I was raised, for three years, in Virginia, where the elementary schools taught us that the Chesapeake was our bay, the Appalachias were our mountains. This was the Virginia I recall, singing an old folk song about the Shenandoah River Valley, Oh Shenandoah, the one that starts, “I long to see you,” and ends, “I’m bound to leave you.”
This was long before I heard the West Virginia story, the story that begins with the coal mines and the addictions and manifests in soiled overalls and solar panels and a big scar through the treeline, where construction was once done but has since wrapped up. That West Virginia story, I now recite far better than any of the songs I once sung; but I have come to believe that the song and the story are, perhaps, one in the same.
This cannot be said about every song. For instance, John Denver’s Country Roads, arguably the most sung of the region, is wildly misleading. At odds to what the urbanite might suppose, nothing is so-called “country” about West Virginian roads, smooth enough to make a Washingtonian (DCer, that is) take a sigh of relief, ease the breaks, and drive around the bends not just faster, but freer.
The DC driver in question was a friend from university, Elson, who intended to “document the clean energy transition in America through a patriotic lens!” She knew I did not have the same intentions but requested my company, anyway. What was originally pitched as a 24-hour day stint turned into a week-long escapade in Hinton County, West Virginia — not inside a coal mine but on a Catholic farm, where she would survey climate initiatives throughout the county’s backcountry.
It is hard to say why I agreed. Perhaps it was an act of friendship, perhaps a justification for a week of “directed journaling,” or perhaps just another story to tell at the dinner table. I can tell myself these fantasies with ease, but really, I wanted to try on the patriotic lens, myself. I wanted to see the America I was once raised in, what it had come to be since age thirteen. This is to say that I was fully sold on this American experiment of hers.
The day before I left DC for West Virginia, I overheard a man and a woman sitting in the National Portrait Gallery, dressed in business attire and exchanging three-letter acronyms, as all DCers tended to do. Among murmurs of “Alaskan social sciences” and the NSF, they grew quiet, and the man went, “She’s not the person, but she could get the person,” and they grew quiet once more.
THE REGULAR CROWD
Hi All!
We are looking forward to having you and your group at the Farm.
A word of dictionary (I just made that word up) caution. It is ok to use google maps up to the point that you are directed onto Interstate 64. After that, if you follow google maps it is guaranteed that you will find yourself on top of a mountain on a road that just ended, with absolutely nothing or no one around and no cell service. We have substantial hard data that consistently confirms this fact. Since we want you to arrive at the Farm safely and “unfrazzled,” please use the following directions once you are directed onto Interstate 64.
Please park in any open space in the parking lot and get hugged.
Safe travels and see you all soon!
Steve
“Welcome home,” they said, “Can we give you a hug?” they asked, as we slammed the car doors shut. Right where East Clayton Road turns into West Clayton Road sits Bethlehem Farm. Bethlehem Farm is a “Catholic community in Appalachia that transforms lives through service with the local community and the teaching of sustainable practices,” according to their website, or a “Catholic community in Appalachia living out service, simplicity, community, and prayer,” as per their Facebook page. Bethlehem Farm is not just a farm, but a 501(c)(3) organisation, a home repair service, a solar farm, and a quasi-summer camp for Catholic kids.
Bethlehem Farmers are known, affectionately, as Caretakers– full-time, voluntary workers– or summer servants– part-time labourers. Eric Fitts, Executive Director of Bethlehem Farm, has served as a Caretaker at the farm since 2007. He was, thus, eager to give us a tour of the four corners of his 91-acre earth, where he lives with his wife, Colleen, and their three children.
We walked past the chicken coop and the squash fields, down to the pond and over the donkey pasture. A game of football was proposed but never played because, as they told us, we “wouldn’t find a flat square mile in West Virginia.” It was true. The terrain seemed to move by itself, harbouring a pulse of its own; a coastline-like quality despite its landlocked nature. You could feel it breathe as you breathed, wake as you woke, dream as you dreamed.
The land was, quite literally, founded on a dream. “One of the messages of the Bethlehem Farm history is the importance of dreaming,” Eric said. “In my opinion, our culture has kind of a split mind on dreaming. On one hand, you have kind of a negative connotation of, Oh, you dreamer, go get a real job, and I’ve certainly heard that.” Eric spoke in a slow, drawn-out voice and faced away from us, turning towards his land. “And then,” he said, “there’s part of our culture that is more aspirational, like Martin Luther King and I Have a Dream and really valuing people who want to see the world a different way.” He pointed to the horizon to align his finger with the mountain flowers. “It’s important to pay attention to our dreams, to keep open to what the Holy Spirit is calling us to do, and if something is really drawing us by the Holy Spirit, then it could be incredibly joyful. Not necessarily easy,” he said, “but incredibly beautiful.”
