Mountaineer proud of heritage

People ask me if I date my cousins. Others have joked that I must live in a double-wide with a giant satellite in my backyard. I brace myself for these oh-so-clever attempts at humor when I tell people I'm from West Virginia. I understand why my home state gets a bad rap. A popular setting for backwoods horror movies, it is a bizarre-shaped anomaly with a land area covered by about 75 percent forests.

I admit that my own ears perk up when I hear the rare mention of my state in a national media outlet. In fact, when cashiers see my driver's license or tour guides ask where I'm from, they often mention a brother in Roanoke or a recent visit to Arlington, unaware that West Virginia is in fact a state in its own right.

Although I don't consider myself to be the prototypical representative of the state (at least by the standards of the "So is your uncle your grandpa?" quipsters), I accept that I'll always be a West Virginian to the core. I've lived in Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Oxford. I get cravings for Thai and Indian food, speak Spanish, shun collegiate football apparel and dabble in yoga. But despite my cosmopolitan aspirations, I'm more of a mountaineer than most of the people I grew up with in Teays Valley, W.Va., even the ones who drive pickup trucks, sing along to country music and grimace at the mention of sushi.

My friends and I splashed in muddy creeks, where we chased each other with crawdads when we were little. We'd run screaming if someone spotted a copperhead. Then a mom or a dad would bash the poisonous snake with a hoe. We scooped tadpoles out of mud puddles and captured lightning bugs in the dusk. Later, we'd cry to find them dead in our glass jars.

My mother is a coal-miner's daughter from the mining town of War high in the Appalachian Mountains. When I was a little girl, my family made an annual Thanksgiving visit. We drove up a narrow dirt road that spiraled a mountain so sharply (over a rushing river) that we had to honk our horn to warn possible oncoming traffic of our presence.

My grandpa wore overalls and didn't have teeth. A father of 13, he suffered from black lung disease, a condition caused by inhaling coal dust. My cousins and I ate Thanksgiving dinner on Styrofoam plates sitting on the porch, overlooking a yard littered with the shell of an old school bus and a pair of penned ostriches. A skittish pack of feral dogs wandered between nearby railroad tracks and the front steps. Few of my classmates back home who lived in suburban brick homes with landscaped yards and drove new Mustangs on their 16th birthdays could relate.

My West Virginia roots run centuries deeper. On vacations, my other grandfather, George III, a ham radio enthusiast who graduated from Harvard and taught psychology at Marshall University, would pull over at cemeteries to show us 1800s-era tombstones etched with our family name. We narrated home videos of our ancestors' farmhouses complete with servants' quarters in Millcreek. My granddad would proudly point out Davisson Avenue and George Ward Elementary School, both named after our family. He'd repeat stories about his father, who managed the state's banks during the Depression, and a great aunt who served as a Yankee spy during the Civil War, smuggling maps deep in her blouse (where she said the Southern gentlemen never once checked).

Now, I've chosen to embrace rather than downplay my indisputable mountain heritage. I confess that when I'm living far away from Appalachia in coastal Carolina or South America, a few notes of bluegrass music or a low train whistle brings on waves of nostalgia for rolling West Virginia hills.

I've even learned to take satisfaction in the surprised, "You don't strike me as the type" reactions I elicit when I announce to acquaintances where I'm from.

Now that I've decided not to let the cousin jokes get to me, I must say that busting stale stereotypes can be quite fulfilling.

Rachel Ward is a freelance writer living in Charleston.