I sit on the banks of the Kanawha River in the dog days of Summer ’23, fishing rod dipped into the toxic flow, a decrepit stairway behind me to frame the dome of the Capitol at sunset. I have been out here at least a hundred times— it is a brief walk from my apartment— without catching a single fish. Folks from around here, those native to West Virginia, tend to be better at the sport than myself. There is a ruggedness to even the gentlest of the lot, a foundational survivalism inherited from reclusive uncles, that was absent from my own childhood. I realize I have never killed a mammal, besides a mouse I stomped for grandma. Years later, I can still remember its soft-durability, that fragile but adamant frame snapping under the heel of my boot. These days, I don’t kill anything ‘cept roaches.
The first time I met a friend of mine here he commented that it’s immediately obvious from very far away that I am not from here. It’s true that, before signing a year-long lease on an apartment on the banks of the Kanawha, I had only spent a total of ten or so hours in West Virginia, and didn’t know a single resident of the state. Eight months later that has changed— I host a regular radio program on a community station and my voice is recognizable (this has only happened three times) in public when I’m ordering coffee. I work as a photojournalist for Channel 8 news, and am decently acquainted with the tri-network community of reporters, producers and photographers who I see often around town on the beat or at Salsa Night. I am welcomed, with a tinge of shame on my part, into a couple of local bars and shows without being asked to pay the cover fee, because it would be strange if I did, because I am familiar, and acquainted. A question I haven’t heard in months, but which I was bombarded with in my first half-year here, is always presented with the same befuddled lilt: “why did you move here?”
I think back on an 8-year career of apartments big and small spanning four states and two continents as I pull in the line for a hearty re-cast. I’m not sure exactly what I can be doing differently, here, but I am suspicious after eight months of consistent fishing as to why I’ve never caught a single living thing. I hear stories about record catches, watch as the governor stocks the rivers with unimaginable quantities of theoretically catchable fish, none of which nip at my line. I get conspiratorial, begin to suspect that fishing isn’t real, is a ruse invented by men looking for an excuse to spend hours on the water with their buds. I wonder what it says about me that I so willingly sit here day after day with no success, and yet never think to google “how to fish,” or, “do i need bait to catch stuff?” I look up the stairs where the corner of my apartment building is visible, illuminated by the lasts glints of light from the fading day. My current residence is nothing like any of my East Village spots, cramped & crowded all, with their printed-out posters on the living room wall and Ikea rugs covering heinous stains. It isn’t as large as the three-bedroom, four-person duplex over a highway in Greenpoint which I secretly lived in for fifteen months. Despite not being on the lease I was established there, had a chiminea on the balcony where I burnt twigs collected in McCarren Park.
It’s not nearly as contemporary nor eco-friendly as the brand-new hive-shaped complex I had in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, nor am I (as I was there) the first resident to live here. Rather, the room and building are exactly one hundred years old, and have likely housed a long parade of Capitol staffers, struggling musicians, single fathers, and low-income families on the lam from the Coal-Fields to the south. The fireplace seems about forty years out of commission, but the balcony is accessible, charming and catches the perfect glint of sunlight at the sun’s daily zenith.
The carbon footprint would put my Paris dwelling to shame. As far as I can tell, there is no recycling in the city of Charleston, West Virginia. This haunted me at first, though by week two or three I derived a small and sick pleasure out of land-filling every plastic bottle, every snipped-to-bits six-can ring and yes, the occasional plastic bag. It is liberating in a way which becomes familiar in the process of moving from LA to WV. It is the liberation of moving out from a highly codified vessel into the realm of fresh air.
I fish, I figure, because I like to. But also because I’m supposed to? Because it aligns with my image? Because it reminds me to slow down, to be impatient, to labor and not to ask for reward. Because it makes me feel like Richard Brautigan and Tom Sawyer, because I have egregious amounts of free-time, and because I live a rich interior life. Because I like the idea of fastening a lethally sharp scourge of metal with complicated knots to a thin rod of titanium and then casting that piece of metal deep into a wild and wonderful river, a deep and mysterious and ancient thing which I have no access to but which I am connected with, literally, via a thin and invisible cord.
It is not my beloved Echo Park apartment, that ridiculously spacious and beautiful hull of mine for three sunny years. It does not peer out at the Hollywood Sign, nor does it have a yard replete with industrious pomegranate, passionfruit and lemon trees. Unlike that apartment there are no crowded and smoky parties, no communal table with nightly card games, no rotation of strangers and friends, no patio for grilling and no procession of roommates, supplying all the furniture, removing all the furniture, ad nauseum until the final exeunt, when I peered over the massive and bare living room floor and mourned my time in that sickeningly hopeful city. I had loaded a Honda Civic with whatever books it could fit and set out in search of a more practical life, a life which didn’t involve a persistent and mortifying fear of being found out as the small-town, East Coast imposter that I was.
