“Okay, so. You, Belikov, the Alchemist, Sonya Karp, Victor Dashkov, and Robert Doru are all hanging out in West Virginia together.”“No,” I said.“No?”“We’re, uh, not in West Virginia.”

“Are we going to New Orleans?""No", she said, backing out of the spot. "We're going to West Virginia.""I assume by 'West Virginia,' you actually mean 'Hawaii,'" I said. "Or some place equally exciting.”

“Welcome to West Virginia, the land of lost models.”

“You West Virginia girls are one tough breed," he said.You got that right," I told him.”

“What has 32 legs and 1 tooth?'What?' we all asked.A West Virginia unemployment line.”

“In West Virginia, we've been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after one hundred and fifty years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it's not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option.”