This land used to dream a different dream. Before Eric, it belonged to a wealthy DC businessman who wished to rehabilitate unhoused men. Existing for a little over twenty years, the program transported men from the city to the farm, until the undisclosed businessman became too old to manage operations. In the absence of buyers, the land was given to the Archdiocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia. In 2011, the Archdiocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, would find itself in hot water and their Reverend would find himself behind bars, sentenced to five years for the sexual assault of an eleven-year-old girl. It is around this time that Eric and Colleen, who were working at Bethlehem Farm’s sister farm, Nazareth Farm, wished to expand.
Steve Rassa, a Caretaker at Bethlehem Farm for the past six years, described the otherwise disturbing ordeal as an “opportunity for people to make the transaction finally happen.” The farm was then sold at “an extremely reasonable price,” he said, “so we then controlled the property, so we then controlled, really, our destiny and much more.”
It is not a lack of empathy but a particular fluency in finance that explains Steve’s attitude. Take, for instance, his decision to get a degree in business administration a semester early simply because the economy at the time was a “dire story.” Or his post-grad job at McCormick & Company, described as a “lot of years working my way through the supply chain.”
“One of our huge customers was Frito-Lay, owned by PepsiCo. McCormick was very, extremely people oriented– did well, made really good decisions, hired a bunch of people. People wanted to stay there because of their culture of valuing people. Frito Lay was more highly demanding, you know, they blew through people, but they were okay with it.”
Steve left McCormick for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. “When I left the world, the business world, I was in corporate supply chain and strategic sourcing.” One could argue the work was anything but otherworldly: Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is now known as Keurig Dr Pepper Inc., the same company that owns Dr. Pepper, 7UP, Crush, Canada Dry, A&W Root Beer, and Margaritaville Margarita Mix– to name a few– along with Krispy Kreme, Cinnabon, McCafé, and Swiss Miss.
“It became very evident that the strategy of the company was to get bought out,” he said. The acquisition left Steve with an opportunity to “jump ship,” and this time, Steve did not want to go back into the business world, let alone the corporate supply chain and strategic sourcing world. He wanted to do something with “service,” he airquoted, without knowing what it entailed.
A quick Google Search led him to an organisation called Catholic Volunteer Network, which linked him to Bethlehem Farm. Although he was unsure, he came anyway. “There’s minimal risk here,” he thought, “there’s really nothing to lose, per se,” and these thoughts have kept him at Bethlehem Farm for the past six years.
Steve has been at the farm the longest out of all the Caretakers, besides Eric and Colleen. This is due, largely, to the fact that he is a relatively older man, preventing him from planting and home repairing and washing dishes like the rest. The other Caretakers– Casey, Jared (Casey’s brother), Anna, Jack, and Molly– will end up staying an average of one to four years. The summer servants– Ethan (E-Dog) and Marc– will stay for just the summer, as their title suggests.
A DCer would have simply said they worked at McCormick or Keurig. A DCer would have referred to it as the CVN, not the Catholic Volunteer Network. But Steve, Steve referred to every company and incorporation by its legal name and spelled out every three-letter acronym there was to spell. Steve Rassa was no DC-er– but he wasn’t a West Virginian, either. “I’m from Maryland, originally,” he said. Although West Virginia borders Maryland, Steve had only been for conferences and meetings. “It was just– it was business.”
Eric sat across from me at dinner and asked where my father was from. “Pittsburg,” I said. Eric nodded his head and lowered his gaze. “Lots of I-talians,” he said, in his dream-like, drawn-out voice. Our evening prayer that night: Pray for the rich in their big cities, for they have a much greater problem.
SOME PLACE WE'D RATHER BE
On a Bethlehem Farm service-retreat week, one is strongly encouraged to partake in material tasks, like “preparing meals from scratch,” “spending time in organic gardens,” and “serving with our neighbours through home repair.” The website also promises the chance to “dig deeper into your spirituality,” “experience a countercultural Catholic community,” “challenge any Appalachian stereotypes you may have,” and “have fun with people you just met.” Although fun has its limits at Catholic quasi-summer camp, Elson and I certainly found our own ways to have a good, old-fashioned time with the people we just met.
As it turned out, none of the Caretakers nor summer servants at Bethlehem Farm were from West Virginia. “Casey and her brother, Jared, are from Virginia,” Steve said. “Anna’s from Minnesota, Eric from Milwaukee Area, Colleen from Chicagoland, Jack from Alabama.” E-Dog was from Nashville, and Marc was from Philly.
