Blue Ridge Country November/December 2021 - 20

COUNTRY ROADS
BOOK NOTE
Jeannette Walls, The Glass
Castle. Scribner, 2005.
288 pp.
t's not often I recommend an audiobook
as the way through a book. There's a big
difference between listening to someone
read a book to you, and letting the words
on the page find their way into your mind
and heart.
I
The City of Radford, Virginia now has a new spot from which
observers can watch both trains and birds.
TRAIN & BIRD VIEWS
IN RADFORD, VIRGINIA
reight trains snake through Radford, Virginia, at least a dozen times every day.
But few people in this city along the New River paid attention to the trains until
town tourism director Deb Cooney suggested building a train viewing platform.
An architecture class from nearby Virginia Tech took up the idea and ran with it.
Now an attractive pier jutting above the tracks draws visiting train buffs and locals
of all ages. Birdwatchers, too, like the avian perspective near the treetops.
" It's a great place to watch birds and trains, " says Cooney. " We're putting up signs
to share the significant role trains have played in our city's history. "
The students in Virginia Tech architecture professor Kay Edge's class produced
a unique structure that far exceeded the city's expectations. The platform, along
with two attached shelters, incorporates cross-laminated timbers (CLT) that have a
strength comparable to steel but half the weight. Made of layers of hardwoods glued
and joined together, CLT is sometimes called the new dream material in construction.
F
The
team used CLT composed of yellow poplar grown nearby, normally a low
value wood, and coordinated the development of locally pressed CLT panels. It is
the first project globally to use prefabricated, hardwood CLT modules and the first in
Southeastern U.S. to use hardwood CLT.
The New River Train observation tower received recognition in the American
Institute of Architects Blue Ridge Design Awards. Columns of the platform support
a structure that looks like an exploded view of two halves of a boxcar. Large peepholes
are randomly drilled into the 12-foot-tall and 5-inch thick CLT slabs to create
dappled light and give visitors a sense of the slabs' composition.
The viewing platform takes viewers almost above the tracks for a view of the rolling
trains. The platform is behind Radford's Glencoe Mansion Museum in western
Radford and is wheelchair-accessible from Unruh Drive.
-SU CLAUSON-WICKER
20 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
But " The Glass Castle " is an exception.
Although I'd read Jeannette Walls' bestselling
memoir a couple of times, and seen
the 2017 movie, hearing the author read
her own story gave the memoir a new
layer of meaning. Walls is a fine reader, and
" The Glass Castle " is a fine memoir. Put
the two together, and
you've got the perfect
companion for a driving
tour of southern West
Virginia coal country-
or anywhere.
Walls writes with
remarkable generosity
about her childhood
traveling the backroads of the Southwest
and California with her ungrounded parents
and three siblings. Her alcoholic father
and her artist mother stayed in one place
until the bill collectors came after them,
and then they'd " skedaddle. " Always just
one step ahead of the law, the Walls family
finally drove east to Welch, West Virginia,
where Rex Walls had grown up.
A third of the memoir takes place in
1970s Welch, and it's a grim setting for
Walls and her siblings. The coal industry
was waning and the town was on the skids.
I won't mince words: The description of
the Walls' family life in Welch as Rex Walls
continued to drink and dream his life away
and Rose Mary painted her way in and out
of deep depression is hard to hear.
I won't spoil the ending, in case there
are a few out there who haven't read
" The Glass Castle. " Let's just leave it like
this: while the memoir leaves you terribly
sorry for many things in Walls' early life, it
also leaves you in awe of her courageous
determination.
-JOAN VANNORSDALL
http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
Blue Ridge Country November/December 2021

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