Top Ten Things to Know Before Visiting My Small Town

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.

Do We Have Good Places to Eat in Gate City?

Over the weekend someone who'd grown up in Gate City, but lived in a nearby town as an adult, gave me a shock. "Apart from McDonalds Gate City doesn't have anywhere to eat any more, do they, except Taco Bell?"

Well.

As an alternative to McDonalds, in the same shopping plaza, there's that Subway where a sponsor of this web site, long dead, used to take me for lunch and discussions of bill reading strategy. I loved that dear old man in a niecely way, and haven't gone in there often without him. I think Subway is too much a big chain, not willing enough to let people forego the sauce and have more cucumber and tomato in their salad, but they used to do good gluten-free salads. 

Now in my personal opinion, our best restaurant--the all-around winner--is technically outside of town, but it's not in any other town and it gets its mail through Gate City. For quality and variety of food, cleanliness of building, period charm and atmosphere, fairness of prices, and a credible attempt at a Real Salad Bar, you drive briskly through Gate City and keep going west till you come to the Hob Nob diner out on Route 58. They used to grill the meat to your taste and have no problem serving just the meat and the veg on a plate. The menu had a nice selection of sandwiches from hamburgers to ostrich meat, side dishes including chili and corn bread, the salad bar, pie and ice cream and milkshakes, and juice as an alternative to soda pop or water. (They served tap water, but tourists used to think it must have been bottled because our local tap water doesn't taste bad--and has, in fact, been filtered and bottled.) They even hired carhops in summer--cute little teenagers who scampered around the parking lot serving customers in the convenience of their cars. Everything was straight out of the 1950s except the ostrich meat (vintage 1970), salad bar (1980), and, unfortunately, the prices. The prices were contemporary, but reasonable. That was before COVID. I've not actually been there post-COVID. That's a hint.

But if you're not driving and want to eat right in the heart of town, as it might be while you're dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, court, or some county office business, there are options.

Long John Silver's Seafood Shop was trendy in the 1970s. Meh. I have fond memories of eating there with a friend, also now dead. He was not much older than I and my feelings toward him were not niecely. That was before I went gluten-free. Just about everything on that chain restaurant's menu could and should have been gluten-free. Nothing, except the drinks, was gluten-free. Can't fix stupid. I've heard the restaurant's gone, or going, out of business. No loss. 

Hardee's...urgh ick...if they hadn't formed a solid clique of people who actually call themselves a club and get free meal tickets in the mail, that place would have died a long time ago. It's been long enough that I can laugh about it now...When I met the man known to this web site as my Significant Other, about twenty years ago, he asked, in the way of small talk, "What do you do?" I said, "I just got back in town and I'm looking for odd jobs." He said, "I can get you jobs...in construction!" It was a dare; he could tell that what I meant by odd jobs were things like teaching, typing, computer-ing, storekeeping, or tour-guiding. I said, "Yer on." So I signed on with a crew who were remodelling a house in Lee County. It was a delightful job. One day, I forget now why we were in Gate City early in the day, I was riding to or from work with the boss. He tried to maintain good relationships with all the other business owners in Gate City; he ate at all the restaurants in turn when he was in town. That day he wanted to eat at Hardee's. So I went in with him, looked at the menu, saw all the versions of meat and bread on it, and asked if they could do a sandwich without the bread, just put the meat and veg on a plate. They did. It wasn't great; it wasn't bad. I thought no more of it but the next time the boss was in Hardee's, he said, the help had said nasty things about being asked to prepare something different from what they always did prepare, by hand. They didn't want me to come back, he said. So then a few weeks later some other friend or relative wanted to use one of those free coupons at Hardee's. I looked at the menu. They were now advertising that they did special gluten-free meals without bread--for twice the price of the same meat and veg in the sandwich. I am not making this up. I seriously recommend that, while walking past Hardee's, all visitors make sure to spit ostentatiously on the pavement. But the place is still there. 

It should probably be required by law: Before opening a restaurant, the owner must demonstrate the ability to cook and serve anything on the menu "free from" any of its regular ingredients. And thank the customer for letting person try. Food bullies should not be allowed even to eat in restaurants.

Taco Bell. What can one say? Taco Bell is writer-friendly; there's actually a literary magazine for people who eat there to use the Internet, the Taco Bell Quarterly. Before glyphosate I liked the food, so now I expect I'd like the food again. Still...it's a big-chain restaurant sitting on the site of a delightful little old house-made-into-a-shop, which I miss. 

You're on Kane Street, passing the Hardee's and Taco Bell, Long John Silver's, Pizza Plus--I'm not sure about the status of Pizza Plus. All they used to offer were combinations of bread and cheese with various meats and vegetables on top. Some of my young relatives liked Pizza Plus and I nibbled on cheese-free bread sticks in there a few times. They had nothing to offer the gluten-free so I can't say I'l miss them if they're gone.

Then you come to a structure that looks like some sort of art, a building-sized concrete sculpture of a big carry-out box--in glen plaid?--with a hot dog, a hamburger, and a box of fries on it. It is an actual building. It's not a restaurant open to the public, but cars roll around it, order fast food on one side, pick up fast food on the other side, and park somewhere nearby while people eat. This is Pal's Restaurant, a locally owned chain. The menu is straight out of the 1950s. The hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, chili, shakes, and sodas are excellent if you like that sort of thing.

If you like that sort of thing but prefer to sit down while you eat it, on the other side of the street is the Campus Drive-In. It's not actually on the high school campus; high schools and colleges were a trendy decorating theme in the 1950s. My opinion is that Pal's and the Hob Nob do 1950s fast food better, but the Campus Drive-In is a local landmark and has its devotees.

Anyway, keep walking; better restaurants are ahead of you. There is a little place that used to be a gas station, on your right, just below the intersection with Jackson Street. They advertise barbecued pork as a specialty. They do other things. I've never gone inside the place but one afternoon, a few years ago, a friend who was a local business booster directed a friend of hers to fill a take-out box with a selection of chicken and vegetable dishes, take it to me, and get a verdict. They passed. 

If you keep walking, on the corner above the intersection of Kane and Jackson Streets you'll see what is now the Maple Tree Cafe. It's a sort of post-COVID makeover of what used to be the Roberts Family Bakery & Cafe where I used to write. If you're in town to meet with your lawyer, and your case does not involve pleading extreme poverty, the Cafe is a good place to have coffee and a snack. The post-COVID influence on the decor started out by building in more healthy distance by having a mini-bookstore in the cafe. Mini-mini...Booksellers are, traditionally, gentlemen and -women. We naturally prefer that you buy books from us but, if another bookseller has a book you want, we'll direct you to per store. 

Across the street is a murky place that attempts to appeal to Northern tourists with an Italian-type name (the place is owned by a woman with an English-type name), dim lighting, and cleaning-fluid-based beverages. For about twenty years those who want to attract more money have been saying that what Gate City needs is a place where alcohol cravers can sit down and drink alcohol with food. I've been saying that we need that almost as badly as we need another episode where a drunk driver runs over a Sunday School picnic. Italian food that requires the look of a Mafia den is probably dreadful. Good Italian food can be enjoyed stone-cold sober in broad daylight.

