In which our heroine learns that she can't get there from here
A summer spent among aging hippies might not
sound like fun to most going-on-eighteen-year-olds, but the truth is
that this felt like a do-or-die situation. Greensun had sent
out a call to all of its past members (thus the flier) asking for a
commitment of time and money if we wanted the community to
continue. And as much as I had to agree with Mom that sleeping
in an old farmhouse with holes in the wall large enough to see
through wasn't so appealing, the alternative was that if the community
shut down, I'd never
know what I was missing.
And I might never meet my bio-dad.
Which is all a long way of explaining how I ended
up in southern West Virginia, which apparently had the closest
airport to Pikeville, Kentucky, which was relatively close to
Greensun. (You know you're going to the boondocks when
specifying locations involves lots of "It's near"s rather than an
actual town's name.) Mom had given me the phone number of a
neighbor who could come pick me up, and she'd even offered
to book a room at a nearby hotel so that one of the previous
Greensun inhabitants could drive me down when he or she arrived.
But
I wanted to get there early to see the place all by myself, and
I 
also wanted to travel on my own. After all, if my
trip had turned out to be a tour of Europe instead of Appalachia,
I'd have been figuring out transportation as I went along, and I
didn't want to miss out on that experience.
On the other hand, now that I was in West
Virginia (aka the land of no public transportation), I was starting
to suspect that I really couldn't get there from here. While
researching options for where to go on my post-high-school and
pre-college trip, I'd initially chosen Europe (before throwing that
voyage away for what was currently seeming like a very bad idea)
since its extensive rail system made it easy to get around for
those of us too young to rent a car. Why couldn't Greensun be
located on an Amtrak line?
I
hope you enjoyed this third installment of Forsythia's adventure. Stay
tuned for another chunk of her story tomorrow, or download the entire
ebook of Watermelon Summer here.
| This post is part of our Watermelon Summer lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.