LOCAL WILDLIFE

It's sometimes about a sense of belonging. Even if you don't know everyone, and many of them are rather disturbing. But you get used to the local coffee shop (sticky counters), the chainsaw emporium (new AND used), and the regular food events (boiled WHAT? with a side of WHAT?). Plus the fact that special needs kids have run off into the woods, and may have started eating pets. No one in town keeps bunny rabbits anymore.

You visit the place nearly everyday.


You saw that the thanksgiving feast at the local diner was, substantially, cooked on a raging greasefire, but emergency services did not need to be called.
Ham, turkey, possum.


You have never wondered why a town founded nearly a century before the revolutionary war has so few people in the local cemetery. You just take for granted that the old folks home is filled with people who are extremely ancient. Must be that specialized genetic stock of folks back east, where you have no intention of ever visiting. Despite the town of Hollow Ridge having a Facebook page, they do not have a local highschool, church, or tourist bureau.
It's unclear how the natives make a living.

Or how some of them stay alive.

Must be that tight-knit sense of community. The enduring affection Americans have for the old homestead, the family farm, the area where their kin settled after the Hessians left a few survivors two centuries ago, and the complete absence of English soldiers and monsters in the local waterways. Great granpaw parked his tractor there when the jerry can ran out, and his multitudinous descendants never left. Except for the lucky ones who got a high school education, and a clerical job at the glue factory in the next county.

They still do things the old fashioned way there. When someone gets sick, no need to call the doctor or coroner's office. And no phone in any case. Leeches, boy, that's all a good Christian needs! And a hillside facing south, where the earth is soft.

That's a large part of why so many of us keep in contact with the town of Hollow Ridge deep in the Appalachian mountians. It feels like home. Admittedly the home a few folks ran away from screaming, but home, nevertheless.

Can't hardly get more American than that.



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