Deliverance
There are places like that all over rural America. I've had the great pleasure of discovering many during my lifetime. I also believe, that as diverse as each may be, there's likely just as many little rural towns and villages that are very similar. Some that I've visited were unfriendly, even foreboding. Most though were quirky and a few....really wacky. The kind of place you leave with a sigh of relief and shake of the head.
Lots of folks live in one place their entire life. Subsequently, they have little or no worldly experience socializing with other kinds of people, different cultures, different ethnic groups. I was Black Bear hunting in the Adirondack Mountains one time long ago and after the days hunt, went looking for a gin mill. A local guy directed my partner and I to an old civilian conservation corp camp that had been turned into the local saloon. We walked through the door....and I swear I could hear the banjo music from Deliverance and that was at least twenty years before they made the movie! The "bar" consisted of 8 or 10 fifty gallon barrels spread across a sawdust floor with rough sawn planks across the top. They also had them as tables with a couple of chairs. It was dark and dreary with large potbelly stove's off in each side of the room. Kerosene lamps were the only illumination because....."we ain't got no lectricity here ya know", as one patron remarked. They were serving various liquors, limited assortmets of mixers and only one brand of canned beer. If you dared ask for a glass of wine, they'd probably run you out on a rail like a pansy. The obligatory 5 gallon bottle of pickled eggs and other similar rare delicacies adorned a c.1940's metal kitchen table.
Seated there was an old, old guy. Dressed in overalls, hi top rubber boots and a railroad engineers cap. We got to talking over a couple of drinks and I learned that this nice old fellow was a dairyman, born in that town some 80 years before. What was most bizarre, was that he told us he had never journeyed out of that county in his whole lifetime. When my partner asked him why? He said "Never had no reason to go nowheres else". We both were astonished at his response.
My point in telling you this is that we all tend to relate to other people on a level we're accustomed to and that is a product of our environment and experience. I take people as I find them, some the same, some different. These little out of the way places are just as important a part of America, as the big cities. Anyone who can't figure that one out, is missing something very special.
Cheers;
Lefty
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