Hoping for a happy and unstereotypical ever after
New River Gorge in West Virginia a destination for adventure sports
The kids and I have been binge-watching a television series about fairytale characters who live in the real world. Under the spell of an evil queen, they don’t know they’re fictional characters and so go about their mundane, human lives, working 8:30 to 5, driving pick-up trucks and buying overpriced lattes.
Two of the characters are destined to be together — Snow White and Prince Charming — and, despite Charming being married to someone else in this non-magical town, they end up in a (very chaste) affair.
When the affair is revealed, the townspeople turn immediately on Snow White. People duck into stores to avoid her on the street. An old woman snarls in public, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” And someone scrawls the word “tramp” on Snow’s sensible station wagon. (Turns out it was the Evil Queen, behaving very much in character, but still, it was pretty mean.)
After the show, the kids and I discussed the way the townsfolk treated Snow White, as opposed to how they treated Prince Charming, who was equally as involved in the affair as she was. They hadn’t noticed at first that P.C. got to walk down Main Street unaccosted, or that no one avoided him in public or called him ugly names.
“Why do you think that is?” we discussed. “And do you think it’s fair?”
It was a good and healthy conversation that lasted all of maybe 10 minutes, but it kept coming back to me. My husband and I aren’t always there to have a post-episode debrief after every silly thing they watch on TV or YouTube.
What are the children learning about women and stereotypes from societal cues and well-worn media tropes? What harmful ideas are already planted, waiting for the world to water?
So, in honor of Women’s History Month, I asked the boys this question, “What does your generation think about women? What do you think about women?”
After getting past their typical tweeny responses — “I dunno. They’re cool.” —the two of them started sharing what they really think.
Son No. 2: “I think that women can do anything if they put their mind to
it. I think that they aren’t just meant to, like, cook and clean and be a housewife and you know, get married, and take care of the kids. They’re so much more than that. They can go on vacations and be with their friends, and not cook and clean. They don’t have to be married. You can be by yourself traveling the world with your $1,000 a week. Wait. Is that a lot of money?”
Son No. 1: “Yeah, I feel like that they can be so much more than housewives. They can pioneer the way for future women; they can start new businesses. Like, Tesla and
Amazon and Facebook are run by men, but I feel like women can run, like, those big corporate companies. Or some new big company.”
Son No. 2: “I think that women think that they need to wear make-up or be skinny and smell nice, or their bodies have to look nice, or like they have to get plastic surgery. I think that boys don’t have to wear makeup and do all this stuff to their faces, so I think that it doesn’t 100% matter about the appearance, but about what’s on the inside.”
I asked them about women they admired, women who had something “on the inside” to give the world. They named a few obvious superstars — Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, Simone Biles and Serena Williams. But they also mentioned activist Angela Davis and actress Viola Davis and each of the teachers they’ve had in the last few years.
From that wide-ranging list of women, they told me they’ve learned that girls and women should “go out in the world and be yourself. Don’t listen to what other people say.” And that boys and men should, “treat everyone with respect, treat women with respect, don’t be abusive or manhandle anyone. Be nice.”
And so, thanks to my boys, I am hopeful that the curse of sexism, misogyny and patriarchy will one day be lifted from the land and, maybe we will all live happily, and unstereotypically, ever after.
Tanika Davis is a former Baltimore Sun reporter who works in communications at Constellation. She and her husband have twin 10-yearold sons, a 9-year-old daughter, a perpetually messy house and rapidly appearing gray hairs. She also needs a nap. She can be reached at tanikawhite@gmail. com. Her column appears monthly.
As Americans continue to weather the pandemic, the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and spending bill passed by the federal government in December brought an unexpected and lasting gift: a new national park.
The 5,593-page spending package included a raft of provisions authorizing little-known projects — the construction of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, for one — and giving lawmakers a chance to advance a variety of long-delayed initiatives. Among them was the elevation of the New River Gorge, in southern West Virginia, to the status of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the country’s other most renowned outdoor spaces. The designation of the area — roughly 72,000 acres of land flanking 53 miles of the gorge — as a national park and preserve creates the 63rd national park in the United States and completes a multigenerational effort, started in the mid-20th century, to transform a tired industrial area into a national landmark.
