My small town is Gate City, Virginia. People most often visit because they have relatives or friends here. Some other reasons to visit Gate City include camping at the Natural Tunnel State Park, hiking in the Jefferson National Forest, musical performances at the Carter Fold, NASCAR races at nearby Bristol (which fills up enough that race fans feel lucky to find rooms only thirty miles away), work for or with the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, and generally exploring the scenic Appalachian Mountain region. If you are visiting for this kind of reason, knowing these ten things will help you not to seem outrageously less informed than those who are visiting friends and relatives.
1. Gate City is not even within walking distance from Appalachia.
The Appalachian Mountains were named for people who lived further south and called themselves Apalachee or Appalatchi. People who live in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, or north Georgia usually pronounce the third syllable like "latch." People living further away from the name's point of origin pronounce it more like "laysh." In many places the whole mountain region may be called Appalachia without causing confusion.
In Virginia, however, Appalachia is the name of one specific town, and it's more than thirty miles away from Gate City. (People who live in one town might organize car pools to the other town, but not every week, or every month.) Traditionally Gate City enjoyed a more stable economy, though the difference has narrowed considerably within my lifetime. Appalachia was a mining town, while Gate City was a farm-and-market town with some small factories.
2. Downtown Gate City is a model of a walkable community.
People don't have to live packed in on top of each other to have a "walkable" downtown. People with mailing addresses in Gate City may live ten or more miles away from the town's business district. Once in the business district, most people can walk from any point in "downtown" Gate City to any other point in ten or fifteen minutes.
3. Though Gate City is not a model of wheelchair accessibility, people can and do roll through town in wheelchairs.
Drivers should be careful to show courtesy to a vibrant wheelchair-using community who whir on battery-powered chairs and carts along the main streets of town Not all stores and restaurants have smooth, wide doorways or fully accessible restrooms, but people will usually help anyone who needs help. Respect for our elders includes making things accessible to people with mobility challenges.
4. What "Blue Devils" really means is "students preparing to go to Duke or a similar big-name university." So, yes, you might see a T-shirt advertising that the wearer "still prays"...and, though it's not been advertised on the same shirt, for our "Devils."
Two separate traditions face off here:
(a) The "blue devils" of alarm and despondency plagued English-speaking people as early as the sixteenth century. In the 1910s, during the war, the name "Blue Devils" was given to a group of fighter pilots and planes. Admiration for the pilots led to Duke University and other schools nicknaming their athletic teams "Blue Devils." High school teams were usually named in honor of university teams. So the Gate City Blue Devils are a football team that have, historically, bagged far more than their fair share of state trophies. Relatively little "satanic panic" has been generated by this traditional name.
(b) Voluntary, often student-led, prayer and Bible study has often been tolerated on campus until someone complained. Most people in Gate City identify as Christians; many attend evangelical churches and feel, or try to become, comfortable praying and leading Bible studies in any social context. During one incident the American Civil Liberties Union told student prayer warriors that an appropriate way to proclaim their faith at a public school might be "on a T-shirt." The intention might have been to stifle effusions of religious fervor; if so, it failed. Someone promptly designed rather attractive T-shirts advertising "Gate City: I Still Pray in Jesus' Name."
Most religious teachers agree that it's not appropriate to pray that the Blue Devils win games, but it is appropriate to pray for a good, safe, fair game where nobody gets hurt and all college-bound Blue Devils get their chances to qualify for athletic scholarships.
5. The Devil's Bathtub is a naturally formed, deep pool in a mountain stream.
The place was named before the team was. People who embarrassed Gate City High School by performing badly in competitions--e.g. forgetting all about a school competition in the excitement of getting something of real importance done at home--were traditionally punished by scolding and shunning, not by being thrown into the Devil's Bathtub. Anyway, competent swimmers who dive into the Devil's Bathtub in warm weather usually pop out feeling refreshed. But it is deep enough, with enough current and rocks, that a non-swimmer might be able to drown.
