Morgantown WV

It's Friday late afternoon and Carter is head down in his brand new laptop that just arrived via Amazon, the dogs are cowering in corners because of the daily rumbling of August thunder, and Ann is in Carter's room comforting herself about losing her baby to college by packing and repacking Carter's belongings.

Carter is getting ready to go out for the last time this summer, but we have asked him to be home reasonably early for the early morning ride to Morgantown that will make him officially a Mountaineer, joining the 4-year party that they call college.

Saturday morning Ann and I are up just before 7:00 and head downstairs to make coffee and walk the dogs. It is an emotional morning for Ann. We throw together our daypacks for Sunday's planned hike at Cooper's Rock State Forest, but I can tell that Ann is distracted, just going through the motions. I'm sure she has forgotten something and I'm equally sure she doesn't care. I try to keep my mouth shut. Losing her baby is hard.

Post coffee, I go through the massive game of Tetris that is packing all of Carter's stuff into the Jeep. I went to college with less than a quarter of the amount of things that are piled on the garage floor, including a huge bean bag chair that will take up a quarter of the volume of the Jeep. I manage to get it all in, just. There's not much room for us humans. It will be a cramped three-hour ride to Morgantown.

In an effort to control something in her life that seems out of control right now, Ann announces that she is driving and that is just fine by me because I slept two and a half hours the night before, after getting a blow-off email from a job that I had been pursuing since May. I content myself and make the time pass by trying to identify roadside wildflowers at 75 miles per hour. The list numbers greater than 30 as we approach our exit off I-68.

At noon, traffic in Morgantown is insane with the crush of arriving students, many of whom like us have no idea where they're going. It is a circus at Carter's dorm but we finally manage to find an RA in the street who talks us through where to park and unload. We would come to find that parking in Morgantown is as scarce as hens' teeth.

A Happy-Sad Goodbye

Student volunteers have carts to help schlep the freshmen students' belongings to their dorm rooms, in Carter's case, on the 9th floor in a block of similar looking dorms surrounding a bit of green space, carpeted in artificial turf, emblazoned with the WVU logo. We finally get all Carter's stuff to the correct room and Ann proceeds to help him unpack, her final act for now in the mom dance. I stay out of the way and do what I am told. She holds it together for the most part, but the tears are really close to the surface.

Mom Helping with the Unpacking

The Bean Bag Throne

By 3:00pm the ordeal is over for us and I escort my weeping wife to the car, parked six minutes away at the hospital. While Ann was unpacking Carter's stuff, I was scoping the map for beer. I know Ann needs some anesthesia. We make for nearby Mountain State Brewing on the river and a few hundred yards from our hotel.

They have just three of their own beers on tap (their brewery is in Thomas, right next to Davis, where we visited Labor Day Weekend last year), an IPA, a lager, and a stout. The beers are all acceptable, but not extraordinary. I choose the IPA and Ann chooses the lager over the stout: it is too early for dessert. After my IPA, the bartender volunteers that they have a couple of other local IPAs from Chestnut Brewing on guest taps. I taste both and they are both exceptionally good.

We finish the afternoon with some nachos, a flatbread pizza, and conversation with a couple from Louisa VA also in town to drop off  a daughter. It turns out that he and I grew up in the same tiny town of Earlysville VA and although he is five years younger than me, we know a lot of the same people. In between reminiscing about back home, we comment on the deplorable state of affairs in Charlottesville, the clash between white supremacists, protestors, and the cops.

Damping the Sorrow

Late afternoon, we head the quarter mile upstream to check in to our hotel and after getting situated, we decide to walk off some of the beer on the Monongahela Rail Trail which runs between the hotel and the river.

Monongahela River Ten Floors Up

Morgantown Dam

Walleye?!?!! Who Knew?

Tottering Spotted Sandpiper, Actitis macularius

Bird's-foot Trefoil, Lotus corniculatus

New York Ironweed, Vernonia noveboracensis

Bouncing Bet, Saponaria officinalis

Joe-pye-weed, Eutrochium sp.

After our walk and showers, we're still stuffed from our late lunch, so we decide to skip dinner and turn in early in anticipation of our hike on Sunday at Cooper's Rock State Forest. It's been an emotionally grueling day.