Institute, West Virginia

Angie Argabrite    

When we go to church we drive over to the Tudor's Biscuit World in Hurricane for breakfast, or lunch, depending on who you are and what shift you work. In our Camaros and Oldsmobile Cutlasses we drive down I-64 to Nitro, named for the nitroglycerin that used to be made there, or go fishing in the Mud River, or the Kanawha, though you can't eat anything you catch from there, the Kanawha, I mean, that dirty piece of the Ohio that made this land what it is today, a chemical valley smelling of sulphur in South Charleston, hazy from the smoke of the Dupont plant here. You can watch the barges going down the Kanawha every day to the Ohio, where they take the coal and wood and chemicals to places where people can pay for 'em, not here where the biggest city is Huntington, population 67,000.

When there was that explosion in India at that Dupont, some here got scared, wanted to quit, but hell, not so many got scared as jobs got scarcer. They sent some specialists out to the plant to talk to 'em, explain how that wouldn't happen here. I'm just glad I got my job with the Board of Ed., cooking at Kanawha County Junior High over in Milton. The kids are real nice there. Sometimes we give 'em the only hot meal they'll get all day.

Look at this land, cold and snowy in winter, all green and sunny in summer, you know God meant it for something better than what they've done to it. We have so many deer in the summer, there's a new kill on the highway everyday, just about. You can go to the top of my driveway, turn your back on South Charleston, and look at what Eden must've been. And I'll tell ya', this is still God's land, and one day, God will have what's his.