6. The Tour de Possum Creek was a serious bicycle race that many people enjoyed for many years, but it's no longer staged today. Maps of the course are still available for those who want to cycle 43 miles including a long climb.
Possum Creek is the stream that flows along the other side of the Clinch Mountain, in a pretty rural neighborhood called Yuma. (Somebody had been to Yuma, Arizona, and liked the name.) It meanders along a nice smooth course in between farms, churches, and country stores, for much of the way but does feature about half a mile of heavy pedalling. Events associated with the Tour also included a half-course race for less serious cyclists and a six-mile "Family Fun Ride," for "Little Possums," between family-friendly restaurants.
7. People who keep horses still don't like possums.
Possums are awesome. They can and do eat ticks--though ticks are hardly their favorite thing and I often do find dog ticks within a few feet of the resident possum's den. They are more likely to eat roaches, including the wood and palmetto roaches that nibble on old wooden houses in damp weather. They do love to clean out cats' litter pits and eat things the cats catch and then don't want to eat, themselves. Although possums eat dung and carrion and can carry disease germs for short distances, their peculiarly slow metabolism and low body temperature kill most virus and bacteria. Most people avoid getting close to possums; therefore very few diseases are spread among people by possums. (Possums are, for example, probably the least likely of wild animals to spread rabies.)
Most possums don't want to get close to humans any more than humans want to get close to them. A normal possum has about fifty teeth. If you try to pick up a possum the animal may sink every one of those teeth into you...though possums really do collapse into a comalike state, showing minimal vital signs, when they're scared and the possum might seem to have "died of fright" before you touched it, especially if it was in a trap.
However, if everyone in the family, including cats and dogs, allows a possum to clean up nasty messes in peace, possums can become friends. You don't have to touch an animal to bond with it. Possums aren't very clever or entertaining animals but they do learn to come and go on call, and they can completely eliminate the most unpleasant part of routine cat ownership.
Horsey people, however, will never forgive possums for one thing the little animals can't help: there is one parasitic infection they do spread--to horses--and it's fatal. If you keep horses, you never feel safe keeping a possum.
8. Raccoons, bears, coyotes, and rattlesnakes really don't mix well with humans. Most other wild animals, however, do.
If you stay long enough in a place where most wildlife have adapted to coexist with humans, you too may have an unforgettable relationship with an unusual animal--a "personal moth" who feels safe in your woodbin, a wren who nests on your front porch, a neighbor's horse who comes to lean over the fence for a friendly visit every evening. Bonding with a spider is not a sign of desperate loneliness or even heavy drinking. It can be an indication that you were able to recognize one of the local spider species that naturally live in a near-symbiotic relationship with humans.
It's not unusual to meet a deer, wild turkey, or stray chicken on the street in my town. I wish it were still unusual to meet a bear--but it's not really.
9. You can tap maple trees and make maple syrup in the South, too.
In Vermont and Canada, maple sap rises in March. Here, it rises in the February thaw--some years, even in the January thaw. The proportion of sap to syrup is still ridiculously high. You have to boil off the water in about 40 gallons of sap to get about a pint of thick maple syrup.
All maple species yield usable syrup. Ironically, sugar maples were rated the best because they tend to produce syrup and sugar that taste least "maple-y," most like white sugar. People who buy maple syrup now tend to prefer a more "maple-y" flavor.
However, maple syrup never became a major local tradition here because boiling down sorghum syrup was a more efficient way to get a sweet taste. There is a local beekeeping tradition, too, although I often wonder how many of the people who display bee-motif "country" decor items had the fortitude to talk to our local beekeeper when he was alive. (Beekeeping was traditionally a hobby for weird old men and we had one who filled the bill.)
10 Most people don't know what they have till it's gone.
A surprising number of people in Gate City are denatured humans who don't know one useful herb from another. You don't have to know what natural richness is in and around this little town to live here, have family here, or belong here. But it would be nice if more people did.