There is, however, a decent little Mexican place, further up Jackson Street, closer to the courthouse. It's changed hands a few times but I think it's still owned by real Mexicans. Food is cooked fresh, reasonably authentic, with a reasonable range of heat, and sold at quite good prices for that quality of restaurant food. They offer an authentic selection of Mexican cervezas and vinos. 

I, like most people in Gate City, don't really do restaurants. They're not an authentic part of our cultural heritage. Our ancestors raised most of their food on their own farms and cooked and ate it in their own 

homes. When they got tired of their own cooking, they visited friends and relatives and ate food cooked their way. The quality of locally produced food as served by local farmers or their children, even if they use the really old traditional recipes that over-cook, over-salt, and over-grease food, is much, much better than 1950s fast food. So who even needs restaurants, except, as a male client said to me a few years ago, as a place where people of different genders, who are married to other people, can talk at length and everyone can see that all they're doing is talking about business. And of course everyone knows that that tells us nothing about what they do next as they drive off, probably in separate cars, possibly to a motel in Kingsport. And there's a movement in the Baptist church these days for men to practice moral rectitude by not going to lunch alone with women, because of the possibility of going somewhere else after lunch. So we probably don't need any restaurants. 

But we have them. Lots of people like to cook, have been told they could open a restaurant, have opened one, and have found themselves fighting like cornered rats to keep the places open. Surely, they tell themselves, there must be some way to make their dream of earning a living by cooking pay...

So, back in the 1960s, the restaurant owners of then kicked, screamed, clawed, and bit when Route 23 was being rammed through the mountains. It would make it easy for people just to roll on into Kingsport and never shop or eat in Gate City, they wailed. 

(Route 23 is still here. Most of the restaurant owners of then had retired from thirty or forty years of working and saving to open their restaurants, and aren't even remembered any more, though I do remember vividly where the Mill House and Liberty Bell restaurants used to be. When I rented a store space on Jackson Street, in between two later owners' use of it, that store space was where the Mill House used to be. (I had lunch in the Mill House, the first time I ever ate lunch in a restaurant alone, on grade eight's "career day." I don't remember what I ate.) I remember when most of the restaurants that now exist came to town. The Campus Drive-In and the Hob Nob have been around longer than I have. Pal's existed before I was born, in Kingsport, but opened the branches in the giant glen plaid boxes only in the 1980s.)

Then in 1980 the first effort was made to shut down the Friday Market. People were coming to town to trade there and were ignoring the restaurants and the regular stores, the restaurant owners of then screamed. The market was declared closed. People announced a real boycott of Gate City's restaurants and regular stores. The market reopened in time for strawberries to be sold.

Nobody messed with the Friday Market again during the next forty years, but while writing in the Cafe I learned that the restaurant owners still resented it. They wanted something else to be done with the space, something good enough to make people forget the Friday Market. 

Hello? Gate City is a farm and market town. It made an heroic effort to be a factory town, a hundred years ago, and you can still see where one of the factories used to be, but they're all long gone. If and whenever the Friday Market goes, I said, Gate City will become...not quite so much of an historical curiosity as Bray, because we'll still have the courthouse with the adjacent law offices, but similar to Bray. Which is still an interesting place on a tourist's itinerary, but which will never be mistaken for an actual town.

COVID happened. Friday Market traffic dropped. Efforts to recover from COVID began. The Weber City Fire Department, which is technically in a different town but I've never seen a tourist notice the difference, bought a shopping plaza and opened a bigger farm-and-flea market. Friday Market vendors moved. (Except for me, of course. I thought seriously about renting a place in Weber City to store my merchandise, but nobody really seemed to need the money and in any case the people I knew who had suitable places weren't what you could call close to the market, at least not in terms of carrying unsold merchandise after six or eight hours in the sun.) 

The restaurant owners, and "boutique-y" store owners, pounced. Mrs. Roberts, of the Cafe, had gone to a "splash park" in Tennessee with her grandchildren and thought that would be a wonderful way to fill up the space where our own Friday Market belonged. In town council meetings people demanded that a couple of food trucks that had started rolling around town be subjected to extra licensing fees, to make sure they weren't at any possible financial advantage over the restaurant owners. I've even heard wild talk about free drinks or free children's meals being offered to splash park patrons to entice them into our restaurants. 

Well, y'know what? I had already explained to Mrs. Roberts, at length and in detail, why attacking the Friday Market was just wrong, unbefitting a good Carson Republican like herself, and also doomed. I had, meanwhile, been working on other plans. An open-air market is not actually good for books. I think Gate City needs its Friday Market, and will have its Friday Market. I always had thought I, personally, needed a different kind of venue. People had said "If you don't want to take out a loan and make a big investment, just take a few books into Friday Market," and when better alternatives were not available I did, but I never once intended to stay there for long. 

When Mrs. Roberts had bought, and rented to me, the space where the Mill House Restaurant used to be, she said, "You'll find out"...what she meant was why I wouldn't make money there, although as it turned out I did. Now I say to her, "You'll find out." The splash park will be fun for a year or two. It will be little used, since local people don't need to go into town and splash in the same water other people are using when we want to cool off. It will lose money. The expensive gadgets will break down. The town council will end up reopening the Friday Market as one of several steps it will be taking to pay for the splash park. It will all cost me absolutely nothing, and I hope those who will be involved with it will enjoy it.

I think Providence has actually provided them with an opportunity for a safe and salutary learning experience, while most of the people who were earning significant parts of their incomes in the Friday Market have an opportunity to work in a bigger market with more traffic.

But if the splash park won't boost Gate City's restaurants very far, what will?

"Try to keep the customers they've got," the out-of-towner said. "That convenience store" (that we had passed) "is next to where the power company's headquarters used to be. In the morning you used to see all the company trucks stop at that store while the men went in for coffee. Now, of course, APCo has moved their headquarters to Kingsport. But those men don't stop there any more for coffee even when they're in town."

"They can get coffee closer to their headquarters in Kingsport?" I guessed.

"They go to a gas station in Weber City. Because X never liked cleaning the bathrooms. When the COVID mess started, she was the first to ask, 'Can we close the bathrooms?' They kept the bathrooms open but X wanted to keep them locked in the morning and make people ask for a key. Wanted to lock them up, a few hours ahead of closing time, after the last cleaning and not give people the key. I've seen her not let old people who could hardly walk, even after they had walked all the way to the bathroom and then back to the counter, into the bathrooms. Well, maybe they would have left a mess in the bathroom. Maybe they went out and made a mess in the parking lot. And you know they would not come back. Probably not come back to other places in Gate City, either."

"I have never minded asking for a restroom key," I said, "but I know some people do."

"Those linemen wouldn't ask a young lady about anything like that. And what they do, first thing in the morning, is go to the bathroom, wash their hands, then get their coffee and snacks for breakfast. So X just got rid of them, and who knows how many other customers. Now she complains because traffic is slowing down at the store."

"That is not the only problem that store has," I observed. "Maybe they needed to do some remodelling, but they went too far. They've tried to become 'upscale.' A convenience store is by nature downscale, and I don't see anybody actually buying the fancy snacks they have put in place of the old favorite junk food people looked for. I don't see people paying the 20 to 50 percent surcharge they've put on to all the old favorite convenience things they still sell, either." 

