Appalachia can be as vicious as being in a standoff with a bobcat. The critter may be small, but it does not fear anything or anyone. Many of the people here are as autonomous as can be, planted on the mountain peaks, and in these hollers, roots running deep. The land and people reflect one another- the pain, the resilience, the earthiness endures, even thrives.
Which is why I am musing on the way the rest of the country has become. People are coming here, just as I did, hopefully because they love freedom and a tie to the land. There has been an invasion into this land before, but most tend to adjust or eventually move away.
The concept of this area is more geographical than economic, although the latter term here defies the same American measurement used in DC. Poverty is a relative term in the hills, hollers, and up in the mountains. Here, like parts of distant European lands with less money, there is a sense of richness when you have a full belly, drink your own spring water, and don't have someone telling you to be something you are not. Freedom will not look the same as a home on a suburban lot somewhere in the flat lands. That is because this part of the country tends to value some things more or less than the standard urban America. It is America, but maybe, just maybe, it is an older America...an America of values and ways that have remained in principle.
While Appalachia has changed, it still has romanced the lovers of freedom like few places in the lower 48 have. It is why the Amish, tired of a bishop trying to run their lives, will move everyone into the hills to make a living on more desperate looking soil. It is why the Romanian woman I know fled New York City for a place that reminded her more of home. It is why so many have returned from the cities they were told to move to...to return to a simpler life, one that may not embrace materialism the way your urban neighborhood did.
The love of freedom, of nature, of God's natural blessings is more obvious here than in Columbus, California, or New York City. Even if outsiders rape the land in the name of financial wealth. Even if the drug problem weighs heavy on the little communities spread throughout the region. Even if it is more difficult to find the sense of family so common years ago. But this rough place, like hardened coal, will continue to refine those who live in the shadow of the mountains, or up in them, or in the foothills, or even in the rolling lands at the edges. Appalachia is destined to be something more, arguably better as an autonomous region within the whole, where foundations should survive what happens in the rest of the lower 48.
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