It was a cold late autumn day when I brought my children to live in rural Walton, West Virginia. The farmhouse was one hundred years old, there was already snow on the ground, and the heat was sparse—as was the insulation. The floors weren’t even either. My then-twelve-year-old son walked in the door and said, “You’ve brought us to this slanted little house to die.”
Products of suburbia, my three children wondered why there was no cable TV or Target, not to mention central heat. My daughter, hungry from the trip, tried to call Domino’s. My cousin Mark explained gently and without laughing that “they don’t deliver pizza out here.” I think it took her a good thirty minutes to believe he wasn’t making that up.
I was at a turning point in my life, a crossroads where for the first time I could choose where I would live, not simply be carried along by circumstance. I was born in Texas, grew up in Maryland, Alabama, and California, and had since lived everywhere from Idaho to the Carolinas. When people used to ask me where I was from, I would go blank, like a foster child passed around to too many families to know which one was home. Where did I come from? I longed, deeply, to find a place to call mine. And as a writer, my office was my laptop. I could choose anywhere.
So why did I choose West Virginia, a state that has notoriously lost population in the past century?
When I was a little girl and we lived in a suburb of D.C., my father took us every summer to an old cabin in West Virginia. It stood on the last family-owned piece of a farm that had belonged to my great-grandfather, a farm once spanning hundreds of acres on the banks of the Pocatalico River. My father was born and raised on that farm in Stringtown, an early twentieth-century gas and oil boomtown in rural Roane County, rising up out of the backwoods between Walton and the county seat of Spencer. Back in his day, what are now wild woods were cleared farm fields. There was a church, a school, a store, and even a hotel. The gasoline plant employed fifty men. There were wooden sidewalks down the dirt road and a public walking bridge across the river. The one-room schoolhouse where my grandmother taught still stands, but the Stringtown where I played during those long-ago summers was much different otherwise. It was like some kind of lushly forested alternate universe filled with the ghosts and tales of my ancestors—the now-overgrown hills and meadows they once farmed, the caves where they hid their horses from Confederate soldiers, the graves in hidden cemeteries where they were buried.
I loved those summers in West Virginia. I loved the trees and the quiet. I loved swinging on grapevines over the river and learning to skip rocks. And most of all, I loved that sense of history and place. My father clearly felt enough sentiment for the land to share it with me by bringing me to visit. Yet despite its charms he—like so many of his generation, drawn like moths to the flame of cosmopolitan life beyond those simple hills—grew up and moved away, never to return but for those brief times. He used to say about West Virginia, “I got out of there as soon as I could.”
But when I stood at that crossroads in my life and decided to move to the boonies of West Virginia, to the countryside outside the tiny town of Walton just over the hill from my great-grandfather’s old farm, I took a deep breath of the clean air, looked up at the sky littered with stars you could actually see, felt the far-reaching pull of my family’s roots, and said, “I got here as soon as I could.”
The tiny town of Walton takes, oh, a minute and a half to drive through. Most people might think there’s not much there, but there’s all we need. If we actually want something from the city, we can drive the winding road to the interstate and get it, but that doesn’t happen too often. There is a cute little one-room library, a cute little grocery store with half a dozen aisles, a couple of small churches, and a bank, all flanked by country roads so narrow you have to pull off to pass. The school is so small, when my younger son graduated from eighth grade and I asked him who his friends were, he looked at me as if that was a stupid question and said, “There are only thirty-six students in the whole grade. I have to be friends with everyone.”
And he was right—everyone is friends with everyone. Walton was like one big Cheers bar. Everybody knows your name. At first, I found this disconcerting. Why were these strangers at the Thriftway, Walton’s one little store, talking to me as if they knew me? And how did they know my name? When my oldest son totaled my car two days after he got his driver’s license, all the kids at school knew about it by the time he got there the next morning. When I arrived at the accident scene, a paramedic I’d never laid eyes on before was calling me by my first name. Mark, my cousin, heard about it at his office and drove down to check on the scene. Mark’s wife, Sheryl, a nurse at the nearby hospital, ran down to the emergency room in case we needed to come in. It’s like everyone knows everything by some kind of osmosis. Everywhere I went for the next month, people asked me about the accident. I was a world away from the anonymous suburbs. Here, people were connected—to the land, to the history, to one another.
My kids ate sandwiches sitting in apple trees. They jumped fully clothed into the river. They skated on frozen creeks and learned how to pick a hoe out of the shed. They knew what a low-water bridge was and how to set a turtle trap. They piled corn on the cob on their plates and remembered planting the seeds. We didn’t worry about burglars at night—just raccoons.
People around here don’t have much if you compare them to suburbanites. Even if they can afford it, they don’t buy granite countertops or designer clothes, and there’s not much competition at the high school for the swankest car. As my older son liked to say (in his exaggerated teenage way), “They’re all driving cars their grandfathers bought in 1950.” But for all they don’t have, what they do have is one another, along with that deeply held pride in community and family and plain living that has been largely lost in the contemporary world.
And that’s exactly why I wanted to bring my once-pampered suburban children here, to grow up knowing what matters, what is real. The rural landscape of Appalachia is still an alternate universe from the rest of the country. Here, you don’t call for pizza. You call your neighbor.
Other people may have chosen to leave, but I chose to come, and I choose to stay. When people ask me where I’m from now, I have an answer. I’m from West Virginia. And my children, who once wondered if I brought them to this Slanted Little House to die, bloomed like flowers taken from a sterile hothouse and put out in the natural sun.
We didn’t come to this Slanted Little House to die. We came here to live.