Odd WV

[Core Shot]

This shit is amazing. A train wreck that’s hard not to watch.

[JayPowHound]

Hmm, the odd YouTube video that can't embed (even though you did it right... And no pun intended).

I've seen that one before, and it's a crazy fitting town name. Would be interesting to see a family tree broken down.. probably more than one uncle/brothers and sister/cousins in there. Must be hard to keep it straight.

I think my favorite thing is the newish (?) blue paint on the porch railings, seemingly newer on the viewers right side than the left, with no discernable line between painted and not painted as you go up the rails.

Maybe trying to make the tarps blend in a little better?

In all honesty I wonder how far off this is from some places in the Upstates....

[JayPowHound]

On a little more serious note, I read in some of the YouTube comments people talking about Ray's clear desire to communicate.

As someone who has spent my entire career in intensive Special Education I can absolutely see a lot of wasted potential in him, and still a lot of possibilities for intervention with appropriate services.

Unfortunately given his location and circumstances that will likely never be an option.

Ugh...

[stealurface831]

In all honesty I wonder how far off this is from some places in the Upstates....

can't speak to the upstates but the prevalence of this sort of quality of life in south appalachia would be shocking to most. there are entire hollers that live this way. meth hasn't helped.

[JayPowHound]

can't speak to the upstates but the prevalence of this sort of quality of life in south appalachia would be shocking to most. there are entire hollers that live this way. meth hasn't helped.

Can you objectively define a "holler" for me?

When I've heard it used I guess I assumed It meant "hollow",. which I thought may refer to a geographical feature. But sometimes that doesn't seem to play out on maps when my assumption was some sort to depression.

So what is it?

Is a Holler like a neighborhood? A town? county? redneck version of a cul-de-sac? area of (50)square acres? space between 2 creeks? Or are they criks?

Legit yankee question, lol. Heard the term, but never here and always been vague and you seem to use it as a specific area.

I've always wondered...

[lowsparkco]

Can you objectively define a "holler" for me?

When I've heard it used I guess I assumed It meant "hollow",. which I thought may refer to a geographical feature. But sometimes that doesn't seem to play out on maps when my assumption was some sort to depression.

So what is it?

Is a Holler like a neighborhood? A town? county? redneck version of a cul-de-sac? area of (50)square acres? space between 2 creeks? Or are they criks?

Legit yankee question, lol. Heard the term, but never here and always been vague and you seem to use it as a specific area.

I've always wondered...

Yes, hollow.

Creek valley.

Not super literal in usage. “Over yonder” is a reasonable translation.

[stealurface831]

Can you objectively define a "holler" for me?

When I've heard it used I guess I assumed It meant "hollow",. which I thought may refer to a geographical feature. But sometimes that doesn't seem to play out on maps when my assumption was some sort to depression.

So what is it?

Is a Holler like a neighborhood? A town? county? redneck version of a cul-de-sac? area of (50)square acres? space between 2 creeks? Or are they criks?

Legit yankee question, lol. Heard the term, but never here and always been vague and you seem to use it as a specific area.

I've always wondered...

generally speaking, its an isolated community of a dozen or so dwellings. more literally, it is the community formed in mountain coves along creekbeds.
and i don't think "crick" has any roots in the south. growing up, i never heard someone use the turn of phrase unironically.

[Woolly the Mammoth]

I spent my summers in college near there guiding rafts on the New and the Gauley. We lived in tents and old broken down school buses. We ran extension cords through the trees so we had electricity. The people that I worked with that were from around there were the craziest people I've ever met, and they would talk about how you don't go down certain roads and up certain hollers. If you haven't seen the original Dancing Outlaw (1989), then do yourself a favor and track it down, its amazing.

[JayPowHound]

Are you talking about this dude?

[Woolly the Mammoth]

Yes, that's it.

[SB]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aXkqrM...b29uc2hpbmU%3D

[warthog]

Bit of a funny story.

My girls dance competitively, so we have to go to a lot of dance competitions. Every year, "Nationals" are held in 3 or 4 locations around the country for each dance group, making it a little easier for different areas of the country to attend. Ours, many years, is in Gatlinburg,TN.

The first time we headed up to Gatlinburg, I had no idea what was in store. I grew up in CT. The craziest it gets there is 3 or 4 old cars on the front lawn. Tennessee is not CT. Here is my tale.

