By Steve Edington | for WestVirginiaVille.com
When I graduated from Marshall University in 1967 my known world did not extend beyond southern West Virginia and southern Ohio. Beginning in my early teens, I would make a yearly weekend trip by train to Cincinnati to see the Reds baseball games with an uncle who lived north of the city. Those Cincinnati trips were my world’s furthermost boundary.
Then, in the spring of my senior year at Marshall, the Thundering Herd’s basketball team made it to the semi-finals of the National Invitational Tournament held at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Thanks to an MU campus minister who made the arrangements for the trip, I saw New York City for the first time a few months shy of my 22nd birthday — and saw The Herd lose to Al McGuires’s Marquette University. That trip let me know that there were any number of roads I could travel beyond the ones I had known up until then.
While I have never lived there again, I cannot shake myself loose from the Mountain State.
Indeed, since then there have been a lot of roads. The first one was my departure, in the fall of 1967, for a theological school in Rochester, New York. The latest stop so far — and with many stopping places in between — has been Nashua, New Hampshire, where I was the minister of a Unitarian Universalist congregation for 24 years before retiring.
By now, I have lived three-quarters of my life in places other than West Virginia. But that opening quarter of my life remains a defining piece of who I am. I thought I was done with the state as I drove off to Rochester. But while I have never lived there again, I cannot shake myself loose from the Mountain State. In thinking as to why this is so, I get some insight from the life and writings of an American author whose hometown is just a few miles south of my New Hampshire home.
That would be Jack Kerouac, born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts.
I discovered the writings of Kerouac shortly after he died in 1969, while I was still in seminary. When my wife, son, and I moved to Nashua in 1988, my interest in him was rekindled, largely due to the proximity of his hometown. I learned there was an organization in Lowell that produces an annual literary and cultural festival in Kerouac’s name called Lowell Celebrates Kerouac (LCK). I joined up.
Kerouac was a far more complicated and conflicted individual than his cultural image suggests.
As the saying goes, one thing led to another. A few years later I was the President of LCK, and learning how to produce an annual city-wide arts and cultural festival. I then went on to write a couple of books about Kerouac; and for a time even taught a course at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, as an adjunct faculty member, on “The Literature of the Beat Generation.” As is the case with West Virginia, I never shook off my BA in English from Marshall, either.
The name “Kerouac” generally evokes musings of wanderlust, of being a vagabond in search of what he himself called “joy, kicks, darkness,” and living a rebel life of nonconformity. Yet Kerouac was a far more complicated and conflicted individual than his cultural image suggests. His was also a life cut short at the age of 47 due to his alcoholism. As those of us who focus on the Lowell piece of him like to say: “If all you know of Kerouac is what you’ve read in ‘On the Road,’ then you don’t know Jack!”
The tension Kerouac lived with throughout his life was between his need for his Lowell roots and his equally driven need to break free of those roots and be on the road. He may have been given the title “King of the Beats” — about which he had mixed feelings at best — but he never quite left the French-Canadian, working class, Catholic neighborhoods of Lowell where he grew up. He went on to write five novels based on his childhood and adolescence there during the 1920s and 1930s.
For all of the ways in which he was caricatured as a “beatnik” — a term for which he had little use — his favorite mode of dress was that of a checkered red and black working man’s lumberjack shirt. And for all of the many pictures of him I’ve seen, I’ve yet to find one where he’s wearing a beret.
Jack’s conflicted feelings about Lowell can be seen in a couple of passages from his voluminous writing. In a letter to a woman in Lowell whom he’d known since high school, and who later became his third wife, he wrote: “My dearest hope is to come back to Lowell and make a home…and walk all I please those hallowed streets of life.” But in another piece of writing, he refers to Lowell as “stinktown on the Merrimack (River).”
As I did a deep dive into the multifaceted, and often convoluted, life of Jack Kerouac I came to see West Virginia as my version of Kerouac’s Lowell. He knew that Lowell was an integral part of his identity, which at times he embraced and at other times sought to cast off. I know that territory well. Unlike Jack, I do not have a “dearest hope…to make a home” in West Virginia, but I’m taken by his writing about walking Lowell’s “hallowed streets of life.” On my family visits to Charleston, I go down to St. Albans, and drive through some of the neighborhoods where we lived as I grew up there. I’m aware of how my early life in those neighborhoods helped shape the person I became. I hadn’t thought of them as “hallowed streets of life” until I read Kerouac’s words, but perhaps they are.
