I was terrified of driving on the road to our new farm once the snows started. 52 still lived in the city, and it was up to me to keep tabs on the construction progress and to meet with the builder when he needed a quick consultation on-site about one detail or another. I was often so scared and exhausted after the three-mile trip from the Slanted Little House to our farm on its icy, unpaved road that I would get to the bottom of the driveway to the new house, blow my horn, and wait for the builder to drive down and take me up.
My cousin Mark took me for a winter driving lesson.
“What if we roll over the hill?” I asked.
Mark sat in the passenger seat beside me in my SUV, his deadpan gaze suggesting he wasn’t getting paid enough for this expedition. I had the key in the ignition, my hands on the wheel. The steep, twisting, narrow rural roads of West Virginia—so bucolic in spring, summer, and fall—looked like nightmare sheets of ice.
One-lane back roads were cut into hillsides, bordered by sharp drop-offs—and there weren’t any guardrails. The mountainous landscape was breathtaking and scary.
“If you start sliding, stay off the brake so you can steer,” Mark said.
“What if we careen off a cliff?”
“Just take it easy. And step on the gas.”
“But what if we go over the cliff?”
“We’ll call Peewee to come get your car.” Peewee was my cousin’s mechanic buddy, and I knew the answer was meant to reassure me. I didn’t want to be reassured.
“What if we die?” I countered. Some drop-offs were fifty or more feet down.
“What if a meteor hits us? What if a spaceship lands on our heads?”
“Now you understand!”
Lost in the foreign land of rural Appalachia, sometimes I just needed someone to validate my hysteria.
I’d never lived where it snowed much, and the true four seasons of West Virginia had been a big attraction to me. The reality was a big challenge, not just on the road but in the Slanted Little House as we waited for the new house to be finished. Outside the Slanted Little House, it was a gorgeous winter wonderland, crisp and cold. Inside . . . it was crisp and cold. On snow days home from school, the kids would sleep in front of the gas fire in the sitting room. It was the only warm place in the house. Windows were covered in plastic, rugs were shoved along the bottoms of the doors, all to no avail. It was freezing cold, inside and out. There was no such thing as insulation or double-paned glass back in the day that house was built. Pipes, added later when running water didn’t mean running out to the well, passed through the cellar porch on their way to the house, and they froze regularly. (The “cellar porch” was not much more than an enclosed porch that connected the old cellar to the rest of the house.) I used an old gas range in the cellar porch to try to keep the pipes warm. The ignition didn’t work quite right, so I’d have to turn on the burners, then light them with a match. Most nights, I’d just light one burner.
If it got down into the teens or below, it was a two-burner night.
Usually if it was that cold, the pipes froze anyway.
I’d had a three-thousand-square-foot modern colonial back in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina. I married when I was eighteen years old. I met my husband when I was fifteen. I still loved him like family, but our relationship had spiraled into a disaster. I wrote romance novels for a living—a dream concocted during my teen years reading Harlequins—and I had begun to feel trapped in a happily ever after that wasn’t happy or even my own.
My childhood environment had been sheltered and traditional. My father was a Church of Christ preacher, which was a strict denomination. Men were looked upon as the head of the household and the family’s religious leader. Marriage was a woman’s true calling, and divorce was severely discouraged—for almost any reason. I was a good girl, and I couldn’t get married soon enough. My husband was in the navy at the time, and we both finished college after his enlistment ended. Children were next on the to-do list. Three, just how I’d always planned. I had two boys, then the last one was a girl. Perfect.
It was a bad time to realize that I didn’t like my husband very much and that marriage might not be my true calling. I worked hard turning out books left and right. The rest of my attention was focused on the kids. My husband felt neglected and became increasingly angry. I buried myself in my shell, pouring all my passion into my writing while my marriage disintegrated around me. He would explode in outbursts of temper that, while never physical, still scared me and scared the kids, too. The night my youngest, Morgan, ran downstairs crying, demanding to know if we were getting a divorce, stopped me in my tracks.
It wasn’t the kind of environment in which I wanted to raise my children, and the moment catapulted me into facing the truth I’d been carrying for too long. I was unhappy. At the same time, I knew that a divorce would not be acceptable. I had been the good girl all my life, the one who never caused my parents trouble, the one who always did what was expected, the one who could be counted on to go along to get along.
I was the youngest child. My sister was two years older than me and liked to lock me in the pantry when we were little. My brother was thirteen years older than me and used to hold me upside down by my ankles over dog poop piles when he got home from school. No matter what they did, I never told my mother because then my brother and sister would have been mad at me. I knew how to tolerate trouble and keep it a secret.
