The spring of this year brought the ten-year mark of our tenure in Waldhurst. I only realized this a few weeks ago, however, and if Petra registered the arrival of this anniversary in late May, she kept it to herself. It was a disconcerting season. We had other things on our minds.
Besides, for my part, the more significant anniversary had already passed two years earlier, in May of 2018. That is the point in time—eight years after Petra and I moved here—when Waldhurst dethroned Baltimore as the place I've lived longest.
If I were to travel back in time and visit the 1990s or 2000s version of myself, I think I would have real trouble convincing him that he would end up in a place like Waldhurst. Until moving here, in 2010, I had lived in big cities for almost all of my 35 years on earth and assumed I would always continue to do so. I can't remember ever once feeling the slightest curiosity about what it might be like to take up residence in a rural setting, and really you'd have to say I was downright averse to the possibility.
My baseline assumption had long been that small rural towns were at best uninteresting and at worst bleak cultural hellscapes typified by proud disdain of book learning, gibbering devotion to superstition, genetically ill-advised mating patterns, and the violent externalities of atavistic honor codes.
And yet here I am, ten years gone in Waldhurst and no plans to move on anytime soon. Perhaps the strangest thing about this development is that I am not constantly marveling at how strange it is. Nonetheless, sometimes I am perplexed to notice how comfortable I've grown in this small town, in sort of the same way that I am sometimes perplexed to notice that I am now 46.
What happened to 33, or 27, or 8, anyway?
And what happened to that big-city guy I figured I would always be?
* * *
As a purely factual matter, the question of how I—we—ended up in Waldhurst is answered simply enough.
We followed my parents here.
My parents moved here about four years before we did, having sold what had since the late 1980s been the family home in the D.C. suburbs on the occasion of my mother's retirement from the local school system. Before the sale, they spent about two years "trying on" small towns in Pennsylvania, far western Maryland, and West Virginia. They were trying to find a place where they could downsize and live less expensively without also feeling like they were wearing blinking neon "outsider" signs every time they went for a stroll.
Eventually, they started to think that this place called Waldhurst, which none of us had ever heard of before, might be the kind of town they were looking for. Duly diligent, as decision time neared they treated Petra and me to a fall weekend at a historic inn located here, with the request that we take the town's measure and report back.
"Leaving only made the city look more beautiful," I wrote—in reference to setting out from Baltimore for Waldhurst—in an entry dated November 11, 2005 in a notebook I was carrying at the time. I recorded that the tops of the tall buildings around the Inner Harbor were shining in the sun and noted "trees the color of a gasoline fire along the highway."
As we followed the route devised for us by MapQuest, the interstates gave way to state highways and then county roads. Traffic dwindled. Two-lane blacktops led us on their winding ways up and down steep hills and mountainsides. We sped through forests and slowed for small towns marked with single, blinking yellow lights. I noted "lonely-looking houses perched on wooded hillsides" and felt "the mournfulness of the sun going down, out in the country where you can really see it." The sun sank and shadows climbed the hillsides and the "grey trees of winter crowded the road as night came on."
We stopped for scones in a town called Accident. On "the last winding stretch of road" before Waldhurst, our headlights illuminated a scene of horror: "A mutilated deer struggles to rise from a pool of its own blood, a dark stain interrupting the double yellow line."
* * *
Not a month earlier, my parents had made their second overnight visit to Waldhurst. I still have the email my mother sent me afterward. She wrote that they had viewed an art show in the gallery of an arts center housed in an old church, watched a play at Waldhurst College, shopped in a health food store and a book store, taken a walk in the woods. "We met interesting people," she wrote. She mentioned that the city was ringed by "gorgeous mountains."
This email and other communications with my parents suggested they were close to a decision and leaning toward Waldhurst. At some point during the weekend, therefore, I recorded in my notebook "a given at the outset: at this point my parents know whether or not they want to live in a small town." What I meant was that, although the desire to live in a small town was not at that time comprehensible to me, I figured my parents had during the previous two years spent enough time in such places that we could probably safely assume they knew both what they wanted and what they might be letting themselves in for.
