Bill Carrico on Public Transportation in Virginia

From State Senator Bill Carrico:

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Public Input Sought On Prioritizing Transportation Projects

The Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) will hold nine meetings across the Commonwealth from October through November at which the public will have the opportunity to get the latest information, ask questions, and provide input on the prioritization of transportation projects. The meetings will consist of an open house where attendees can view displays to learn about transportation planning, interact with subject matter experts, and review the proposed local and regional projects that have been submitted for scoring through SMART SCALE, an objective, data-driven prioritization process to score projects according to critical transportation needs. For this funding cycle, 468 applications for projects were submitted by 158 local and regional transportation planning organizations and partners across the state. Following the open house, there will be an opportunity for the public to provide comments about transportation projects and priorities. Projects that have been determined to meet a need identified in VTrans, Virginia’s statewide transportation policy plan, will be advanced for evaluation and scoring. Scoring results will be made available to the public in January 2019. Following public meetings in the spring, the CTB will use public feedback and the scoring data to select which projects to fund and be included in the next Six-Year Improvement Program by June of 2019. A public hearing will be held for the Interstate 81 Corridor Improvement Plan in conjunction with the meetings in the Bristol districts. For the latest on the I-81 Improvement Project, please click HERE. Meeting Date/Time: October 22, 4 PM Meeting Location: SWVA HigherEd Center (1 Partnership Circle, Abingdon, VA 24210) If you are unable to attend a meeting, you may view the displays and provide your comments online. You may also mail comments on highway projects to Infrastructure Investment Director, VDOT, 1401 E. Broad St., Richmond, Virginia 23219, or Six-YearProgram@VDOT.Virginia.gov. Comments on rail, public transportation, and transportation demand management may be sent to Public Information Officer, DRPT, 600 E. Main St., Suite 2102, Richmond, Virginia 23219, or DRPTPR@drpt.Virginia.gov. Comments will be accepted until Dec. 13, 2018.

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Book Review: She Walks These Hills

A Fair Trade Book



Title: She Walks These Hills

Author: Sharyn McCrumb

Author's web site: http://sharynmccrumb.com/

Date: 1994

Publisher: Penguin/Signet

ISBN: none

Length: 444 pages

Quote: “Nora had tried to help this poor wayfaring stranger, but she couldn’t make her hear…When Nora stood close to the path to try to touch her, she wouldn’t be there at all.”

Nora “sees” the ghost of Katie Wyler, kidnapped by Shawnees in 1779. Katie escaped and found her way back to the White settlement, where she was promptly murdered. Katie is, of course, the least dangerous of the people walking around a fictional Smoky Mountains community called Dark Hollow. What Sharyn McCrumb writes are, technically, murder mysteries, though fleshed out with more subplots, history, and character than most murder mysteries have; in She Walks These Hills there’s an escaped murder convict, geriatric and likable but not completely harmless, and there’s a confused young man who thought he was just about ready to hike the Appalachian Trail alone, and somewhere in the hills with them there’s a present-time murderer.

Rounding out this cast are the detective, a policewoman with things to prove to the local policemen, and Hank the Yank, a fictional radio personality who reports on the story as it develops, and the requisite number of victims, witnesses, additional suspects, potential victims, and bystanders a murder mystery needs.

It would be easy to construct a story like She Walks These Hills on stereotypes alone, if you weren’t from a small mountain town, yourself. McCrumb is. If the murderer comes close to being a stereotype, the stereotype he fits is not “hillbilly” so much as “murderer in a mystery novel,” doomed by the rules of the genre.

The more interesting part of the story is of course the sense of place. McCrumb is one of the most topophilic writers alive. When writing novels, she disclosed in Bloodroot, she always puts in a good bit of real historical research (documented in a note at the end of the book), including listening to recordings of old music. The scene of the action is a fictional place readers could almost find in real life; Hamelin, Tennessee, isn’t on the map, but that mall in Johnson City where some of the characters shop is. So is East Tennessee State University, where some of them go to school. Likewise, you can’t tune in to WHTN, where Hank the Yank reads the news, but even from my part of Virginia you can usually pick up a good clear signal from WJCW.

