Looking back, I don’t know how I did it.
Sitting here now on the shores of the English Channel, five thousand miles and what feels like a lifetime away from Appalachia, I’m still numb from my experiences there and suspect I might always be. Those hills are a world unto themselves, as foreign to the rest of the world as North Korea and only slightly more accessible. There’s no centralized ruler in those parts, but the communities are nonetheless bound by a prison of their own making--ideologies, superstitions, and an underlying feudal hierarchy that affects everything from the high school marching band to the region’s overall socioeconomic viability.
I’m going to write some harsh things, facts about the life I lived in Southwest Virginia that even those close to me may not have known. This is not an appeal for sympathy because believe me--my way out was planned, sure, and far more successful than even I could have imagined. There is nothing about my circumstance in need of pity now. I made a deliberate choice to stay as long as I did, in the conditions I lived in, not as a martyr but out of sheer determination to fulfill my obligations before I moved on. I was almost successful. I could not save the property or my marriage, but the latter is ending on a very positive note with a permanent, close friendship resulting, and I still have hope that a buyer for the land and structures on it will emerge and save it from utter abandonment. Time will tell.
This particular article is an opinion piece, not a documentary, so I won’t get bogged down with “proving” every single claim I make, though rest assured I have nearly all of my experiences recorded with screen shots, exhaustive note-taking, and some video/audio capture. I’ll go into more detail here and in subsequent articles than was safe to do while I still lived in Appalachia. Even though I was known for my outspokenness, I kept quiet about a lot of things. I feared for the safety of my animals in rescue, for the security of my property, and yes...for my own life, which was threatened on more than one occasion. I also lived with persistent police harassment (Town of Tazewell, not County) and several (unsuccessful) attempts at criminalizing my behavior by the local commonwealth’s attorney and county administration. I fictionalized many of these experiences in my latest novel High Kill. The Kindle version is free right now if anyone wants to snag it at this unbeatable price.
When I finally decided to leave, it was after realizing that I simply could not survive another winter on that mountain. Bankers and realtors and even family members can think what they will, but with the health issues I face, my life hung in the balance every time the temperature dropped below freezing. Last year, I woke to find ice on my bedroom walls. Despite an open tap, water froze in the lines, leaving the rescue dogs and me without any way to drink or clean for nearly two weeks. I ported in jugged water that got us through, but we never fully recovered from that disaster. The floors suffered greatly from my inability to scrub and wash them and I ended up having to physically do the work of replacing every water line in the house. What most people didn’t know--and ostensibly didn’t care about--is that I had been declared medically disabled for quite some time by that point and had no business undertaking a project of that nature. It took months for me to recover.
Yes, I asked for help. Yes, I tried to hire a plumber. No, I could not interest anyone in doing this work in a timely way when I needed it, regardless of how much I offered to pay. The same was true for lawn care this past summer. I was no longer physically able to do the work and I could not get any local lawn care professional to give me an estimate. I lost almost eighty dollars paying a fellow in advance who never showed up to do the work, who stopped taking my phone calls and ultimately became unreachable. I had a weed eater but the head of it jammed and I sent it off for repair, only to be told I should just buy a new one. I could have bought a new one, but who would operate it? I certainly could not, at least not without the risk of hospitalization or even death from the effects of dysautonomia, a neurological complication of lupus that leaves me unable to cope with extreme temperatures or accelerated heart rate.
Despite growing pressure from the mortgage holder of that property and some community members, I was caught in yet another double bind, something I’d eventually realized the Appalachian culture is quite skilled at deploying. I could let the weeds grow and resign myself to said pressure, or buy a weed eater and risk both my health and a “concerned citizen” report to the SSA that I was doing physical work that contravened my disability status. In that event, I could have lost benefits that include medical coverage for physician’s care. There was no shortage of vindictive souls in the area who would have relished a chance to do me this harm.
For those unfamiliar with the term “double bind,” it’s a situation in which an individual or group (the subject) receives conflicting messages (from the offender) about expectations. Think of it as the clinical term for “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Most often, a double bind is intentional, a type of mind game similar to gaslighting that is used by narcissists and sociopaths to control their victims. Cultures, religions, and political groups are also capable of manifesting a double bind scenario. For more information, you can read this article or watch this video. The video is extraordinary. I highly recommend that everyone give it a view, whether you feel you’ve been the victim of a double bind or not.
I’d recognized the double bind psychology of the Central Appalachian community many years before. It surfaced early in my work as an animal rescuer when I would be excoriated on social media for refusing to “help” in a given situation, and crucified in complaints to local law enforcement when I did. Accusations that I “drink baby’s blood” were too numerous to count in situations when I didn’t step in to render help, like legal issues that were animal control jurisdiction, or in cases when TARC simply didn’t have sufficient resources. Yet, for example, when we took in a litter of Aussie mix puppies abandoned under a bridge near Bonanza in Russell County, our local ACOs received a complaint that the puppies would not receive proper care from my rescue. An ACO was compelled to waste time and taxpayer money following up on this complaint, only to discover (not at all to his surprise,) that the puppies had already received veterinary care and remained under the care of a very competent local veterinarian.
