by John Lingan
For information on the growth of the bottled water industry, I relied on Bottlemania (2009) by Elizabeth Royte. My understanding of the state of water in West Virginia was aided by “The Freedom Industries Spill: Lessons Learned and Needed Reforms” (2014), a report written by the consulting group Downstream Strategies and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.
Chapter 6: Toxically Pure
Joe Bageant published only one book in the United States, Deer Hunting with Jesus (2007), which, while essential, barely conveys his unbelievable prolificacy over the last eight or so years of his life. His current website, bageant.typepad.com, is still operated by Ken Smith, and will supply the curious reader with a seemingly infinite number of essays, responses to reader e-mails, diaries, and tossed-off ramblings. Better than any book, that website conveys the overwhelming productivity of Joe’s mind during this final era, as well as his burdensome and obsessive personality.
His second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (2010), is a wonderful portrait of mountain subsistence life and the values therein, and beautifully written. It was originally published in Australia and remains without a U.S. publisher as of this writing, though copies are easily obtained online or in Winchester-area bookstores.
Of his many, many other uncollected pieces, the one that provided the greatest insights for this chapter is a 2009 essay, “Skinny-Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party,” which details his relationship with hallucinogens and the 1960s counterculture generally. It is also the essay that I think best exhibits Joe’s worldview and talent for prose. It’s stunning. “Skinny-Dipping in Reality” originally appeared on the website alternet.org.
For a great understanding of the back-to-the-land movement, I relied on Kate Daloz’s We Are As Gods (2016) and The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (1999) by Timothy Miller, though there is a huge and growing library surrounding the era, from academic work to memoirs.
For information on the growth of Virginia and Winchester’s Hispanic population, I relied on U.S. Census Bureau figures and a few reports: “Immigrants, Politics, and Local Response in Suburban Washington” (2009) from the Brookings Institution, the Pew Research Center’s “Demographic profile of Hispanics in Virginia, 2014,” and “US Immigration: National and State Trends and Actions Overview” (2015) from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
A great number of friends and family submitted to be interviewed about Joe, which is a tribute to the effect he had on people at all stages of his life. These included his three children, Tim, Patrick, and Liz; his webmaster and fellow Mexican émigré Ken Smith; Ward Churchill and Jerry Roberts from the Boulder days; Scott Mason from the Winchester Star; Andy Gyurisin, onetime owner of the Winchester Book Gallery; Nick Smart, whose company I could see why Joe valued as he did; Rachel Klayman, the editor of Deer Hunting with Jesus; and obviously his widow, Barbara Dickinson, whose generosity and support were frankly shocking.
I must take the opportunity here to recommend Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), which I contend was a major influence on Deer Hunting with Jesus, even down to the provocatively comic title. That’s technically conjecture, however; I have yet to find any specific mention of that book among Joe’s own writing, though he did dedicate a 2005 essay, “Carpooling with Adolf Eichmann” (again, provocatively comic), to Deloria and Ward Churchill.
Chapter 7: They’ll Have to Carry Me Out
I know what I know about George Jones from Rich Kienzle’s The Grand Tour (2016) and Nick Tosches’s 1994 profile, also inevitably called “The Grand Tour,” which is collected in The Nick Tosches Reader (2000).
Chapter 8: Better Neighbors
For information on the formation of Winchester’s medical and health-care systems (and for many other insights into the region’s development and expansion during the Byrd era), I relied on “Up to Date and Progressive: Winchester and Frederick County Virginia, 1870–1980” (2014), a dissertation by Mary Sullivan Linhart at George Mason University. Dr. Matt Hahn’s Distracted: How Regulations Are Destroying the Practice of Medicine and Preventing True Health-Care Reform (2017) was an obvious source for his thoughts on administrative health-care obstacles, and for a welcome look at national health policy from the unlikely vantage point of Berkeley Springs and Hancock, Maryland. For coverage of Valley Health’s various expansions and partnerships, I read innumerable articles in the Winchester Star and the Washington Business Journal. No surprise, there are additional comments (growls, really) about Valley Health and Winchester Medical Center in Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus (2007).
For sources on the growth of Winchester-Frederick County’s Hispanic population, see the notes on Chapter 6.
I relied on a number of articles and papers for general information on the state of modern rural health care and outcomes, including “Rural Relevance 2017: Assessing the State of Rural Healthcare in America” (2017), written by Michael Topchik for iVantage Health Analytics and the The Chartis Group; “Establishing and Maintaining Rural Public Health Infrastructure” (2012) by Michael Meit et al. for the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis; and “How Has the ACA Changed Finances for Different Types of Hospitals? Updated Insights from 2015 Cost Report Data” (2017) by Fredric Blavin for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.
Chapter 9: Blessed to Be Gray
“On the wide level of a mountain’s head” is the opening line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Time, Real and Imaginary (An Allegory),” a poem that rumbled in my head for all the years I thought about Winchester and its inhabitants.
About the Author
John Lingan has written for the Oxford American, the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Pacific Standard, and many other publications. He spent four years reporting and writing Homeplace, his first book. He lives in Maryland.
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