As Petra and I took our first-ever stroll in Waldhurst, the place's charms were not as evident to me as they seemed to have been to my parents. Compared to Baltimore, where I had at that point been living for six years, Waldhurst's sidewalks felt unnervingly empty. The lack of skyscrapers admitted too much of the dreary early-winter sky. The bars and restaurants did not feel inviting. And where were the artists and college students and musicians with whom this town was supposed to be teeming, according to my parents? It seemed to me that everyone we passed in the street looked like an unreconstructed hick from the shallower reaches of the gene pool and with shocking views about the ideal organization of society.
We ate dinner at a bar and grill on the town's main street, then wound our wandering way back to the inn. At one point, as we waited to cross a street, I found I was ready to render my judgement about Waldhurst.
“Well, it’ll probably be fine for my parents,” I said. “But there’s no way in hell I’d ever want to live here.”
* * *
Just four years later, Petra and I were back in Waldhurst and standing in front of this very house—which was then still wearing its "for sale" sign—as we looked up and down this street and tried on the idea that we might soon be living in this of all places. On her chest, Petra was wearing an Ergo baby carrier containing five-month-old Axl, whose arrival had, characteristically where babies are concerned, changed everything.
Petra and I had been living for close to three years in Missoula by that time. Missoula was then the smallest city we'd yet lived in but was still an order of magnitude larger than Waldhurst. We'd moved to Missoula so that Petra could take a job at the university there, but that job—which required Petra to spend her summers living in a tent several states away—had become unworkable once we'd become parents.
One day I had joked to my mother that maybe we would move to Waldhurst, and within a week it seemed we were making plans to do so. In response to my joke, my mother had quickly emailed me a handful of real-estate listings. Compared to Missoula, I saw, the Waldhurst real-estate market offered many a livable house at roughly half the cost per square foot—and I should add that our Missoula house had less than 1,000 square feet of living space, which had seemed plenty until we'd added squalling, restless Axl to the family.
A few months later, when we actually made the move to Waldhurst, Petra flew with Axl while I drove our Toyota Corolla east. One of my final stops was for a night in a motel near Beaver, Pennsylvania. When I stepped out of the car into the late-May dusk, I felt close, muggy air on my skin, heard the insects' evening serenade, and wondered at how comfortable and familiar it all seemed. I was now back inside the wider Mid-Atlantic ecosystem of my youth, and I was surprised to notice how good it felt to be taking up residence here again. Three years into living in Missoula, I had begun to suspect that I would never really come to feel at home in the gorgeously alien mountainscapes of western Montana. Now, standing in this motel parking lot, it felt good to let go of that goal altogether.
Officially, I still hated humid weather, and I was braced to learn that my new neighbors were all John Birchers with white hoods hanging in their closets, but at least in Waldhurst the bugs would be singing the right tune as the evening sun went down.
* * *
Ten years on, I am pleased to be able to report that, as best as I have been able to determine, almost none of my neighbors are John Birchers or have white hoods hanging in their closets. In fact, most of them have turned out to be quite wonderful, and I'll always be grateful to have landed in their midst. As I never seem to tire of telling people, you could move continuously around the country for the next twenty years (and some of you will) and never hope to just stumble onto a neighborhood like this one.
The virus has given us all an additional angle from which to consider the places where we have made our homes. So far, Waldhurst has been a pretty good place to ride out a pandemic. The infection rate stayed very low here for a long time, partly because so many West Virginians never leave the state and so relatively few non-West Virginians ever enter it. As a result, it never felt unsafe to recreate outdoors, even at the height of the lockdowns, and that has been a crucial hedge against the anxiety and even madness that I assume would long ago have doomed the Oakes household if we'd been, say, crammed into 550 square feet in Brooklyn.
It also helps that so many of my neighbors are willing to wear masks when appropriate, keep their distance from one another, and take the other small precautions recommended for people who wish to avoid killing their friends and family members.
On the other hand, West Virginia in general and Waldhurst in specific do not lack for the kind of lightly informed, heavily armed "American patriots" for whom Putin probably gives thanks every day. Sometimes he must pinch himself and wonder if he might only be dreaming of the existence of a sizable number of Americans so eager to submit to hypnosis by virus disinformation and fever-dream imaginings about the imminence of civil war. Russia and, before it, the USSR worked hard for generations to cultivate and encourage useful idiocy like this around the world, and Putin and his spymasters must look on every maskless shoutfest and AR-15 show-and-tell gathering in the U.S. as gratifying in the utmost.