It didn’t seem to change how much they took care of us and what had come to be their land. Casey helped us make collages from the local newspaper, and her brother, Jared, led us in “home crew,” or domestic tasks. Anna demonstrated how to use power tools and identify plywood by its dimensions. Jack navigated us through nature walks (until he stepped on a nail that pierced through his foot); E-Dog taught us how to plant squash seeds (until he came down with heat exhaustion and extreme fatigue); and Marc, a tatted-up twenty-year-old sporting an “I PLEDGE TO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE” wristband, well, perhaps Marc wasn’t certified to help or lead or teach us anything, just yet.
Accompanying me and Elson on our service-retreat week was a group of college kids– Gracie, Laura, Michael, Andy, and Rochelle– from a Catholic parish in Noblesville, Indiana, joined by their Father Andrew. Their dreams stretched far beyond Indiana: Gracie wanted to perform on Broadway; Laura studied pre-medicine in Chicago; Michael hoped to get a summer internship in finance; Andy pursued aeronautical engineering at Purdue; and Rochelle wanted to make the most of Indiana University’s “fun dating scene.” Father Andrew, too, was committed to teaching Elson and I about eucharistic blood miracles. “It’s just undeniable evidence,” he said, “it’s substantial hard data,” he went, all night long.
Collaging and nature-walking by day, puzzling and strumming guitars by night, it all felt straight out of a brochure, exactly as advertised. Any consumer of advertisements would recognise this oddity, this blurring of expectation and reality, but I was sold. I did not want to take off the lens.
As the week progressed, however, the majority of our bonding occurred on the fields, in the kitchen, and on various West Virginian roofs and ramps. We bonded simply because the labour was hard. If you were indoors, you were preparing three to four meals a day for twenty half-starved adults. If you were outdoors, you were spending hours upon hours in the sun, sweeping the porch, working the crops, scaling the scaffolding, drilling the screws. The intensity of the labour only presented itself to me in hindsight, as if we were in the Dancing Plague of 1518, endlessly bound by a greater power, a higher purpose, and yet utterly perplexed at our continued motion, our subjection to the one-two step. Like the dancers back then, still we laughed and drove onwards.
I recall, one day, E-Dog turned to me while spacing out squash seeds and said, “Has anyone told you you’ve done a good job today?” and I said, “No, I don’t think so,” and he said, “Well, good job.” E-Dog looked to the sky and howled, as if he was releasing something, as if he was channelling the sacred jukebox, begging for it to stop. I presumed this howling was why E-Dog was called E-Dog, but now Elson and I joke it was because he worked like one. He would return to Nashville at the end of that summer.
At the end of that summer, yet another left. “Bethlehem Farm waved a fond farewell to long-term Caretaker and unofficial naturalist, Molly,” their newsletter read. “As lead house manager, she has patiently taught hundreds (maybe thousands) of volunteers how to make bread, make a toilet clean, and make mistakes and grow from them.” Like everyone else who passed through Bethlehem Farm, she was coming from somewhere with the objective of going somewhere, whether it was Wall Street or the West End, Indiana University or heaven. Like everyone else, she was not native to the land but loved it enough to leave it behind; to believe in, for lack of a better word, a miracle.
She left the farm to pursue a graduate degree in Appalachian Studies. After all, West Virginia is the only state entirely in Appalachia– a region with generational poverty and rampant drug addiction per capita, a land exploited for its coal and energy, an area with the most grandchildren raised by grandparents, an experimental ground for American industry. “They did it because they knew we wouldn’t ask questions,” a local said one night at the farm. For those who do not ask questions, this is certainly the only Appalachia they will come to know.
This is to say that West Virginia was the story no West Virginian wrote, and yet a story neither the state nor its people, nor the country, knew how to heal from.
So, how does a group of non–West Virginian Catholics end up in West Virginia? “The reason we are here,” Steve said, “is because the need is here.”
PRACTISING POLITICS
Elson was not the first to attempt documenting Bethlehem Farm. A few Decembers ago, a Dutch filmmaking crew approached Eric for a feature on politics, climate change, and Christianity in Appalachia. “I was holding a head of lettuce,” Eric said, “and they asked if they could get a shot of me biting into it.” He politely declined their request.
Caretaker Casey had a few thoughts on this film crew, published in the farm newsletter: “An important query for them was, what will you do during the upcoming presidential election? What I wonder is how we will engage with this election season in a way that is aligned with the mission and vision of Bethlehem Farm.”
