Since we are focusing on Appalachia and Zen, to say that I am a coal-camp hillbilly is appropriate since I was born in the mountains and raised for fifteen years in the coal camps of Logan County, West Virginia, the result of which has been a lifelong hostility towards industrial capitalism, the economic exploitation of miners and the decimation of the environment. The other effect of the mountains is the Pentecostal passion for a spiritually ecstatic experience of God.Escape from that hillbilly hell-in-paradise is, of course, the military. My four years in the Navy felt like the old-fashioned Grand Tour: Imperial Beach, California; Yokohama and Fukuoka in Japan; and the Florida Keys. I think the U.S. Government lost some money on my tours of duty, but I learned a lot about Zen while in Japan, and I certainly was aesthetically educated by the beauty of the world.The other escape from poverty in the mountains is education, and I went full-on, ultimately obtaining a PhD in the American Renaissance, especially the Transcendentalism of Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau. And my years in stoned San Francisco were certainly an escape. And then, in 1969 when I was thirty in Pineknob in Raleigh County, West Virginia, I was enlightened by the knowledge that reality is a darkness of the potential creativity of anything, anywhere, particularly of the blue, spikey beauty of a thistle on a scraggly hillside.
