Democratic Underground - Peggy Noonan fans, rejoice!

She's back with a dandy of a column.

Peggy has returned from "digging" in the dirt that is West Virginia.

She decided to go there after watching "Deliverance" and thought she might visit Appalachia and maybe score some hillbilly action.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007054

I have just been there for the first time, and it is a jewel of a state. It is like an emerald you dig from a hill with your hands.

You know when you've passed into it from the east because suddenly things look more dramatic. You get the impression you're in a real place. All around you are mountains and hills and gullies, gulches and streams. The woods wherever I went were thick and deep. From Morgantown to Ballengee a squirrel can jump from tree to tree. It is a tall state--the hills, trees and mountains--and shadowy-dark, with winding roads, except for where it's broad and beige and full of highway, courtesy of Robert Byrd. The highways are perfect looking, unstained by wear and tear, and not many people seem to use them.

There are little churches in every town, where the highest thing is the steeples, and road signs with exhortations to follow Jesus, and big crosses made of white wood on the side of the road. The ACLU would do well not to come here and do their church-state thing. Three hours into our drive west, a police car drove by, and someone mentioned that was the first one he'd seen since we crossed the state line. Someone else said, approvingly, "Everyone keeps a gun in West Virginia. Crime is low." Later I would be told it has the lowest violent crime per capita in the United States. It is very nice, when traveling, to see your beliefs and assumptions statistically borne out.

Few people I met seemed interested in politics. I got the impression they see is as something dull and faraway, as a normal person would. I was in the southwest corner of the state, in the Fayetteville area of Fayette County, named for the Marquis de Lafayette. When I asked a man tending the grass in front of the statue of Lafayette on the courthouse lawn why they left the "La" off, he said he didn't know but "maybe it was a little lah dee dah." West Virginia has a town named Artie and a town named Bud.

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