Once, I could simply have ignored the existence of such people in my town, but now I manage the City of Waldhurst Facebook page, where they are over-represented in comments threads under even the most anodyne reminders to please be slightly more careful given the deadly virus abroad in our nation, state, and—increasingly—town. It is disheartening to realize I live among such people, naturally. Toward the end of the summer, it occurred to me that, after the EMP, these are the people who will put me on a leash, pull out my tongue, and teach me that I must dance if I want dinner. Having once had this thought I could not shake it, and I found myself posting reminders about masks and the like less and less often. It seemed there were probably few people left who were convincible one way or the other on this point, so perhaps it would be best to cede the floor to the processes of natural selection.
No place is perfect, but, as many people around here like to claim, Waldhurst is a great place to raise children. I find this to be a true statement both for the usual reasons most people have for saying something like this—e.g., Waldhurst is a calm and peaceful place where children can be allowed to run around outside, unsupervised, from a relatively young age, etc.—and because I would hate for my kids to grow up unaware of how deeply and strongly run the currents of ignorance, fear, and conformity in so many parts of what some people have the audacity to refer to as "real America." On dark nights of the soul, when I am feeling outside the mainstream of this place, I soothe myself by imagining I am in something like the Peace Corps, here to help improve and learn the ways of a primitive, alien land.
It also helps to remind myself that my mortgage is only $562 a month.
* * *
Back in my twenties and thirties, there was something I remember saying a number of times that I intended as an encapsulation of my ideal city: I want to live somewhere you can buy sushi at 3 in the morning. It's not that I had ever felt a pressing need for wee-hours eel rolls. This statement simply functioned as shorthand for what I believed recommended big cities over small ones.
Show me a city where I can procure sushi at 3 a.m., after all, and I'll show you a city with quirky, idiosyncratic shops, restaurants helmed by brilliant chefs, eclectic art galleries and broadening museums, all sorts of venues where one can watch all sorts of live music, and—most importantly—a population of people with the curiosity and refinement necessary to appreciate such benefits combined with the fortitude to put up with grimy sidewalks, higher crime rates, honking taxicabs, and the other alleged downsides of city life.
A few years back, it was announced that Wednesdays would be sushi night at a restaurant in downtown Waldhurst. Not being insane, I never partook. To paraphrase Harold Francis Callahan, a town has got to know its limitations and should work on playing to its strengths. We are fortunate to have a couple of decent restaurants in Waldhurst by this point, but no one travels to this area from any big city for our food scene, and it is certainly not on the list of things that keep us here.
For us, Waldhurst's strengths include those "gorgeous mountains" and the way nature's beauty is the default backdrop for so much of what we do. The other day Axl told me how anxious he had felt on our visit to Chicago last Christmas, standing on the sidewalk outside Union Station and looking in vain for a single patch of green, and I was glad to hear it, in a way. I know that, when he flees Waldhurst and West Virginia—as any young person with any sense growing up here must eventually do—he will overcome any anxiety about big cities quickly enough, but I think it is reasonable to believe he will never entirely lose the appreciation for and allegiance to the world's wilder places that both of our children are developing in the course of a childhood fuller than average with playing in the woods, swimming in creeks, and going on family camping trips.
Although this area lacks many of the amenities that are readily available in and around large cities, its very smallness supports a good quality of life in ways I never previously expected to matter. For example, because Petra and I don't have to struggle for hours a day in the beltway traffic of some major metropolis, we are able to spend more time at home with the kids, which in turn helps make up for the not great but still not terrible schooling available here. Along the same lines, we can usually knock off a weekend's worth of errands by noon on Saturday, although admittedly this is partly due to the fact that there is nowhere to go. (Also, you should see our monthly Amazon spend.) Nonetheless, I can't help but think I get a lot more reading done on a weekend in Waldhurst than I would on a weekend in Baltimore.
Meanwhile, I find I am able to get a sufficient fix of 3 a.m. sushi and the other enchantments of urban life on periodic vacations to real cities, and then the nice thing is that the drive back to Waldhurst feels like a continuation, rather than the end, of the trip. For most of my life, the end of a vacation occasioned a voyage from a location of relatively low stress back into the traffic and noise of a big city. Now it is the case that any trip I take has as its postscript yet another drive home through steadily diminishing traffic into a steadily lovelier landscape.
Even now, ten years in, when I make that drive home to Waldhurst, I still feel like I'm getting away with something.
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