Time moves differently here, and that cuts both ways.

By “here” I mean West Virginia.

Here, we tend to keep the past close. I’m sitting I my kitchen, and on the counter, there’s an old Lance candy jar from my great-grandparents grocery store. Six generations of my family have been fed off the table at which I’m typing this. To my left, the state capitol dome fills the window—a 2/3 scale version of the nation’s capitol, because a WV architect designed both. Five miles in the opposite direction is an Indian mound that predates Rome.

We keep our history close and our people closer, and two days ago, two of our people were killed and nineteen were injured in a chemical spill.

But this tragedy isn’t as random as it seems. It’s woven into our history.

A little over a century ago, the town of Nitro, WV, sprang up along the Kanawha River almost overnight. A town had never been built so quickly here, but we had to house the workers for the nitroglycerine factories that had also suddenly erupted from the earth. Such was the United States’ entry into World War I.

But the factories didn’t disappear with the wartime contracts, like we expected. They grew, filling the entire Kanawha Valley, and in the century since, we’ve made everything you could think of, from dynamite to chicken steroids to silver catalyst. With so many volatile chemicals being used to manufacture others, tragedy occasionally slips through the safety nets.

It’s what we do to feed our families. Sort of the like the coal mining that people think is all we do.

I live here in the middle of it, but work for a company in NY, and I appreciate their willingness to let me publish this piece. That’s something I like about them: they care about people they don’t even know. Perhaps it comes with building devices for lifesaving surgeries.

Two dead and nineteen injured… Sadly, we all learn to accept death, because as humans, we have to. But it never gets easier. It always feels like the families of the victims feel right now.

The Kanawha flows past Charleston, where I live, on its way towards Institute, where the spill happened, and to Nitro beyond that. I think I’m going to go sit on the riverbank for my lunch. It looks different now than it did a hundred years ago, because we built locks to ship the chemicals from the plants along it’s banks. It’s all woven together now.

The river is still beautiful though.

Always changing.

Yet somehow always the same.

Thanks for reading,

                 Transonic System, Inc

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