As we exited the main highway, Google maps had us going through some beautiful country. If anyone has ever rafted the Pigeon, we were in that area. We drove right by NOC's main raft base. As the map kept us heading towards Gatlinburg, it kept getting more and more rural. The distant fog shrouded houses, the ones
that we could see, were getting more and more run down, with more and more of the former contents of the houses, and vehicles starting to decorate the lawns.. Suddenly, the map has us exiting "society", and turning onto a pretty narrow 2 lane road. Those distant houses were now in full focus, and our new reality. It was paved, in a way, and seemed fairly legit, at first. That started to change about a mile in. The road got narrower and narrower. The brush started scraping our truck in spots. If another car came, we would have had to do that Mexican standoff thing where each decides if they are going to be the one to back up. Thankfully, no cars came. The sides of the road were in various states of washout, and the houses were in similar states. You could feel the eyes watching. Our fairly loud exhaust notes announcing our arrival ahead of us. I was legitimately getting nervous. As the only male, I would definitely be the first to die. An innocent joke about how Hillbillies don't kill you, they keep you, goes over poorly with my audience.
Spoiler- we survived.
The road crested onto a freshly paved main highway.

Once we got to Gatlinburg, it got a little better. The people that live in those houses don't come to G'burg, but their cousins do. It is an odd place.
The stories from the others in the dance crew were just as amusing as ours.

On the way home, we went past the exit of that rural road, and at the top there was a sign- " Truckers- Google is wrong, this is NOT the right way"
Seems Google maps has been terrorizing this poor 'hood for a while, and trucks get stuck on the road. I really can't imagine a semi taking that road. That must have been a mess the first couple times.

Anyway, that is my Appalachian adventure. I imagine there are much much scarier areas in Appalachia. They are top ten in areas I don't want to ever see.

[ötzi]

Came across these videos somewhere, maybe here. Dude goes some places I wouldn't go.

[Dantheman]

Would be interesting to see a family tree broken down.. probably more than one uncle/brothers and sister/cousins in there. Must be hard to keep it straight.

Someone did it and you can find it with some googling. The parents were double first cousins, which is a little hard to explain but they share all four grandparents. On top of that, the two grandfathers were monozygous twins. More of gene bathtub than a gene pool (no disrespect intended).

[stealurface831]

Bit of a funny story.

My girls dance competitively, so we have to go to a lot of dance competitions. Every year, "Nationals" are held in 3 or 4 locations around the country for each dance group, making it a little easier for different areas of the country to attend. Ours, many years, is in Gatlinburg,TN.

The first time we headed up to Gatlinburg, I had no idea what was in store. I grew up in CT. The craziest it gets there is 3 or 4 old cars on the front lawn. Tennessee is not CT. Here is my tale.

As we exited the main highway, Google maps had us going through some beautiful country. If anyone has ever rafted the Pigeon, we were in that area. We drove right by NOC's main raft base. As the map kept us heading towards Gatlinburg, it kept getting more and more rural. The distant fog shrouded houses, the ones
that we could see, were getting more and more run down, with more and more of the former contents of the houses, and vehicles starting to decorate the lawns.. Suddenly, the map has us exiting "society", and turning onto a pretty narrow 2 lane road. Those distant houses were now in full focus, and our new reality. It was paved, in a way, and seemed fairly legit, at first. That started to change about a mile in. The road got narrower and narrower. The brush started scraping our truck in spots. If another car came, we would have had to do that Mexican standoff thing where each decides if they are going to be the one to back up. Thankfully, no cars came. The sides of the road were in various states of washout, and the houses were in similar states. You could feel the eyes watching. Our fairly loud exhaust notes announcing our arrival ahead of us. I was legitimately getting nervous. As the only male, I would definitely be the first to die. An innocent joke about how Hillbillies don't kill you, they keep you, goes over poorly with my audience.
Spoiler- we survived.
The road crested onto a freshly paved main highway.

Once we got to Gatlinburg, it got a little better. The people that live in those houses don't come to G'burg, but their cousins do. It is an odd place.
The stories from the others in the dance crew were just as amusing as ours.

On the way home, we went past the exit of that rural road, and at the top there was a sign- " Truckers- Google is wrong, this is NOT the right way"
Seems Google maps has been terrorizing this poor 'hood for a while, and trucks get stuck on the road. I really can't imagine a semi taking that road. That must have been a mess the first couple times.

Anyway, that is my Appalachian adventure. I imagine there are much much scarier areas in Appalachia. They are top ten in areas I don't want to ever see.

Your fear is understandable but almost entirely unwarranted. Appalachia has been stigmatized to no end as a backwards place. While that was certainly true in places last century, it isn’t representative of the region today. Plenty of mountain people are still gruff and aloof, but I can’t imagine anyone facing violence unless they seriously overstep. The vast majority folks are as gentle and kind as you’ll find anywhere. They are just isolated, uneducated, poor, and misunderstood.


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[BmillsSkier]

This thread seems as appropriate a time as any to bring up The Gobbler, wherever he may be.

Came across these videos somewhere, maybe here. Dude goes some places I wouldn't go.

Wow. When I was 16 I did an Appalachian Service Project for a week in War, WV with a group of other teens from my parish. I hadn't seen it since I left that week till you posted this video. I was completely changed as to what real rural poverty looks like.

