Packed the car and left Woodbridge, phone functioning (hallelujah), about 10.30 and drove west through the Shenandoah Valley under magnificent clouds and light rain, shafts of light breaking through the blue and grey, making the hills preternaturally green and lush, miles and miles of that fresh green breast of the new world.  I’m singing “Oh, Shenandoah,” though not so well as my sweet daddy did, until the gorgeous approach to West Virginia prompts several choruses of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” 

Truly, the vistas do seem “almost heaven,” but the news of two racially motivated mass shootings, one in Buffalo, one in Irvine Ca, begs to differ.  At the welcome station, the flag flies at half-staff. 

The juxtaposition of such spacious, fertile, seemingly endless natural beauty with the actions of “les mauvais singes,” always my late friend Ed Bastian’s sad dismissal of the evil men do, makes what we wicked monkeys get up to even more incomprehensible.

When I arrive in the industrial outskirts of Charleston WV, the setting of my Comfort Inn on Maccorkle Avenue seems NOT so promising:  neither the huge parking lot nor the graceless façade on one of the Inn’s three buildings bodes well, and I spy an enormous truck stop and a McDonald’s next door. 

The inside lobby and, finally, the room are, however, new and spotlessly clean, and clearly the Indian family managing the place knows what they are doing.  My second floor room overlooks the Kanawha River, conjuring visions of westward migration that I still recall from How the West Was Won, the 1962 epic—in Cinerama!  Jimmy Stewart piloting a flatboat ‘cross the wide Missouri!

With a little phone research I find a pleasant sidewalk restaurant, Pies & Pints, on Capitol Street where my attentive server Shalin serves me a small margherita pie and a glass of Malbec

after which, fortified, I drive along the river to Cass Gilbert’s imposing 1832 Capitol building for a first look in the raking late afternoon sunlight. 

Lincoln is very much in evidence here, but so is Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, and the pall of obstructionist Democrat Senator Joe Manchin rather blights what Gilbert called the “reasonable function” and “idealistic character” of a State Capitol, which should “constitute the best evidences of the character of material, success and solidity, culture and civilization of a state.”  O, that our politics and policies lived up to the grandeur of such architecture, or that our present cold civil war were done and the Union preserved.