Homeplace

by John Lingan

  A few days before I went to Berkeley Springs and saw some of the most revered water on earth bubble out of the ground, a Virginia-bound CSX train carrying 109 cars of crude oil had derailed outside Beckley, about four and a half hours southwest. Two cars went into the Kanawha River. Ten others exploded at half-hour intervals. Mushroom plumes filled the sky and at least one house caught fire. Two hundred people were evacuated, and Governor Earl Ray Tomblin declared another state of emergency, this time only affecting two counties.

  Berkeley Springs residents have been spared the kind of environmental disasters that plague their downstate neighbors because the eastern panhandle is separated from the rest of the state geographically, culturally, and most important, geologically. The greater part of West Virginia, including Charleston, belongs to the Appalachian Plain, snug between the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus. This is the real sticks, land of gorgeous rolling forest that too many people see only in the credits of bleak documentaries about the Other Half, the white poor. Here’s where you find places like Wirt County, population 5,901, which comes to only 26 people per square mile. Morgan County, site of Berkeley Springs and the Troubadour, is a bit denser at 65 people per square mile, but one county east, Berkeley County, is a relative metropolis of nearly 109,000 residents, 323 people per square mile. Out in the panhandle they have silica, not coal. They have D.C. within an easy drive, not rural Kentucky. They have the Shenandoah Valley within view, not the densest woods of the Mountain State.

  They also have many more liberal, out-of-state transplants like Jeanne Mozier, who wouldn’t be opposed to the panhandle cutting ties entirely and creating its own state based on the boundaries of the old Northern Neck Proprietary, a stretch of land belonging to Lord Thomas Fairfax in the late seventeenth century. The Proprietary encompassed everything between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, stretching all the way down into the Tidewater region, even a segment of the Chesapeake coast. But the bulk of it was the northern Shenandoah, Route 522’s domain: Winchester and Berkeley Springs. From the very beginning of its settlement, this region was defined by its inviolability—surrounded by mountains, custom-built for farming, filled with money and cheap labor. It never became slave-powered tobacco land like the flatter, warmer areas to the east, and was never stripped for coal like the region to the west. Instead, it was defined by old money, social rigidity, bountiful wheat and apple harvests, and pristine water. In the late twentieth century, as the rest of the rural United States became wracked by economic inflation and environmental distress, the Northern Neck could be plausibly sold as a haven. And it became a destination for people like Jeanne, who had the means to relocate from denser, more environmentally compromised locations.

  I walked up the road toward the Star Theatre’s glowing marquee. The show that night was The Imitation Game, which would play at 7:30, then the same time on Saturday, followed by a Sunday matinee. The venue was a wonderful throwback: from the small lobby, visitors could either go straight through into the 350-seat theater or take a left into the tall-ceilinged concessions room, which was hand-painted by Jeanne and her husband, Jack, in a starry-night pattern and wallpapered with decades’ worth of framed local newspaper coverage.

  When I walked in, Jeanne was wrapping gummy worms in plastic bags to be sold for 50 cents, while Jack, sporting a handlebar mustache that could have won prizes, sat in a comfortable chair in the corner, reading the day’s paper. It felt like an especially charming living room, albeit one with a vintage cast-iron popcorn maker and art deco candy-display case.

  “Well, here it is,” Jeanne said, rolling her eyes at her little Shangri-la. Jack smiled at her lovingly. High up to her left, in the corner above the popcorn machine, hung a large, framed black and white portrait of a young man on a motorcycle.

  “That’s him,” Jeanne nodded toward Jack. “Nineteen sixty . . . five?” He nodded. “Five. He loves machines. When we bought the place he taught himself to operate the projector and he still does it, every show.” He smiled again, looking back to the paper.

  Besides that dashing photograph, the place was a museum to Jeanne. In the pictures on the wall, many dating back to the late ’70s, she was slight and long-haired, her trademark asymmetrical grin peeking out from underneath massive black-frame glasses. The more recent ones showed her growing stature in the town: a clip from a national film magazine highlighted the Star’s retro charm, and an article from the Morgan Messenger celebrated her annual role as the emcee of the Berkeley Springs Apple Butter Festival, held each Columbus Day weekend. And on the counter, above the well-lit candy boxes, sat her books.

