I spent a few minutes in Paw Paw, West Virginia just over forty years ago. My hosts, a young couple from Cumberland, Maryland, were driving myself and a schoolmate back to their home after a day touring the battlefield at Gettysburg.
We were discussing America’s wealth, or somesuch, when the husband, no doubt amused by our ignorance of rural reality, swung off onto a side road until we were about twenty yards from a small village. The car engine was switched off and we sat for a while, companionably, in the darkness.
“Shall we get out?” I asked.
“Best not,” he said. “Notice anything strange?”
Not really. It was pretty quiet, apart from the cicadas and bullfrogs, and we’d both seen In The Heat of the Night.
Then my mate got it. “There are no streetlights”.
It was about eight o’clock in the evening, but the only lights to be seen flickering through cracks in curtains were evidently from oil or paraffin lamps.
“No electricity,” our host’s wife said. “These people are real poor.”
Suddenly, I felt scared. What if these hillbillies took agin these durned nosey furriners gawping at the their picturesque lack of wealth and basic utilities. As we’d already discovered, every home in these parts was a mini-armoury of gleaming, fully-functioning weaponry – handguns, shot-guns, air rifles, the lot. What if those sinister, silent shacks were full of drooling seven-foot tall inbreds slavering for the juicy flesh of chubby English boys? What if they were staring at us right now?!
“Maw, fetch me my shotgun, wake Zeke and Joe Bob, and unchain Old Blue. He’s right hongry. Reckon we’ll have to show these city folk what we do with strangers who come sneakin’ round these here parts at night.”
“Oh son, aincha had enough killin’ fer one month?”
“Just do it, maw! I got the urge on me.”
Our host, perhaps sensing the panic all this strangeness was stirring in us suburban Londoners, chuckled, and started the engine. We stared out the back window as we headed for civilization, and were rewarded with two separate curtain twitches and a half-glimpsed face, which looked disappointingly normal.
In 2008, Paw Paw boasted a population of 489. The average income per family was just under $35,000. I’m guessing they’re plumbed for electricity these days.
In a way, I wish I hadn’t looked up those statistics: knowing that Paw Paw is now a modern-sounding small town rather than an 18th century village we visited has somewhat diminished its romantic weirdness for me. But not by much. Because so much of the romance of America lies in the bizarre “otherness” of its place names. The reality behind the names just doesn’t matter that much.
Little Feat’s much-covered truck-driving classic “Willin’” contains the lines:
“I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari,
Tehachapi to Tonopah…”
I shivered when I first heard those lines. The Indian names conjured up images of wildness, vast distance, blistering heat, wagon trains, massacres, a mile of linked boxcars trundling through darkness under huge star-specked skies, trains emitting lonesome dying animal wails, and massive chrome 18-wheelers heading out across the desert, smoke stack exhausts belching… well, you get my drift. (Even the names of US trucking companies have the same effect - as in Dave Dudley’s 1968 No. 10 hit, “There Ain’t No Easy Run”.)
Of course, it’s not just Indian names like Wichita, Biloxi and Minneapolis that conjure up what Bob Dylan – referring to the world of old folk songs - called, “The Old Weird America”. Galveston, Cleveland, Baton Rouge, Salem, Lake Ponchartrain, Santa Fe, Memphis and a thousand others do the trick just as well: each possesses its own unique patina of glamour and romance.
The odd thing is that we know, whether from visiting the places themselves, or extrapolating from our experiences of dozens of other American towns, that the vast majority of these places will be at best dull and featureless, or, at worst, run-down dumps you wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes in.
But American place names aren’t about arriving and staying put: they’re about places to head for and pass through on a neverending journey to somewhere new and better. The promise and the strangeness are all that matter, and both are contained in the names, not the reality.
I used to got to a lot of these places so redolent of excitement (and tv) like Laramie,Cheyenne,El Paso etc and as you noted,passed on to somewhere else somtimes finding work in 'Man' or 'Labour Pools in another often bigger city.Foresaking the disappointing for the gritty only too real menacing urban downtown.
ReplyDeleteIf you've ever been in one of these and if they still exist today,you'll see hardship etched on everyface of mainly broken middle-aged men reflecting the tough neighbourhood outside in every way except one.They were to a man white existing(just) as an island in an ocean of African-Americans.
At the time I never once really took much notice of this and have often since wondered if the 'thought police' could make a case for my being culturally racist:'Ya mean ya never questioned this 'cos ya think all blacks are on welfare and don't work for no chump change."
I have no idea why this is the case, or was the case, but imagine LBJ's 'Great Society' and all the baggage that came with it, has something to do with it.
After the white flight from American Cities in the late 60's and throughout the 70's,the only truly dispossessed were my fellow workers in these dark satanic 'Manpools.'
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 - 01:17 PM