Education, Education, Education

Snowshoeing took me to the "mountains" of West Virginia a couple of weeks back. It was my first venture into "The ----- State" ...I actually don't know what the state nickname is, and frankly, it's too late for me to care enough to look it up. Anyway, given Rye's semi-offensive jokes regarding the inhabitants of WV, I was expecting green, sprawling fields with rows and rows of bathtubs filled with fermenting moonshine, or toothless, bearded men donning 'coon skin caps firing shotguns at each other from the ditches on each side of the road. Something like that.

Crazy expectations, you say? You haven't heard the jokes that Rye tells.

On the return journey we had to pull over and flip around once. We pulled temporarily into a driveway which Dave said "look[ed] like it belong[ed] to a slasher." Below is the sign that was posted at the beginning of his driveway. A simple "No Trespassing: Private Property" probably would have sufficed; not only in preventing trespassers, but also in preserving this man's dignity by not exposing his ignorance to anyone who happens to pass by:

Let me type it out in case you can't see it well, and go through this like my 6th grade English teacher used to go through sentences, picking it apart piece-by-piece.

"Trespassers will b
percecuted to the full extent of 2 mungrel dogs which
never was over sochible to strangers
& 1 dubble brl. shot gun which aint loded with sofa pillers. Dam if
I aint gitten tired of this
hell raisin on my place."

On second thought, I will not pick this apart. I think it speaks quite clearly for itself.

If I were in any other state, I would say that this is so over the top that it is a joke. But when you're in WV, sometimes you just don't know --