  In 1999 she published her first, Way Out in West Virginia, a compendium of off-kilter travel recommendations—the state’s first brick road, the oldest golf course, that kind of thing. It had been recently reissued in an updated fourth edition. For her second, she coauthored the Berkeley Springs volume in the Images of America series, whose sepia-toned covers populate every small-town gift shop in the United States. So far, it is the sole book-length history of Berkeley Springs in existence; between her creation and curation of the historical museum and her authorship of that volume, Jeanne Mozier is literally the keeper of Berkeley Springs’s past. When I asked her how this happened, especially since she didn’t arrive here until well into adulthood, she told me that it was a message from the universe.

  “When we came here in 1977, it seemed to be my cosmic assignment. ‘Okay, Jeanne, here you go, this is what has to happen.’”

  She didn’t take celestial stuff or the sense of duty lightly. Born in upstate New York, Jeanne studied at Cornell before getting her masters in Communist Studies from Columbia. She graduated in 1967, and since “in that field, you either work for us or for them,” she was soon hired as an analyst for the CIA, focused on East Asia. The Tet Offensive occurred only months into her tenure. For two and a half years, right as Jim McCoy’s Nashville hopes were fading, she wrote for the agency’s internal magazine and analyzed every open and undercover report that came in from Vietnam. Finally the atmosphere of spy games and brutal conflict broke her, and she went to work for the D.C. corrections system as an administrator.

  While visiting an all-female jail in 1971, she witnessed a speech by an astrologer. “I watched these women,” she told me while folding up plastic candy bags, “some of them were hookers, murderers—they all had the attention of a fruit fly. But when they heard this one guy speak, they were riveted for forty-five minutes. They started sharing these unbelievable psychic experiences: visions, premonitions, auras. That’s when I understood the disruption on the etheric plane, the emotional chaos that surrounded these people. They had no boundaries. Some of them were certainly possessed on some level and they had no way to deal with it.”

  She began studying astrology with the teacher, and “it was obvious that I had done this before. Because it was already full-blown in my mind. I predicted the day the Berlin Wall came down.”

  When she and Jack decided they needed to leave D.C. altogether, they got in a camper and traveled the country, stopping only in towns that had naturally occurring springs. Jeanne wanted the energy, the atmospheric power, of natural water. All around America they went, until finally, nearly back home, they landed in a little town two hours west of where they started. In Berkeley Springs, Jeanne finally felt ethereally aligned. They moved in 1977, and Jeanne convinced her friend Jill Klein Rone, a lifelong actor and theater-troupe coordinator, to move as well; Jill arrived in 1979.

  Jeanne started the museum and tourism bureau, Travel Berkeley Springs, because at the time she moved in, “Nobody would’ve known that you could eat, sleep, and shop in West Virginia. They’d know they could hike or canoe, but hotels and restaurants are the money industries.”

  Her mission, the cosmic one, was to transcend the state’s near-hostility to outside visitors and make Berkeley Springs the best possible version of itself, a town that took pride in its past as a leisure destination and sought to uphold that legacy. She encouraged posh pri
vate spas to open in addition to the state-owned ones that abut the springs themselves. Now, as she told me repeatedly, Berkeley Springs boasted three times as many massage therapists as lawyers. Taking a cue from the town’s history of agricultural festivals in the 1930s—a new Tomato Queen was crowned annually—she founded the annual Apple Butter Festival. When his Jim McCoy record came out, Matt Hahn played with his band on the back of a flatbed truck as it crawled through downtown. Jeanne capitalized on the artist-retreat vibe by opening the Morgan Arts Council and holding craft shows on the square throughout the summer. And in order to keep the lights on in winter, she created the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting out of whole cloth, and grew it into the town’s global legacy. Because that’s what small towns often are: a bunch of people gathered around a natural landmark, led by the person who wants most passionately for that landmark to mean something and make money.

