By Bob Weaver Dec. 11 2025

Now 86 years old today and I rarely have problems in searching for gratitude.

I am grateful for being able to put together thousands of stories about their life and times, people in the Calhoun backwoods.

West Virginia has been my hobby, having stayed all-night in all 55 counties.

Growing up in the woods, most of my habits and beliefs were related to who and where I was around - a person of place. We are rapidly fading.

My tendency is to drive to the end of a holler, usually to connect with somebody I've never met, putting more miles on a car without leaving the county.

In more recent years I've discovered that most are transplants from the bigger world, and its clear they love the backwoods. Most of them keep a low profile and they'll tell you over and over again how much they like their mountain life.

Calhoun has dropped population from 12,000 in 1940 to 5,800 in 2025. It would seem that "transplants" have almost reached a number exceeding people of place.

School enrollment has dropped from 1,700 in 1990 to about 800 in 2025.

Among the newcomers in the past two years, a theologian, a surgeon, a NASA scientist, FBI employee, a chemist, and dozens of others from all walks of life.

James Haught, the now deceased longtime editor of the Charleston Gazette, proclaimed backwoods West Virginia position is being far from the madding crowd, away from the noise and hubris, away from sardine living.

Calhoun and many West Virginia counties were mostly bypassed, at least with jobs with the Industrial Revolution, the current crop of Calhoun politicians want to "Make Calhoun Great Again," when it was never great by development standards.

But we have one of the lowest tax rates in the USA and live in an area where most natural disasters skip over us.

It's greatness likely peaked about 1940 with the agricultural era, the last of the pioneers who had a survival gene that never gave up, surviving the Great Depression.

A few of us are aware we live in a great forest, underdeveloped and peaceful.

It is now midnight in the garden of good and evil, the wobbly-kneed Great American Experiment seems to be moving toward collapse, history repeating itself over money and power, hopefully a few remaining to rejuvenate some survival skills, having a life.

Hopefully they will be able to gander across the hills and hollers and be grateful to God for being in one of the most wonderful places to live.