I didn't even know I had a cousin Edna until my mid-thirties. As my interest in (perhaps obsession with) our old family farm grew, my grandma said I had to meet Edna and her twin sister Elma. They were raised in Stewartsville, Virginia, near the farm my husband and I now own.
When I first visited the twins in 2008, they regaled me with old stories for three hours — who was kind, who was difficult, who plowed their land stark nekkid in the height of summer!
These ladies remembered it all.
Sadly, Elma has since passed, but Edna is going strong and on tech's cutting edge. At age 101, she began making TikTok-worthy videos, in which she sings tunes learned from older relatives. This one — "The Texas Rangers" — was taught to her when my great, great grandfather William Byrd Ferguson visited.
This man came of age during the Civil War and remembered hiding his daddy — a soldier who deserted his post more than once to help his destitute family. When the military came looking for Byrd's father, the family would spirit him off to the woods until the search party gave up and moved on.
To have a first-person account of Byrd's life is downright remarkable, and to have Edna alive, kicking, and recording her memories is a true gift. Please consider sharing her video because this lovely lady deserves to be internet famous!
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After a decades-long ban on black bear hunting in North Carolina's bear sanctuaries, residents there will be permitted to hunt in three different bear sanctuaries later this year.
North Carolina’s Wildlife Resources Commission voted tooverturn the state’s bear hunting ban in designated sanctuaries that was first enacted in 1971 when the black bear population was fewer than 1,000. Since then, the species’ numbers skyrocketed, and the black bear population is now estimated to be at 15,000. TheUniversity of North Carolina Charlotte Urban Institute said that over the last 30 years the population has expanded at an estimated rate of 6 percent per year.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have been to space (maybe). Elon Musk wants to go to Mars.
Another billionaire has more earthbound ideas. Marc Lore wants to build a new city, a $400 billion eco-friendly metropolis that makes use of all the latest technology and would be the “most open, most fair and most inclusive city in the world.”
He also might build it somewhere in Appalachia.
Now do I have your attention?
On Sunday morning in Sandy Level, Virginia, about an hour southeast of Roanoke, upbeat gospel music blares from speakers as cars pull past the sign that advertisesthe drive-in church. Churchgoers tune into 87.9 FM and honk their horns in greeting.
This isn’t a usual weekend, but Sandy Level Baptist Church is no stranger to unconventional forms of worship. Every summer Sunday, from May until September, the clergy holds “boat church”: Pastor Kendell Smith ministers to a floating congregation from a dock on a nearby lake. When Virginia went into lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, the pastor didn’t skip a beat; the next Sunday, the drive-in service was up and running.
As Wythe County hunkers down with the rest of the country to ride out the coronavirus pandemic and hopefully slow its progress, many can’t help but remember: we’ve been here before.
It was 70 years ago, but people still talk about it. The local museum has an exhibit dedicated to it. In the summer of 1950, 20-month-old John Seccafico, the son of a local minor league baseball player, came down with polio.
The crippling illness swept through Wythe County like no other place in the nation, earning the town the infamous honor of having the highest number of polio cases per capita in the country. By the epidemic’s end later that summer, the Wytheville area reported 189 cases of the virus and 17 deaths, or almost 10%, twice the national average. Most victims were children.
Nikki King was 17 years old when she left the mountain hollow where she was raised by her grandparents and sneaked off to the University of Kentucky under cover of darkness. It was 2009, and the advice of her late grandmother Sue King echoed in her head as she drove: Leave. Go to college. And do not let anybody from the bigger, wider world think they’re better than you.
Sue died of a heart attack in 2000, when Nikki was 9. The opioid epidemic had already begun to infiltrate eastern Kentucky by then, and in Nikki’s mind the drug problem turned into a drug crisis shortly after Sue’s death, when her family went from sleeping with the screen door unlocked to buying new doors—without glass panes, which could be knocked out by burglars. Around that time, Nikki went to a birthday party where her friend’s mom stumbled and smashed the cake into the kitchen counter. Nikki later found her passed out on the toilet, surrounded by vomit and pill bottles.
Carolyn Vigil was lying in bed next to her husband when she first saw the meme. It noted West Virginia had no reported cases of coronavirus, and jokingly pleaded for its people to hang on.
She remembers it so well because it's the day her husband James began to feel sick in their Shepherdstown home in the West Virginia panhandle.
Her husband was sick from Covid-19. But her "coronavirus-free" state wasn't set up to test him.
He would become the state's Patient #1. They didn't know it then, of course, nor did anyone else. But in the following days they felt like that they were the only people in the state who wanted to find out. From medical professionals who simply had no information to health administrators in the same boat, all the way up to the President saying the state was doing a good job for having no cases.
In a narrow shadow of land between two steep mountainsides in West Virginia, residents of a town called Minden are dying. Not in that existential “we’re all dying a little bit every day” way, but in the blotchy-lesions-and-tumor-riddled-organs-that-eventually-stop-working way.
The 250 residents are all that’s left of a community that peaked at about 1,200 in 1970, and they think they know what’s picking them off one by one, in a relentless, who’s-next roulette. They can’t avoid it in their homes. Or in their backyards. Or on the grounds of the abandoned factory where kids ride their dirt bikes. Locals have taken to calling Minden’s main road “Death Valley Drive.”
There is a tradition in Appalachia of observing “Old Christmas” on January 6. Folklore suggests that animals speak in the middle of the night on Old Christmas.
But it turns out, you don’t have to wait till January 6 to hear goats singing to Christmas carols.
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