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[Ninurta]

Yep.  The country turned its back on Appalachia a half century ago.  When the region was noticed, it was for exploitation by the creatures of Hollywood with shows like Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, etc.  NEVER a serious look at life there or the abandonment of the region by the rest of the country who imagined they were too sophisticated for the likes of Appalachia.

For a brief period, the book series "Foxfire" looked at real people and their lives in the region.  Those books are mostly forgotten today, I'd guess, but they are worthy of at least occasional dips and can be read in non-sequential bits.



Cheers

Those are great books. Not only do they explain what life is like here, they also explain in some detail how to git 'er done when technology and civilization bypass you on the interstates.

Appalachia has become something of a patchwork. You can still find places exactly like that, and you can also find places where modern civilization has encroached on us, not always for the better. A lot of it has been brought back by kids who went out into the world and then returned, but found they just couldn't live any more without the conveniences they found out there. Some of it has been brought in by megacorps like Walmart. Grundy VA has, as far as I know, the only Walmart on Earth with a shopping cart escalator. Grundy is a bitty little former coal mining town that, when I was growing up, tended to get washed away with every flood, the entire town disappearing every 30 years or so, being washed downstream on Levisa Fork of Big Sandy. Now that the coal industry has been ridden out on a rail by the Democrats, the economy of that entire county (Buchanan) suffers. Walmart is now the largest employer there. They didn't bother cleaning up the mess that the coal mines left, either. There are warning signs on Levisa Fork that you can't eat the fish you catch out of it. So, no work there, and tougher to fend for yourself.

It's almost like they're trying to drive folks into an ambush in the cities.

The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, and the spinoffs from them, were all hill folks, from the same general culture, but from quite a bit farther west, in the Ozarks. I dunno how many times I was asked when I was out in the world how often I went home to Bugtussel to visit. Folks were not trying to be nice when they asked.

But, if the rest of the world ever turns into Appalachia -  and I believe the Globalists/ Marxists are trying to do just that - the Foxfire Books are a good resource to have for folks that don't have old hillbillies around to teach them how survival is done on a smallhold farm in hard times. They were written in the 70's to record and preserve that way of life that was disappearing at the time. My dad grew up in the Great Depression, in the Appalachians, so I learned it from him. He made sure I knew how to do to it... by making me do it. I've plowed and cultivated with a horse, because he made me do it to make sure I knew how. When he was growing up, shells were at a premium, so every shot had to count. He used to count out my shells whenever I went out to hunt, and count them again when I came back, and there had better be enough game coming with me to account for all the missing shells. I've done blacksmithing and farrier work on a home-made forge. We used a truck tire rim standing on water pipe legs for a mud box, and "fire bricked" it with red clay. A two pound hammer and a 150 pound anvil mounted on a section of tree pulled out of a firewood pile and left unsplit rounded out the set. I've split wood with a double bitted axe (there's a trick to that) and learned to make my own wedges out of wood when the axe was not enough, which was not often.

And I still used the Foxfire books to learn other things. I particularly like Book 5 - it tells you how to make stuff that will blow shit up, from scratch, i.e. black powder from charcoal, horse piss, and sulfur. I don't know if they are out of print by now or not, but I do know PDF's of them can be found here and there in the shady corners of the internet.

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