"Almost Heaven, West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River......... ...Country roads, take me home To the place where I belong West Virginia, Mountain Mama Take me home, country roads" And so this unforgettable refrain goes. When I was around three years old, my parents thought it would be a good idea to move to Third Worldish West Virginia. (An American state where infant mortality rates and gross income have long been ranked amongst the country's worst.) My parent's decision, for reasons not entirely clear to me, was in the spirit of the times of course, in the early 1970s. We got water from a stream, paved roads were nowhere to be found, our toilet was an outhouse and we got some of our food from the surrounding forest. Some of my first coherent images of life
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