Sometimes people ask me, when did the tour start? or, how long is the tour? or when’s the next tour? But right now tour is more of a constant than home, so I usually think in terms of, when is the next break? when is the next home time? This is why I have to run and eat salad while on the road. It’s not a temporary state, it’s the majority of my life. And this is why at 12:23 AM I was running in the 24 hour gym at the Hampton Inn counting down the hours until 8:15 am van call and wondering where I might source the best coffee for a very long day tomorrow (today).
We played this week in West Virginia, in a small place called Morgantown. I had gotten about 100 pages into Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, so I was feeling pretty in touch with the area. But, man, I was still unprepared for the sheer volume of strung-out and opioid-ravaged folks walking around the downtown area where our Airbnb was located.
One man was circling the block blowing a singular note over and over on a beat-up harmonica. Another couple was sleeping on stone benches at the bus stop with six or seven Kroger shopping bags full of what was probably all of their worldly belongings. Around the corner from our door was an alleyway market of the informal variety (in Anthropology class we used to discuss the “informal economy”), where folks were gathering and I watched a smug-looking man emerge counting twenty dollar bills.
Our show was full of wonderful and healthy seeming people, so I don’t mean to imply that West Virginia is only economic depression and addiction, merely to say that the intensity of these problems is less hidden in rural areas of the country, with so many fewer layers of pomp and circumstance to cover them up.
I can’t believe what a writer Barbara Kingsolver is. How does one person contain the mental space to inhabit such diverse experiences and human emotions? I loved The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, and Animal Dreams… all such wildly different characters and settings, and she’s written so, so many books.
If you haven’t read Demon Copperhead perhaps these feel like unrelated thoughts, but the book follows the story of a child orphaned by the Opioid Crisis growing up in Modern Appalachia. So being in this neighborhood while reading the book felt like a merging of my real and fictional worlds.
Every truth exists from a million different perspectives. Somewhere in the middle of the Venn Diagram all of those viewpoints are the facts. But every circle is a nuanced and emotional reality that can help us understand those facts as they relate to being human. What does the Opioid crisis mean to one child growing up in Lee County, Virginia? That story breaks me open in a way that reading the facts and knowing the truths never could.
I took pictures of some of my favorite passages from the book so far. I have found that Kingsolver tends to punch you in the gut with a line at the end of each chapter. See below for evidence:
I hope y’all are having a wonderful week, and have found a book that shakes you to your core <3
Rachel