We got into quite a discussion of things some stores and restaurants in Gate City could try if they wanted to keep the customers they have.

1. Always have a restroom open to the public. Unless there is a specific temporary need to keep undesirable persons out of the restroom, let it be locked only when it's in use.

2. If you want to be a storekeeper, you have to sweep and mop the floor all day because people are too lazy to wipe their feet, and clean the bathroom when men leave spots on the seat and/or the floor, and put things back on the shelves where slobs fail to put them back in their places, AND say "Thank you, Sir" and "Thank you, Ma'am" whenever people pay for things. Deal with it. 

3. Absolutely no gossip. People drive to Kingsport to buy things even when the same things are available at a better price in Gate City, just to avoid seeing people who they know will gossip about them after they've left the store. 

4. Respect and appreciate all the customers--especially the ones who are poor, or old, or confused, or funny-looking. Some of these businesses have employees who've talked back to me because I'm not rich or because I walked into town rather than driving. B'y h...I can at least give them what they've paid for. Some people can't. What store employees need to know is that comfortably retired gentlemen like this former resident of our town, and arguably overeducated idle writers like myself, and our rich friends from the city, also notice things like, say, a certain bleach-blonde Lee County wench calling one of my former teachers, who happened to have grown old while Black, "honey" instead of "Ma'am." We notice. And we want to pull every yellow hair out of your head by its black or white roots. And we for sure do not want to support your store. That kind of thing has in fact been mentioned when I've asked rich friends from Washington to visit Gate City and they've declined.

You see somebody wandering around like a person who needs thick glasses and has misplaced the said glasses, muttering to himself, bumping into things, obviously no more aware that the prison pants fad is over than that it ever existed, but just not fitting into his clothes in the normal way, and finally stumbling into the bathroom, just too late by the look and smell of things...his name is "Sir" to you. And you thank him when he pays for a cup of coffee. And you shut your wretched yap-hole after he leaves, and keep it shut during and after the thorough cleaning the bathroom requires. Because in a place like Gate City you know that that wretched creature is somebody's grandfather, and he probably used to be a teacher or fire fighter or some such thing, too. Extreme respect.

5. In theory it's nice if you happen to "like" a customer. In reality it's not appropriate. The United States is a democratic republic where you, the store employee,  are considered the social equal of anyone else who is working for the minimum hourly wage at your age. At school you can sit beside people who have professional skills and own their own businesses. In social settings you can eat or play sports or watch birds with people who may even be rich. Your job, however, is not a social setting. On your job you need to focus on your work and not waste mental energy on emotional feelings about customers. Some customers, myself for one, don't want to receive special favors or attentions in a place of business. The ideal is not that you "like" customers, but that you wait on all customers, whether you "like" them or not, with equal honesty and civility. 

6. So, don't bother your head about who is buying what and why and for whom. If you think a product is bad, which is what I think about cleaning-fluid-based beverages, you shouldn't sell it. If you sell it, don't ask questions about people who are trying to help your business by buying it.

7. If you don't have wheelchair-using customers, hire a wheelchair consultant to show you why, and fix the problem right away. Wheelchair users should be able to understand that older stores have oldfashioned charm that should not be lost, even when it involves stairs...and store employees should be working to equalize the situation. If your store has lovely historic staircases and some of your customers love shopping on the upstairs and downstairs levels, for example, you might make those levels virtually available to wheelchair users via videos they can watch on the street level, sending you up or down to bring out whatever interests them for inspection.

8. Discrimination is not your friend. We are not a big enough town that anyone should even want to start excluding anyone else. "Oh, but isn't it nice to keep a store or a row or a whole neighborhood 'upscale' so that nobody really minds paying a little more...?" No. It is not. The nature of a business does tend to attract some types of people more than others. Bookstores don't attract a lot of coal miners but a good bookstore should be a place where a determined coal miner can educate himself to qualify for a different kind of job. A good hardware store should be a place where a rich lady feels secure enough to walk in and ask for PVC pipe, or a plumber's tool, or a plumber.  And a good town is walkable enough that, if people ride into town in a car and need to leave that car at the mechanic's garage for a few hours, they can still visit all the little "boutique" shops they wanted to visit.

9. Asking for protection from competing entrepreneurs is an indication that you don't deserve it. From the downtown merchants who feared competition from the Friday Market I heard, "But an open-air market attracts a different kind of people...they don't walk around town..." This is false. I worked the Friday Market, and I know. People buy food from a food truck rather than a big-chain restaurant because they don't like the big chains. They buy food from a food truck rather than a real, locally owned restaurant because the food truck owner has made sure to offer better deals on something or other. If you panic, "That food truck is going to destroy my business," you're locking into refusal to meet your customers where they are and offer them an equally good deal, so you can't keep a loyal customer base and probably won't keep a business. Getting rid of a modest, friendly, lovable Mennonite bakery truck will attract the attention of an unscrupulous foreign-owned ethnic restaurant chain, which will bury you. If you accept your restaurant's limitations and offer good deals on good food, on the other hand, you'll keep a loyal customer base. The food truck will take a few sales because it's offering something new and different, but then after a while your customers will want to see you and eat your food again. The food truck will probably build up a route that brings it here only weekly, or fortnightly, so there'll be business for all. 

10. No matter how righteous you feel about losing a customer, the bottom line is that Gate City loses customers because too many of us would rather feel righteous about losing customers than try to see their point of view and keep customers. Any customer you lose has relatives. Even if those relatives see your point of view at the time, they'll see the ex-customer's point of view, too. A lot of people stopped eating at Hardee's after that little display of stupidity on the menu. If you want customers, instead of going into ego defense mode about a request that you do something differently, take pride in being able to accommodate every customer's tastes or needs. Find topics other than religion or politics to talk about with people who disagree with you, too. And make peace with the grandchildren of your least favorite primary school teacher.

Kingsport Vlogger's Walking Tour of Gate City

Just one link with lots of comments, in which "Big O" walks through my town and does a pretty decent vlog. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRY_UcrtcPU

Comments:

"Big O" doesn't sound local and mentions, in the video, having come from Atlanta. An immigrant! Probably that's typical of the best "walking tour of a small town" vlogs. People who have always lived in a small town tend to overlook things that they're not advertising. You get a better view of the town through fresher eyes. More balance. More willingness to focus on things like litter, and, by focussing on one piece of litter in this video, celebrate the general tidiness of the streets.

Gate City was only starting to talk about building the middle school when I was a student; actually built it when my sister was in high school. She worked on the clean-up crew in the summer! I missed all the fun! The old college building, which housed grade eight when I was in school (grade seven had to use classrooms in the elementary school building), was pulled down and replaced with a nice new elementary school gym. When I was in elementary school nobody thought kids needed a gym. On the other hand, when I was in grade nine, people thought ninth graders were competent to mingle with high school students in "open" classes, divided by how much people had already learned rather than when they were born, which made high school more interesting than grade school had been.  

