The Ohio valley is astir with May. Farmers curry the wide, level melon fields and Carolina wrens exhort from roadside shrubbery. I hit the river at the hamlet of Fly and follow her downstream fifteen miles on the Ohio side. She is a formidable river from first glance, as always, low-slung and moody with a resentful, beast-of-burden cast to her even on fine days. I smell her heavy scent of muck and catfish water as soon as I edge her. On the far side the knobby green-up hills of West Virginia and a string of fluttery mirage habitations, glimpses of coiled cable and the gritty raw ends of riverbank commerce. A northbound coal train chugs export/import across a narrow bridge.

I stop for gas near the foot of the big bridge spanning to St. Marys, West Virginia, and go in to fill my coffee cup. The proprietor of the station is shooting the vernal breeze with a pair of old cronies in tight porkpie hats. I soon realize, as I sugar my coffee, that they are discussing the disastrous collapse of the Point Pleasant-Gallipolis bridge wherein some 50 people perished into the midwinter Ohio. That took place more than twenty years ago and some 70 miles downstream, but they jab and tack about the intimate details as if it were this very morning's news.

One old chap smacks his lips and declares, "There is a handful of other bridges up and down this river that will be going pretty soon if they don't watch 'em." I pay up and climb in the car thinking—"But not today!"

I cross into West Virginia and pass through the village of St. Marys and up the long steep switchbacked hill behind her to the ridgetop, the first of many hundreds, and drive south on highway 16. Five miles in, I pull over at a high spot to let pushy traffic pass and to look off to the east, off and over at the great secrecy and fertile closure of the mountains and their hollows and runs, the soft hill upon hill, ridge after ridge, all buffered and screened by the beneficent canopy of broadleafed deciduous forest. It is always a surprise and an uplift, the first intimation of the magnitude, of the vast continuity of the Appalachians, their thousand miles of unbroken treetops bound and unified this very moment by the end-to-end overlap of countless titmouse songs.

There is a trace of haze and a cool moist silence this morning that shifts and sways like something palpable, adjusts with a slight flinch when a woodpecker calls. The aspect is long and imposing, yet comfortable; there is the knowledge that in the end these are traversable, walkable mountains. Unlike the Rockies or the Sierras, these ranges are conceivably crossable at almost any point, given the right shoes, a slicker, and a good snake stick...

Already the driving rhythm is set, the swing of the plumb and the shift and lean of the body through the curves. And already we are among the beautiful Appalachian ruins, the old houses given up and left to moulder on the slopes above the road. Ruins by tradition seem more poignant south of the Mason Dixon; they seem "heroically abandoned" in a manner that makes the sag of their rooves more eloquent and their broad porches loaded with junk and racoon jetsam more reflective. Among the square and thrifty frame homes with admirable two-story porches and spring houses off to one side, their old unpainted barns starting to brown and curl, their sheds and shanties full of briars, listing among sumac, there are the classic mountain bungalows: one and a half story dwellings with house-wide low-hung porches with white posts and a host of chairs and half a dozen flower pots hanging from the eave lip. They are either white frame or red/brown tarpaper "brick." Some stand on cement block stilts—one in a creek bottom was set eight feet off the ground. All are tough and thin and sometimes feeble to the eye, and yet—this is the Appalachian patina—always, unabashedly, sufficient. And the many creekside housetrailers, even they are set parallel to the road with the ubiquitous wide porch and roof rigged to them such that the entire structure closely resembles the bungalows of the preceding generation.

At the edge of Burnt House I stop for lunch, pulling up a sharp gravel drive to a churchyard. A Methodist church, it says above the door, built in 1889. It stands, painted neatly white, amid a grove of mature oaks and commands a ort but handsome view: a brushy draw runs below, beyond highway 47, and to the north a narrow dirt road disappears up the mountain side, just eking out a path of least resistance through the trees. A small graveyard lies on a terrace a few feet above the church parking lot, and then a spanking white outhouse, its two doors labeled "Adam" and "Eve."

I get out of the car to stretch and make a sandwich on the hood and quarter a big dill pickle lengthwise. There are crows yelling away up that enticing little dirt road and the bluejays in the church oaks cock an ear to listen. When I turn back toward the church I discover a man peeking at me around the corner of the building. A tall pale man of 60 in Oshkosh overalls, he bends timidly from the waist, out from behind the corner, his head under a navy blue ballcap waggling with a will of its own over his hesitant frame. He is possessed, it appears, by amentia; maybe a caretaker at the church: pew-polisher and fly swatter. I take a step in his direction, thinking to say hello, explain my presence, but my sandwich-in-hand does that, I guess, and the fellow shrinks, and the waggling intensifies, so I stop and turn back to my car and finish my lunch trying to make myself unobtrusive and harmonious, gazing off into the upper oaks.