Growing up Hillbilly, how it began

OK well, let’s see where to begin, the beginning maybe?  I grew up where everyone, even us say, we are hillbillies, or better known to me as the middle of frigging nowhere and that is being nice. Some people comment that it must have been a hard life or maybe that they are backwards and well, it is all prospective. Think about it, you don’t miss what you never had or even know about.

So, I grew up in the mountains of Virginia in an area called Sandy Ridge. Sandy Ridge is located in the mountains about 10 miles outside a very small town called Coeburn and well, on the Wise County, Dickenson County line, literally right on the line is where I grew up.

My father was a coal miner all his life with exception of 4 years in the army in which he drove a tank. There were 5 of us kids in all and I was next to the youngest. I had two older sisters, and older brother and a younger brother.

When I came into the world it was in the year 1961! Yes kids, 1961 is an actual year lmao. At this point in my life we were living in what became my grandfather’s garage for 1 car. We had a living room, kitchen and 1 bedroom. My grandparents house was so close all you had to do was step outside, walk across the driveway and there was there 3 bedroom house. Did I mention the outhouse and the fact we had running water, in the kitchen only.  All the kids started out in our parent’s room but as new ones came along we ended up either on a pullout, a folding bed or the couch. There was a tiny stream right next to it and for kids, it was heaven.No these pictures are not actually them but they are close trust me.

Toms Creek, near where I grew up

Let me flash back a little to my birth. I’ve always loved this story. It was Halloween night and my mother was visiting a neighbor seeing things they had done to improve their house when her water broke. So now my dad had to take her to the clinic to have me, it was raining on Halloween late evening and of course his car had little gas in it so, he had to siphon some from an old truck to put it into the car so he could take my mother to have me.

Well my dad had a tooth bothering him and he had not taken care of it and got gas into the tooth which I hear is extremely painful. He would still grit his teeth to this day thinking about that. So they finally get going and take my mother to the clinic in a small town called Dante Virginia. Let me explain the clinic in Dante. It was a one room clinic so run down that while my mother was laying on the table trying to have me, the midwife and her helper had to swat away the bees that were living in the wall. My dad I understand had to stay outside, either in the car or in the rain, no idea but I do know he was in a lot of pain after getting gas in a bad tooth.

So, I came into the world at 6 minutes after midnight, the day after Halloween while my dad was running around in pain with a bad tooth, my mom, the midwife, and her assistant were fighting off bees. By about 6 am I was home with my parents in our one bedroom, garage lol. For the first 4 years of my life that was home.

Personal freedoms, omg as kids in the hills, you did whatever the hell you wanted. Everyone had to of course work around the house, in the gardens and take care of the chickens and such but there was no fear, no kid had fear and in diapers I was out the door with the other kids. Now we lived on a dirt road that dead ended not much further down that evidently as a child, I loved because I was told I was always missing up or down this dirt road visiting everyone and their kids or I’d just be found playing along the road.

Now understand, when I was a year old my mother was in a seriously bad car accident and lost her right leg just above the knee. With a husband who worked 7 days a week for 25 to 30 dollars a week, 4 kids at home, grandparents who were well, mean, I’m trying to be nice but they were fucking mean people. They never did shit for us except loan us the garage, in which my dad paid, rent for. My first memory of my grandfather was him chasing me with a belt.

Bear Rock, not far from where I grew up

So back on track, I was always on the go and my mother was and still is one of the toughest people I know. I kindly refer to her as the meanest woman alive and you know what, she still is but she kind of had to be, she just took it to extremes that today would put her in prison, but that is for another blog. She told me of one day I was intent on going up the road to the neighbors to play and since she was now on crutches and me being almost 3 was testing her limits as often as I could. She said she was yelling for me to get into the house and I would turn and put my hands on my hips and tell her, “I’m don’t hap too” and the start walking again. This, I guess happened more than once but even on crutches she could run me down and beat me all the way home.

When I was about 4 ish we moved from the garage to Sandy Ridge. My dad had changed jobs to another mine and the 3 bedroom house with a pond was HEAVEN to us kids. I’m still not certain if anyone considered it a bad thing or not but within a short walk was Waltons grocery, a small country store that to us was the hangout of hangouts and they got every dime we had for years.

Now I was still to young for school but my brothers and sisters started school there on sandy Ridge in a small 2 room school that was about 2 miles down the road. Yes, that is the actual picture of the school they went to at first. I remember the school but only years after it was closed as a school and turned into a community center.

Yes this is the actual school near where I grew up on Sandy Ridge

Just before my 5^th Birthday my dad bought a small house not far from the house we were renting. 3 bedrooms with an upstairs, 5 acres of land and a couple of small outbuildings we called the dairy and the coal house. The coal house was just that, a small storage building with a place with a dirt floor for coal and wood storage next to it. The dairy was a thick block building with a wood door about a foot thick. It has a foot thick sawdust insulation in the ceiling to help keep it cool, even on the hottest summer day the dairy was nice and cool and it housed the well and the only water we had in the house was in the kitchen, no bathrooms. The heat was a small buck stove in each room for heat and yes, at age 5, I was just as responsible as any of the other kids for building and maintaining a fire.

The outhouse was behind the coal house, and about a hundred yards away was the barn and chicken coop. This was home and to this day my parents still live there and all the kids except me aren’t far away from them. Yes I’m the black sheep or as they put it, the god damn northerner.

