In an eco-friendly Toyota Prius hybrid, Stephan Wilkinson caroms over the rivers and through the woods of Appalachia

Everything I knew about West Virginia I learned from John Denver. Country roads, mountain mommas, misty taste of moonshine... it all merged with my clichéd image of coal miners' daughters and Hatfields blasting away at McCoys with squirrel guns. It didn't help that my long-ago flight instructor, a prosperous airline captain, boasted of having found his first wife barefoot in West Virginia.

Boy, was I wrong. This is one quietly spectacular state. The mountains are low and humble, the rivers not Mississippi-majestic but eerily beautiful, the land either gently wild or well tended. For too long, West Virginia has meant hillbilly and Appalachia, and it's time for me, at least, to make amends.

DAY 1: Berkeley Springs to Buckhannon, 240 miles
An hour and a half east is cut-and-thrust D.C. commuter traffic, HOV lanes, and bumper-to-bumper congestion. Here, I'm on empty backroads in a Toyota Prius gas-and-electric hybrid, humming through dogwood- dotted forests and along a river—the Cacapon—boiling with springtime runoff.

The old C&O Canal's Paw Paw Tunnel, a hand-dug passage through a small mountain, echoes with the splat of leaking springwater. The light at the end of the tunnel, which is as straight as a billiard cue, gleams almost two-thirds of a mile away. The brick-lined hole connected the Midwest to the Atlantic. The mountain was the final barrier to fall before Cumberland, Maryland, and the Chesapeake Bay were linked. Just one barge wide, the tunnel was still a bottleneck. The downstream boat was supposed to back out when two barges met in the middle, but it often came down to which barge had the more thuggish crew.

Today's equivalent of what must in the early nineteenth century have been a moon shot-sized project is the enormous highway boondoggles that dot West Virginia, thanks to the King of Pork, Robert Byrd, of the Senate Appropriations Committee. One such project under construction south of Wardensville will soon soar from ridge to ridge atop towering concrete piers, as though somebody had laid a straightedge on a map and said, "Four lanes go here. Pour concrete." "Here" seems to be from Nowhere to Who Cares. The twisty two-lane it will replace is barely trafficked.

But what of this somewhat controversial hybrid eco-car I'm driving? Will the Prius and its successors guarantee that there's still a use for Senator Byrd's highways half a century hence?

My first night in West Virginia, I'd parked the little Toyota in front of a cabin at the Coolfont Resort, just outside Berkeley Springs. Looming next door was a four-and-a-half-ton Ford Excursion, a vehicle capable of towing another five and a half tons. Fascinating: ten tons thundering down the road in answer to somebody's perceived need for portability. (I have a neighbor who has a big SUV that she rarely uses but wouldn't part with because she occasionally goes to Sam's Club: a $35,000 truck to save a few bucks on pallets of taco chips.)