Gate City does not actually have two fire departments. The one located "in the old Food City building" on Route 23 is for Weber City, which has its own zipcode. They are two separate organizations. The quiet older man walking around the fire truck is our Fire Chief; he still fights fires, operating a truck and directing the younger men. He was the first responder who arrived in time to save the Cat Sanctuary from a chimney fire in 2015. 

"Pal's" is a local fast food chain. Their signs always feature "Pal's Instructions"--sometimes calling attention to new menu items, sometimes giving advice on life in general. The pastel checkered buildings were challenged under an eyesore law in Kingsport, where the chain's based, and ruled to be just exactly as ugly as local eyes could be asked to endure. Anything tackier would absolutely be illegal. The Pal's in the video is managed by a relative of mine and is my pick of the fast food places in town, though the McDonald's and Taco Bell are writer-friendly and have better food selections than Hardee's.  

The glass plant's been closed for a while. 

Q.S.Q. was named from its owners' initials and closed when the last one died. It and the laundromat next door have been known to attract drug traffic, because neither is monitored in the evening.

How much of a drug problem do we have, really? "Scag" is about the rudest name a local person of my age and background ever called anybody. We used it to mean any drug addict including, if we wanted to be nasty, cigarette smokers. Decent human beings do not talk to scags. But mild non-prescription stimulants such as coffee and tea were always socially acceptable and, unfortunately, some people trying to work through injuries or compete with their grandchildren's generation on jobs have become meth addicts. Others have become addicted to prescription painkillers as a result of trying to work through injuries or compete with their grandchildren's generation on jobs. So we do have a drug problem, with the attendant social problems, illegal traffickers trying to take over blocks or open-air markets, addicts stealing property or engaging in prostitution to support their habit, people falsifying their medical records to get more prescription painkillers for resale. About 2000 some too-clever-for-her-own-good body got a grant to open a methadone clinic and twelve-step group meeting place. There weren't a lot of heroin users interested in methadone, and my understanding is that someone closer to Kingsport took over that business, but Gate City has always had plenty of twelve-steppers. Classic alcoholics, mostly harmless, they don't really bother anybody but just hang around downtown lowering the tone of Kane Street. Drug activity usually takes place around the state line and involves the welfare-and-other-kinds-of-addicts brought in to stock those awful apartment towers. Yes, there's a lot of it.

Nancy Broadwater was the vet who offered to euthanize Mogwai-cat when her hind legs went spastic. I've been told that that degree of spasticity really is fatal to a majority of cats who develop it...as with polio, though in cats it's caused by a different virus. The odds might really have been against Mogwai making a full recovery, but she did. A year after Dr. Broadwater recommended putting her down, she'd grown up with all her oddly proportioned body parts fitting together into a classic Siamese-type body shape, and become a beautiful, healthy, athletic cat with funny-looking spots on her face. She did look freaky and as if she might not have been meant to live as long as she did, though, as a kitten. I don't really blame Dr. Broadwater. There are just cats who are dumb animals, useful as small predators but pretty much interchangeable, and cats who contribute as much to your family as any of the humans and more than your brother-in-law...Mogwai was one of the latter. I have felt sort of...weird...about Dr. Broadwater ever since. Like the way you feel about the Canadian government trying to salvage its government medical system by urging everyone with a chronic disease to "choose" suicide. It's not possible to hate Canada but...ick.

"West Jackson Street or whatever"? Jackson Street buildings are numbered either "west" or "east" from that central location.

There is not a lot to see in Gate City after 5:00 p.m. When the street lamps come on, some stores keep lights on for security but hardly any are open to the public. There's not a lot of traffic in the daytime. Generally the town looks liveliest between 8 and 9 a.m. and slows down to a siesta pace by mid-afternoon. 

Broadwater Drugs has changed a great deal. It was once the classic 1950s American "drugstore," with all the over-the-counter pharmaceuticals getting legitimacy from being sold next to racks of greeting cards, books, toys, snacks, and the classic soda-fountain bar. High school kids might stop for "Cokes" (generic term including other brands of soda pop) and hamburgers at the Campus Drive-In. (Once long ago Gate City had a two-year teachers' college--back when a two-year course was thought to qualify teachers.) Elementary school students, and many of their parents, hung out after school at "the drugstore." It was called that because a Broadwater owned it, though someone from a nearby town also operated a drugstore, without a bar, when I was growing up. In the 1990s the store passed down to the next generation, who closed the bar and took out the fun stuff, having determined that the money was in having a drive-through pharmacy and displaying only "home medical supplies." It went from being a social hub to doing a tightly limited, strictly confidential trade. I've heard that this decision paid. A lot of people like doing small-town gossip but those people are, if possible, more fanatical about their own privacy than those of us who stay out of the gossip.

Southern Graphics looks dead at sundown, when the building is probably empty, but it's a nice, modern print shop. They do everything from signs to books, but they're not publishers, merely printers. They print all our high school yearbooks and most of our local history books.

One of the few businesses that aren't located on Kane or Jackson Street is the telephone and cable company, up the hill to the left on Woodland Street. Apart from that I think we really might see "it all" in this video. 

Where "Big O" stops is across the street from the elementary school, the School Board, a row of houses that are "suburban" enough to have had a cat sanctuary (when I was growing up they were patrolled by a free-range bantam hen), and then the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But he's right to turn back, because he started so late. There's nothing to see there after dark. A woman walking out there alone, here I stand to testify, is likely to get the "pretty little girl / lady of your age" (note the absence of anything in between, any willingness to acknowledge that women are ever competent responsible adults) "shouldn't be out alone after dark" kind of annoyance. A man just might  be arrested. 

When he walks back and looks up King Alley, nothing's going on in the parking lot behind the stores. At one time that parking lot housed a Bristol-Jenkins bus station. (The buses, old school buses painted pale green, ran from Bristol to Kingsport to Gate City to a few other towns ending with Jenkins. The fare for a ride between two stations was a quarter. I rode in from Kingsport on a B-J bus once, the last year the company was in business, 1976.) After the bus company shut down there was still a cab stand up into the early 2000s. I looked for a cab in 2006 and was told that all three of Gate City's cab services had shut down in 2005. Since then the alley has been monitored to keep out illegal activity, which means that most of the time it's dead, but sometimes it's used for open-air concerts and parties.

The Maple Tree Cafe replaced the Roberts Family Bakery Cafe, former home of this web site. Mr. Roberts died and Mrs. Roberts wanted to concentrate on running her AirBNB since it had been less damaged by the COVID panic. She sold the cafe and the gift shop to old friends from Tennessee, where she grew up. Immigration is such a nasty thing if your children want to get a good price on a store, such a wonderful thing if they want to date someone who already lives here and won't try to pull them away. Grandma Bonnie Peters grew up in Indiana. Adayahi immigrated from Wise County. This web site will always be liberal about individual immigrants, even if we can't encourage them, but does observe that, when local people complain about "carpetbaggers" liberalizing the local Republican Party or inflating property values, those local people are getting what they deserve for not sponsoring my book biz.

That "Antique Mall" and "Antique Alley" used to be the Hackney Furniture store and Nichols Department Store. People miss what used to be in those buildings. Alas the mortality of humankind. No living Hackney seems to have wanted to sell furniture and no living Nichols (or Nickels or various other spellings; they're all one family, they were here before Noah Webster brought in the idea of standard spelling, and the name is German) wanted to keep up the big department store building. What's in those buildings now is overpriced but not bad, though currently the corner of the Nichols Building is occupied by an "Italian bistro" that is pretty disgusting.

