NOVEMBER 16, 2020 – Jeff Oppenheim, my close friend and college roommate, and I share many common interests—history, politics, travel, worldview, lawyering, community service, the great outdoors, and . . . Appalachia.
I don’t mean to offend readers who possess prideful attachment to the aforesaid region of our great land. Appalachia is replete with natural beauty, and its people exhibit an admirable grittiness born of long-standing hardship. They’ve also contributed vastly to the canon of American folk music.
But the poverty of Appalachia has produced a stereo-typical image of the rural, hillbilly homestead—a weathered, broken-down dwelling with a rickety porch, surrounded by junk of all kinds rusted by a thousand rains.
So what does Appalachia have to do with my good friend Jeff, a New Englander, and me, an Upper Midwesterner?
This morning Jeff emailed me a picture of the Shangri-La that he and his wife, Val, have created for themselves on a “Walden Pond” near their home on Cape Cod. It’s their “Red Cabin,” except it’s painted blue-green. Facing south, it rests on a slope leading down to tranquil waters. An enclosed front porch is supported by solid block pillars, creating ample space under the porch. Within that space lies . . . Appalachia!
I recognized it immediately, because the nondescript stuff that is stored there looks nearly identical to junk stored under the side porch of our Red Cabin.
Apologetically, Jeff explained that he wants to wall-in his Appalachia from view. Typical Jeff. He’s always possessed a sense of orderliness, a trait fully supported by Val’s artistic tastes in décor and design and her own impressive organizational skills.
Me? I’m fully capable of kicking butt in D.O. (“Department of Order”), but all too often I slip and slide into . . . West Virginia. Not so my wife, except to the extent she’s sitting in the passenger’s seat.
She’s not a passive passenger, however.
One day years ago she and I emerged from a walk in the woods leading up to the side porch of the Red Cabin. She eyed all the scrap lumber I’d stored under the porch and exclaimed, “That looks like Appalachia!” She then said, “You’ve got a week to clean that up or it’s gone.”
As a “tree hugger” of frugal Småläning (immigrant from the stony, forested, lacustrian province of southern Sweden) tradition, I can’t waste scrap lumber. I follow my dad’s example. He often said, “A guy just never knows when he’ll need that [piece of stub lumber].” Exactly. In my case, using only scrap lumber, I needed to design and build an attractive addition to our shed—to house scrap lumber.
But now, 20 years later, rural West Virginia has reappeared under our porch. Actually, that state of affairs reappeared years ago, but over time you become so used to seeing stuff, you no longer see it.
In a world of uncertainty, I found refuge in Jeff’s photo. Despite the miles that have separated us since college, we’re both livin’ the same dream.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
