The Wheeling Island, West Virginia - The American Guide (2015)

When I’m feeling particularly honest, conversations about what things were like growing up—those ones I’ve avoided until recently—begin something like, “I know we didn’t have money when I was a kid, but to call yourself ‘poor’ in West Virginia means something else.”

Or, to borrow a family refrain: Everything’s relative.

We shopped at the Hostess Bakery Outlet, where bread past its shelf date was sold cheap. Though the old house we lived in looked nice from the outside and was solid on the inside, the living room required a mixture of real and foldable lawn furniture to fill the space. At age 10 I legendarily informed my mother we had to “stop having garage sales because we have nothing left to sell that anyone would buy.” But since we didn’t live on the Island, I never doubted we’d be fine.

From the beginning, I understood that the Wheeling Island was where life was actually rough. It was the home of the dog track and bookies, where the dirty pool was—the one you had to take a shower at home after swimming in. And some of the kids who lived on the Island didn’t have parents at all.

Thanks to blessed youth, these were merely harsh facts, removed from all judgment. Things on the Island were just plain harder in every way; as a kid, I accepted this as such, and was content. Then, at the moment when emerging adulthood would have turned disparate means into tools of cruelty, I moved across the country to a city that might as well have been the Moon.

The Island was left behind, frozen in time. Decades on, it has remained the geographical embodiment of a cautionary tale: Things can always be worse, and it’s only a matter of time until the waters will come for you.

* * *

From the original WPA volume, A Guide To the Mountain State, 1941 (appearing on the volume’s very last page, which feels fitting):

WHEELING ISLAND, a large suburb of Wheeling, is often swept by floods; in 1884, 1913, and 1936, the island was completely inundated. After the regular annual flood the islanders clean up the wreckage, rebuild their houses, and calmly go about their business until the waters rise again the next spring. The island was bought from the Indians by Ebenezer Zane, who, it is said, gave them a barrel of whisky for it.

On the island is WHEELING DOWNS, S. Penn St., a half-mile race track opened in 1937 on the grounds of the State Fair Park. Races are held here from late May to late June, and from late August to late September. The pari-mutuel system of betting on horse races, legal in West Virginia, is used here.

In the years since the above was written and I departed my hometown, the Island has evolved into a more extreme version of what I’d known it to be as a child. The days of horse racing were gone long before my lifetime, leaving only greyhounds in their wake. A new casino-hotel complex attached to the dog track funnels more fugitive cash through the streets than ever before. The addition of fracking money and a new breed of outsider-versus-local tension has created a situation rife with distrust, charging the air with volatility. Simple acts like stopping into a corner store involve being buzzed in and out of locked doors during business hours, even in broad daylight.

The Island continues to flood regularly. Periodically such events are biblical. It’s been that way as long as the Ohio River has run its course, and will continue to be so until the end of time.

Way back when, the populace inhabiting this small plot of land could take to higher ground on either bank of the river when the water rose, and was affluent enough to repair these cycles of damage. The Island’s once gorgeous Victorian behemoths now sit rotting, decorated with scaling shingles in variegated tones. Ornate gingerbread woodwork dangles from their gables, as wraparound porches on the verge of collapse are propped up with beams stuck so far into their yards that they seem more like marooned Viking ships than steady homes.

To this day, a marker at the corner of Virginia and South Penn streets bears testimony to the battery the place continues to survive. Though the rest of the building has long since been leveled, civic duty prevailed in leaving its northwest corner intact. When approached from the wrong angle, this seems truly bizarre until, rounding the corner, its hand-painted record depicting centuries of the Island’s historic floods, broken down by year and water levels reached at that exact spot, reveals itself.

Attached to this wall is an old doorway, gaping onto an empty lot gone to seed. A set of curtains were left to sway in the breeze, imbuing the scene with an ominousness that diffuses all curiosity. Sticking around long enough to see what the Island has been through draws stares from passersby.

One gets the feeling that history wasn’t meant for you… or me.