I was not born in this place. This holler, this state, this region, this culture. It is adopted, and I both love it and hate it.
I am not a miner's son. I never took up a rifle to serve my country. I never dug in the dirt to grow my dinner, or turned a wrench to earn my keep. I sit at a desk, write software, and manage servers. Though I have a taste for the shine.
Before I moved here, people told me this place is dying, if it wasn't dead already. They told me that there's no future, no hope, nothing but drugs and despair. Opioids and conflict. This place is the punchline of jokes I used to laugh at, along with everyone else.
But after a few years I see it. There is a life force here. There is a pulse. The mountains themselves are alive, and the men who inhabit them will tell you the same thing. There exist here all aspects of life: birth, death, danger, joy, terror, celebration, hate and love, anxiety and peace.
I live here because I chose to live here. I could have had my pick of property, within a modest budget that 99% of the world's population would envy. Wife insisted on having water on the property. Why, who knows. Whatever. Here I am, in the bottom of a deep dark holler in a place that time forgot. Here I am in the most beautiful place in the world, surrounded by people I'm both proud and ashamed to call my friends.
Those people didn't have the luxury of choosing this place. For some, the mountains are an anchor, an albatross around their neck. It weighs them down, keeps them stuck in a place they'd rather not. For others, they live on a road named with their own last name, and they wouldn't leave for all the money in the world. They stay, and do what is necessary to survive, no matter how ugly the times might get.
Man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. We are all where we are because of our choices, whether we meant this as our destination, or whether it is something we failed to escape. Of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be.
To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better, and our lives are the summation of those choices.
I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself, I fashion mankind in my image.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
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