I pull into Paw Paw, West Virginia, about noon. The day is overcast and vaguely expectant. Deep within, I realize I was headed for Paw Paw the entire trip; it has been an unspoken but persistent destination by virtue, pure and simple, of its name glowing on the map beside the upper Potomac. The past several days, whenever the traveling grew tiresome and the look-see thin, it was Paw Paw that loomed beckoningly on the horizon.

I had envisioned a bright, breezy day with good, tonic sunlight on the trees—but this will do. I make a brief swing through the residential part of town—old neighborhoods up and away from the river; neighborhoods of well-built, classic Appalachian houses set close to the street and low to the ground. It is a standard enough village; I like the way her railroad tracks swing with the curve of the river.

Then I drive back to the main street and stop at a cafe. It is a converted frame home, apparently, sooty white and listless—but I can't rush through Paw Paw after all that subliminal beckoning.

There are two women in the place, a clammy old cook and a young waitress. I am the only customer, again. I order cherry pie and black coffee and scan the bulletin board near the door. "Chihuahua Puppies for Sale—Father on Premises." The pie is not good, but I finally manage to interrupt the women's desultory talk and get the young one going about the block-long, acned cream-colored factory sprawling in desuetude just across the street. It was the Vesuvius Crucible, she tells me, until that business dried up some years ago. The last she knew someone had converted its windowless metal halls to a mushroom nursery. And nowadays most everyone in town travels to work way down in Winchester, Virginia.

From the cafe I drive down to the Potomac and off on a dirt road to a little boatlaunch area below the new bridge. I get out the binoculars and amble downstream, through a narrow little grove east from the bridge. Bait litter and beer cans are strewn along the bank, but no birds show themselves at the moment. Ornithologically, this is on the edge of legendary territory. The three counties immediately east of Paw Paw—the three counties comprising the jagged beak of the West Virginia panhandle—were the original sites of one of the famous American mystery birds, the Sutton's warbler. This creature, suspected of being a hybrid between the Yellow-throated and the Parula warblers, was discovered in May of 1939 on Opequon Creek over toward Martinsburg. Only another half-dozen or so have been seen in the ensuing half-century, all but one in the panhandle. The bird has taken its furtive place alongside the Carbonated Swamp warbler (collected, described, and painted by John James Audubon in May 1811 and never heard of since); the Blue Mountain and the Cincinnati warblers, neither bird seen in over a century; and Bachman's warbler, the rarest songbird of late 20th century North America.

For a moment I consider the possibility of loading the daypack with peanut butter and striking off downriver to loiter at likely intersections and test my bird-luck. (Twelve years ago I spent ten high-adrenalin days on the banks of the Suwanee River looking for—in a rhapsody of naiveté—Bachman's warbler: up each morning at daybreak to brew a rank cup of instant coffee with tepid water from the Manatee Springs campground tap and off into the burgeoning late-March woods along the river to sweep in vain the budding treetops like radar.) But no, the rain still lurks in the upper hills and the odds are way too long. I spend ten minutes along the Potomac, idling out to the large sycamore leaning at a 45 degree angle over the river, before turning back to the car.

So it seems it wasn't the Sutton's warbler that beckoned from Paw Paw all through the preceding week, if one can track such things. There is no feast in the streets of Paw Paw or sudden full-moon epiphany; no grail it seems but the river scent. Just the katydid-green toponym aflutter on the south bank, the sweet double-thump of the spondee, with hot black day-in-place coffee and a low basket full of Chihuahua pups shivering in their nest like little birds.