe start a forest fire -- thankfully, they didn't. I took the whole thing as a sign from heaven, offered up the sincerest thank you prayer I could muster, gave up drinkin’ and runnin’ shine, and confined my racin’ to the dirt track after that. Always missed that old Ford I'd wrecked that night, though. Best racer and best 'shine hauler I'd ever run.”
And that’s when I glanced at the back side panel of his tow truck and saw, not in large letters, but clear and visible enough, ‘Boxcars #12.’ He'd put the name and number on his truck as a memento of his racing days, no doubt. I guess I didn't turn pale. I guess the queasy feeling in my stomach didn't produce visible symptoms. Somehow, I continued shooting the bull for several minutes, then he started back to Elkins, and I began the considerably longer drive to home and my darkroom, leaving me lots of time to try to figure out how this long-haired Pagan country boy from the '70's had played Jesus to a Good Samaritan moonshine runner in 1957. I guess I could have looked at the other side of his tow truck before he left, but I knew what was there and I was afraid to find it. I just wasn’t sure how I’d handle seeing ‘Boxcars #66’ on that other back panel.
*****
copyright Gale Price 2006