Yes, there is a political angle to what I seek to embrace and what I seek to cast off when it comes to West Virginia. Some of my liberal friends and compatriots wonder how I can feel a connection with people living in one of the reddest States in America. I got at some of this in a piece I wrote for WestVirginiaVille.com a couple of years ago about my father, a self-employed house painter with an eighth-grade education that he got in a couple of one-room schoolhouses in rural West Virginia and Ohio. I’ll never know for sure if Dad — now long gone — would have been a Trump supporter or not, but through him I have some insight into the lives of many of the West Virginians who did.
Also by the author. Click image or here to read
I recently read a book titled ‘Stolen Pride‘ by a retired sociology professor, Dr. Arlie Hochschild. Its subtitle is “Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.” Dr. Hochschild spent several months in 2016 living in Pikeville, Kentucky. She focused on the lives of a dozen or so Pikeville residents, listening to their stories, their struggles, their hopes and their dashed hopes — of the positive pieces of their lives and the pieces where they felt lost and defeated. If there was a common theme in the lives of these various and varied people, it was that they felt left out, that they had been made to feel their lives didn’t count for much — hence “stolen pride.”
Dr. Rothschild could have written the same book by spending time in any number of West Virginia towns of comparable size and make-up as Pikeville. While I had no way of knowing any of her interviewees personally, on another level I knew who they were. My Dad could have been one of them.
Dr. Rothschild researched her book in the run-up to Trump’s first election as President, and he had a lot of support in Pikeville. She had a revealing conversation with one of his supporters. While the man she was talking with acknowledged Trump’s many shortcomings and personal failings, he went on to say, “But we need a big microphone.” He, and others like him, somehow see Trump as being their “big microphone” through which they can recover some of their stolen pride.
There is something about West Virginia itself that remains hallowed ground for me — red state and all.
I read that passage with understanding, while also being deeply angry. I understand the desire for a “big microphone” by those who feel they have little or no voice. I get where they are coming from. And I’m furious that a manipulative, hyper ego-inflated, con man has managed to convince so many of those who feel a loss of pride, and the loss of a voice, that he is their “big microphone.”
I will have to leave it at that so I can get back to Kerouac and me as I finish up. His phrase, as cited earlier, of “hallowed streets” does resonate with me in ways that go beyond his, as well as my own, childhood and youthful neighborhoods. There is something about West Virginia itself that remains hallowed ground for me — red State and all.
I feel like I’m in a sacred space when I visit the fountain on the Marshall campus where the names of those who perished in the November 1970 plane crash are inscribed (one of whom I knew and hung out with for a time in St. Albans). I sense being in a holy place when I visit the graves of my Edington ancestors in a couple of small cemeteries out in the back country between Buffalo and Point Pleasant. It’s the same feeling I get when I stand by the marker for the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant and recall the hundreds of times I rode, and later drove, over that bridge to spend time with my extended family in Gallipolis before it collapsed into the Ohio River in December of 1967.
On a less somber note, being on the Upper or Lower New River in a whitewater raft is a bit like being on a hallowed river, although I’m probably too old for any more such trips. Just taking in any one of the many vistas around the state offers a kind of beauty that gives one a sense of being a part of something greater than the self, however one may wish to name it.
In ‘On the Road’ Kerouac wrote that “all of life is holy and every moment is precious.” I know that none of us can live in a state of constant awareness of the holiness and preciousness of life of which Kerouac writes. Too much other stuff keeps getting in the way, just as it did with him. But we all, I would guess, still have our moments when the holiness of life breaks through — even if it’s just a fleeting glimpse. I’ve had such moments in my life, and some of them come when the “country roads take me home.”
Steve Edington is a 1963 graduate of St. Albans High School and a 1967 graduate of Marshall University. He is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire. He and his wife live in Nashua. He is author of “The Beat Face of God—The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides”, published in 2005, and of “The Gospel According to Jack—Tracking Kerouac in My Life”, due out later this year. “The Beat Face of God” can be ordered via this link.
