West Virginia: Practicing Social Isolation since 1863

When you grow up in the mountains of West Virginia, social distancing is nothing new. It is a way of life. So is not having enough of what you need to be healthy. But you make do.

The Appalachian Mountains were the home to many Native American groups, including the Shawnee, Cherokee, Delaware, and Mingo. We found leftover tools all over my grandmother’s garden. “Arrowheads” we called them all. My uncle has an incredible collection of them. I have seen him walk through the freshly tilled garden and quietly pick up what looked to me like clumps of dirt or rocks, that, when seen up close, were finely chiseled tools made by craftsmen hundreds or thousands of years ago.

The first white settlers were the Scots-Irish. The Scots-Irish — “Ulster Scots,” as they are known in the U.K. — migrated from the Scottish Highlands to this continent because they would not submit to the Crown’s creation of the Church of England. These Highlanders (that’s what they were called) were very pleased with themselves, until (unsurprisingly), the Protestant Scots kicked them out. They headed over to Ireland, where they picked up a few recruits, but were such an unseemly lot that they were kicked out of Ireland. Then they headed to the infamous Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose inhabitants hustled them out as soon as possible to Pennsylvania. Finally, they made their way south until they settled in the glorious Appalachian Mountains. It was easy to practice their isolationist (and sometimes anti-social) behavior there. There was plenty of land. It was protected by unforgiving (yet achingly beautiful) terrain. And nobody gave a damn about what you were doing if you left them alone.

Live and let live.

Other settlers in my home state included escaped criminals and bonded people who knew perfectly well that nobody was going to bother traversing these mountains and hollers to re-capture them. Escaped slaves and Free People of Color took up residence here for the same reasons, and there has always been some talk that a group of Native Americans gave the U.S. Government the slip during the Trail of Tears and quietly moved into the hills. 

All of these groups eventually blended together to form the Melungeon and Chestnut Ridge communities. Later, African American families moved to the state in order to work in the coal mines — a precursor to the first Great Migration.

Other waves of immigrants added to the mix. Chinese immigrants came to build tunnels and our railroads. Irish, Polish, Hungarian, and Italian immigrants showed up to mine coal and settled in for the long haul. Lebanese tinkers and peddlers showed up, too, to service the coal camps. Italian stonemasons who came for the coal mines left behind fabulous churches and houses where I grew up. I won’t even go into the immigrant food that still graces tables and native cuisine today. Look up pepperoni roll or salt-rising bread for further information.

Let all of these disenfranchised groups settle in, claim their holler, and intermarry … and you have Appalachia. Some people where I grew up still use language that can be traced back to 15th century England (“Bath the baby,” anyone?) And at Christmas their mincemeat pies contain large pieces of roast beef. But rather than turning into a melting pot, our home has been more like a chunky beef stew. We may be in the same pot, but you can definitely pick out chunks and kin-groups, and communities, and clans. When a war between the states threatened to rip our country apart, the members of our state had no problem whatsoever ripping the state apart and seceding from Virginia, just as Virginia had seceded from the Union. We formed our own state in 1863, thank you very much.

You stay in your holler, and I’ll stay in mine.

The people of our state have been practicing social isolation for the past 400 years, and with good reason. Even during the 20th century, our settlements and hollers have been far apart, sparsely populated, and largely neglected by the federal government and the rest of the world. Or, and I can’t stress this enough, they have been exploited in the most horrifying ways possible by outside forces. Think coal mines collapsing on people. Think rich politicians who exploit working people and buy votes. Think entire communities exposed to acid mine drainage and houses ruined and abandoned due to mine subsidence. Think roads that are next to impossible to navigate because of potholes that never get fixed.

We are distrustful of outsiders, and we have good reason to be.

As a child growing up in the 1970s, I thought that “Black Lung” was a check you got in the mail, because most of the elderly men I was around “collected their Black Lung” if they had ever worked in the mines. I thought that all old people coughed. I thought it was common to have an outhouse, whether you had indoor plumbing or not. I thought creeks were orange. I thought all schools and homes were heated with coal furnaces that spewed out coal dust and blackened everything around them. (Which is why, every spring, we automatically opened the windows and washed down the walls.) When it was “miner’s vacation,” everyone stopped and went to Myrtle Beach (if they had the money) or to Michigan (to visit expat relatives who escaped in the ’50s and ’60s to work in the automotive industry).

It is a myth that we are uneducated. It was not uncommon, in the middle class West Virginia of my youth, to have a mother who had a master’s degree (because she was a schoolteacher, like mine) and a father who may or may not have graduated from high school but who made a good bit of money working in coal mines. That’s the way you got ahead. One of the guys I went to school with is now a diplomat who has served in China, South Korea, and the Marshall Islands. He speaks fluent Korean. Another former classmate is the local “Morning Edition” host in Portland, Oregon. I went to school with people who are chemists and administrators for large pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and college professors.

We aren’t dumb.