Another example was the time when my nonprofit, 501c3 organization held a fundraiser to improve the heating situation at the property. Bear in mind that at the time, we housed approximately forty dogs in residence and sixteen cats. All of these were animals rescued from local kill shelters, off the sides of the road, or from owners threatening to “set them out in the woods” if we didn’t help. At this time, some of them were from the kill shelter in the very community we operated in. Yet the president of the local humane society remarked on social media that we had no business trying to raise the funds, nonprofit notwithstanding, because if we didn’t already have the means of installing proper heating then the animals probably needed rescuing from us.
This is the same humane society that did not operate a quarantine or holding facility of its own, whose officers refused to foster animals in their own homes, and who once publicly defended the right for dog owners to allow their pets to ride unrestrained in the beds of pickup trucks on major highways. It took credit for intaking hundreds of dogs and transferring them to other rescues, when the truth was, they “intook” the dogs on the day of transport, loaded them directly into vans without any preventative quarantine measures after being exposed to diseases in the shelter, and shipped them off to any unsuspecting rescue that would take the animals. I’ve worked with several agencies that stopped taking animals from my region after receiving so many parvo cases and heartworm positive dogs that they were going bankrupt trying to care for them. We can thank organizations with slipshod operating standards like that local humane society for states like New Hampshire imposing so many import restrictions that you can barely get a dog across the border these days, and for the burgeoning heartworm epidemic in the U.S. northwest after Hurricane Katrina, and for the fact that many agencies who gladly helped Appalachian dogs when I first opened the rescue had closed the door to them less than five years later.
We were at war with the local populace from the very beginning of our incorporation. The seven acres and house were purchased after a year of dealing with unpleasant neighbors in the Baptist Valley area of Tazewell County. Understand, this is a rural area with cattle and all manner of livestock raised on both sides of the road, where barn cats roam the woods and coyotes can be heard on the mountain almost every night. This was in no way an urban or even suburban setting. Yet our dog rescue caused problems almost from its inception.
For years, our neighbors across the road had lived as they pleased. Their two boys rode four-wheelers almost every evening on the property, round and round on the acre of land facing the road, until a dirt track was well worn into the ground. The noise was insufferable. It was impossible to watch TV until well after dark because one could not hear anything with those ATV engines roaring in the background. Did we complain? Not once, neither to the neighbors themselves, nor to law enforcement or any regulatory agency. We lived in the country. People can do what they want on their own land.
Sadly, the oldest boy passed away unexpectedly at school during gym class. Our neighbors sued the school system and received a hefty settlement. They purchased land, livestock, expensive cars. Their remaining son didn’t ride his ATV much. Our sympathies were with them.
Then we started the rescue. Yes, we intook dogs directly and housed them on the property until transfer to a receiving agency or adoption. Our neighbors took great exception to this and reported us to local law enforcement. ACOs in the county were intimately familiar with our operation and had been there offering support and advice as we became established. They performed an unannounced welfare check on our animals and declared there was nothing to see there but “happy faces and wagging tails.”
This did not satisfy our neighbors. One day a woman showed up at our door with a camera. She said she wanted to see what we were doing with the dogs, that she worked with the mayor of Richlands and they were interested in our project. What she didn’t know is that I recognized her as the sister of the man who lived across the street. I showed her the dogs, she took photos (that revealed only what law enforcement had seen themselves,) interrogated us about property damage and showed clear disapproval that we would use our home for such an undertaking, then went back to give her report to the mayor, whose jurisdiction we did not even live in. Nothing ever came of this impromptu little “investigation,” but after that I noted several occasions when the woman who lived across the street appeared to be taking video of our property. I couldn’t prove it, considered that she was probably still half out of her mind with grief, and decided to let it lie. But this factored heavily in my decision to acquire the property in Adria, the property that was ultimately used against us in more social media battles than I can possibly recall.
I have many more stories like this to share and I think they’re worthy of documentation on the blockchain. I won’t pull punches when it comes to holding people and agencies accountable for their behavior--professional or otherwise. The entire system of animal sheltering and “rescue” in Southwest Virginia is broken and as long as the current political mechanisms stay in place, there’s little chance of improvement. It’s not my problem any more. But I suffer from compassion fatigue and PTSD as a result of dealing with that community for six years in the arena of animal welfare. I am not the only one. Several individuals who have tried to help the animals have retreated in exhaustion and bitterness. This is not normal. Situations do not parallel this in other regions of the country. After visiting several other progressive nations, my impression that the U.S. is on par with third world countries when it comes to animal welfare has been confirmed many times over. And Central Appalachia is among the worst of the worst in America, with no real hope on the horizon.
For now, I’ll go for a walk alongside the English Channel. I’ll purge my thoughts of these memories, at least temporarily. I’ll enjoy the company of people who love and appreciate their animals in the same way that I do, and feel grateful for every breath that I take away from a society that is collapsing on itself from the inside out. I don’t know what to say to the people who still live there. I assume some are grounded and happy and getting by just fine. But if you’re looking for a better future, Central Appalachia isn’t likely to give that to you. And if you try to take a stand against the corruption that rots it, buy good life insurance. Your family will need it after the stress--or a good ole’ boy--kills you dead and disappears your body down a mine shaft.
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