I spent a week on the road, a month in a Vermont cabin (no service, no WiFi, no electricity, no heat but by the wood-stove fed by whatever logs I had chopped that afternoon from ol Glenn Mack’s forest). I read a hundred pages a day, finally made a dent in the bibliographies of Virginia Woolf, of Updike, of Steinbeck; finally tackled Magic Mountain and for the first time read through my journals— eight thick, leather-bound nightmare-sequences— in chronological order to ascertain what precisely was wrong with me. The answer wasn’t there, or anywhere, and despite every urge within I had no choice but to continue existing. I left the Vermont mountain-scape and continued roaming, spent a night sleeping beside Kerouac’s grave in the bitter cold, a night in Portsmouth, in New Bedford, in Concord, all in search of an America lost, one I had the delusional hope of reclaiming. It is a literary and lawless one, one with walkable downtown strips and cantankerous bar-keeps in underground dives. One without tax documentation, where to make an extra buck I could hop on a frigate or a whaler and try my hand at the harpoon.
I feel a tug on the fishing rod and instinctively pull in. It must be a big one, I figure, but after a brief struggle I come to accept that I am at war with a rock, maybe a particularly formidable underwater shrub. I pull out a pocketknife, cut the line, and head back home. It strikes me that, if I were to catch a fish now, after all this time, it would likely be the dumbest fish in West Virginia. Word of my incompetence must have traveled so far up and down Teay’s Valley that the concept of actually fooling one of these (who woulda thought) brilliant animals is hard to fathom. No, if I catch a fish it won’t be the marketing executive fish, it won’t be the law degree fish, the project manager fish, the surly bartender fish, the witty but loan-saddled diner-waitress fish. If I catch a fish it’ll have to be one with dangerous levels of stupidity and curiosity, one prone to wandering, one who is a little stoned, a little confused, a little sad and a little distracted, one with a tendency to put its mouth where it’s not suppose to be. If I catch a fish, it’ll have to be a lot like me.
Ignoring Check Engine lights and accruing parking tickets and being woken up by the rapping of a flash-light on my window I moved south, moved west, and found this America nowhere. Found a nation of once distinct cultures reduced to homogenization, found corner stores replaced by gas stations, diners by fast food. A two-bedroom in a town I had passed through three years earlier beckoned at me from a local paper and I perked my ears. I moved on to Detroit, but two days later was back, back in the transportation-desert, the left-behind state, the “Beautiful, But Depressed,” the coal-ridden technically-conservative-but-secretly-very-liberal opioid-smacked hills of West Virginia, that state you forgot, the one you have all wrong, the one that’s exactly how you imagine it but with a twinge of enchantment which you can’t understand until you’ve bled here, seen rain here, crawled through the mined-dry hills or dipped in Elk River after a mid-summer deluge beside a town which was hit once by the loss of industry, once more by billion-dollar pharmaceutical Molochs, once more by floods, by brain-drain, by the passing ship of modernity which most who remain bid adieu and refuse looking back towards.
This is where I healed after seven years of aggressive, mind- and heart-numbing participation in the metropolitan flow of Society which left me incapable of locating the contours of my Self. This is where I learned that you plop a decent attitude and a willing smile in the middle of anywhere and it’ll find a community. Where I learned to hug just a second too long, in a way which un-nerved visiting friends from New York, Connecticut, California. Where I learned how to be yourself in a community that is oh-so visible, oh-so talkative and oh-so forgiving. Where I learned to say Kuh-Naw and not Kah-Nah-Wah, to call a Stromboli a Pepperoni Roll and introduce myself as a writer; to live off a salary that is less than half of the one I made last year. Where I learned to give more than I take, to say “Be Safe” whenever leaving a friend.
Where my West Virginia journey ends I can not say, but it is forever branded on me, will forever be a part of the Ryan-concoction in a way that I can’t say other places will be. How long I’ll spend here, whether I’ll go off to grad school, back to NYC or somewhere further into the mire of cities grappling with the madness of Po-Mo America, I have no clue. You don’t ask those types of questions, here.
Welcome to the mouse-car moment. This is a home for my essays, for my cultural reviews, and a forum for me to present my fiction. I have been writing aspirationally since I was eighteen, and much of my life is the story of one sacrifice, one adventure, or one colossal bit of haphazardry made in the name of pursuing this career, of becoming the type of person worth listening to. I am excited to see what this will become— how I will navigate the responsibility of it. I would also like to post weekly playlists from my radio program on 88.1 WTSQ, along with commentary on what I’ve seen, read and listened to.
Eventually I’d like to start posting weekly fiction behind the pay-wall, and would be thrilled to share my novel with anyone who reaches out asking to see it. I hope you’ll interact with me, comment on my posts and respond to the ideas put forward. Please visit the glossary of terms for the specific way I am using certain subjective terminology, and please enjoy. This is the work of a young writer, a honed one but one with far more work ahead than behind. Here will be the seed of ideas which blossom into my stories, and notes on the content I have digested. If there is a core mission to this Substack it is to somehow finger this particular and peculiar moment, to try and identify a unified theory on the contemporary mindset.
Anyways— enjoy.
Good job!!