In short: one does not go to Bethlehem Farm to practise politics. When speaking of the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, Steve was “not trying to be partisan because I’m actually an independent voter.” The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 promised American citizens tax provisions, climate-and-energy investments, and healthcare reforms, but the bill cracked him up, since it “reduced the rate of inflation as opposed to inflation itself.”
There was a time when West Virginia senator Joe Manchin attempted to block the IRA, but that time feels long ago. American actress Bette Midler criticised Manchin, via Twitter, for wanting the rest of the country to be like West Virginia– in her tweeted words, poor, illiterate, and strung out. “Like any politician, Joe Manchin wanted something out of it,” Steve said. “But of course, she’s a very liberal democrat. Well, I’m not sure if I should say of course, she is a very liberal democrat.”
It does not take a partisan to admit that the IRA has fallen short. Take, for instance, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, transporting nearly two billion gallons of natural gas per day through three of West Virginia’s poorest counties. These three counties happen to be Bethlehem Farm’s backyard.
“Somehow, the Mountain Valley Pipeline was used as a negotiating point. So, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act to bypass any concerns on environmental issues,” Steve said. “It was a leverage point that some used to hold up the bill until it was passed,” he said, “it was as simple as that, as politics.” But nothing he said seemed all that simple. Now gas courses through the mountain’s artificial veins. Protests happened for a while until they didn’t. “It kind of calmed down,” he said, “because it’s a done deal.” The pipeline was still under construction the summer Elson and I went. When Eric would point to the horizon, past the mountain flowers, I’d get lost in the treeline, in its scar.
The IRA also provided funding for sustainable improvement projects. Bethlehem Farm, thus, introduced a low-income repair program. Although our professional certification was not challenged, our safety certainly was, and yet Elson and I went along scaling scaffolding on smelting rooftops as our DC mothers whined from their DC phones.
One such site was a woman’s centre, Healing Homes, for expecting, new, and existing mothers addicted to or coming off drugs. They needed our help installing an ADA-compliant ramp to receive federal funding, and they helped us by demonstrating the ONEBox– the West Virginia Drug Intervention Institute’s emergency opioid overdose Narcan kit– and teaching us about West Virginia’s needle harm-reduction program: Four used needles for four clean. “At the church I go to, either before mass or after, you have to take training to get Narcan,” Steve said. “You just never know.”
Hanging on the Healing Homes bathroom door was a plastic shoe rack filled with drug-awareness pamphlets. Leaning against the wall was a piano, slightly out of tune, but sufficient enough for aspiring finance intern Michael to occupy our motley work crew as it rained and rained on a once sunny West Virginian day:
He says, “Bill, I believe this is killing me”
As the smile ran away from his face
“Well, I’m sure that I could be a movie star
If I could get out of this place.”
The last note rang through the valley as we drove from Healing Homes back to Bethlehem Farm, to what we now called home. It would be an understatement to say the storm caused damage, for it took at least eight chainsaw-bearing men to clear a tree that had fallen into East Clayton Road. I took the opportunity to marvel at the unexpected quality of the roads, now obstructed by nature. “You know it was paved for the pipeline work,” one of the Caretakers said, and I do not know why it felt like I had to have known.
FORGET ABOUT LIFE, FOR A WHILE
Much of what I have learned about West Virginia– and Bethlehem Farm, and the IRA– I came to know months later, when I called Steve to write a profile.
“Living here, I tell people you’ve got the totally wrong impression of West Virginia. It is such a beautiful area, with virtually no crime. People are very friendly, they’re honest, they’re generous, they’re hard working. Yeah, a lot are addicted, but guess what, it’s not their fault. Like anything, people hear stuff, and they start believing.”
Steve took this as an opportunity to reiterate that Bethlehem Farm was “not here to convert anyone.” After all, Catholics make up just four percent of the West Virginian population. He explained Catholicism as a network of “ideas of how we should interact together in social justice and social teaching,” and it is this very social teaching that makes up the basis of their pledge to environmentalism.
“Catholic Social teachings is care for creation, which is care for the earth: treating the earth as a gift. What do you say when someone gives you a gift? You say, Thank you, and you take care of it.”
Bethlehem Farm is one-hundred percent solar electric and almost one-hundred percent solar hot water, producing more kilowatts of energy than they consume. “West Virginia is still primarily electricity powered by coal, which would make sense for the coal state,” Steve said, “but, I mean, there’s just not that many coal jobs anymore.” It is not so much that West Virginia has stopped producing coal, but rather that technology has made coal mountain-top removal (MTP) better, which translates to more efficiency, which translates to fewer workers.