  Not everyone appreciated her passion, of course. There’s an expression among deeply rooted Berkeley Springs folks: in this town, like so many others, it’s “from-heres” versus “come-heres.” One outspoken from-here, Brooks McCumbee, caused a local stir in 2014 when he posted a photo on Facebook from 1973, describing the scene “before the trash started arriving in this area.” In an interview with the locally produced news website Morgan County, USA, McCumbee took issue with the Ice House and said, “You’ve got to understand, this town was a nice small town, I’ve lived here my whole life. We’ve had the city people, in a lot of cases, come in and take over. The transplants have moved in, taken over.” He never mentioned Jeanne by name but she is the standard-bearer of this transformation, and McCumbee is not alone.

  In her quest to rejuvenate Berkeley Springs, Jeanne had of course asked Jim McCoy to relocate down to Washington Street rather than stay stuck on top of Highland Ridge. It would be good for the hoteliers to have somewhere close to send people late at night. But Jim declined every request; relocating would defeat the whole point. The Troubadour sits on Jim’s ancestral land. The McCoys have been there longer than the Star Theatre, longer than the antique shops or the silica plant, and in the business of country music, those kinds of roots mean everything. Berkeley Springs is defined by the water—so long as it’s there, anything else around it is advertising. Likewise, the Troubadour is the Troubadour because it’s on Highland Ridge and because it’s run by Jim. He is the spring. It took decades of devoted historical preservation work and marketing effort for this New Yorker-cum-Washingtonian to approximate Jim’s rootedness, and Jeanne still wasn’t a local by the standards of people who knew Patsy Cline. She had single-handedly Pygmalion’d an entire town, but only an outsider would work so hard just to make a place more true to itself.

  On a Friday night, however, her duties were simple: pop the popcorn, wrap up the gummy worms, and show a movie for $4.50 a ticket. Jeanne was wearing a red sweater, because “things are going into Aries—hot, fire, that kind of thing.” Jack smiled. The audience would be there soon.

  “You know what we call that in the industry?” asked Arthur von Wiesenberger, gesturing to the window and the heavy snow falling just outside. “Future inventory.”

  It was 1 p.m. on Saturday, and my fellow judges and I had assembled for our training. Most of us were media of one kind or another: the publisher of the Observer; the director and host of EmeraldPlanet TV, a nonprofit environmentally focused production company; a news director and on-air host for WHAG, the NBC affiliate serving the four-state area out of Hagerstown, Maryland. The last would be piping in live from the dais that night, the tasting’s first-ever live-on-air television coverage.

  “You’ll be sitting over there,” said von Wiesenberger, gesturing to two linen-covered tables under stage lights at the far end of the room, 5 yards away. “The pourers will come by and give you each water in the right numbered glass. Hold the glass up, take a look for any impurities, anything floating. Now bring the glass to your nose and take a deep breath—what do you smell? Maybe it’s chlorine, or plastic. Then take a sip, and keep the water in your mouth. How does it feel on the tongue? Is it harsh or soft? Fresh or bland? As you swallow it, is it refreshing, or does it have a lingering residue?”

  In all we’d be tasting sixty-seven waters throughout the day, in four “flights”—Municipal, Purified Bottled, Spring, and Sparkling. We were to rate each water in five categories listed on a specially prepared document: Appearance, Aroma, Flavor, Mouthfeel, and Aftertaste, plus Overall Impressions. The pourers would collect our papers and hand them to the scorers, who would then average the numbers. In order to keep our senses clear, we’d been asked not to wear any heavy scents or lotions. von Wiesenberger, who would only be hosting, not tasting, looked like he never left the house without a penumbra of aftershave.

  “We’re here today to determine what tastes good in water,” he ended his introduction. “Even though we have a lot of waters here every year, it’s amazing how frequently the scores line up. In general, the judges tend to like the same things, so it’s clear that some waters are better tasting than others.”

  There was a cloth-lined wicker basket of water crackers on the table in between each judge. To our disbelief, von Wiesenberger explained that they were there in case we got thirsty. The constant flow of water, most of it heavily mineralized, could in fact wash away all our saliva over time, and the crackers were meant to help us gain a little of that spit back if needed.