"Big O" doesn't mention the little building tucked in between courthouse and law firm behind that statue of a soldier. The statue was done by Jim Speers. The building was the quaint little independent local library I loved as a child; after that it's been used by the Historical Society and by business owners' groups. Both deserve a good close look, by daylight.

And yes, isn't it funny how most of the businesses located within a block of the county courthouse are law firms? There's a bail bonding company, too, if you know where to look. However, a wonderful third-or-fourth-generation hardware store remains to be discovered in that Part II video..

Bad Poetry: Scab

For the Poets & Storytellers United, a  poem about scabs. A scab is a crust of dried body fluids over a wound, or a strike-breaking worker.

A strike was meant to be a blow

if only wounding profit.

If workers thought job paid too low

they simply would walk off it,

and this was felt as "bleeding" labor,

money, all away,

and bosses tried to hire a neighbor

to fill in that day.

And so this man was called a scab.

It wasn't meant to injure,

until the striking laborers' gab

added gall and ginger.

A skilled coal miner's pay was low; 

work, dangerous and hard.

How far below could wages go

on a day labor yard?

So scabs could easily be despised

as lowest of the low

though, when disasters traumatized,

to scabbing men would go.

Those times are gone to come no more

and who would call them back?

So Hollywood said "Mining lore

a scab's viewpoint doth lack."

And someone wrote an eighties movie

simply called The River

and said "Mel Gibson's young and groovy!

He'll make girls' hearts quiver,

and for the boys, bring Spacek in,

and show them having sex

(from shoulders up) with sweaty skin

in scabs' grim little shacks."

Mel Gibson played a noble-hearted

man who saved his farm

by scabbing; Sissy'd not be parted

from him, but risked harm

and left the kids behind to meet him

in his pine board shanty.

From that day on, reviewers treat them

as poison, not eye candy.

Gibson's his own producer now.

Spacek's career was charred.

Bygones are bygones, you'd avow,

but bitterness dies hard.

(The River (1984) is currently available to watch online--for a fee. 

In 1983 the producers looked for a real Tennessee town that looked weatherbeaten but not hopeless. The farm scenes that ended up in the movie were shot in Tennessee. For the town, people said "They wanted Clinchport; too bad they didn't come out before the flood." Gate City wanted to be used as the scene of the movie--though we don't actually have a river. The producers didn't think my town looked weatherbeaten enough but finally agreed that a short stretch of a back street could be made to look down-at-heel when wet. So you can see an unflattering view of part of my town, with some real local people in the crowd, in the scene where Mel Gibson goes to the bank after the flood. 

We never were a mining town. People I knew liked The River and Gibson and Spacek and the whole foofarah of having a film crew in town. Those who remember 1983 still do. 

People who belong to unions, e.g. the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, haaaated the movie and have never forgiven those who made it.

I'd never claim that it was a great movie, no suspense, no comedy, not even a car chase, strictly a reenactment of some long-gone scab's apologia, but what pretty scenery it has!)

Gate City Kitties Should Come Inside This Week

This post needs a photo. My old faithful cell phone will still snap blurry, barely recognizable photos but won't upload them. I'll just have to describe what I saw in words.

Killdeer. Everyone in Virginia knows what killdeer look like. For the rest of the world, they're a sort of inland plover whose calls supposedly sounded to hungry hunters like "Kill deer! Deer here!" Since they forage in grassy meadows in between the deep forests, their calls often did lead the hunters to accessible deer and water. The birds are about the size of long-legged pigeons. They look like this.

(Fair use, but Google traces this picture to Unsplash.) 

So they are very cute. Usually they don't spend much time in Gate City because we don't have a lot of grassy meadows. We have mown lawns and gardens, and we have uncultivated land that quickly shoots up into woods, and not much of the in-between land killdeer like. This is a very good way to maintain land if you want not to have to worry about ground-nesting birds. 

But one year I saw a couple of killdeer nesting on the Presbyterian church lawn, and one year they at least tried to nest in front of the Duffield market, and this year it seems they succeeded in nesting on the vacant lot where Daugherty's Chevrolet lot used to be. 

What could be more adorable than an adult killdeer? A baby killdeer, of course. The fluffy little chicks start scampering about on their own stiltlike legs while they're about the size of baby chickens, before real grown-up feathers grow in. 

Early this morning someone posted a photo of a downy baby killdeer at someone else's blog, and then I went into town and saw two of them scampering after their parents in the bank's drive-through lane. 

Two? No, three. One was with its mother, a yard or so further from pavement than the father and the two bolder babies. 

And what was calling my attention to the baby killdeer was the little daddybird, hunching his neck and trailing his wings in a chickenlike threat display, squawking "Peep-peep-peep-peep-peep-peep!" He could almost have been a half-grown bantam rooster. He clearly meant something like "Leave my babies alone or I'll...I'll...I'll reach across your foot and bite your leg and thus assume the position for you to kick me into the creek, I will! Nobody's going to mess with MY babies!"

Then, seeing that I'd spotted him as the source of the angry peeping, he hastily changed tactics, jumped back, skittered back toward Mama Killdeer, and began limping and trailing a wing, nonverbally saying, "Oh, I'm hurt! I'm helpless! Kill me and be done with it but leave my family alone!" 

Plovers are hysterical drama queens and also terrible, obvious liars, but you have to love their courage. They keep taking the chance that they'll always be able to fly away before a predator gets close enough to eat them. They are not always able to escape from a determined predator. 

It would have served the little fellow's purposes so much better to have been quiet and let me walk past, not seeing him, as most humans would. (Killdeer's peculiar markings help them recognize each other but also help them fade into the background of a meadow.) Who said he had any sense? He's a bird. He has only a bird brain. But he does have a kind of desperate, quixotic fortitude. If I'd been a predator, he was fully prepared to give his life for his family.

In another week his babies should be able to fly, and the family will probably move on. Meanwhile, all cats likely to prowl around the corner of Kane and Water Streets should spend a few days indoors. Male cats normally prowl about a mile in any direction from their home base. Females normally prowl for a quarter-mile or less, but if they're extra-large and/or have hungry kittens to feed, who knows what they can do. 

 Cats, as a species, need to be at the top of the food chain in neighborhoods where humans live. They need to be outdoors, and we need to have them outdoors. This does not mean that every old purr-by-the-fire cat wants or needs to be outdoors. Older cats who spend most of their time dozing aren't making much contribution to the ecology any more, and often prefer to be indoors. Cats who are ill or injured need to be indoors. Cats with FIV are more likely to live longer if you can persuade them to be content with indoor territory. But we need cats to keep nuisance species populations down, and we don't need to let other predators that are larger and less human-friendly move into the ecological niche cats occupy in Europe and North America.

(In Australia, of course, the ecology is different. In Australia the idea that all cats should spend their whole lives indoors actually makes sense. In the United States it's a stupid idea.)

But the ecology can stand for cats to be indoors when baby plovers are scampering about. 

