A long story about hillbillies that doesn't go anywhere

I should talk about something not my dumb feelings or poetry although it is National Poetry Month and I do have a lot of opinions.

A thing about Staunton is there are a ton of crazy people. In my vast, unpublished works I have enjoyed writing about both their antics and struggles in detail. The local standards like Fast Eddie and Crazy Ramona, as well as the one-hit-wonders like Circus Guy or that Dude Who Threw His Coffee on the Ground Because I Wouldn't Get a Beer with Him.

Now that it's warm, they stir. Suddenly they're everywhere. It's not even the genuinely insane that I'm used to, it's more this strange hillfolk that must come into town to resupply after their winter hibernation. (I bet they probably feel like I feel whenever I go to Charlottesville, where the locals inevitably consider me to be a hillfolk by my own right. "Look at all them beans!" I goon to the Whole Foods at large, while a middle-aged woman in yoga pants hits me with her cart. )

Anyway, they are a certain kind of mountain redneck I didn't experience before I lived out here. I try not to make a bunch of mass judgements on a group of people I don't know about at all, but I think it's a very specific kind of Appalachian thing. Growing up in Northern VA we had our very own version of weirdo poor, a class of which I was solidly a member. But out here are pockets of people who don't live in cities, who are sometimes pretty bad off, and seem to make their own separate identity in the social strata.

I remember this one time I went out to Pedler Mountain Reservoir (great fly fishing) and I made friends with the old man who kept the property there. He was a great guy, told me about the water, the age of the rocks, and how the government was secretly re-introducing cougars to control the white deer population and he had shot one with a radio collar on and how he called the number on the radio collar and they picked up the phone and were like "HELLO THIS IS USA GOVERNMENT" and he was all scoobydoo"Ah-ha!" and they hung up and wouldn't pick up the phone again when he called back. Anyway, he warned me about the local hillbillies with a crazy Deliverance-esque speech. "Out here you have two enemies and they aren't the coyotes or the elements. Their names are: Billy Bob and Junior." I'm not exaggerating and I remember this sentence word for word because I was about nineteen and my brain was still soft and squishy before my heavy drinking set it. But anyway, according to Reservoir Friend (god this would be a better story if I could remember his name), rural folk were a real danger. To hear him talk, there was literally only the giant chain link fence keeping them from overrunning the place and killing him and presumably poaching all his nice fish. "People think hicks are funny," he warned, "but they're dangerous."

He said this as if he was referencing a terrible event that had happened in his own life, but the main grievances he instanced to me at least were poaching, shooting wildlife from moving cars, and driving backroads drunkenly, and I've personally done two and a half of those. Still we didn't know each other that well, so perhaps there were other stories that discretion limited him from detailing to me.

It's okay to make fun of hillbillies. I thought you should know.

Recently, I've had two strange run-ins, both with women. The first was my age or even a bit older in Walmart. She did not seem proper Staunton crazy, but fit this bill, perhaps. She asked me casually if I had forty cents with which she could buy a coke, since she had brought a dollar, but forgot about the increase in modern soda costs, and she said she thought I looked like a good person to ask. I gave it to her of course because I was a good person to ask, and she was grateful, but not in the way that people asking for money in public generally are. She didn't say "god bless you" excessively--it felt a bit like handing over something to a kid. I don't even know what really to make of the encounter except that something about her plainly honest and straightforward manner stuck with me, though I couldn't say why.

The other encounter was with a dirty, loaded-down pickup that had stopped to let someone out right in front of my parking lot's driveway. I was waiting, not impatiently, because it was a fine day and quite a spectacle was unfolding in front of me. The pickup had some farm workers in it, a large dog, and a leggy, bedraggled 20 year old with long, uncombed red hair. The truck was taking up most of the road and so the cars started backing up impatiently on either side. She noticed this and leaped up into action, directing the traffic around the pickup with exaggerated ballerina-like motions, the grand conductor, her ice cream cone dripping in one out-stretched hand. I don't know. It was a strange moment.