West Virginia is the setting for a return journey that stretches to more than three times the length of the trip out, as repeated car trouble and the need to stop for Seldon Wishnow leave the travelers circling near Charleston instead of continuing east and north toward Maryland. The state’s industrial towns and mountain roads make the journey both a physical ordeal and a pointed backdrop to the novel’s national crisis: on October 15, while the family searches for help there, arrests and detentions are unfolding elsewhere in the country.

The Journey Around Charleston

The car breaks down six times in little more than a day within a twenty-mile radius of Charleston. The travelers lose their way, going round in circles rather than making progress toward Maryland. Their return takes over twenty-four hours, compared with just over a day for the outward trip, because Seldon repeatedly needs to stop and because the car cannot reliably carry them onward.

The breakdowns place the family in a succession of small communities shaped by heavy industry. In Alloy, the car stops amid railroad tracks, power lines, conveyors, and mounds of ore and silica surrounding the Electro-Metallurgical Company plant. In Boomer, a roadside map is difficult to read after sundown by the light of nearby coke-oven flames. At Belle, fumes from a Du Pont ammonia plant trouble the travelers as they inspect the car. South Charleston, with its freight yards, warehouses, steam, and smoke, appears to Seldon like a monster. The place names mark not a smooth route across the state but a series of delays in a tight circle around its capital.

Searching for Medical Help

By the morning after the breakdowns, Seldon is acutely distressed. On October 15, Herman Roth and Sandy Roth search the West Virginia mountains for the county’s only licensed physician; a licensed barber has already offered to help. They find an elderly doctor on a rural dirt road. He is described as kind and energetic despite having been drinking, and he runs a small clinic from a frame house. Patients wait on its front porch while Herman and Sandy seek something to calm Seldon.

The search makes the state’s distance and limited access to care part of the family’s immediate predicament. The car’s repeated failures have already trapped them near Charleston; now the worsening of Seldon’s condition sends Herman and Sandy further into the mountains in pursuit of the only physician they can locate. The evidence ends as Sandy begins describing the people waiting at the clinic, leaving the scene’s account incomplete.

The State in the National Crisis

The date gives the West Virginia journey a wider political frame. On the same October 15, Fiorello La Guardia is arrested in New York, the First Lady is confined at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Franklin D. Roosevelt is detained along with people accused of conspiring in the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s father, and Lionel Bengelsdorf is arrested in Washington. Aunt Evelyn is also in distress, in the family’s storage bin. While these events occur elsewhere, Herman and Sandy are searching the West Virginia mountains for a doctor.

The narrative also makes the region’s history part of its political interpretation. It invokes the Appalachian barrier and the Indigenous hunting grounds of the Delaware and Algonquin tribes, comparing earlier white settlement to the presence of Jewish families now treated as alien. The comparison is deliberately inverted: in the present crisis, the people defending their land and way of life are American Christians, acting under the authority of the country’s acting president. West Virginia is thus more than a route through which the family passes; its mountains and industrial settlements anchor a scene of private vulnerability within a broader account of exclusion and political violence.