The gorge and its surroundings have been prized for decades as one of southern West Virginia’s more spectacular natural places.
In 1963, the West Virginia House of Delegates passed a resolution seeking to designate the New River Gorge as a “national playground,” preparing to send the proposal to President John F. Kennedy, whose primary campaign was lifted substantially through support from West Virginia voters. But momentum to create a national recreation area stalled after Kennedy’s assassination later that year.
Although the gorge remained a curiosity among rafters and outdoor enthusiasts, the area only received federal protection from the Interior Department in 1978, when it was designated a national river.
Now, the outdoor offerings in the gorge have come to define the area as a premier destination for adventure sports in the East.
The New River plunges 750 feet over 66 miles, resulting in long stretches of violent rapids that can reach a class five level, generally considered the most difficult that can be navigated by white-water boaters. (Licensed outfitters operate in several towns near the river, providing rentals and tours for rafting and kayaking.)
The canyon walls, which soar as high as 1,600 feet, offer miles of cliffs that rank among the best in the East
Coast for rock climbing. Sheer faces in the gorge made of robust Nuttall sandstone provide both traditional and sport-climbing routes across the difficulty spectrum.
Bike routes are scattered throughout the park on both sides of the river, with options for both technical mountain biking and more casual pedaling along former railroad beds.
According to the
National Park Service, geologists believe the New River — its name a misnomer used by early American explorers who often assigned the same name to any river they came upon for the first time — was a segment of the preglacial Teays River. This larger river, which traversed much of the current Ohio River watershed, was later diverted and broken up by glaciers. The age of the
Teays is uncertain, but fossil evidence suggests it could be as much as 320 million years old, leaving its remnant, the New River, as quite possibly the second-oldest river in the world.
Beyond the millions of years of geological history on display, the gorge is also filled with signs of the region’s heritage as a major coal production hub.
Miners once capitalized on the easy access to rich deposits of high-quality bituminous coal in the canyon, where the river had already shorn through hundreds of feet of rock. Especially after the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway linked the New River coal fields to markets in 1873, dozens of boom towns popped up along the river’s edge.
The park contains the remnants of communities such as Nuttallburg and Kaymoor, which still stand near the riverbank and are accessible from points higher up. Seams of exposed coal are visible along some trails leading into the gorge and its towns, where abandoned mine portals remain.
Despite the environmental degradation and pollution that industry unleashed, some unique ecological features make the gorge well-suited to a diverse combination of wildlife, which has slowly reappeared as time has passed.
The river lies at the center of a migration corridor where plants and animals that typically range farther north or south come together, including several federally endangered and threatened species, such as the Virginia big-eared bat and the Allegheny wood rat.
According to Lizzie Watts, the park’s superintendent, the river itself is also notably warmer than surrounding areas, making it a popular warm-water fishing destination with more than a dozen public access points. The river is one of the premier spots for smallmouth bass fishing on the East Coast, and muskellunge and walleye are common in the park today.
“The next generation will have the opportunity to see what, in the last 150 years, it looks like when an area goes from being logged and mined to left alone,”
Watts said. “The ecosystem has come back to full trees and mature forests.”
The New River Gorge does not match the scale of many national parks in the western United States, where Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone sprawl over more than 1 million acres each.
Nevertheless, officials expect the new designation to bring a substantial influx of travelers, boosted in part by a dedicated set of enthusiasts who strive to visit every national park.
In typical years, around 1.3 million travelers visit the gorge, according to the Park Service’s tourism data.
When legislation was first introduced to designate the area as a national park, pushback came from some locals. Hunters have long enjoyed access to secluded sections of woods around the gorge, and with hunting prohibited in federal parks, some protested the potential loss of hunting grounds.
In a compromise, more than 65,000 acres of the total area were designated as a nature preserve where hunting can continue as before, and only roughly 7,000 acres directly within the canyon are officially off limits as national parkland. A provision was included to empower the park to acquire more than 3,000 acres of private land around its current boundaries as well, to expand the size of the preserve and add public hunting grounds.