  We took a break as the hotel crew checked the microphones and stage lighting. The crowd was just beginning to grow beyond the small group of Friday symposium attendees. I met a young, tweed-jacketed financier named Ben who had been dispatched from Boston by his private equity firm, which had recently purchased Llanllyr Source, a Welsh springwater company that had previously placed at Berkeley Springs in the Bottled flight. “It comes from a little town with one of the oldest inscribed stones in the British Isles,” Ben explained without conviction. He pulled out his phone to show me pictures of an ancient standing rock, and I nodded as he shrugged.

  At 2 p.m. sharp, the judges were compelled back to the tables and the videographer gave a thumbs-up. Von Wiesenberger joined Jill at the front of the stage, where they clicked on their microphones and instantly slipped into pitch-perfect Rose Parade rapport.

  “It’s the opposite of warm outside,” said Jill, “but it’s so warm in this room, and you all are a big part of that. And now I’d like to introduce my good friend, he’s been with us almost every year since we started this long ago, Arthur von Wiesenberger!”

  To my left, one of my fellow judges, the middle-aged male publisher of the Observer, took a bite of a cracker and looked wistfully out toward the crowd. “God, you could do anything with that name.”

  “You know, it’s so cold outside,” von Wiesenberger said with a leer, “that I heard Congress couldn’t even get in a heated argument.” A groan rolled over the room like a soft wave.

  “And just like we say every year,” said Jill, before von Wiesenberger joined and they chanted in unison, “Let the waters flow!” The pourers came out with unmarked carafes and gave us half a glassful of each water in the flight. These were the Municipal waters, the common stuff from the sink, sent in by little towns like Berkeley Springs that were proud of their local supply and looking for recognition.

  I was as skeptical as anyone as I stuck my nose in that first glass and sniffed embarrassedly. I smelled a weak hint of chlorine, and then took a sip and sensed it on my tongue as well. It was nothing worse than what I’d expect from the tap at home, and I judged it accordingly, giving it a 13 out of 14 in the Overall category.

  But after a half-dozen other samples, I realized just how forgiving I’d been. Some of them felt like chilled silk. I wanted more of them, immediately. We’d been instructed not to react to the water so as not to sway our neighbors’ opinions. We weren’t supposed to look at each other’s forms, either. The audience, about twenty or thirty people by this point, sat in silence. It was as if someone had consciously designed th
e bizarro Troubadour—a stage, a dance floor, low ceilings, and entertainment, but in every meaningful sense the opposite of a place that called itself “Hillbilly Heaven.” There were large bright windows instead of the smoke-filled air of Jim’s main room, fresh water and crackers rather than beer and onion rings, live-streaming video instead of a mile-high cell-phone dead zone. And most horribly, the “show,” as it were, consisted of a would-be baron in a suit telling awful jokes while a bunch of come-heres sipped water from crystal and wrote calmly, betraying no emotion whatsoever. No one who grew up in this part of the world would have settled for such a waste of a dance floor. But no one in the audience had grown up in this part of the world.

  The second flight, Purified Bottled waters, were the hardest to judge since they were virtually indistinguishable from one another. These were simply tap waters that had been run through industrial-grade Brita filters. If Dasani or Aquafina or the plastic jug in your doctor’s waiting room had been competing, this is where they would have been. I couldn’t tell one from another, and assigned them all a generous grade.

  A break followed, and I walked into the growing crowd to see just who would travel to the snow-covered Blue Ridge foothills for an event like this. I found two serious-looking young men, John and Travis, who had come down from New Salem, Pennsylvania, where they founded Life Source Water Service in 2008. They now delivered bottles to homes and offices around a 45-mile radius in the south-central portion of the state. I asked why they’d bother entering the contest.

  “I guess a lot of people would say it’s bragging rights,” said Travis shyly. “But really we entered just to see where our water stands.” They had recently purchased a new warehouse office and had two trucks making deliveries. The golden Berkeley Springs seal would be some kind of boon, even if they didn’t quite know what sort.

  Two other men, middle-aged cousins, had come from suburban Toronto representing their own, even greener business, Theoni Natural Mineral Water. They were Greek, and nearly two decades ago had discovered that their family land in the small central town of Vatsounia contained a natural spring.