Almost Heaven

When John Denver first sang the words to Take Me Home, Country Roads, many of us thought, “Yeah, sure … West Virginia.”

The Mountain State has long been synonymous with the backwoods … coal mines … country folk … seclusion. It has always been remote, and that remoteness led to its being discovered as a place of retreat and restoration.

West Virginia’s first tourists were the carriage trade who could afford to travel for relief from the “heat, humidity and disease of the ‘sickly season,'” Wikipedia recounts.

As early as the late 1700s, wealthy people traveled to White Sulfur Springs for their health and by the beginning of the 19th century, it was considered to be the “Queen of the Watering Places” in the South and one of the country’s first summer destinations.

There, the Greenbriar, the nation’s first golf resort, continues that tradition as one of the country’s largest and most exclusive resorts, one of several elite retreats.

Though more often today, West Virginia’s mountains, hills and forests attract down-to-earth rock climbers, skiers, hikers, backpackers, hunters, anglers and nature lovers in search of the state tree, the sugar maple.

So, when Alena Nicholas’ photograph of a West Virginia mill stream arrived, it relit images of John Denver’s words …

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.

Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze.

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads.

All my memories gather ’round her
Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.

Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye.

(refrain)

I hear her voice in the mornin’ hour, she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away.

Drivin’ down the road, I get a feelin’
That I should’ve been home yesterday, yesterday.

(refrain)

John Denver