Greetings from the burbs of Chicago, Monkey Keys. I just got here yesterday after driving 11ty-billion-billion hours from Raleigh, NC. It was a ton of fun! I got to learn about muscle groups that tend to spasm if locked in a constant position, and I was able to compare how different cities deal with traffic jams.
One of the most amusing things about being on the open road is making fun of native city names. I happened to be updating my Google latitude location yesterday as I passed the wee village of Fancy Gap, VA. At first I laughed and laughed. I decided it reminded me of a plumber in a tuxedo.
“Some gaps will never be fancy…”
Right you are, Disgusted Key. I started to internally wax poetic about the place though. I started to realize how large this world really is. On my brief 13 hour drive, I was going to pass thousands of Fancy Gaps. they would be of all shapes and sizes, and some would be fancier than others. I’d go through entire states populated by millions of idiots, and here I was, my own idiot, driving a little piece of metal by Fancy Gap.
What kind of person lives in Fancy Gap? According to the 2000 census*, the town is heavily populated with 260 individuals. Out of that 260, their racial makeup was 99.23% White, 0.38% Native American, 0.38% from other races. That means 258 white people, and an Indian/octopus couple. Suddenly the story of Fancy Gap is starting to make more sense.
I was originally under the misconception “Fancy Gap” was so named because the settlers found a mountain pass, or gap, that was highly decorated or of a particularly fine quality. This is not so. Those who named the village were actually making reference to imagining a break in continuity.
You see, back in the late 1700s the area was little more than a collection of trails. The settlement was known as Foggy Camp by the Indians. This was so named because of the foggy outcome for the settlement as seen by the chief Indian soothsayer, Swims with Fishes. Swims with Fishes could only predict that an ancestor of his would have to overcome a great evil in order to save the holy spirit animal of the mountain.
Years later in the 1800s, Ira Blair Coltrane, the illegitimate child of his single mother, was helping push wagons up the mountainside Sisyphus style. He was 15 at the time and did this because 15-year-olds were cheaper than oxen as accurately depicted in The Oregon Trail (an ox costs $20, extra kids are free). One day years later, he happened to notice Foggy Camp and went to investigate. The Indians had long since left, but he did find a struggling octopus. Legend has it he said, “Fancy that…” Coltrane picked up a large rock to crush the mollusk with, but was stopped at the last second by a frantic scream from his mother.
“Don’t hurt him, Ira!” she begged. “He’s your father!” Coltrane became so dumbfounded and disgusted by the realization he was half octopus, he ran screaming down the mountainside. Once at the base of the mountain, he gathered all the able bodied men he could find in order to hunt down the beast and his mother and kill them both.
“We have to create a gap in my lineage,” he said. “We must ensure that no more octo-mates grace God’s great earth!” the bloodthirsty mob scoured the Fancy Gap region, and finally found Coltrane’s mother and father in Devil’s Den (a nearby cave system).
Coltrane took the initiative and charged his own mother with a miner’s pick. Before he could strike her, the great beast of the sea entangled him in its tentacles. He screamed for help, but he was only paying the mob minimum wadge (which was -$14 in the day) so they all ran off to watch cricket instead.
Nobody knows what became of Coletrane or his parents, but members of the mob said they imagined he was able to kill the octopus and live for 40 winters on sweet succulent tako. Thus, when the town was settled nearly one day later, they named it Fancy Gap in honor of the perceived gap he was able to create in his family tree.
What the population didn’t know at the time was the octopus was the spirit guardian of the mountain. He was able to retreat into the bowls of Devil’s Den and hibernate until 1997 when he was discovered by Jessica Fishes. The two instantly fell in love and moved back to her home in Fancy Gap. History, however, has an evil way of repeating itself.
The couple was immediately subject to massive amounts of discrimination by the predominantly white community. Their marriage was viewed as illegal by the government of Virginia. The local media began to lambaste the union saying it was unchristian, and next people would want to marry their cars. The community ostracized the couple, and then turned violent.
Fish frys started popping up on the couple’s lawn in the middle of the night. People spray painted, “fish go home to the sea!” on their home. In late 2003, the couple’s home was set ablaze by a bloodthirsty mob. The two were forced to flee back into Devil’s Den.
“What’s become of them now, Dylan?”
I’m afraid I can’t say, Tyke Key. I didn’t take the time to visit Fancy Gap and find out.
“Why not?”
Are you kidding? I’m not going there. That place is a dump.
*The United States Census Bureau would like to remind all American citizens to FILL OUT YOUR FREAKING 2010 CENSUS! If you don’t, you WILL suffer a fate much worse than that of Fancy Gap, VA. By that, we mean velociraptors. Probably 80-90 of the things WILL be mailed to your door. We at the United States Census Bureau like to provoke our velociraptors prior to shipment by forcing them to watch America’s Next Top Model during playoff games and feeding them rice cakes when there is a strawberry rhubarb pie within noseshot. They never get the pie, but we do tell them you have one… in your belly.
