Against The Wind

Day 12, 6/16/77

Mid-morning of the next day we saw a sign on the road for “People, Incorporated.”  This was a rural poverty social services program, so we chatted with the staff for a while, and left our resumes.  They graciously accepted them, but I wonder what they said to one another after we left.  We were an odd duo, even though somewhat qualified for some of their jobs (Inanna had a master’s degree in school counseling, and I had a masters in administration).

But we were reminded that we didn’t have a plan for after the trip.  We needed jobs for September.  We had to be on the lookout.  We thought it a romantic notion that a couple of job applicants might ride out of the East to some worthy social program, and by chance walk in and apply.  In case it were meant to happen, we wouldn’t avoid the doors of any human service programs we might encounter along the way.  The facts that most social programs are in the cities, and that neither of us was expert in rural problems, did not deter us.       

We came to another Methodist church, where we got some fresh water and played their piano a little.  We bought ice cream in a store and crossed the street to eat it in shade.  The noontime sun was very hot.

We soon encountered more rugged mountains than we had been in before.  We came to one hill called “The Big A” and found ourselves pushing the bikes again.  A coal miner with three pretty little girls in the cab of his pickup truck had mercy on us and stopped to give us a ride over The Big A, eleven miles in all.

That night, we were in Bee, Virginia.  As usual, we bought what we would cook for dinner in a local store, in addition to what we would need for breakfast and the following lunch.  In this way, we only had to carry the added weight of three meals from the store to our next camping spot.  But it was hard to find a camping spot there in the hollows of Western Virginia.  There is precious little open space between the roads and the dense trees and mountainsides.