My Appalachian Catchment, Ray Peek and Professor Bill Woods, Esquires.

I have dear friends and clients, past and present, alive, dead, and dying, for whom I care deeply, who reside in spots with names like Owl Hole Gap, Poor Valley, Tate Springs, Rock Haven, Ni**er Hollow, Wildcat Hollow, Joppa Mountain, Washburn, Treadway, Thorn Hill, Chinqupin, Yellow Branch, Spruce Pine, Pressman's Home, Hogg Lot, Cloud Creek, Cloud Creek Hollow, Mulberry Gap, Duck Creek, Snake Hollow, Newman's Ridge, Vardy, Clinch, War Creek, Stoney Fork, Cool Branch, Short Mountain, Stone Mountain, Devil's Nose, Treadway, Thorn Hill, Round Mountain, Grassy Fork, Kyle's Ford, Viking Mountain, Blackwater, Turkey Creek, Stubblefield Creek, Morristown Mountain, and Gravel Hill, where I live. These people make mistakes, requiring at times help, not punishment because punishment don't help. From a distance the mountains and hollows seem idyllic, but it's not so. In fact, ignorance permeates the rise and fall of my catchment and its topography. I'll only be able to change things one family at a time, introducing the ideas of neither killing nor consuming animals, mutual aid, community, and secularism. Unfortunately, upon learning that there are people who think differently, their faces blanken as if there's nothing going on. But, in the words of my Torts professor, Hon. Bill Woods, "it ain't necessarily so." Fading memories from attending the pure brutality of four years of law school discharged at night, after work, include my buddy, Ray McAlexander Peek, and red faced Professor Woods, who, at mid lecture, always broke the neo-Socratic torture chamber with a monotone, "time to take a little break," to take another drink. Thank God. Ray approached me during one of those little pauses and posited: "I know how we're going to be able to endure this hell on earth for four years, Paul" "How?," I says. He winked: "two beers."