Google traces this picture of a baby killdeer to the AllAboutBirds site maintained by Cornell University, which used to be a respectable school. 

Mark Warner on the Lower Energy Costs Act

This weekend, this web site received Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletter summarizing the Lower Energy Costs Act, US HR 1. The Newsletter went live on this web site; you should see a link to it on the right side of the page. 

This web site particularly called the Newsletter to the attention of our US Senators, who are not paid to sit around reading personal blogs every day. Since they're D and our House Representative is R, we can expect some debate about the final wording from them; that's how the system is supposed to work. This web site asked them to make sure the bill supports the economy of the Ninth District of Virginia by requiring APCo to invest in harvesting our sunshine before it sinks any more money in fossil or nuclear fuel. 

(For those who don't know: Virginia already has laws authorizing anyone who has the money to put as many solar collectors as we want over our roofs, sheds, pavements, and any southwest-facing slopes that are too steep to cultivate and too rocky to support fruit trees. Stores like Gate City's Thriftway Supermarket, which died partly because its oldfashioned flat roof held water and sprung leaks, could have new, watertight, sloping roof covers that drain water and collect sunshine if their owners chose to invest in such. I could have a new, watertight, sloping roof cover if I could afford one. And yes, the technology is already workable to allow us to sell our surplus sunshine back to APCo. One of my old schoolmates claims to be collecting monthly checks for that. I am not asking for taxes to be used to make all of us equal participants in this venture, though I would emphasize that solar collectors can be installed on roof covers, outbuildings, or shelters especially over stores and parking lots, so they would actually protect rather than weigh down roofs. I would like to see a requirement that APCo install solar collectors wherever anyone they've threatened to disconnect for non-payment will allow them to install one, before APCo sinks any more money into new plants. This web site supported letting APCo build a new plant, which didn't look bad or do obvious damage to its environment, back in 2011-2012. They built it and everybody was happy. Now they're saying it's old and inadequate. Well. Let them have more sources of energy. Enough to sell to PEPCo and Dominion! And after a few years when they can balance their payments to us against payments on the equipment they install, they should start sending us monthly checks, too. It is jolly high time the Ninth District's economy was boosted by something that is clean, Green, honest, and wholesome.)

Below is Senator Mark Warner's reply. From its format we may infer that it was typed, probably by a student, from a template that was probably mailed out to a lot of people who've e-mailed him about this bill. 

"

Dear Ms. King,

          Thank you for contacting me regarding H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Cost Act.  I appreciate the benefit of your views on this important issue.

          On March 30, 2023, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 225 - 204. The bill must pass the Senate and be signed by the President before becoming law.

          You may be assured that I will keep your views in mind as this issue is considered. If you need additional information or if there’s another issue that’s important to you, please visit my website at: http://www.warner.senate.gov where you may send a message to me or sign-up for email updates to get the latest on my work in the Senate. You may also follow me at: http://www.facebook.com/MarkRWarner/ and https://twitter.com/MarkWarner.

Sincerely,
MARK R. WARNER
United States Senator

"

Voting Rural? Is That Even Possible?

(This started out as an e-mail reply to a Good Folks newsletter about the author's hopes for "slow activism in rural areas." For those who don't read the Good Folks newsletter, it often promotes the work of writers, artists, and musicians who happen to be "gay." As with any demographic, some of that work also happens to be good, which is the primary reason why people subscribe to the newsletter.)

Must supporting things that matter to rural people, to oneself as a rural person, always mean going Republican? I hope not. It would help if Democrats had more to say about the interests of rural people as distinct from those of rich Eurotrash who want to "preserve resources" by criminalizing rural life. 

Example: Appalachian Power wants to sink money in "a small nuclear reactor" in rural Wise County, Virginia. Wise County is worked-out coalfields, Not only could a nuclear reactor built there not possibly be safe, it would also contaminate drinking water from the Virginia-Kentucky border to New Orleans.

Typical R position: "Youall want jobs, don't you? A small nuclear reactor would create jobs, right?"

When I was young we would have expected the D party to be the ones saying, "Wait a minute. Appalachian Power should first invest in the community by putting solar collectors where people want them, letting those people pay for the collectors and thus keeping them paying APCo for a few more years, and give Wise County and other coalfields counties a chance to export something healthy for once. "

Now look at the Democrats in power. What do they know or care about this kind of thing? They're too busy spouting the line their European owners are feeding them. "Ban guns, ban all aspects of rural life, make Wise County unlivable, tell people we're giving the good land back to the bears as we herd the people into apartment towers in cities where they'll die faster, and get people like Schwab controlling the rural land in the U.S. just as they are in Europe, so they can turn North America back into the kind of mess Europe is." 

I want APCo to give older people like me and my neighbors the "job" of exporting our sunshine. I think of that as a "liberal" idea, and so you may be sure do some big influences in the Republican party. But today's Democrats are too busy screaming about gun bans and abortion being a "right" (for women over 50, yeah RIGHT!) to support anything that actually works for rural people. When they notice that we exist, they're screaming that our existence is racist. (I'm biracial myself, and duh, solar collectors would work for Black home owners too, and did you see anything about their not working for "gays" or Muslims or any other demographic group?...but the Loony Left has apparently decided that just being home owners is "racist." Stay in those housing projects in the slums where you belong, proles! Achievement, freedom, privacy, even good health are racist things for YOU losers even to WANT! Anyway why aren't all these people over 50 dead, as they would be in Europe?)

As a lifelong registered Independent I want what works for me and others like me, and don't care which party picks up those ideas...but it looks as if Terry Kilgore, the hardcore "conservative" Republican, is more likely to be more helpful to rural people here than Democrats like Tim Kaine. 

*****

It's important to note here that I don't hate Europeans. 

I hate the fantasy of "global governance" that makes it possible for people to take political sides in countries where they don't live. There is a Muslim version of that fantasy, but currently the people who subscribe to it and are meddling in U.S. government are Europeans. They're also bigots, and they get their notions about what's "racist" and "anti-Semitic" straight out of their mirrors. They're also sexists and Socialists. The craziest part of their bigotry is that their tribal hate, which is also strong, shifts overnight. Basically they still seem to think of themselves as tiny feuding tribes, not even Hungarians-as-opposed-to-Italians-in-Europe as Huns-as-opposed-to-Magyars-in-Hungary, and they'll be ready to go to war with any other tribe in minutes. I think those Saturday morning cartoons probably got it right. It may be true that "everybody wants to rule the world" in moments of moral weakness, but all people who seriously try to rule the world are villains, and detestable.

Ordinary sane Europeans who come here as visitors, your typical exchange student, exchange teacher, diplomat, tourist, etc., I've almost always liked. Their history is instructive, and their cultural traditions of art, literature, architecture, and so on, such as have survived their wars, are impressive. As individual people they usually seem pleasant to know and interesting to talk to. The world needs no more bigotry and no more war. 

The more advanced civilizations on this continent do, however, need to remain aware of and consistently beat back any further incursions of the toxic European ideas our ancestors left behind. There ought to be a specific name for those ideas, more specific than "tyranny" or "totalitarianism" or "bigotry" or "warmongering" or "elitism," although those words usually apply to the specific bad ideas as they appear, and ideally more separable from any idea of people than "European," although I think it is helpful to note where the toxic ideas are coming from. It would be helpful if the people promulgating these bad ideas all belonged to one party, whose name would then be the proper name for the bad ideas. 

