Pinch Gut Hollow

I was brought to this bucolic abode when I was four years old. It was paradise to me. The property was just off of Colfax Road just north of Pinch Gut Hollow. The entrance to the property was a winding dirt road which meandered down the side of a hill for a mile and a half. The house itself was a classic West Virginia farm house. It was a two story frame with a grand porch which stretched across the entire front of the house.

There was a barn one hundred yards from the house which was occupied by cows and chickens. There was also a one room building where the farm hand lived.

For some reason, I remember the roads most succinctly. The dirt was a dirty yellow. Rocks protruded through the dirt randomly and infinitely. At first glance, it was difficult to imagine walking or riding on the rough surface, but we did every day.

I remember I went back to Pinch Gut Hollow after a few years respite in the military. I had purchased a ‘66 Mustang and wanted to find out how my sports car would fare on the road. I started up the road from the Colfax Bridge but only navigated a few hundred yards before I heard a sickening, clanging sound underneath my car’s carriage. I got out to investigate, and saw my muffler had been stripped off of the underbelly. The scene was comical to me because the sound of the muffler being ripped off drew the curiosity of a young boy and tempted him to run down from his shack to see what the commotion was about. He looked like a typical Pinch Gut kid. His hair was not of fancy cut but of the cereal bowl. His clothes were vintage Gabriel rather than Dillard. His eyes betrayed nothing behind except a paucity of analytical thought.

The kid gave me a frown, glanced toward the dented muffler then ran back toward his shack shouting “Momma, momma, horse wreck, momma.”

That’s where I lived from four to fourteen. I was mostly isolated from the outside world other than for the time I was in school and the few times I interfaced with the Beckenstaff family down the hill.

The Beckenstaff’s were the typical Pinch Gut Family. There was a grandfather figure who seemed to wield some control over the dysfunctional family. He always had a two day beard and talked mostly in riddles with a high pitched voice. There was a mother figure who seemed to always be in a state of suspended animation on her beloved couch on the front porch. Then there were the two kids, Roger and Sally, who were approximately my age but seemed much older in their vision of their own reality.

I always thought of myself as an intruder into this alien space while the two Beckenstaff kids seemed to revel in it and be immersed in their own cultural morass.

The old man had started to build a house a few feet from the old clapboard house which the family called home. The first floor was of mortar and block while the second floor was of wood. In the ten years that I lived in that area, I never saw any one work on the house. Roger told me that they were going to move in any day. But, in actuality, we used the house only as a giant play area. There were no windows, doors or a roof. Just a shell of a dream house which would never be completed. Sally would sometimes join in on our playmaking but only as a diversion. She treated Roger and me only as props in her own vintage play that she watched over and over in her head.

There was a spring a few hundred yards north of their house. Someone had built a fountain at the epicenter so that one could quench his thirst with the cold, running water bubbling up from the sweet earth. However, there was always a dichotomy to contemplate on the road to Pinch Gut Hollow. If you stood on the road and looked north toward the spring, it seemed that you might have been delivered to paradise. But, if you turned one hundred eighty degrees, your eyes would be cast down onto a dump which contained all manner of disgusting castoffs from the Beckenstaff clan. The dump was adorned with old tires, metal automobile parts, construction waste, and, of course, rats the size of cats.

Yes, that was West Virginia in a nutshell. On one glance, you could see almost unimaginable beauty and tranquility, but if you fixed your gaze in another direction, you could find disgusting waste created by unconscionable laziness, albeit inherent necessity.