Big Sandy: Recollection in the Free State

The hollow remains unphotographed. Memory, not landscape, frames it— a road cleaving winter in two, children laughing while gravity negotiated its own terms. Neighbors spoke without flourish. Their kindness was practical, never advertised, always assumed. You could leave your grief on the porch overnight; someone would tuck it in and leave bread beside it by morning. Coal knew every surname but never asked for praise. It shaped the valley, not into monuments, but into routine—a quiet survival where the mines ran deep, and people deeper. The river was not ornamental. It offered proof of summer, reminding us that coolness is a gift, not a right. We swam because the water didn’t judge. At the Ball Diamond we learned ambition and humility could share a field. Glory was counted in grass stains and silence between innings. Even now, the one-lane bridge remains as metaphor: we all crossed it—some to school, some to leave, some never quite back. And the friends— those initial encounters of trust— they are not forgotten. They are stitched into the muscle that resists cynicism. Big Sandy isn’t quaint. It is not curated for nostalgia. It simply was, and still is— in the West Virginia dialect of loyalty, in the rituals of remembering, in the free state of McDowell County, in the mythic hush of southern hills, in who we were when we first understood what it meant to be known. (Not everything that mattered had words for it. But the hills kept it well, and the river still knows the difference between a story told and a truth lived.)