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Jack Slocomb
September 23rd, 2024
“The Narrows”
"He-l-l-l, if it wasn't fer the piss in it there wouldn't be any water in Will’s Creek a'tall.”
Once in a while you hear things like this in Kline's: little perorations, scraps of alcohol fortified Appalachian hyperbole drifting over the din of conservation while you're shoveling in supper. Kline's is the only dining establishment along the Old Route #40 National Highway as it snakes through the looming Cumberland Narrows in western Maryland’s Alleghenies.
I always have a sixth sense that this kind of parlance usually has a more serious current in it somewhere - an uneasy consciousness, a festering apprehension maybe. I'm Appalachian to the bone. These folks are my kind, and I know it. I can break some unholy bread with them and libate stale ale any time. Hell, yes.
The Narrows is an at least 400-million-year-old 1000-foot-deep water gap separating Will's Mountain to the north from Haystack Mountain on the south. These two mountains define the western limit of Cumberland's tight sprawl. And Kline's is an iteration of the slightly seamy genre' community eatery found in western Maryland and neighboring parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania — just clean enough to pass for a family place, yet despoiled enough to tolerate a good dose of boisterous commentary after pouring down a few brewskis. There's nothing phony about it. It's the real McCoy, murky and crowded and noisy with Country and Western juking in the Lover's Leap Lounge. It’s a cultural lyceum of this neck of the woods.
Kline's is representative, though, especially located where it is, in the literal shadow of these towering hunks of Paleozoic quartzites. It is in its obliviousness to this geography, in its wearied fried chicken and beer cured human architecture in the midst of the overwhelming, that it is emblematic. It bespeaks a kind of fatalistic mindset that is embedded in much of the Central and Southern Appalachians - where heart-stopping landscapes become passe', and the awareness of the failing integrity of local and global ecosystems has been recast into well-honed cynicism or outright denial. Something like that.
But Will's Creek, the aforementioned public urinal which flows almost at the back door of Kline's, is, in reality, a liquid blade.
Over the years, the unassuming stream bisected what had been a single continuous ridge. While I'm sure the stream does have its share of piss in it, it was once a clear torrent spurting out of the Alleghenies destined to rendezvous with the North Branch of the Potomac River and as the Appalachian crests were heaved into position, it bored out the almost two mile long fissure which now serves as the back and front scenery for Kline's.
I doubt that much in the way of this larger picture works into conversation in the Lover's Leap Lounge. Maybe your marriage is giving out, the brake shoes are wearing thin, your blood pressure is climbing, the fuckingovermint, the fuckinhippie environmentalists are destroying the economy, you’re always being on the ass end of the opportunity mill. Not the long deathless eonian history, the vast geological canon, the mighty wheels of the Gods grinding away right outside the doors.
Nothing of the ilk of Kline's was there 250 or so years ago when the Ohio Land Company built an outpost called Fort Cumberland (named after a rather bloody British General who never once set foot in the New World) at the confluence of Will's Creek and the North Branch of the Potomac - about a mile and a half east of the Narrows.
The bottomland of the Narrows was swampy then. Too boggy to build any kind of road through it. In fact, it was for this reason that when the ill-fated British General, Edward Braddock, arrived at the fort with the intention of marching westward on the French who held Fort Duquesne, he would not consider going through the narrows. Instead, he cobbled together an army of smartly uniformed soldiers and a lot of unruly whisky-soaked locals who built a roadway up on the hard ground slightly to the South though a mini gap depression in Haystack Mountain. This saddle would undoubtedly have become a colossal incision like the Narrows, had not Wills Creek "captured" its lost stream millions of years ago and diverted it through the Narrows.
George Washington and Daniel Boone were among the company. And, as legend has it, Boone high-tailed it just about the time the French and their Iroquoian allies, who had been hiding in the trees along the road, were finishing off routing Braddock's army about a day's march from Fort Duquesne. Enough of these fur trade campaigns, thank you. And Braddock’s an idiot.
Many years later, after the massacre was consigned to history, nineteenth century engineering technology was eventually brought to bear, and rock talus from the slopes was piled on either side of Will's Creek to build parallel roadway and railroad beds through the Narrows. The road originally blazed by Braddock, like the stream, was captured and channeled through the narrows. Later the road was improved by Congress to become part of the first National Highway system.
And the gap, due to the increasingly heavy flow of westwardly bound people, wagons, and animals along the National Road, got to be known as the Gateway to the West. I think, also, that it was sometime during this period that people began calling it the Narrows. As the Narrows became more of a well-known landmark, it frequently got confused with the Cumberland Gap, which is on the Kentucky/Tennessee border. And if memory serves, Boone did walk through that opening.