We slept on the floor of the gym in the only schoolhouse in town and were explicitly told not to wander oustide "town" past the sole gas station, which was little more than the empty storefronts you see in that video and a DEA outpost. Weed farming was the #1 business in town and it was repeated many times that people there will shoot at outsiders on principle alone if you wandered into places you shouldn't.

The family that we were assigned to lived in a one-room house for all 4 of them at the end of a holler (yes, creek-bed dirt lane) with the rest of the family tree living in equally shitty shanties up the holler till it met with the gravel road into town. The house was supported by 3 still-growing trees on 3 of its corners and we installed standalone posts/walls to support the new roof we put on. The group that came through the week before installed an actual flushing toilet. This family literally didn't have a pot to piss in (but they had a hacked satellite dish) but they greeted us every day with fresh iced tea (they did have a chest-freezer) and muffins. Thankful and kind is how I'd describe them.

Incredible seeing that place again, brought back a lot of memories.


ETA: I see from the other videos that guy posted is from East Cleveland, OH. He must have a death wish wandering around there. No joke, I can't think of many worse urban environments than East Cleveland. It's geographically isolated on all sides at the bottom of a steep drainage and those who live there don't venture out and vice versa for good reason. Hellscape.

[Buzzworthy]

My wife has some old old family in several areas of WV and she’s taken me to see them way back when. Talk about eye opening. Would’ve never encountered real WV people like this had I not met her. Some places were so remote you didn’t even know people lived in those areas. Being a Forestry major there that did land survey work in the middle of nowhere, WV, I came across some of the kindest people known to man. And also I had guns pulled on me. I’ve been given full meals, moonshine, beers, tea, jerky, even a grocery bag full of WV field grown weed for helping a family hang some sheet rock in a house that was only studs and plywood. None of this makes me bat an eye. Rural WV is a world unto its own.

Edit to say her Uncle was so backwoods I could never understand his accent. Wife actually had to translate most of it. That was wild.

[fatnslow]

Your fear is understandable but almost entirely unwarranted. Appalachia has been stigmatized to no end as a backwards place. While that was certainly true in places last century, it isn’t representative of the region today. Plenty of mountain people are still gruff and aloof, but I can’t imagine anyone facing violence unless they seriously overstep. The vast majority folks are as gentle and kind as you’ll find anywhere. They are just isolated, uneducated, poor, and misunderstood.


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This is spot on and one of the biggest reasons the red states are the red states after decades of scorn, mockery and systematic failure of the liberal left to actually help the less fortunate without blatant disrespect.

[MontuckyFried]

Must be all that white privilege I've been hearing so much about!

[AK47bp]

I’m from that region, Southwestern PA. Those run down areas are everywhere unfortunately but it just seems normal. Even in a nicer community there are sections that look like these videos. That guy did a video on Brownsville PA, that’s where my HS football camp was.

It’s not until you live elsewhere do you realize those places are pretty bad.

But everyone is pretty nice.

[JongDoe]

I gotta say this thread was enlightening. Makes you not take things for granted after seeing this.

[Core Shot]

I gotta say this thread was enlightening. Makes you not take things for granted after seeing this.

And yet. They take everything for granted.
Not in a bad way. More of a Buddhist existence of whatever life gives you is what you get.
Poor. But surviving.

[MarcusBrody]

I'm from a place (rural NW PA) that's pretty similar to a lot of West Virginia, and once you get outside of the towns, there is a lot of this type of poverty, with people living in falling down houses with junk all over the porches.

My dad was a special education teacher, and a lot of the students he had came from rough situations. One of the particular difficulties is that not only are these folks often out of sight/out of mind for everyone else, they're just geographically spread out. Our school district and the one next to it cover twice the area of New York City (and half the total area of Rhode Island) while graduating maybe 400 kids a year. And they're the "big" school districts in the area. And as mentioned, a lot of the folks in question live on back roads. So it's a big challenge to get services to everyone who needs them. It's not like you have an urban focal point where you can have a center that covers a few square blocks, everyone is pretty much in walking distance, and you can distribute everything from that base. Or even if things need to be delivered you can hit hundreds of people within a few miles. In these areas to serve 100 families, you'd likely be driving 100-200 miles. That difficulty is most obvious with setting up school bus routes, but it matters for any form of social service.

[BmillsSkier]

I make the drive from ATL-NE Ohio once or twice a year. Sometimes I take the I-75 route, sometimes I take the I-77 route, and each trip I think to myself when staring out the window of the absolute poverty that exists just out of eyesight on either side of the highway as I make my way through TN/WV/KY/SEOH.

It's been mentioned a few times in this thread, but it's incredible how hidden so much of this is to most of America. We think poverty in this country and we think burned out hoods or housing projects when the vast majority of it is hidden from view in a region of the country that spans 13 states.

[warthog]

Headed up to Blue Ridge, GA next weekend. Gonna take the highway.
I love that area of N. Ga, but we don't explore too much off the beaten paths.