Some local readers enjoy this type of thing; McCrumb’s novels have never been quite as heavily marketed as John Fox’s or Adriana Trigiani’s, but they sell and resell briskly in local stores.

Of course there’ve never really been many murder mysteries in the Southern Appalachian mountains. There’ve been relatively few people; part of the sense of place in McCrumb’s novels is a sense of sparse population, a fundamental expectation that people who walk into the woods alone are normally going to be alone in the woods for as many hours, days, or weeks as they want to be. Of those people, very few have been murderers. Within that micro-minority, nearly all the murderers have been insane, usually as a result of voluntary ingestion of some chemical or other, and easy to prove guilty; the difficulty about a few serial murderers in Appalachian history, like Chief Benge and Kinnie Wagner, was not proving them guilty but doing anything about them. Murderers are not typical of any community but, to the extent that there is such a thing as a typical murderer in the mountains, stoned shooter Lakeem Scott is probably it—not very bright even when sober and far too demented to present a challenge to police detectives.

Some of the details in a McCrumb novel that sound most unlikely are, however, fact-based. The convict and too-obvious prime suspect in She Walks These Hills is called Harm. In his case, McCrumb tells us, “Harm” is a mispronunciation of “Hiram,” but in fact “Harm” was a name actually given to a few little boys in the early twentieth century, like Herman, Armand, and Ormond. And a popular song—was it the Stonemans?—actually began with “Poor Ellen Smith, how she was found, Shot through the heart, lying cold on the ground.”  

And the characters share the concerns of real mountain people. “Seems that…officers…checking out the crime scene…found some sort of crud oozing out of the ground…toxic waste…Industrial chemicals dumped in a poor man’s field…on the day Claib Maggard was murdered, Harm Sorley’s cow died…I’ll bet they find out that Claib Maggard arranged for that dumping, and pocketed the money from whatever company unloaded it,” Hank the Yank reports, in a speech unlikely to have been broadcast even on a strictly local radio station. “The people who settled this land, and loved it too much to leave it, were being pushed back then by the government interests, and the corporations, and the tourists, and the city people with their vacation homes.Thirty years hasn’t changed any of that, either. We’ve got the pollution, and condos…‘When the last moonshiner buys his radio…Something will pass that was American And all the movies will not bring it back.’”

Hank is of course a first-generation immigrant to Tennessee. That may not be as it should be, but it is as reality so often is. People who have always and only lived in the mountains are typically the ones letting their family farms and the lifestyle that goes with them die. Our great-grandparents worked hard, seldom grew rich, didn’t have a lot of things that we enjoy having. If we’ve not lived in other places, and experienced the frustrations of life in Washington or New York, California or Florida, Ireland, France, or Nepal, for ourselves, many of us are prone to imagine that we want to trade the family farm for a chance to live in some place and way that sound richer and more exciting. And some of the prodigal sons and daughters of the Appalachian Mountains even do enjoy living in the places to which they go.

Many, of course, don’t. I’ve not read or carried out a formal survey, but it’s often seemed to me that a majority of the people living in small mountain towns, sometimes especially the ones whose oldfashioned accents sound as if they’d never met an outsider or watched television, have in fact lived in other parts of the world for a few years. Some of us even liked the other places where we lived; I loved Washington, and the easiest way to ease some of my neighbors out of a bad mood is to say something in the language of their favorite foreign country…but those places, however delightful to visit, were not “home.”

“Home” is, well, prickly (I live in an orchard; I’m writing this review at the end of raspberry season.) And hot and humid in summer, damp and chilly in winter, lonesome if you’re out in the woods, crowded if you’re indoors with your ever-loving family all underfoot. And where there aren’t wasps and hornets, there are flies and mosquitoes; where there aren’t black snakes, there are rattlesnakes. And as a teenager you could have sweet age-appropriate dreams about being seen with some attractive, popular person of the opposite sex, but in order for more adult fantasies not to feel icky you have to get away from home. And if you do choose to spend your time and money on radio, TV, telephones, the Internet or anything else that might seem to promise to connect your home with your friends and life somewhere else, most of the time whatever it is won’t work. And “home” is still where you know, with every part of your mind and body, that you’re meant to be. You don’t even need to shorten your time at home with moonshine.

