west virginia

The state with the country's lowest crime rate, year after year. A place where the air is clean and you can drive even on an Interstate without seeing another car. "It's all relative"? Yes, but not in the way that many people took it. When I meet someone from "home," it often turns out that we have cousins, albeit distant ones, in common.

I grew up in a West Virginia town that was home to a state mental hospital with a wing for what were then called "criminally insane" (much scarier sounding than "defective delinquents"). One misty, late-summer evening when I was about fourteen, a friend and I were alone in my house playing a board game when we heard on the radio that some inmates of that wing had escaped. We did something very unusual for that time and place, and when my father came home about half an hour later, he was surprised to find the door locked.

512👍 223👎