Despite embracing a sustainable lifestyle, Bethlehem Farm is “under no illusions at all.” “People are going to do exactly what they do when they go back home,” Steve said. “It’s more just imparting, Here’s a glimpse of what you could do, and out of that glimpse, start small and work up.”
He was right. I was outside of West Virginia, and I no longer collaged or played guitar, let alone thought about blood miracles or scaffolding. But in West Virginia, I lost all reference to this external home, immersed in more than just the lens. I wanted to remain in that glimpse, I wanted to see the undeniable evidence denied, the deal undone, the promise kept, the scar healed. I did not want to be the movie star. I did not want to get out of that place.
When I read back my journal from that week, many of my observations were directed outwards, in part due to fatigue, in part because we were denied the ability to technology or know the time or use flush-toilets and mirrors. The last personal entry was an unfinished letter, unaddressed and unsent:
To whom it concerns,
I’m not quite exactly sure who it is I am writing to, at least not as of now. I don’t want to leave the impression that I am attempting to contact something I miss, or that I feel lacking in some way, or that I am surrounded by unfamiliar people and scenery.
For one, it feels very familiar. And secondly, as much as I want to show you this, there are many scenes and places I want to show you, and I get the feeling I never quite can.
You are the men they fear, the wealth, the urban dweller...
And I trailed off, for it was time for evening prayer. Around the time I stopped writing was when summer-serving, drunk-driving Mark-from-Philly led me to a corner with cellular service, tucked behind the upper-porch hammock. I tried reading the news, I tried calling home, but I could not bring myself to engage with anything beyond the West Virginian horizon. Doing so would be a betrayal of the brochure– I was to gaze upon the fields, and hear of the dreams, and drill the nails, and be convinced of the impossible, and nothing else.
Elson set out for West Virginia with intentions. As for me, I sold myself on all these dreams without a clue why. I understood everything in DC: migraines were due to a lack of caffeine; fatigue was, most likely, the result of low iron levels; she wasn’t the person for the NSF simply because she could get the person. As for me, it didn’t matter whether Elson’s notice came twenty-four or twenty-five hours in advance, or whether I was gone for a day or five, or whether it was Hinton County or Monroe County or Summers.
Before going to bed each night, I envisioned a simple scene from the night before I left for West Virginia. Etched into the marble walls of the John F. Kennedy Centre were Kennedy’s words, reflecting in the murky water of the Potomac River: This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor. Perhaps this is not why we leave but why we return, perhaps we come to realise what we can and cannot afford.
SING US A SONG
“Open for Business” was West Virginia’s short-lived state slogan. According to the West Virgina Tribune, it “just didn’t cut it, probably because every survey of state economics placed West Virginia at the bottom of national rankings.”
But on a Catholic Farm in Hinton, Summers County, what one lacked in material was rich in spirit, or so it was said, because we all, in one way or another, knew the power of the stories we told ourselves. We told ourselves that the holes for the squash seeds were to be measured and spaced ten-point-five inches apart; that the local newspaper was to be displayed and read and, when the news got old, used in the creation of a collage as part of prayer; that praying to the big men in big cities would cure them of their spiritual poverty.
Such specificities left little room for speculation and almost none for doubt. It didn’t matter if the youth abused opioid-overdose reversal spray, because it wouldn’t do harm to them, anyway. It didn’t matter if the miracle came today, or tomorrow, or in seven years. Most of all, it didn’t matter if the big men in their big cities received our prayers, because it wouldn’t stop us from becoming one of them or ending up in one of them, whether it was engineering their planes, medicating their souls, marketing their businesses, overseeing their energy transition, entertaining them on Broadway. We were dreamers, after all, and West Virginia was our stage.
“That John Denver song, Country Roads, is world-renowned. You hear them singing it at karaoke night in Japan,” Steve said, “and, I mean, I can relate to what the song is talking about now that I’m here.” I did not tell Steve Rassa that Country Roads was actually written about somewhere else. Massachusetts-native Bill Danoff, John Denver’s songwriter, didn’t want to write about Massachusetts because they didn’t think the word was musical.
West Virginia, thus, was not the first choice and perhaps not the second, but it had the ability to roll off the tongue and slide up the vocal cords well enough to take Bill Danoff and John Denver somewhere that resembled home.
There was no need to tell Steve that story. It would be like learning the roads were only paved so they could build the Mountain Valley Pipeline, or like understanding the scar in the treeline was always intended to heal, for that is what scars do. It is a matter of time before the songs we are taught to sing cease to be sung, and the Valley we love ceases to be loved, and it’s all in the name of– not the Lord, but– the job being done.
2025