Sharyn McCrumb’s murder mysteries probably aren’t enough to convince the young to hold on to the family farm. But they remind older readers that we’re glad if we did.

You're welcome to use that Amazon photo link to buy a brand-new first edition. That's not what I physically have for sale, nor is it what $5 per book + $5 per package, from which 10% ($1) goes to Sharyn McCrumb or the charity of her choice, will buy from the address at the very bottom of this screen. Other sellers may list random used copies of this book for less than $5 but, since the $5 per package applies to as many of McCrumb's older pocket-size novels (or other books) as we can squeeze into the box, the Fair Trade Book option may be your best deal after all...and it includes $1 per book to each living author we can locate or to that author's favorite charity.

Schools That Want Common Core Funds

From Karen Bracken:

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You need to post/share this list of school districts planning on applying directly for Fed funding, bypassing their state legislatures.

http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-district/2013-list-intent-apply.pdf

Karen Bracken

www.tnacc.net

www.americadontforget.com

215-692-2147

"Common Core is just the "smoke" hiding the fire.  After we clear the smoke we must put out the fire."  k. bracken

 "The change we seek has always required great struggle and great sacrifice." - Barack Hussein Obama
"The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." - Ayn Rand

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It's a PDF, but this computer seems to cope with PDF's better than some in this building; I can tell local lurkers that the Bristol (Tennessee) school system is on the list of schools actively trying to get sucked into the boondoggle.

Targeted Ads Bounce Off the Bull's Eye

It was bad enough two years ago when Yahoo was "targeting" ads by zip codes. Internet dating services pay for constant ad bombardments. I know this may be a surprise to some of the people who operate Internet dating services, but the probability of my paying an Internet dating service to introduce me to one of my cousins is subzero. If I ever did use a personal ad service, the idea would be to "meet" men from some place where all the decent guys were not already related to me.

But now the computer is, as advertised, picking up on words in my e-mail, and possibly on this blog. If so, here's something for local family-owned businesses to know:

I know where Bill Gatton's car lots are. I don't own or want a car, but I worked there in the 1990s. Bill Gatton's has been around long enough, and outlasted enough competition, that they're probably doing something right. I mean, over and above keeping the building sparkly-clean, although that's definitely a step in the right direction. But I'm not more likely to buy a car because they've bought a Yahoo ad. The fact that I receive, and sometimes reply to, a fair amount of e-mail about Bristol and some e-mail containing the word "car" in no way implies that I'm likely to buy a car.

I know where more than one Food City supermarket is. Sometimes I do buy groceries there. Not often, because although they sometimes offer good sale prices on things I buy, they practically never offer a reasonable regular price on anything I buy. But I'm not more likely to buy more groceries because they've bought a Yahoo ad. Even though I do eat, do buy groceries, and sometimes buy groceries from Food City, I don't use my limited online time or ability to stare at a computer screen to read ads. I check the ads in the Kingsport Times-News and Virginia Star. The fact that I not only blog about food but actually eat it in no way implies that I'm likely to let a nuisance graphic tell me what food to buy where.

I know where Gilbert's Gun & Pawn Shop is. I've never bought a gun or pawned anything there, but I used to have a booth in a flea market, and all the local junk dealers know each other and trade junk that seems to fit in somebody else's collection better than in one's own. The Gilberts didn't try to cheat me, nor have I heard of them cheating anybody else. But I'm not more likely to buy a gun or pawn any of the high-end junk they handle because they've bought a Yahoo ad. The fact that I receive, and sometimes reply to, e-mail about firearms rights legislation in no way implies that I'm likely to buy a gun.

