We moved here in 2001… after shit hit the fan, oh no, we weren’t in New York, but, well, I guess after 9/11 … we were in Charleston and there was a big chemical plant, and it seemed like that could be a target at the time … OK, well what really happened was my girlfriend got pregnant and we just wanted to be somewhere that would definitely be safe to raise a kid, and well, I have bipolar tendencies but she is certified bipolar, and I was riding one of her mania waves… it was a fun wave to ride! But yeah, we bought the building and renovated it and we found a crew to work on it and she planned the space and planned our wedding all at the same time while she was pregnant… it was crazy! We had the wedding in the space, it was our first event… our son was born in the bathtub upstairs, a Friday night, while there was a show going on downstairs…
Oh, up here is one of our historic landmarks, there used to be a mine shaft here… if we went four miles we could see the old coke ovens but I think you’re on a schedule…
I bet you don’t know what a coke oven is …no not cocaine, no not Coca-Cola… they used to take the coal and cook it into this substance called coke and the advantage of coke is it burns so hot you can use it to melt steel…
Yeah they shipped that coke to Pittsburgh during World War II and it actually helped in the war effort to defeat the Nazis, most people would say that’s the most important thing they did with it .. not necessarily me cuz I’m a pacifist …
Before I moved here? I was the Governor’s photographer… Yep that’s a real job.. I would travel around with him,.. mostly I met him at different events but sometimes I got to ride with him in his bus or his plane … he’s a good guy, well some people don’t think so anymore because he ended up having an affair with a married woman while he was also married but … I know, in Europe, they wouldn’t think twice about that!… But anyway I’m proud that while I was working for him he got the Promise Scholarship passed so any kid from West Virginia with a '“b” average in school could get a full scholarship to college … I know, it’s amazing!…
But I’m so upset the president of my college recently cut the entire language department, which is where I went and first fell in love with Asian languages and started speaking Japanese …
There’s another coal shaft there … and that’s where the old railroad platform was, I think they used to turn the trains around there but I’m not sure I gotta find some old guys and ask them about it…
Yeah so these colleges, I mean, they are just at the whim of the cogs of capitalism just like anyone else and the thing is the people graduating from the Languages and English and Sociology departments don’t have money to make big donations like the engineers and business guys, so what are you gonna do? But it’s so important for a kid from West Virginia to get to learn languages… I just got out of a relationship with a woman from China and there really is not that much difference between capitalism and communism, I mean there really isn’t
… free speech? Well yeah it’s a little more limited, I mean there’s a difference between voting and not voting, but with the internet, you really can’t keep people from getting information… I mean in China they had the strongest Covid lockdowns of anywhere and eventually the people protested and they changed the situation! and of course then they got COVID… but the people were happier!
So when this town was first built in the late 1800’s there was no roads , you would arrive by train and leave by train, and people from all over Europe came to work on the railroad, Polish, Italian, well, here it was mostly Italians because they were the Mafia..
Yeah you can feel that small incline? It’s barely noticeable and the biggest locomotives in the world would take this track because the incline was slight enough that they could handle it… but back there about a mile, that’s the steepest part, sometimes a train would lose control and go flying off the bridge…and if you go down there you can still find pieces of trains… need to go down there with a metal detector
When I retire I want to do historical tours along this trail on mountain bikes for the families who come and visit… and that’s all that I’ll do … I’m saving for retirement now…I don’t buy my coffee anymore… $10 a day can make you a millionaire!