Posted Friday night, August 4, 2017.
Appropriate this character lived in the Mark Twain National Forest, because Twain would have appreciated the final sentence of this passage. Heck. He could have written it and been pleased with himself for the effort:
When I was growing up, my father occasionally brought us kids along to interviews. He was a medical sociologist at the University of Missouri, and his work took him to places that seemed exotic to me and my sisters: prisons, mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met with the scion of an extended family that lived in the Mark Twain National Forest, deep in the Ozarks, where the clam was notorious for exerting heavy-handed control over surrounding hamlets. The old man’s name was Elijah, and during the interview he sat next to an open window with a .22 rifle in his lap, in case a squirrel entered the conversation.
---from Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West by Peter Hessler.
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