Mountains. Sky. Trees. Water. Ukraine
A letter from the West Virginia outback in a time of turbulence | march4.2022
RIGHT NOW, I am deeply situated in the glorious back hills of West Virginia for a week. Working on a book-length “sorta memoir” (here’s a sample set in France, 1987). Plus, a documentary on this notable and cloudy guy. Like you, perhaps, I’m overdosing on the dire news of Ukraine’s potential national apocalypse, updating my timelines to see if Vlad the Invader has kicked off the End Times. As a distraction, I’ve learned from dear friends, who live near my Hardy County lodging, how to play Quirkle. It has a pleasing, kindred, if less logophile, Wordle pattern-recognition vibe. I also had some therapy with a dear dog named Two Rivers in Moorefield, WV. Read on and be well. | Douglas John Imbrogno, WestVirginiaVille.com editor. PS: If you did not get this via e-mail, free subscribe at WestVirginiaVille.substack.com or hit the button.
The Dog Is In
“Dog Days.” | “Malcolm’s Grocery in Moorefield, WV | photo by Douglas John Imbrogno, march2022
I HAVE BEEN PASSING Malcom’s Grocery in Moorefield for maybe 40 years in countless transits of the length and girth of West Virginia. Once, decades ago, I drove by Malcolm’s one dark summer’s eve on my way to the Bhavana Society Buddhist Monastery and Retreat Center, an hour and some change east. Hung nose-downward on the steel huntsman weigh-scale to the right of the front door, sagged an adult black bear, its jet-black fur a deeper darkness in the night. Fresh kill off some Appalachian hillside. Men stood around, admiring it.
This March afternoon in 2022, on a sunny cool day as the world elsewhere felt like it was devolving into apocalypse, I finally investigated the inside of the store.
FRIENDLY FOLK. I asked the two companions you see above if I might photograph them. “Sure,” he said. That’s Steve with the beard. The amiable dog said nothing. But it gave kisses up close and presented her belly for rubs, one leg twitching in time in satisfaction. Her name is Two Rivers. Or maybe it’s a boy — I didn’t get that clear.
“'Two Rivers' is just a name he picked,” said the woman at the counter, who said she used to drive a school bus. While appearing to be about Steve’s age, she had bright, cheery blonde hair.
I didn’t notice the Trump gear until I cropped and lightly edited the photo. Neither of the two folks in the store indicated any affiliations and I’ll not jump to any conclusions. My eye was more engaged by the lineup of classic cereal on the shelf to Steve's right.
I WAS GLAD to finally see inside Malcolm’s Grocery these many decades on. I came away with an ‘Appalachian White Birch Beer’ and a Peppermint Patty. And some much needed friendly beast interaction, given the current beastliness abroad.
“Thanks for the dog therapy,” I said, paying up.
It’s a Ukraine Thing
BUT WHAT DO YOU DO about a possibly Mad King, shelling and shellacking a sovereign nation? One who has a vicious streak as wide and long as the Moska River bisecting Moscow? Especially if you’re just a wordsmith and iPhone documentarian (I leave the serious documentary shooting to my AmpMediaProject partner). One who is camped in front of Bear’s Hell Mountain in the Appalachian outback, 5,000 miles from Kyiv?
You stand in solidarity, as much as you can. Check out our feb27.2022 newsletter on an old West Virginia friend. His two twenty-something daughters are bunkered up in Kyiv, where he lived 20 years of his life: “Putting a family's face on the trauma of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.”
You do some homework and donate to groups doing on-the-ground, frontline work for displaced, traumatized Ukranians. For example, Break the Wheel’s “Housing, Food & Supplies for Displaced Ukrainian Families.” Or Razom for Ukraine’s critical medical supply effort. Or the crew of Chef Jose Andres and his World Central Kitchen, feeding people fleeing Ukraine’s war-torn locales.
You do what you do. I mean to say, what you do. What I do. I write. Edit. I point my iPhones at things. Especially what I feel are striking images that convey some of the gravitas and fundamental beauty that belie the awfulness of human beings at their worst. After all, in the end, peacefulness will triumph over terribleness. It always has and always will. Putin thinks he has sealed Ukraine’s fate. But he has only certainly sealed one person’s fate: his own.
Meanwhile, all I’ve got — after pushing out a Ukraine-themed newsletter, after donating, after posting the most heartening or what I feel is the most essential Ukraine news — is what is in front of me.
Mountains. Sky. Trees. Water.
And a wish that Ukranians may get their own peace back. And that you and I, if you are not on a warfront, may stand in solidarity. And that we maintain our own equilibrium. So, we may be at our best when others in need need us.