THE LATITUDE of NOW

On the road & looking for real things in unreal times | february16.2025

‘SNOW DAWN’ | Snowy squalls mist the blueish, pre-dawn morning out the back door of my room at a lodge outside Davis, W.Va., in the foothills of the Monongahela National Forest. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | february2025

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Photo-essay reprinted from the February14.2025 issue of theSTORYistheTHING.com

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WORDS & PHOTOS by Douglas John Imbrogno | february14.2025 | theSTORYistheTHING.com

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I should be writing about the dire state of America, something I have done several times here, here and here. It appears after all that, for the foreseeable future, our old America is lost, even as a cohesive resistance begins to coalesce and get its act together. Meanwhile, the appalling, nightmarish new norm is an anarchic, oligarch-powered free-for-all, stripping the American government to its bones in a piranha-like feeding frenzy, while tossing millions of people overboard in this country and abroad. And the sharks there in the water? ‘Well, boys, have at them …’ This constant sense of living in a Bizarro World unreality deepens every time you see the puerile faces of the two men who have birthed this cruel chaos. Looking up different nuances of ‘puerile‘ in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe the Trump-Musk Infantile Axis of Evil yields this bulls-eye summation of their beyond-damaged characters:

Unripe, not mature, not matured, unmellowed, undeveloped, unformed, imperfect, unfinished, incomplete.

But you knew that.

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‘END OF THE ROAD’ | Along Douglas Road on the way to the Douglas Falls near Davis, W.Va., you encounter this behemoth, deep into its senescence. Hard to imagine the kids’ faces that once looked out it now-grimy windows. Years back, someone remade the old bus into a residence or hangout, complete with a stove inside (the black thing is a stovepipe). Several windows are since popped out, and the interior must be a chilly place on a winter’s night. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | february2025

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Like you, perhaps, my email in-box is full to bursting with breathless, four-alarm fire notices from my preferred, still-trusted media outlets, and the sane, well-reasoned commentators I prefer (Joyce Vance; Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo; The Bulwark; Dahlia Lithwick and Slate; Timothy Snyder; Kevin Drum and others). So, I am not exiting stage left into political quietism when I say that sometimes I need to go touch grass. (Or snow, depending.) A soul just needs to depart Dodge and find real, touchable things to look at, ponder or admire before returning to the exhausting front-line fray, at least for this jacked-in Minor League, new-media maven in the West Virginia outback.

Hence, from this point on in today’s photo-essay, you will hear me utter not a syllable further on political matters, except to emphasize that Trump-Musk-Johnson-Vance et al are squirrelly cumquats , swamp donkeys, bratholes, gobshites, gombeens and eedjits. So, there! Now, let’s roll tape on other things to look at that give this guy’s mind a despair breather. He’ll come back stronger from being away, I tell you.

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‘GIANT IN THE MIST’ | This monster wind turbine in Tucker County’s Mount Storm wind farm complex is a friend of mine, a reliable companion whom I stop to visit when I travel east across the Allegheny Front’s ridges and valleys on my way from here to there. On this February morning, snow clouds turned My Turbine Pal into a ghostly colossus. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | february2025

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Several times yearly, I undertake the four to six hour drive (depending on my destination), from my home in the western quarter of West Virginia, across its sinuous eastern highlands. My goal is a visit to one or the other of the sprinkle of pleasant towns on the opposite end of an undeniably challenging state to criss and cross. Attention is essential around each curve, and then up, down, and up the scores of hills to come.

Last week’s snowfall and ice-slicks made the passage all the more demanding. Trying to leave up a steep hill outside Davis, W.Va., my front-wheel drive car began struggling, its wheels spinning uselessly on the ice-crusted road. The whole shebang of the vehicle began sliding backwards and then sideways. You never want to go sideways in a 2,000-pound conveyance, and at that moment I failed to acquit myself well, Buddhism-wise, in the Right Speech department. Fortunately, what looked like an appointment with a ditch got canceled as the car sensibly stopped itself. A young Good Samaritan with a black beard and stylish scarf helped to guide me in turning around. (People can be so cool.)

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‘THATAWAY’ | The welcome view of a navigable road coming out of the Monongahela National Forest on your way to Davis, W.Va., after not ending up in a ditch. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | february2025

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Unstuck and no longer sideways to Reality, I went the long way around to a welcome meet-up with a flavorsome plate of huevos rancheros and fresh orange juice at Milo’s Restaurant in Davis, W.Va. FUN FACT: Davis is the highest town in West Virginia and a good place to chill on a chilly day. And for the record, the tiny Trailhead Coffee Shop a few doors down from Milo’s — where I got a double cappuccino with oat milk and a squeeze of caramel syrup for the road — may pull the best cappuccino in West Virginia. Those are likely fighting words and, yes, TipTop Coffee’s fare in nearby Thomas is excellent. But I aver that Trailhead’s is better (and cheaper). I recommend them both to mountain wayfarers as I certainly enjoyed both venues during my weekend walkabout.

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‘TIMES TWO’ | I’ve tried several times over the years to get my cellphone camera’s measure of this building in Davis which houses the local post office. I almost never post both color and black-and-white photos of my photographic subjects (pick a lane and show me the one you picked, sir or madame!). Both these versions capture some of the Old World/Old Country vibe of this edifice. You pick. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | february2025

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I stopped in Thomas heading out. It was time to move on for home, where silky cat fur and meows awaited in the easy chair beside your partner’s easy chair, where it’s easy to relax. But, wait. See, this is the thing about Thomas, one of the artiest little burgs in a state that is not really a state, but a succession of villages. If you see a bike up against an orange wall in Thomas on a freezing day in mid-Winter, it may be someone’s bike who left it there, then bolted down the street to get an almost $7 cappuccino at the cool coffeeshop on the gallery-filled main drag.

Or — and I once did a photo essay on the artful bikes of Thomas — is it possible it is an objet d’art, positioned for your aesthetic pleasure? In this case, it sure looks like someone’s ill-parked bicycle. But do check my notes under the photo below for powerful countervailing evidence. My point is that one of the several pleasures in stopping in Thomas — and I recommend always stopping in Thomas and Davis, too, if you’re traveling from here to there and back again — is that it could be an art object. Which is a wonderful puzzle that for whole minutes at a time takes your mind off the puerile, pasty, bully boys at this very minute looking around the china shop of the American government and its hallowed Constitution and wondering: ‘Hey, I’m a bull, man! What can I break next?!?’

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‘TO BIKE OR NOT TO BIKE, THAT IS THE QUESTION’ | Yeah, it’s probably a fast parking job on a frigid day. But is it possibly an art display so insouciant, so hyper-realistic, that it is New York gallery installation-quality art?!? Probably the first, but it could be the second. Check it out — the rusted chain is off the sprockets in a Gordian Knot of a hopeless tangle. Or was the chain muck-up what led to the leaning wall emergency parking job? Your call. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | february2025

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The End.

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P.S. TAKE A ‘SNOW RIDE’

I posted the short musical video below to Facebook of my post-slide pleasure drive into Davis, W.Va., adding a homemade riff on lap dulcimer, an instrument with which I am currently infatuated. But it felt a bit short at a minute in length, and folks liked the music, so I’ve slowed the footage down in order to fit in more dulcimer riffing. Don’t let things go sideways. And I mean that both personally and government-wise.

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Thanks to Jeff Seager for his editing help and feedback on this piece.