Now if you have never used an outhouse you have missed out on so much lol. You have no idea how to appreciate a bathroom indoors until in mid January, 9pm at night; snowing and you have to go so bad you know you will NEVER make it till morning. At 5 years old I would get the oil lantern and well, go the bathroom in the outhouse. Damn that was cold lol, really cold BUT, in the winter, it didn’t smell which the ONLY bonus to it being winter was the lack of smell!!!

At age 5 I thought I’d go to school with my brother and sisters but, the luck was on my side and they started busing from Sandy Ridge to Coeburn. It was an hour ride each way down of the mountain on the bus but just worth the trip. You have no idea how I dodged a bullet by that one simple thing. My fondest memory of going to Coeburn schools, the indoor bathrooms. Yes, see, the two room school although only a couple miles away had outhouses also. We learned to hold it, especially in the winter till we got to school.

Coeburn High School

Now life as a hillbilly has its short falls yes but it also has huge advantages. We had a huge garden, a little over 2 acres and we all had to work in that but we always had fresh vegetables and all the extras were stored in the dairy. We froze, pickled, canned, and preserved everything.  We raised our own pigs and every fall we would kill them and have pork and sausage till the following fall because in the spring we would get another couple of pigs and start over. Chickens well, eggs every day and if one didn’t lay eggs for a few days, that was dinner. We had a couple of cows and a horse.

Not my dad but you get the point

By age 9 my dad had moved up in the company he was working for and started to make a lot more money so we started to get things in our house. First thing my dad did was to add 2 rooms onto the house and at the same time added plumbing and heating, all in the same year. He had the frame done and my dad, my older brother and yup me, we had to finish it to save money and although I can honestly say I did not know what the hell I was doing, my day knew and taught me and he only showed you something once, you were expected to know it after that.

When I was like 10 or 11 they installed an in ground pool with a diving board and well, life changed dramatically for us in a very short period of time. To go from having nothing, using an outhouse and buck stoves to having everything and a pool within a matter of 2 years was just crazy. You do learn to appreciate what you have though and we worked our asses off to insure everything was taken care of. Pool was clean, garden, animals fed, morning and night, homework, and yet we still had time to go out and play with our friends and get into trouble.

Here is a truly funny ass story but every word of it is true. Several of us kids had pretty much taken our fathers chainsaws and axes and gone deep into the woods and built a log cabin. A big one too but we had made the door in the top instead of the side to help keep people, grownups, and animals out. It had a small stove for heat and an old bed someone had taken from god knows where.

Well, several months had gone by and none of us had gone out to our cabin because the weather had been crap, snow, slush, rain, just not worth trudging through the fields and the woods to get there. Once it cleared a little we decided, hey, we are going to stay overnight in our cabin, hell, we put in a stove for a reason so let’s do it.  We grabbed our bikes and gear, met at the store and off we went to our cabin.

We ditched our bikes behind old man Walton’s barn and headed off. When we got to the cabin, climbed up and we handed off each other’s gear to the roof and then lowered into the inside. Right away Regan said, hey someone’s been here, it is way to clean in here and he was asking us and none of us had been there. So the search was on and it didn’t take long to locate several items, some porn magazines and a few other things and one big one, a huge dildo! What the hell was this thing doing there for god’s sake?

 OK so, we sat around for hours laughing and trying to figure out who, how, or why this stuff was there and if they were going to come back looking for it. As kids, the porn magazines were of course a bonus but the toys, especially the big rubber dildo was used to torture each other, throwing it at each other in the night and doing what kids do.

So, the next morning we left our cabin after setting a few little snags to trip anyone up that might go near our cabin in hopes they would complain so we could find out who it was. Well Regan brought along the big toy and as we were crossing old man Walton's field he went up behind a cow and doing what kids do, shoved it up the cow, yup you guessed it, the cow took off running and howling. So here we all were trying to catch this cow and retrieve this huge dildo because we could not imagine old man Walton and what he would say if he found one of his cows with this thing shoved up its ass.

Finally after running around ½ this frigging pasture chasing this cow it fell out, whew, crisis averted!!! So Regan pick it up, walked down to the pond and washed it off and we proceeded to our bikes. When we got to our bikes Regan was like dude, give me the tape and he taped the dildo standing up between the handlebars of his bike. As we would ride this thing swayed back and forth and it was the most historical thing you have ever seen. A kid, about 11 with this huge dildo taped to his handlebars swaying back and forth.

About a mile or so down the road there was a car coming which to us made everything even more hysterical and as the car passed us and were in tears laughing, they slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop. OMG it was Regan's mom, she jumped out of the car, walked over to him, snatches the huge dildo from his handlebars knocking him and his bike over, then grabbing him by the arm and dragging him to her car, throwing them both it the back seat and driving off. We were in shock, she never said a word at all, nothing but she was obviously pissed.

We took his bike to my house and for the next several days none of use saw him. When we did I can honestly say I laughed so hard I pissed myself. It turns out, Regan's older sister was the one who had been at our cabin and all that stuff and the huge dildo she had taken there BUT, his sister had stolen it from his mother who had been looking for it for weeks and then it turns up on her son’s handlebars. I still laugh to this day about that. One of the best memories of growing up hillbilly!

More to follow but that is a start to growing up hillbilly!