Hurt Happens

There's a little place in a little county 45 minutes from Lynchburg that I get mixed up with other little places that are virtually impossible to distinguish from other parts in the same said country over the river or bridge or through the woods or hop left and stick your right leg in and out past McDonalds.

Obviously I'm talking about Hurt, Virginia.

In the grab bag of crazy that is SCrew Lucy, you may reach in and pull out a quality that looks something like this:

A child raised in urban America all her life, later exposed to a small town, running gleefully through the streets, amazed at rural people, places, and things. Driving on back roads, staring at people who live in houses that don't look like they should be lived in (but, as indicated by a local Gretna, "you can tell by the mowed grass and the firewood on the porch"), fascination at parking lots of abandoned strip malls that are home to two businesses and are run by the town's only people of color, an Asian woman and a black man--both of whom sell pipes that are emphatically "only for tobacco use."

I obviously deserve the disdain provided by my peers but I want to emphasize the fact that I make fun of all people equally and with the best of intentions--including myself.

That said, these types of towns are full of interesting things. Really. They are. For instance, both Stacy Compton and Ricky Van Shelton are from Hurt. The former temporarily owned a restaurant in Altavista and the later has his own dilapidated landmark advising residents and visitors that Hurt was at one time his home. Well, technically it's in Grit which is to the left of the tree up the road from the bridge by the old factory and half a stone's throw from Dooder's place.

Meanwhile, here is a song Ricky Van Shelton wrote about me:

Don't be quick to condemn me. Life turned me this way.

The next series of blogs will include my discoveries about Hurt. If you're from the area, please feel free to litter the comments section below with everything including, but not limited to, gossip about Stacy Compton and Ricky Van Shelton, gossip about people who are not Stacy Compton and Ricky Van Shelton, stories about people who have the last name of Shelton or Dalton (which is half the populace, by the way), your experiences or pictures growing up, and last but not least, inflammatory comments about me personally, still keeping in mind that life made me this way. 

And let me know if you've met Dooder.