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A Holiday Visit Home
🕑 Added 2023-12-14 18:00:08 +0000 UTCThe second of two holiday missives which you will receive from Peter H. "Nice Pete" Cropes this year. Read along as a nostalgic itch takes him on an impromptu tour of one of the many places his family took refuge in his early years.
A rough draft of this piece originally appeared in the Fanflow on December 27, 2009, but it has been so heavily updated as to carry an entirely different import, pathos, and portrayal of — yet again — alcoholic depravity.
Comments
Julie (HiDeeHoGal)
Agreed, leaving the boy was the ethically appropriate move.
Ben Sunshine-Hill
It does make you wonder if Nice Pete is just as afraid of being punished by Nice Pete as everyone else is.
Spyguitar
"Few things make a man smaller than being too good for a place he was once no better than." As someone who has all but abandoned* his hometown, oof. *Not particularly with intention or malice, but due to "I only have two big trips a year and it's priority three at best", but still
Chris Onstad
Ok, you’re on deck to guest write the next Nice Pete piece, good stuff
GruntyGinMan
We have in-laws in central WV, the Town of the Mummies(you know the place, you have seent it). As a result we travel into reasonably isolated places reasonably often, since they are just close enough that we cannot brush off visits. In the warmer months we have often commented on the collapsed and destitute homes, perhaps 10 ft from the paved road. Often they are structures that, as Nice Pete put while describing his domicile, "have a part held up by a chimney stack". We often commented on the seemingly abandoned structures that seemed well-place in vidya games such as Fallout76. Last winter was a particularly biting one, and Christmas was held in the Town of the Covered Bridge. Thick fog, so thick we could not see in front of it but the stately Honda Ridgelines Lidar in the adaptive cruise control could see trucks who deigned not to turn their lights was something. The roads were reasonably clear; these mountaineers took plowing and treating roads seriously. And to our amazement many of those forlorn structures had great billows of smoke coming out of the chimney stacks. For people who do not visit, not pass through but +visit+ West Virginia, it is difficult to internalize the adjective poverty of the place. It is a state on life support, grasping at promises to return king coal as a desperate, imprisoned man searches for a rasp to cut it's way out. But there is no way out.
b.zap
God bless us, everyone!
Zen Window
ill say this about nice pete he certainly respects the rules he set for himself with a fervor normally only seen in adherents of rules for life imposed by others
Miles McMahon
I feel like Troubleman and No-No might have also been from Nacre Shoals. Or I guess maybe there is a Nacre Shoals everywhere.
zoë hayden
is it weird that i find nice pete's writing voice rather soothing?
