Literary Hub
Growing up in West Virginia, you are resolutely assured by popular culture of how unfortunate you are to have been born there—backward, isolated, living on scraps—while real American life flourishes elsewhere, vaguely in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, NYC, dream coasts. In some ways that’s true. But even as a deluded child, I knew we were rich, because we had over a million acres of public mountain land to do whatever we wanted, without asking or begging for it. You could walk on it as if your name was on the deed.