But to fully experience the raw physiography of the Narrows, away from the Kline's - always-congested-National Highway-rail line - conglomeration, I have to hoof it to the top. The best view is from the Will's Mountain side. After meandering up past an abandoned injection molding plant and the weed wracked remains of a turn-of-the-century spa, I can work my way to the edge. From there, I follow it along to an outcropping called, what else, Lover's Leap.
It seems like every small town with high escarpments nearby has some kind of Lover's Leap. In the case of the Narrows, the story goes that the lovers were a hunter named Jack Chadwick and a Shawnee Indian princess of surpassing beauty. In an enraged encounter with her chieftain father, who objected to the liaison because he felt Indian blood was getting a little too thin, Jack managed to jab the chief with his hunting knife, inflicting a mortal wound. As a result of this, his princess was dishonored among the Shawnee — whose numbers had been whittled down considerably by then. And, of course, she had always been despised by the settlers since the affair began. There was only one choice that remained for her. So she met her suitor at the summit of the overhanging rocks, probably quickly explained her problem and then before he could stop her, over she went.
Jack, being faithful to what he started, and, also, probably more importantly, being the person directly responsible for her situation in the first place, unhesitatingly followed after, flinging himself to his own death. So goes one of the versions. Nowadays the only people who fall off the ledges are adventure starved teenagers and drunks — an increasing number of which may be both.
But I hike up to the Lover's Leap vantage point now and then, not to enact the final resolution for a recent love affair's denouement, but to get perspective. To have the eagle’s eye, to sense the plunging abyssal verticality of time, the palimpsest, beneath the rough surface tension of brick and asphalt.
For here is where the immensity of the Narrows and its proper significance in the universe comes into play. I especially like to hit these heights when the atmosphere is clean and lucent in the early spring and late fall days. Then the Narrows has a ring like the crisp pellucidity of a Mozart sonata. I also have recently grown to like days that are more blustery and dark when it seems like the grounding centripetal pull of Bach's organ Passacaglia in C Minor, with repeating heavy bass counterpoint, is rising from the bowels of the chasm. From this ledge, Kline's and the roadway recede into the far down reaches of the huge womb of the canyon. Only the faint vwroooo-m-m-m now and then of a truck engaging gears carried up by the drafts reminds me at all of the Lilliputian life that I have temporarily discarded below.
Sometimes I have a sense of hovering. Suspended over the edge of this massive quiet, this great void, bounded on either side by jagged exposed Devonian quartz and hard Tuscarora sandstone stratas on the upper 300 feet of the canyon and by the sparsely timbered slopes and crumbled rock scree on the lower 700 feet. It all converges down on the muddy strand of the creek which has finally worked its way into the Ordovician times, dating from about 460 million years ago. The Ordovician layers were revealed when the B&O Railroad built its line through the Narrows and blasted into what is called the Juniata Formation at the base with its distinct rusty hue of iron oxides.
Although not a very far distance to walk, there is no established public access or overlook. Maybe this is better, because the experience is more solitary in nature. On the other hand, in not having this opportunity easily available, I have a hunch that folks in Cumberland are being robbed of a rich and sacred dialogue that exists in media res, smack in the middle of ordinary life. Lately, however, there has been some talk of building a public park surrounding Lover' s Leap.
I hope it's not just rumor. For I have a wistful comfort in anticipating that in Cumberland there may be a place you can get to - Lover's Leap, or anywhere along the Narrows’ ledges, for that matter - where the built world for one sweet moment recedes into oblivion. Even though a community's range of view may be frighteningly entrapped by all the redundant fabrications of structure and thought it has to operate within every day, just as easily people can skulk into Kline's, they can also secrete their way up to this one particular place of such unyielding sweep.
And from there, it's a helluva lot more than just a piss in the river.
(Jack Slocomb is a nature poet, essayist, and novelist living in Cumberland, Maryland.)
Will DiNola
September 23rd, 2024
True community isn’t instantly around you. You have to grow it yourself. It’s something that needs to be sewn, then cultivated. Only then can it blossom.
Growing up in Cumberland, MD, going to college in Philadelphia, PA, and finally moving to New York, NY where I live currently: I would meet people in those big cities, describe where I grew up, and hear their inevitable conclusion: well, sounds like you had nothing to do there.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. You may not have nightly live comedy shows or a million bars to choose from here in Cumberland… but what you do/did have is genuine people, creativity, and community.
See, living in NYC, I see it everyday, “decision fatigue,” so they call it. There are so many things to do that people just end up staying inside; Or else there are so many things to do that people just follow the crowd and go to the talked-about, “hip” spot… when really it’s nothing all that special.
Growing up in the 301, you may not have had as many options, but that forced you to MAKE THE THINGS YOU WANT HAPPEN. Which also happens to be a great life lesson. For me, this is one of, if not the most formative thing living in the area taught me. And something I am forever grateful for.