Until a better name suggests itself, this web site is stuck with "European" as the name for the most toxic ideas floating around these days. When talking about people, books, music, etc., which we usually do in a favorable way, usually it's possible to identify them with specific countries that happen to be in Europe. And we will be talking favorably about British, Swedish, Greek, German, Ukrainian, etc., etc., people and their work, because, loathsome as these European political ideas are, we have nothing against the plain people of Europe. 

Status Update: McDonald's Is Open

Not that I care or dare to eat there every day, but McDonald's have reopened their dining areas in Virginia, at last. It was jolly high time; nonprofit public-access computer centers have not. 

I am sitting in McDonald's. I just saw a little Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (a female, no conspicuous red spot on the throat) flitting around the colorful sign in the window. 

Just to annoy those who don't like my flights of animal whimsy, let's postulate that she was buzzing around the store because she'd heard a fellow customer singing the praises of their French Vanilla Iced Coffee...No. Probably not. Probably somebody had spilled something with real sugar in it on the ground, where the hummingbird couldn't drink it, and the bird was hoping that the colorful sign was the source of that lovely sugary smell. Sorry, bird.

I'd like to mention the French Vanilla Iced Coffee because I never heard of such a confection. I like one cup of hot black coffee in the morning. After that, I like to rinse out the cup with water. After that, depending on which is a better bargain, I can drink more coffee, or maybe tea, or maybe soda pop. At my fa-a-a-avorite cafe, where I don't plan to hang out again until they've had a chance to recover from last year, I liked to alternate between black coffee, sweet coffee, and sometimes decaf coffee. At McDonald's my afternoon cold drink of choice is Coca-Cola. If I had to keep buying drinks to use the Internet at some other places I might start with Mountain Dew or Mello Yello and then move on to something without caffeine in it, because the most popular kinds of soda pop in my part of the world contain very high levels of caffeine and were not meant to be sipped all day.

But this gentleman wanted everyone to know that such a thing as French Vanilla Iced Coffee exists. He says it's sweet, but not too sweet, yet also sugar-free. It's cold enough to drink on a hot summer afternoon, and, he says, he finds the flavor and caffeine content satisfying enough to feel like lunch. 

McDonald's still does hamburgers, fries, and soda pop (and you can still get at least the cheap version of each of those for 99 cents), but in recent years they've been trying to attract adults with all kinds of trendier, hypothetically healthier food and drinks. 

Hummingbirds literally live on sweet drinks--specifically the nectar of tube-shaped flowers, and different species feed primarily on flowers that are the right size for their bills. So there's a reason why this one might be attracted to McDonald's. However, they need real natural sucrose: preferably from flowers, or failing that from natural sugar. They can't live on the sugar-free sweet drinks some humans prefer. They can't live on the ice cream and milkshakes people have been ordering, either. They might be able to drink sugary Coke or Sprite or Hi-C, but it wouldn't be good food for them...so I hope this hummingbird has found some real flowers to feed on by now. 

Here's an update some local folks may not have heard. Most of us have had the coronavirus by now, or the vaccine, or both--not necessarily in that order. On hearing that a mutant strain of virus may still be able to affect people who've had the vaccine, I expect a lot of people in Gate City to react the same way I did. "Dang-bang-blast it all, we had that, last year. I'm NOT going to bother about it a-GA-in!" For most of us there was no need to "bother" worrying, or panicking, or probably even having the vaccine unless it was to protect other people, at any time in the whole COVID saga. If we weren't already reacting to something else we didn't know we had it. Some of us still don't know whether we had it or not; we had a cough, or felt tired, or had vivid memories of mononucleosis, when everyone else was having COVID, But It Was Nothing To Miss A Day's Pay Over, Really... 

Meh. Mehhh. I've not thrown out any of my masks, and I'm still a huge fan of social distancing, especially from older people and those known to be at special risk. But seriously, we are still talking about a chest cold. Head colds, flu, strep, and other stupid little infections no normal adult even notices having, are still more dangerous to the fragile than any strain of coronavirus ever was. For many of us not only glyphosate reactions, but also "breaking in" new shoes or sipping too-hot coffee, are a lot more painful than coronavirus. The only cause for special concern about coronavirus was to try to prevent whole towns from all going down with it at once, and since natural immunity formed by having the virus is more effective than vaccines, I think few if any of us have any reason to worry. 

I'm tempted to speculate that anybody who notices any form of coronavirus symptoms, now, is probably having a glyphosate reaction. Of course that's wrong. Some of these people have AIDS or lupus or cancer--which is why asking which individuals have COVID or what else was going on with them is not nice. If they want us to know, they'll tell us. (The tendency of older people to share Too Much Information about their health is widely documented. Some of us are just making heroic efforts not to be boring about it. Given any encouragement, quite a few baby-boomers for whom it's still "news" that we're not bursting with crazy teenage energy any more will discuss ailments all day long.)

I merely maintain that there was no valid reason for any businesses to shut down altogether, or anyone to lose their job, last year and there's even less of one now. We've all at least had a chance to learn something from the coronavirus. We all should know, about places like McDonald's: If you're not ill and haven't been ill, consider yourself an immune carrier--if not of coronavirus, of a couple dozen things that are probably more dangerous to the fragile. Go ahead and sit at the same table with people you know to be immune carriers of the same kinds of virus, bacteria, and fungi. Do not go into the restroom, even though it still has two toilets, while anyone you don't know well is in there. (Stop, look, listen.) Do not sit down at a table adjacent to one where people you don't know well are sitting. If the place gets crowded (which I've not seen happen, because by now people know the drill), that's what those picnic tables out on the grassy lawn are for. 

Actually, for most of the day, a lot more people could come inside McDonald's without violating the official rules for social distance. We have learned the drill. More people could come inside the other restaurants, too. It's no longer true, as it once was, that any of our local restaurants is likely to get crowded enough that writers who come in mostly to use the Internet would feel ethically obligated to go out for a walk and make sure all of the eat-and-run crowd could find tables at a good healthy distance from one another. However, many people still prefer to take food out of restaurants, to their cars or to their jobs, and that's fine with the restaurant owners and nice for those of us who can only reliably connect to the Internet from a public place in town. 

One way or another, everybody (except those who are seriously allergic to sugar-free sweet stuff, or caffeine, or maybe vanilla) should have a chance to try French Vanilla Iced Coffee for themselves. 

Book Review: Hiding Ezra and Wayland

Sad news, Gentle Readers. Goodreads is now hiding real individual book reviews just like Amazon. Amazon can get away with a little discrimination, because it's huge and commercial. Goodreads is neither.

Underwhelmed, to say the least, by typing in mini-reviews of these two novels-from-family-history, hitting "Post," and having the book's home page pop back onto the screen with a smarmy little message saying "Priscilla King, write a review of [the book I just did]!"--I don't like web sites that bark orders at readers, in any case...I'm going back to my own blog. Which Google, of course, will try to hide from people, and Goodsearch will try so hard to hide that it'll even redirect readers back to cached copies of the posts for which Blogjob paid. Goodheavens, the corporate would-be rulers of the world cried, we mustn't let people discover a blog that blows the whistle on sneaky corporate censorship on the Internet!