I know where most of the local businesses and attractions are, actually. Mr. Clark's Furniture Store. Quillin's Hardware. Mac's Medicine Mart. Broadwater Drugs. Thriftway. Oliver's Loft. The Ivy Cottage. Estilville Bed & Breakfast. Addco. I Love Books. Memory Lane. Circle V. Wallace News. Chris's Department Store. The Haggle Shop. The Hob Nob. Etc., etc., etc. I remember Appco, Nickels, the Corner Copia...yesterday I took a survey about nationally advertised appliances and wasn't sure which brands were still being manufactured, but I remember which year these local businesses ceased to exist.

I know some of the local business owners personally--enough to feel bemused when a yuppie type who's trying to launch a business by overspending recklessly pays for an unnecessary and off-putting ad, and outraged when a nice seventy-something couple both of whom have been in the hospital lately have been slick-talked into paying for an unnecessary and off-putting ad. When Yahoo's "targeted ads" are annoying people who've been your neighbors for longer than Yahoo has existed, those ads are bouncing right off the bull's-eye.

And if you're my neighbors, not that I've gone into the stores discussed above (or any other store) to push this idea, you're more likely to get more business and more loyalty from me if you advertise right here. That would keep the money in the area; if I had more money I probably wouldn't buy more of the things I don't buy, but at least I'd buy more of the things I do buy, so the money would circulate around Gate City, Kingsport, and Bristol and possibly trickle back to your business.

Yahoo's "targeting" ads within the local area may work for newcomers to a big city who want to know where to find things in the neighborhood where they're renting, but in this part of the world, it's a stupid idea. If the people who see your ads are going to be people who already know who, what, and where you are, why annoy them with pop-up ads at all?

Washington County Says No to NHA

E-mailed first by Patricia Evans, edited for format:

"It was a major win for property rights activists last night, Tuesday, March 12th, when Washington County Supervisors voted 5-2 against the impending designation of 19 counties in SWVA Congressional District 9 as the USA's 50th "National Heritage Area", which would effectively put the District under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service and Department of the Interior. Following the lead of Wythe and Russell Counties, along with the Town of Rural Retreat, Washington County passed the Resolution of Non-Support. Smyth County supervisors voted to defund The Crooked Road last year.

Abingdon, Virginia is the headquarters of the Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Foundation, the "parent" organization of The Crooked Road and its sister organization, Heartwood Artisan Center. The grant-funded artisan center is currently more than $950,000 in debt, a matter of considerable concern for taxpayers.

Sponsored by Congressman Morgan Griffith and Senator Mark Warner, the impending designation, routinely fast-tracked to passage through Congress with no debate, would have remained unknown to County Commissioners until concerned citizens made the counties aware of this move by The Crooked Road 501c3 organization last August, 2012. The Crooked Road organization, responding to a FOIA request by a private citizen, admits that commissioners of all 19 counties were not advised of this scheme!

Hear the latest update from TRICITIES SUPERTALK 92.9 FM on the STEVE HAWKINS SHOW, starting at 7AM Thursday morning, March 14 when STAR OPPONENTS OF THE NATIONAL HERITAGE AREA, Commissioners Bill Gibson (Washington County), Ron Blevins (Smyth County), Bob Gibson (Russell County), Charlie Hargis (Planning Commissioner, Washington County) and Linda Meyer (Wythe County) join Steve to TELL IT LIKE IT IS!!!

 

For more information, contact: 276-274-8304

The Southwest Virginia Tea Party, Abingdon/Bristol/WashCo

www.swvateapartyab.org

Washington County, Va., supervisors say no to national designation for The Crooked Road...

http://www.tricities.com/news/local/article_a52efde8-8b8a-11e2-816d-0019bb30f31a.html

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"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." - Thomas Jefferson Virginia Tea Party Patriots www.virginiateapartypatriots.com Danville Patriots http://danvillepatriots.com/
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Catherine Turner adds that the Southwest Virginia Tea Party will be meeting at Moondogs, tonight at 7 p.m.