These days, I’m a musician and composer in the city, and my early days toying with and learning new instruments, or making beats on the computer, the learning processes that brought me to do what I love today— all of that was me just creating my own fun and wouldn’t have happened if I could go SEE musicians every night or distract myself with other activities and engagements on the daily.
Those were in my early days. And once I came out of my shell a bit more in middle and high school, I looked for a musical community. In those days, what was left of the indie/emo music scene in the Cumberland/Frostburg area had withered a bit. Venues had closed (RIP Winsor Hall), bands had moved away (RIP Sea Lines), people had started families— it was time to make our own scene happen, build the community we wanted to see.
So 301 Stories creator, Ethan Romaine, and I started a band together, called Golf of Mexico. This was during our years in high school. Joined by some of our other high school buds, we took things seriously— more seriously than other kids might have taken things in other towns. Some teens might just be in it “for the chicks.” We didn’t care about that, we just wanted to build something great for ourselves and for others. We recorded multiple albums together, put on shows at bars, houses, school gymnasiums, wherever anyone would have us, and brought people together to listen to great music and have a good time. Eventually, other bands came to us… including a highlight when early 2010s indie rock legend Darwin Deez showed up and played a set at Ethan’s place. In our little town…
“Nothing to do.” That’s only the case if you don’t go out and find it.
“We are the music makers. And we are the dreamers of dreams.” - Willy Wonka
(Will DiNola is a musician and film composer living from Cumberland, MD and based in New York City.)
Ty DeMartino
July 26th, 2024
I honestly don’t think I have ever written anything (in one draft or another) outside of the 301.
Sure, I have had my scripts performed or filmed in the 310 (Los Angeles) and even the coveted 212 (New York City), but all of my writing has been inspired by my beloved 301 area code.
As a lifelong resident of Western Maryland, I have been fortunate enough to have a semi-successful career as a screenwriter and playwright. In the days before wireless internet, all it took was a squawking dial-up modem from my 301 landline to zap my scripts to producers in remote locations. I have written about people and places and stories far beyond these Maryland Mountains, but those stories and characters were all created in the great 301.
You see, there is something about these mountains that has given me the freedom to create without limitation. I am forever chatting with distant writers who long for their next “remote writer’s getaway” to find inspiration or they ask me to join them at some fabulous writer’s retreat that promises a “quiet location, free of distraction.” I already have that in the 301. If I get writer’s block? I go for a drive or take a walk on the trail. Need inspiration? I chat with the many real people I encounter at the local coffee shop or along the Main Street. Need encouragement to keep going? I simply look to the sky or the trees or the rivers, soak them in and count my (many) blessings.
It has worked for me.
And what encourages me even more these days is watching the next batch of young content creators rise up from the 301. Whether they are making art, writing, filming, dancing, singing or creating music, these young people are here living their passion) and others have gone away, yet return to find that spark of inspiration). I find my encouragement in encouraging them.
As a great philosopher once sang, “I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way” … all the way back to the 301.
(Ty DeMartino is a writer/filmmaker living in the 301 area code.)
Ethan Romaine
June 23rd, 2024
I taught myself how to write movies by writing about the 301.
I wrote my first short film by copying the format from a Superbad screenplay I found online, as I made up a story about hanging out with my best friend. I got into film school with a script that I wrote about a bunch of kids driving around the county and ending up at Dan’s Rock. Once at NYU, I wrote plays, shorts, pilots, and features - all set in Western Maryland. All this is to say, no matter where life, work, and art takes me, I will always hold home near and dear to me.
When I embarked on directing my first film, it only felt right to take it back to where it all started. That experience, which became “Lovers Leap,” was so fulfilling that it made the path forward clear. Most young filmmakers spend years making short film after short film, forming their voice and their technique. Why not do that with the guidance of my original inspiration? So I set out to make “301 Stories,” an anthology series looking in at some of the simultaneously unqique and universal experiences and perspectives found in my home region.
Three years later, I have only scratched the surface… and that’s the point. This series is my tribute to the bountiful nuance and beauty of rural Appalachian Maryland. My hope is that folks from home will watch this and feel pride and love for their own experiences, and that folks from out of town will watch and experience both empathy and curiosity towards our corner of the country. Then, growth and connection follow.
In that spirit, I am excited to start this blog on the series’ website, where folks can share their own “301 Stories.” If you have a story from growing up in the 301, send it to us, and we will post it here on this site. This way, as more and more people watch the series, audiences can continue to participate in the endless diversity of experience and perspective that is the 301.
(Ethan Romaine is a writer and director from Frostburg, MD. He is the creator of 301 Stories.)