While my brother and sister rebelled against our strict upbringing and had been in frequent conflict with my parents during childhood, I behaved like the ideal child, the one who ate her peas, made perfect grades, and kept her mouth shut. And by the time I was thinking about moving to West Virginia, I’d realized that I could either keep behaving like the ideal child for the rest of my life or I could find out who I was if I stopped doing what everyone expected me to do just because they expected me to do it.
The decision to divorce was selfish or courageous, depending on whom you asked.
I lived in the Slanted Little House for two and a half years after leaving my husband. During my early days there, sometimes when the kids went to school I just stretched out on the tattered couch and stared at the ceiling. For hours. Crying. I’d made a sudden, radical change in the course of my life—and I had no idea how to live outside the perfect good girl box I’d spent my entire life building. I blamed myself for the pain the divorce caused—hurting my husband, hurting my kids, hurting my parents. I couldn’t do what was expected of me anymore, but I couldn’t accept my decision to do differently. I was in desperate need of inner peace, which I sought in various avenues of simplicity in my new country life. I started baking, which I hadn’t done much in years, and learned to make West Virginia staples like corn bread in an iron skillet and big pots of beans.
I started walking. I walked two miles from the Slanted Little House to the main road, then back, every day. I walked when it was hot. I walked in the rain. I walked in blowing snow.
I loved to walk past the neighbors who had cows.
Moo.
The cows did not judge me, and the fresh air and exercise helped vanquish my deep feelings of guilt, at least for a little while each day. Old childhood longings, based on storybooks, for a farm and a cow and chickens awakened and stretched within me as I walked and walked and walked past the farms. A farm was just a dream, not something I had ever seen as a reality. Realistic plans were things like going to college, getting married, having kids, even getting books published. I grew up in the outlying suburbs of major metropolitan areas. I’d never known anyone who had moved to a farm. It seemed completely unrealistic. But if I had the courage to leave my marriage, what else could I do?
After I moved into the Slanted Little House, anything I could imagine suddenly seemed within reach. Coming back to the world of my childhood, I was like a child again, with my life open before me, the future a story I could write fresh.
Neighbors stopped by often, especially when I first moved in. I was the new local attraction. My favorite was a woman named Faye who lived several miles up the road. She wore lumberjack shirts and jeans, kept her hair tied back, and applied no makeup; she worked at the hardware store. She was good to “Georgie” as she called Georgia, and she stopped by often to visit her. Afterward, she’d come by the porch of the old farmhouse and tell me stories, spitting hulls off sunflower seeds all the while. Her husband had become disabled. She told me that he used to be mean.
She got sick of his behavior and thought about leaving him.
“I told him he needed to call his mother and see when she could come,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“He asked that question, too,” she said. “I told him he’d need somebody to take care of him when I was gone.” She told him that he wasn’t a very nice person.
She was doing his laundry one day not long afterward and, as always, she checked his pockets before putting his jeans in the wash.
“He had a little folded-up paper in there,” she said. “I opened it up and it was a to-do list. Get gas, stop at the store, things like that—except for one. The last thing on the list was ‘Be a nicer person.’ That day, I decided to stay, and he did become a nicer person.”
I was impressed. Faye was an independent woman, and she’d insisted on how she expected to be treated. She was kind, plainspoken, and tough all at once. She was like a foreigner to me, and I was fascinated.
One day she told me that they didn’t have an indoor bathroom. They had an outhouse. It was time to move it and she was digging a new hole.
When she left, I went straight to my cousin Mark. He was the county prosecutor by day. The rest of the time, he liked to work on old cars, drive his tractor around mowing the grass, and cook. He was six foot four, and a giant of a man. He was only a few years older than me, but his hair was salt and pepper. We hadn’t known each other well before I’d moved to the Slanted Little House, but he’d taken me in like his little sister. He did a lot of charity work, both through his church and through the courthouse. He’d help people he’d put in jail after they got out. I was his new long-term project. He’d go shopping and buy milk and other groceries, then come to the door at the Slanted Little House with his arms full and tell me they were having a sale or that the items had accidentally fallen into his cart. He knew I had three kids to feed and sometimes not enough money.
“Yes, they use an outhouse,” Mark said in response to my flabbergasted demand. He possessed an eternally calm demeanor.
“That’s not possible.”
“Of course it’s possible.”
The tectonic plates of my perception of actual hardship had taken a leery shift then, and they took another every time I drove past the mildewed, dilapidated home of my new abrasive neighbor.