And if the miners went on strike, everyone’s dad (including my non-union dad), stayed home. It was too dangerous for non-union guys to go to work. You didn’t screw with the unions in the 1970s.

Because our communities (and I use the term “community” loosely because I grew up on 11 acres) were spread so far apart, I could hear gunshots on neighboring hillsides, and hear music when things got lively on a Friday night, but a neighbor is someone who lived within a half-mile or mile of my house. Trick-or-treating always required a car.

Because our communities were spread so far apart, our schools were, too. We spent (and our children still spend) a lot of time on school buses. Many kids don’t participate in after-school activities because it is simply too difficult to get home afterward. People have little money, so we have low tax bases, and our schools and clinics are underfunded. Doctors here still sometimes make house calls, because that is the only way some of our elderly residents get to see a doctor. West Virginia University has a wonderful Rural Medicine Program that has trained many of the medical practitioners in our state.

Make no mistake, though: The sense of community is unstoppable and formidable. A few years ago, when Superstorm Sandy hit and covered us with several feet of snow, my elderly mother was trapped in her home for four days with no heat and no electricity. A nephew and a great-nephew  spent four hours with two chainsaws getting to her. Other neighbors/relatives showed up the next day, shoved her into a car, and drove her to safety, even though she didn’t want to leave. It took weeks for her community to dig itself out (no thanks to the federal government). My cousin, a local politician, eventually organized private citizens to dig each other out once it became clear that the state government and the feds couldn’t/didn’t know how to help us — or weren’t much interested because we didn’t increase revenue.

Once, when my aunt, who was dying of cancer, fell down and couldn’t get up, I called 911, and before I finished my call, five volunteer firemen showed up on a four-wheeler to help her. (They had been listening to the scanner. That’s one of our pastimes in the hills. It is entertaining and informative. It was our version of social media long before the internet. And it is a lot more reliable.) For the most part, our fire departments and ambulance services are staffed by volunteer community heroes who make our lives and communities work.

We don’t have many theaters. We don’t always get a lot of channels on the television. And the internet isn’t always great. Satellite dishes are among the best things that could have happened to us. But even those aren’t available to those who live in the 13,000 square miles of West Virginia designated the National Radio Quiet Zone to allow the federal government’s gigantic radio in Green Bank to operate. 

To a visitor, this might seem charming, or quaint — but that doesn’t help much when the whole family has to work or take classes from home. And you can forget about Netflix.

We have a lot of fun out in the sticks, though. We read. We play with the animals. We walk in the woods. We watch the children and the garden grow. My mother (the one who wouldn’t leave her home in a natural disaster) always said that she lived in her own Walden, and my upbringing was very influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who said, “All good things are wild and free” and celebrated directing your eye inward to find and travel the “thousand regions in your mind.”

People hunt deer, squirrels, turkey, and sometimes even bear for food. People gather morel mushrooms, ramps, and ginseng (“sang”) to sell, and eat.

Yes, people around here have guns. We pretty much all know how to shoot them, too. (Yes, even crazy-radical-liberal-doctorate-in-English me.) If our families didn’t teach us, we learned at 4-H camp, or Scout camp, or even school. (I’m not kidding.) But, to our credit, if you call the police around here and report a crime, they might show up in a half an hour, or an hour, or the next day. (This is, again, because of isolation. Not because they aren’t good. We are just really spread out.) Also, many of us live so far out that skeet shooting or target practice on a weekend is a common full-family  activity.

We don’t have enough of a tax base for shooting ranges, and besides, they seem inauthentic and silly. Most of the hunters I know use a bow and arrow. Using a gun means that you are inexperienced. I grew up in a world where my grandmother would shoot groundhogs in her garden from the bedroom window with a shotgun. If you can’t do that yet, you shouldn’t be allowed to go out in the woods with a high-powered rifle. You are a menace.

So, when the government tells us to practice self-isolation, we do. We’ve been doing it all of our lives. It bears little difference to the world we already inhabit. And when it took longer for COVID-19 to show up in our mountains than the rest of the United States, we weren’t surprised. The virus reached West Virginia last, because that’s what happens with trends and fads, to. Besides, as we jokingly pointed out, no one else remembers that we are a state. 

“Let that virus drive around Richmond a while before it arrives in full force,” we said.

And when it turned out that it was here all along, but there were no test kits available to make that determination, we placidly accepted that news, along with the rapidly escalating numbers and lack of medical supplies and facilities to treat the virus. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s pronouncement that West Virginia has the highest percentage of adults adversely affected by the virus when it hits in full force did not land as a surprise. We already knew that. Like I said, we aren’t dumb. Our state’s Department of Health & Human services reported that, as of April 13, 16,655 West Virginians have been tested for COVID-19, with 626 positive, 16,029 negative, and nine deaths.

We aren’t holding out hope anyone will be able to help us besides ourselves, because, as history has shown us, they rarely do.

Pass the ramps.