Getting the flavor of...Road bowling in West Virginia

Road bowling in West Virginia

Throwing a cannonball down a country road may sound like child’s play, “but in some circles, Irish road bowling is serious business,” said Vicki Smith in the Associated Press. One of the world’s oldest sports, it’s also “one of the easiest and cheapest to get into.” Long played by teams based in New York and Boston, it caught on in West Virginia after being introduced in the 1995 Irish Spring Festival, held in a town called Ireland. An association formed (wvirishroadbowling.com), and now some 1,000 people partake in events throughout the state. To play, a bowler stands on a starting line marked on the road and rolls a 2-pound cannonball in the direction of a finish line one or two miles away, trying to help the team reach it in the fewest possible bowls. This summer’s North American finals will be held in upstate New York in August, but West Virginia hosts various competitions from March through November.

An American internment camp

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Don’t be misled by the site’s name: “There was nothing romantic” about what happened in the shadow of Wyoming’s Heart Mountain in the early 1940s, said Diana Lambdin Meyer in the Los Angeles Times. When 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, 14,000 of them were packed into makeshift buildings on a patch of desert here that was ringed by barbed wire. Now one of only two former camps open to visitors, Heart Mountain features a two-year-old interpretive center that tells this disturbing story well (heartmountain.org). The internees faced grueling conditions. Multiple families shared tiny barracks with communal toilets, and when winter’s sub-zero temperatures arrived, gaps in the walls let in the cold winds. As I left the visitors center, I was disturbed, and no happier to be looking out on a landscape “that had been almost as cruel to these individuals as their government.”