The Mountains

The sixth installment of our friend Porte Crayon's ten-part series

Turns out our friend Porte Crayon and I have something in common - we can sleep anywhere, as the above illustration CLEARLY affirms.

The sketch is from Porte’s “The Mountains” - used by “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine” to top the sixth part of his ten-part series that introduced the new state of West Virginia to the nation. It was published in the early 1870s.

Part Six opens the morning after the dance party that featured the fiddle playing of Dilly Wyatt, whose story of being jilted by a young man from the lowlands was told in Part Five. You can find my notes on her story here.

Porte - who refers to himself as Larry Laureate in the narrative - wants to get to know her better, but is annoyed that one of his traveling companions got to her side first and monopolizes her time.

So how does he console himself?

He takes a nap.

First, though, he grabs his rod and goes trout fishing - in the Gandy in eastern Randolph County. But when the fish ignore what he’s offering on his hook, he’s lulled into sleep in the crook of a tree - which is exactly what I would do in his situation and in fact, did, this week - more than once and notably Friday morning.

I rolled out of bed that morning earlier than any human should have to, not because I was looking forward to a day on the banks of a trout stream, but because I was on the work schedule. I had agreed to fill in for a colleague delivering morning radio newscasts, but I noticed something amiss almost as soon as I got up.

The house was dark.

The neighborhood was dark .

The power was out.

And it was snowing … hard.

I had to wake up the boss at oh-dark-thirty and tell him that the whole pandemic “work from home” thing wasn’t going to work that morning, that he needed to find a fill-in for the fill-in.

That done, I stayed up for a couple of hours because I felt guilty about not being able to work. In the end, though, I made like Porte on the banks of the Gandy. But instead of stretching out in the crook of a tree, I made myself comfortable in my favorite chair, wrapped myself in the impossibly long Tom Baker/Dr. Who scarf my daughter knitted for me for Christmas and eventually nodded off while the snow piled up outside.

I woke a couple hours later, nudged by wife who put a shovel in my hand.

By the way, I haven’t told you the best thing I found out since I last wrote one of these things. It appears that the talent for sleeping that Porte and I share may be in the blood.

A Twitter friend and longtime reader dating back to when I was writing a humor column for the Martinsburg Journal is a genealogy enthusiast. He plugged our names into an online database and it seems Porte and I are cousins! At least, we seem to be related in a supremely convoluted way that I don’t really understand and is frankly making my head hurt.

The possibility, however, bears further investigation.

You’re welcome to look into it if you want.

Wake me when you find something.

---

Here are a couple other notable Strother illustrations from Part Five of “The Mountains.”

You might recall Porte’s iconic sketch of the ‘Sinks of Gandy’ from Part Four of “The Mountains.” This is the other end of the cave the stream flows through, from the inside looking out ...I think.

This illustration, ‘The Wolf,’ comes in the part of Porte’s narrative where he is forced to kill a wolf while searching for a companion lost in the woods.

---

That’s it for this week.

If you’re a subscriber, scroll down to get your applejack cocktail recipe.

And if you’re not a subscriber?

Well, why aren’t you?