The Third Rainbow Girl

IT STARTS WITH A ROAD, a two-lane blacktop called West Virginia Route 219 that spines its way through Pocahontas County and serves, depending on the stretch, as main street and back street, freeway and byway, sidewalk and catwalk.

It is June 25, 1980, just after the summer solstice, and a young man named Tim is driving home for the night. He had driven to Lewisburg, the big town almost an hour away, and is coming back now, with fresh laundry and groceries.

The road is made of black tar with a healthy gravel shoulder that gives way to ditch and then forest on both sides except when it climbs up or down a mountain, which is often. On those stretches, the ditches are replaced by tight metal guardrails with reflective yellow arrows that point drivers around the hairpin turns, some nearly one hundred and eighty degrees—a true switchback. To drive this road requires skill, to know when to tap the brake and when to press the gas. Tim is new in town and still learning. It is tempting to slam on the brake every time he sees a switchback, but the better move—for safety, gas efficiency, and natural enjoyment—is to do nothing, to let the speed ride and then, halfway through the turn, give it more gas. Beyond the guardrail is a steep drop-off into a valley where happy cows huddle together under ancient trees. The stakes of driving this road are high for Tim, as the many dents and welds in the guardrails remind him.

If a traveler were so inclined, she could drive this road in its entirety, all 524 miles of it, from Buffalo, New York, to Rich Creek, Virginia. Just south of the modern Mason-Dixon Line, this road roughly traces the original boundary between the land to the east called Virginia and the land to the west that has had so many names: West Augusta, Trans-Allegheny Virginia, Kanawha, and finally, when it declared itself a sovereign state, West Virginia.

In the beginning, the Seneca and the Cherokee used a route that would become this road to travel the wilderness from where the St. Lawrence River flows through New York state all the way to Georgia, long before there were any white people here.

Soon the white people came, first only to the coast at Jamestown but then crashing west across the forest floor. To stop the flow of blood, King George III issued the Proclamation of 1763, declaring what would become this road as the dividing line between what was "rightful" English settlement and what was not. Whites were forbidden to settle west of this boundary, and any who had already crossed were commanded to return; likewise Native Americans were forbidden to go east of it. But do the white people listen? They do not listen.

Choosing this road as the boundary wasn't arbitrary, nor was it empathy for the rights of Native Americans, just sheer capitalist pragmatism. West of this road was wild, and not in a good way: it was steep and craggy mountainsides unsuitable for farming—"trash land." But for those who had left England seeking opportunity in the New World—largely the poor, the criminal, and the disenfranchised—many found that such opportunities were not easily forthcoming in Virginia. A powerful class-stratification system had quickly been established, a scramble for power that left some on top but most out in the cold. Those who had come with slightly more resources and ties to the upper classes back in London rushed to expand their claims over those who had fewer. By 1770, less than 10 percent of the white colonists owned over half the land in Virginia. To everyone else, the land beyond this road, forbidden or not, looked good.

Before long, smoke from the fires of simple timber homes marked the presence of a different kind of settler than the Virginian gentleman farmer: the intrepid woodsman squatter. To choose this place meant choosing violent struggle and disobedience, meant choosing years of raiding and being raided by the Seneca, meant choosing to sign up to fight in the American Revolution against England in such great numbers and with such enthusiasm that George Washington said of the region, "Leave me but a banner to plant upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will gather around me the men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust and set her free."

Tim's car clears the hamlet of Renick, and the road flattens and straightens into a stretch called the Renick flats. Route 219 winds up and to the left, and the world becomes darker as the sun falls away and the pavement narrows and begins to hug the side of Droop Mountain. "Pocahontas County," the sign says, and then Tim is on the mountain's summit, where the road flattens again and takes him past a church marquee and the two-story farmhouses and single-wide trailers of his neighbors, past the pens where they raise chickens and sheep and pigs.

Take your right hand, and give the world the middle finger. Extend your thumb. If this is West Virginia, Pocahontas County sits in the thumb's fleshy heel, a jagged raindrop of land nearly the size of Rhode Island. It was named after the Native American princess we know so well, but there all familiar stories end.

Half the county is Monongahela National Forest. Eight major rivers have their headwaters here, rivers that feed the Gauley, then the Kanawha, the Ohio, and eventually the Mississippi, so that water that begins in Pocahontas County flows as far south as Louisiana. This is not coal country. Instead, its main exports are timber and people.

Each of Pocahontas's nine thousand residents could have her own nine square miles of land, but all the kids go to a single high school. If the kid is athletically inclined, she can become a Pocahontas County Warrior—unremarkable in football and track and field, but excellent in agriculture and archery. Snowshoe Mountain ski resort is here, on land that was logged throughout the first half of the twentieth century, then left to burn. It's owned by out-of-state prospectors, though exactly who owns it and where they call home will change too often to keep track—a North Carolina dentist, a Tokyo development company.

