I was born near the top of Cumberland Mountain in a settlement of a dozen or so houses. Up the hill where there was no road was Virginia, up at the peak of the mountain. We never did. We went the other way down the road past Kenvir, named for Kentucky and Virginia, and then five or so miles to Evarts.

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Dr. Stepchuck attended my mother and he either didn't know that the name of the settlement was Punkin Center or he took some sort of strange future pity on me and wrote down that I was born in Disney, a tiny town a mile or two down the road. Punkin Center had no school, no church, no store, and no pavement. Dizney had them all, albeit one of each.

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We did have a creek though, which with it's brother and sister creeks all over the Cumberlands fed the eventually mighty Cumberland River

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Water is the source of life and mountains the world over organize the water in small streams that eventually become the Gangees 

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asked to account for the huge population of India, pointed to the mountains. Himalaya is the source of the Gangees. 

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The water had carved into the hillsides for over xx million years when Cumberland Mountain and it's friends the Appalachians were pushed up by...

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The slopes the streams made into the hills became animal trails and then people trails and were the same slopes where they built the roads and strung the electric lines.

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A funny thing happened to the plants in far off

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These ferns lived off their own dead, each fading generation becoming topsoil for the next.

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And they were all owned by the company. Maybe not the pavement. They let the state maintain that. It was the Black Mountain Coal Corp. 

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And immediately before Disney was Kenvir, which everybody called Black Mountain because the Black Mountain Coal Corp. had established their mine there

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in the last settlement if you leave the Clover Fork branch of the Cumberland River and come up Yocum Creek past Kenvir, yes named for Kentucky and Virginia and then on another three miles

 

Not that we saw anything of our neighbors. To get to Virginia you would have to walk a mile or two at a steep angle and then when you passed the peak it was downhill another five miles to a town

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To go any farther was to go up the mountain at a steep angle. 

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Past