The Steps up Vineyard Hill
There are 106 stairs from the doors of the West Virginia state capitol building down to the Kanawha River. I used to jog the river trail in Charleston, ending each run with a few ascents of those stairs – river to capitol, river to capitol. It may have looked strange, if anyone noticed. At the bottom I would bend down and splash Kanawha River water over my head. At the top I would pause for breath, letting the river drip, its water mixed with sweat briefly staining the portico.
I suppose the first time I did this I was just overheated, the next few times maybe just out of habit. But over three years of climbing the steps, of bending to the water, of watching the water drip, the ritual became something more. I found I was no longer just going for a jog. Maybe it sounds strange, but in some small, private way, I was doing three things. I was making a plea – asking the capitol to take account of the condition of its river, of all the dark and heavy waters of my home state. I was trying to bring my home’s injured waters to face a source of their injury. I was telling a story – reminding myself of where I am, of the history here. I was touching one of the world’s oldest rivers, standing where buffalo herds roamed these river banks for salt, where that salt was first mined, where coal was dug to dry the salt, and that fire became its own industry. And in that story, I was reminding myself of who I wanted to be. To be a bit more like the river, if I could. Steady. The ritual became a physical symbol of West Virginia’s story and value of its waters.
These days I am jogging in East Wheeling. I take the steps, all the steps I can find. I thought I knew all the staircases on Vineyard Hill from years rambling as a kid, but I find more every jog. I go from the greenhouses on Wood Street up to 12th, from Charles Street to Grandview, from the north end of Eoff up to the Meadow, and always down the other side in a straight line from Summit Street to the Heritage Trail over Tunnel Green. Then, it’s up and over, back to East Wheeling.
Soon there will be hiking and biking trails connecting the stairs and forests all across Vineyard Hill. Wheeling’s local food organization Grow Ohio Valley, in partnership with local residents, the City of Wheeling, and numerous stakeholders, has initiated a plan of ecological and urban restoration. The high tunnel greenhouses on the west slope and the apple orchard on the east are the first steps in a much larger restoration project.
When walking the steps through the tangled Vineyard Hill forests, I’m thinking about what it means to restore a place. Many writers acknowledge that ecological restoration is about both the health of ecosystems and the health of human communities. By working together to restore the land, communities form social connections, affirm social values, and shape their daily culture and habits in relation to their land. Theologian and ecological restorationist Gretel Van Wieren has written about an additional aspect of restoration work, namely, its symbolic significance. Much like walking the steps of the capitol, simple actions can take on far broader meaning. They speak. They begin to tell a story, a story of where we are and who we want to be here. These are the questions at the start of a restoration project and they are answered as a community comes together to do the work of restoration. I’m asking these questions with every jog up Vineyard Hill, filling in the details with the people I meet and the history I hear.
The tangled forest here tells a great deal of Wheeling’s past. Right now hundreds of Pawpaw (Asimina trilobal) are blooming, their curious scab-red flowers are tropical leftovers from a much warmer, ancient past. But their prevalence here on Vineyard Hill, this is recent history. They were planted near long-gone houses for their fall fruit, baked into bread or fermented into wine.
It’s a similar story with the Osage Orange trees (Maclura pomifera) on Vineyard Hill. These trees are some of the largest of their kind in the area. This tree’s range is shrinking nationwide, but it persists in historically populated areas where it was first heavily planted by indigenous people, then by early settlers as ideal wood for bows and later as hedgerows. Among the largest trees on Vineyard Hill is a widebranching sugar maple in the new tangled woods below the water reservoirs. Such a broad crown couldn’t have grown in the forest that now surrounds it. Someone planted this as a shade tree in an open yard, and a generation of Wheeling residents must have sat beneath it looking down at the Ohio River before the present forest grew up.
I’ll learn something more with each walk, each conversation. But walking the steps is already becoming a symbol. It’s a testament to the goodness of the place as it stands. There is litter, contamination, dilapidation, and decay. And yet everywhere, life; beautiful life still breaks through, flowers still produce fruit. This life is part of my community, shaped by its history, growing into its future. The wild, generative character of life is all the more conspicuous in Vineyard Hill’s abandoned places. The goodness is here, the task of restoration is about building ways to celebrate and share space with that goodness moving forward.
This place doesn’t need my work to be valuable; the work is worth doing for the value of this place. Restoration, even something as simple as restoring a habit of walking the steps, is an effort to honor the value already here.