Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have in Brumley Gap, the men and women sit separate. Outside, the evening cold has already crept in, and the hard outline of Virginia mountains has softened into darkness. Inside Hunter Holmes' one-room country store, three worn couches, a board placed on milk cases, and a few wooden chairs make a circle around a Buckeye 135 wood stove. The room is filled with people. The walls are lined with canned goods and staples like salt, sugar, cornmeal and motor oil. A blue denim jacket hangs from one shelf, and a few feet below it hangs a new white...
...refer to as Poor Valley. The soil is rocky and hard to farm. Most families cultivate an acre or so of tobacco, the town's only cash crop, and a vegetable patch, with a little meager grazing land for a few cows. The families in the scattering of wooden houses and log cabins have a median income of about $6,000 a year. To eke out a living, many men have had to work outside the Gap, some, like Gale Webb, the father of six children, journeying 50 miles a day to Johnson City, across the state line...
...count, was reduced to total submission 15 times. But he also thwarted his captors on quite a few occasions. In 1969, when the North Vietnamese were about to use him in a propaganda film, he battered his face to a puffy pulp with a wooden stool and chopped off his hair with a razor, slashing his scalp in the process. The enemy no longer found him photogenic...
...taking the trip, he says, because he "just can't stand the craziness in San Francisco any more." It is Jerry who produces a deck of cards, and the first hand of what turns out to be a five-day rolling poker game gets under way, wooden matches serving as chips...
...glories of autumn. Instead he takes the harder route: bare, muted landscapes filled with ravens, seals and deer. He is aware of the violence in the town and casual cruelty of the hunters. But the book's strongest writing is about the satisfactions of surviving a hard winter: wooden stoves, good drink, a safe journey home made in a blizzard. These are worth more than a tricky plot. Van de Wetering is an amateur who is good enough to get away with...