My father was the ultimate free range kid. He grew up in a Virginia coal mining town called Dante (if you’d like to know how to pronounce it, think less literary history and more along the lines of a word that rhymes with ‘ain’t’), a place nestled so deep in the Appalachian Mountains that you literally have to look straight up to see the sky. Like most of the men in that town and dozens more like it, his father and his father’s father were coal miners, and while his father worked he and his … [Read more...]