Sure, I wasn’t moving into an old trailer. I would be, in fact, moving into a nice, modern home with all the heat and insulation of which I dreamed during the cold winters at the Slanted Little House. But these two women, both living on rough, remote roads, were tough, and they represented pieces of who I wanted to become.
And yet I was no tough mountain woman—even as I was heading for those same hills, “moving up a holler with my cousin,” as I liked to tell people.
I had 52 to take care of me, which was a substantial comfort, and as spring came around and the house neared completion, I was excited and eager to get started on a farm. The kids were excited, too—at least about moving into a new, modern home. I’d introduced 52 into their lives gradually. They accepted him well enough. He took an interest in them, but he didn’t push himself on them. They were as ready as me to move out of the Slanted Little House and have more space. My oldest, Ross, even worked on the house with the builder. He was interested in construction. I was just hoping the house might ever be finished.
Of all the challenges in building a house halfway up a hill on that remote road, water was the last great obstacle. Usually, water is one of the first things you determine you have in hand before you build a house, but the previous owners had had a trailer in the meadow bottom at one time, with a sixty-five-foot well. We depended on the notion that it was what we would use too. The new farmhouse was almost completed before the discovery was made that the well was nearly dry. Possibly the casing had caved somewhere inside. Nobody knew, and it didn’t really matter. A new well would have to be drilled.
In rural areas, where no public water lines are available, a private well on your own property is your source of running water. An electric well pump pushes water from the well through buried lines to the house, where it runs through the plumbing and comes out the faucets, just as if you were hooked up to a public water source. Except that with a well, all this infrastructure is the property owner’s responsibility.
Steve-the-Builder made the arrangements.
“They’re going to witch a well,” he said.
I was excited. “I want to see that!”
He said, “I figured you’d seen that before.”
Maybe in a movie.
The driller arrived with his witcher. I wanted to try, so I asked him to show me how to hold the two wires, which looked like straightened coat hangers to me. (I think they were straightened coat hangers.)
I held the wires out in front of me the way he demonstrated. They didn’t move.
I said, “This doesn’t work. You’re making this up.”
The witcher said, “You have to believe.”
He walked around with the wires for a few minutes, then said, “There’s water right here.” He pointed to a spot on the ground.
The driller pulled the rig over and started drilling. The messy innards of the earth churned forth from a pipe set across the creek. I’d parked my SUV near there, with the window down, and watched volcanic-like ash spew into my vehicle, helpless to do anything about it unless I wanted to be covered in volcanic ash, too.
The dust filling the air made our farm look like the set of a rock concert.
Two hundred and forty dry feet later, the driller gave up and capped it off.
There had been water at one time at the site of the old sixty-five-foot well. One possibility was to go back to that site and drill a new well nearby.
Or if the driller could get the rig up the hill, which would put the well closer to the house, he could drill near the natural spring in the hillside. During the weeks of the well saga, every old-timer around here told me, “Drill by the spring.”
“Drill by the spring.”
“Drill by the spring.”
I asked my father for his advice since he’d grown up in this very community. He said, “Drill by the spring.”
To get the huge drilling rig up the hill, a bulldozer would have to pull it, which was a scary proposition with added expense. Steve-the-Builder arranged for a dozer.
The driller arrived with his rig. 52 and I told him that we wanted to drill by the spring. He pointed to his witcher, who stood halfway up the meadow between the new dry hole and the old well site, pointing at the ground.
He said, “I want to drill there.”
I said, “I’m not poking holes all over this meadow. We’ve already got one dry hole down here.”
The driller crossed his arms and gave us an even stare. “Double or nothing. I drill where I want to drill to a hundred feet. If it’s a good well, you pay double. If it’s dry, it’s free, and I go up the hill this afternoon and drill where you want to drill. If we go up the hill now, you pay for that hole and if it’s dry, then I come down here and you pay for this hole, too.”
He hit water in the meadow at eighteen feet, but he went down to a hundred because he’d promised a hundred feet. The water was gushing all the way. We’d taken the bet that we might get a free dry hole, but it was a well and a half and we were happy enough at that.
The witcher scooped up a handful of the water spewing from the hole and drank it from his hands. “Tastes good,” he said. “Except for the mud.”
With the water problem solved, we’d be moved into our new house in no time.
52 said, “I’ll come home to you every day and we’ll sit on the porch and hold hands.” That sounded good to me.
It had taken nearly six months to build the house. I had chicken eggs in an incubator and a pile of homesteading how-to books. I could hardly wait to be a farmer.