If the Internet doesn't pull a U-turn and require human review before even the ugliest porn images and hatespews can be censored, how long do you think it can last? Two years? Three? It's been fun, and I look forward to getting paid again for my special talent for creating decent-looking documents on manual typewriters...

Here, while it lasts, are full-length reviews of two short paperback novels. They can be read independently; they're best read together.

Author: Rita Sims Quillen

Title: Hiding Ezra

Amazon details:

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Little Creek Books (February 18, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1939289351

And the sequel: Wayland 

Amazon details:

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Iris Press (September 16, 2019)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604542543

I'm late to the Internet today, Gentle Readers, because I started reading Wayland and couldn't put it down. I already knew from Hiding Ezra that this author is not averse to making readers cry, so I had to find out what she was going to do with this study in Human Evil...

Rita Sims Quillen is best known as a poet. No worries for those who don't like poetry; these stories are not told in the sort of lush  prose that tends to be described as "poetic." Landscape descriptions like "She also loved to go to a cool, shady bend in the little branch [creek] below the church where the trees created a canopy like walls" are as "poetic" as it gets. These novels get full marks for clear, straightforward prose that's not wordy, sentimental, or difficult to read. In fact one reviewer has quoted the first sentence of Hiding Ezra as an example of a good opening line for a novel.

They read like family history. Hiding Ezra is in fact based on family history--an old journal kept by a soldier who deserted from the Army in order to help his last few friends and relative survive a set of epidemic diseases that swept our part of the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Wayland might easily be based on another old journal.

Hiding Ezra is about the oddly enjoyable summer Ezra Teague spends hiding in a cave, leaving game near the homes of people who leave bread and ammunition near the cave. It's also about his grieving sister Eva, his faithful sweetheart Alma, and all the other friends and relatives they lose to the epidemics. It's also about Lieutenant Nettles, a nettlesome outsider from Big Stone Gap who connects with his inner decent human being after exposure to the grieving and loving people of Wayland, Gate City, and Fort Blackmore.

Wayland was the real name of one of the little rural settlements outside Gate City up to the 1940s, when it changed its name to Midway. Gate City had changed its name a bit earlier--in the nineteenth century it was called Estillville. Moccasin Gap, on the other side of the gap in the mountains formed by the Big Moccasin Creek, also changed its name, in the 1950s, to Weber City--spelled Weber, as in German, but pronounced Webber, as in English--after a radio comedy about a new subdivision: "The characters were having so much fun with their Weber City, we thought we'd have one too." In these novels place names are used as they were at the time.

When I read this novel, I enjoyed its dramatic climax, but wondered why the denouement was so long and so sad. A more tactful reviewer posted online that she wanted the story to be even longer, to resolve the new issues the denouement raises for the characters. Readers be warned. The last few chapters of Hiding Ezra are the trailer for Wayland.

In between reading the two stories, I cried. I won't spoil the denouement, I think, by explaining that I don't cry about fictional characters. No, but once when the words "rock hall" triggered a memory an 85-year-old great-uncle said, "My sister and sister-in-law used to take bread to the fellows that hid in the rock house." (Actually he used their given names, and one of them was still alive to confirm his claim.) My mother wondered if he was remembering the story she'd heard about my great-grandfather leading a party of soldiers to the nearby "rock house," a cave big enough for people to camp in. No, he said, this was in his lifetime...but he was weak and never had much to say at one time, and never mentioned the cave story again.

In my family the young spoke more frankly to the old, and asked more questions, than in some neighboring families. Still, I never asked for more details about feeding the deserters in 1918. I knew the cave was real; my brother and I had been shown how to find it on condition that we not try to get inside it. I knew Great-Aunt belonged to a pacifist church, and her sons were conscientious objectors, but her husband, Grandfather's brother, was exempt from military service because he was a minister. The great-uncle who first mentioned the story had one of those given names that commemorate a family friend's given and family names: Otto Quillen.That's all I can add to the facts behind Hiding Ezra.


What made me cry was that this story made me realize how lucky the elders were. My grandfather and eight of his younger siblings lived to ages between 75 and 99. Many of their generation did not. Physically and emotionally my elders survived by keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any friends they'd had as children...and even in the 1960s I still grew up hearing "Don't get closer to town children than you can help, don't go into town unless it's necessary, don't EVER go into a swimming pool, don't go to other people's houses and if you do don't eat or take off your shoes..." Two generations later, my extended family are still known as a stand-offish bunch. Possibly the elders' losses of friends to the epidemics had something to do with that. I've heard a lot of rot about possible kinds of "hurt" might have caused our family subculture to be so clannish, but this insight rang true. And it did hurt, briefly, wondering how many school friends my elders had buried...Grandfather was one of fifteen children, eight of whom lived to ages between 75 and 99. In another family of fourteen, six children born before 1940 were still alive in 1970.

Anyway: Ezra Teague survives his adventure, but the epidemic diseases and early deaths aren't over. In Wayland Ezra has left his daughter for his sister to raise. Eva has indeed married Lieutenant Nettles, who is now a nice guy but still insecure enough to be impressed by a stranger's show of respect. That insecurity places the Nettles family at risk when the lieutenant offers a job to a "hobo" who calls himself Buddy Newman. Newman's real name is Deel, as in Scottish "de'il," and his character is a study in Human Evil. He wants to set people against each other, ruin the reputation of a pious but sex-starved old lady, and do even worse things to little Katie Teague.

The suspense of the story is finding out whether Newman's schemes will be foiled, and how, and by which of the decent local folk. There is an interesting and thoroughly local delineation of the relative vileness of Newman, an otherwise likable hobo who has an icky relationship with a teenaged boy, a rude drunk, and a murderer. Newman is a bigot, a pedophile, and also a murderer, but his evil runs deeper than that. (The narration of his evil won't embarrass readers in front of their children but the single telling details, when they emerge, may upset children.)

Did an ancestor really keep a diary that narrated such events? At least they're not the local pedophile story I always heard: it would have been fifteen or twenty years later when the man I heard described as "an escaped mental patient" did some physical damage to a local primary school girl. And I was glad. I did not want that girl, who survived but never married, to have been the real model for Katie. (Katie is characterized as pretty much the perfect niece in Eva's diary, but aunts know to allow for another aunt's auntly perspective. I think each of The Nephews is pretty much a perfect child, too, in his or her own way.)

Once again, after the main plot has resolved itself, the last two chapters go on. I didn't cry while reading Wayland but I found the denouement somewhat sad. Others may like it but I think they'll agree that, once again, the last chapters of Wayland are a trailer for another story.

I gave both books five stars on Goodreads for Keeping It Real. These are not just another stereotype of "Appalachia," the whole mountain range, from Georgia to Nova Scotia and possibly also Britain, confused with old pictures of the coal-mining town. Anything looks grim in a black-and-white photograph. In these books we see Scott County much closer to the way it must have been, between 1917 and 1930, to have become what it's been in Quillen's and my lifetime. I'm delighted.