The world's largest fully steerable radio telescope is here too, a mountain-sized white satellite dish atop a construction crane that is visible from most anywhere in the northern part of the county. In 1958, the federal government established the National Radio Quiet Zone, a thirteen-thousand-square-mile swath of land spanning the West Virginia–Virginia border inside which cell phone signals and Wi-Fi will be severely restricted to minimize interference with the telescope's work of detecting faint interstellar signals, and all of Pocahontas County sits inside it. Take this state of affairs, and layer on top the profit margins of private telecommunications corporations, and the result will be that even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Pocahontas County will remain a white spot on AT&T's orange map.

This is a place where those who wish to be undisturbed by pings and rings can do so in peace. There is a deep awareness here of what the rest of America thinks a life should look like—the newest model, the fanciest vacation, the highest paying job with the best retirement plan—and, among many, a rejection of that life. Some people grow their own corn and make their own music and choose to give birth at home without beeping machines. Some are not just off the grid but off the record—no company knows their name. The Gesundheit! Institute, Patch Adams's movie-famous hospital for alternative healing, is here; ditto Zendik Farm, an intentional artist community originally formed in 1969 in California.

Some people teach school or fix cars or stack the plates of the tourists who come here to hike and fish and ski. Some people are nurses and doctors and home health aides and lawyers and Tudor's Biscuit World servers and Rite Aid employees. Many people cannot get work in their field of interest because the jobs do not exist here, and some cannot get jobs at all. Some are not able to work and subsist on disability. West Virginia ranks forty-fourth out of all the American states for overall physical health of its population and forty-eighth for quality of care. Despite having the second lowest average annual income in the country, West Virginians pay the eighth highest health insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act. Though it has the worst mental health of any state according to the CDC, it is ranked forty-eighth for access to mental health services. A therapist or a specialist is often a drive of an hour or more; the state has a single abortion provider in the capital of Charleston, 140 miles from Pocahontas County.

Some vote in every election, picking up their elderly relatives, driving them into town to pull the lever, and putting signs for their candidates of choice, both local and national, in their yards. Others don't vote at all, because the government doesn't care about West Virginia, so why bother? Some call the sheriff's office with the slightest information; others don't trust its deputies—you could trace law enforcement corruption back more than a century, to when the railroad companies and logging companies used hired guns to force people off their land or to sell their mineral rights. This will happen all over again when fracking is invented and prospectors will draw the Atlantic Coast pipeline straight through Pocahontas County.

Tim puts on his turn signal and gets ready to pull the car off to the left at the small green sign for Lobelia Road. It is easy to miss, he is learning; if he sees the rectangular stone marker for Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, he's gone too far. The park is a popular spot for picnics and family reunions and reenactments of what happened here more than a hundred years ago, a battle that sealed West Virginia's statehood forever. It is said that you can still find musket balls in the dirt there if you dig down deep enough.

The story of West Virginia's birth as a state and how that shaped Pocahontas County in particular is a tough and exciting one, full of pluck and verve and no taxation without representation, an American story of David against Goliath and freedom from bad rules.

Unlike eastern Virginia, where farms were massive agricultural operations powered by African-born people forced into slavery, western Virginia was still primarily small homesteads even into the nineteenth century. People fished, trapped animals for fur, or cut timber. Families raised small beds of crops and livestock to sell to the rich people in eastern Virginia. Few plantations here—not enough flat land, not enough money, but some families did keep small numbers of enslaved people in bondage. To bring lumber from the Great Lakes states to the booming cities of the East, the railroad companies laid track through western Virginia in the 1820s. Thousands of people could now hop a train from eastern Virginia to western Virginia, and thousands did, looking for cheap land. City land promoters sold immigrants arriving from Europe on the dream of western Virginia. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Irish fleeing the potato famine made these mountains their own. But most still did not legally own their land, and without legal claim, they had to continually guard against threats from other squatters and from powerful city people with money and laws on their side. All this made the people of western Virginia vigilant, scrappy, and resourceful, engaged in the constant task of survival.

Many in Richmond and Washington, DC, looked down on western Virginia, regarding it as a lawless place where poor families occupied land they didn't own and didn't farm, a lifestyle that was at odds with both the Puritan ideals of family and Southern aristocratic values. Something "had to be done" about this place. The Virginia government adopted a policy that anyone squatting on land in the western territories of the state could claim first rights to buy it, but if they couldn't come up with the cash fast, they would have to either start paying rent or move on. Most families in western Virginia made their livings from the natural world or bartered; they didn't keep money on hand. Great swaths of land were sold to rich investors in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.

Further, new laws also made owning land a qualification to vote and participate in democracy. But even if they could scrounge up the money, the system was rigged against western Virginians. In a baffling rule, a farm animal was now taxed at a higher rate than an enslaved person, making it far more expensive to farm in western Virginia than in eastern. People here just couldn't compete with the big plantation operations that churned out crops at bargain prices.

Western Virginians did all their own work and without the evil of slavery, so they should pay less in taxes than the slave-owning farmers to the east, they figured, not more. Plus they always seemed to be getting the raw end of the deal when it came to public money to build courthouses, jails, and schools. They didn't have good numbers in the state legislature—partly there had always been fewer people here, partly enslaved persons counted toward population tallies in eastern Virginia (though, disgracefully, as only a portion of a human). As early as 1831, western Virginia farmers backed a movement to free all people enslaved in Virginia—though whether motivated by racial justice or financial self-interest no one can say for sure.