I have been having some really interesting adventures this spring, and I thought I would share with you a humorous anecdote of my last trip home. For the new readers, I grew up in Nicholas County, which is nearly smackdab in the center of West Virginia. Lots of mountains, questionable cell phone service, you get about one stoplight per town.
I had been at my parents' house on our WV "staycation" for less than 24 hours, when my boyfriend (a city boy) asked if we could go see the windmills I had talked so much about. This particular windmill farm is accessed by a dirt road starting in Fenwick, WV (near Richwood), and more than once a wrong turn has led me to Rupert. The windmill farm, like many windmill farms, is located on the top of a mountain, and in my first several trips, a truck or SUV was required to reach it because of the rough roads. I've been scooting around in a Grand Am for the last few years, so I couldn't go visit them myself. My teen brother volunteered to take us in his truck, which was my first questionable choice of the day.
After a lot of winding roads and driving that will eventually require legal (if not medical) intervention, we got to the windmill farm. Like I said, I've been there many times before, usually with my father when we went on a Sunday drive. There are usually lots of other people up there. In my neck of the woods, wind turbines are a site worth seeing. There are probably a hundred different twists and turns up there, and we drove around for nearly two hours. We were just seeing what views each hill had to offer (we believe Cottle Knob, the hill behind my house, is visible).
In the course of all our twists and turns, we somehow ended up behind a gate. When we tried to exit the windmill farm, the gate was LOCKED! My heart sank. We were miles away from civilization, with little to no cell phone service, and we were trapped on a windmill farm. The forecast called for thunder and lightning, we only had a few bottles of water and a few bags of chips, this was not a good start to our vacation. There were a few signs hanging around, and I called the numbers on the signs from my one bar of service. All were disconnected, except for the one that connects to a coal mine in Boone County, and the fellow I spoke to had no clue what windmill farm I was talking about or how I got that number. Ugh. I tried calling the non-emergency lines for the Nicholas County and Richwood Police Departments, but no one answered (I'm guessing because it was Sunday).
I finally had a little luck when I tried calling a non-911 number for Nicholas County Emergency Services. Since we were on the Nicholas/Greenbrier county line, they patched me through to Greenbrier Emergency Dispatch. I explained our situation, but had no clue how to communicate to them our exact location on this expansive windmill maze. As luck would have it, I remembered passing another gate at the entrance of a coal mine and I could actually see the mine. (A coalmine on a windmill farm, how poetic is that?) The dispatch lady called me back, told me someone with keys was on the way, but it would be a while, and that we were TRESPASSING.
This is where I panicked, because I was not about to go to jail for trespassing when about 50 other rubberneckers were up there taking windmills selfies too. I told her I was unaware of that, to which she tersely replied "There are signs everywhere and you had to go through a gate to get there." There were lots of signs, but they all said "NO HUNTING." Unless I am mistaken and all my college criminal justice courses were for naught, "no hunting" and "no trespassing" are not interchangeable signs. So I spent the two hours we had to wait for the keeper of the keys contemplating running off into the wilderness, away from locks and gates and the human construct of "trespassing."
I was gazing at some fibrous plants, thinking about all the episodes of "Naked and Afraid" I'd been watching, considering weaving myself a weed blanket for the winter, when the guy with the keys turned up. He let us loose, told us that a researcher studying the dead bats and birds (the ugly side of this green energy) locked us in by mistake, and told us to have a nice day. We specifically asked if we were trespassing, and he said no. It was a happy accident. The only reason I can come up with for the dispatch lady reading me the riot act is that perhaps she thought I meant we were on the coalmine property when I told her I could see the coalmine. In that case, we definitely would have been trespassing and probably been sent to Guantanamo Bay as eco-terrorists.
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| Boyd Crowder knows. |
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Love it!!!!!! Wish I had been there, too!!!!! S
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