I had to write a descriptive essay for school. It had to be about a person or a place, a person that impacted my life in a major way, good or bad, or a place that I believe is heaven on earth, or hell on earth. I chose to write about the town that I'm from and the things I don't like about it. This is my revised version of the essay.
Oceana, West Virginia
Oceana, West Virginia is a small town with a population of about 1,400 people. Only a little over half its residents have high school diplomas. Most of the residents never attend college. Oceana is, generally speaking, a very undereducated town. It's a place where drug use is more common than higher education. It lacks opportunity for entertainment, there is no movie theater, mall, or decent park. Though it does boast a chain of Churches and gas stations that span the length of the main street. It is a place that affords its townspeople very little opportunities or diversity of any kind.
I moved to Oceana, West Virginia when I was in the 6th grade. I was very much excited to leave Virginia and come to West Virginia to have a fresh start here. It did not live up to the ideal I had formed in my mind of a quaint small town. In fact it was just the opposite. It was quite loud, especially in my bedroom, where I could hear loud music and cars sounding their horns all night long. I did not like the complications of all the hollows, and I have always disliked the mispronunciations that run rampant here. Things like "holler" instead of hollow, "warsher" instead of washer, and the list goes on and on. I can not tolerate living in a place where the residents cannot even speak correctly.
I find Oceana to be a backward type of place. It has little in the way of shopping and entertainment. Oceana lacks variety and excitement. You have to drive at least a hour to see a movie or shop for clothing that isn't made out of cheap, itchy fabric that is sold at Dollar General. It’s very out of the way, which causes its residents to spend a lot of money on gas to enjoy simple pleasures in life that other people take for granted and in other places are convenient. Simple pleasures like taking your child to a park where you won't find used needles and beer bottles on the ground under the swings or going to a movie without having to drive 30 miles to get to the theater. In Oceana, barely anything is convenient. I prefer organic foods for myself and my family. The closest store that sells a good variety of organic food is in Princeton, which is a good hour and ten minute drive. Here the option to eat foods without chemicals and growth hormones is non existent, unless you’re willing to spend 30 to 40 dollars in gas to get to a store that provides you with the healthier option.
Drugs are a huge problem in Oceana, which is something that is not positive for its residents. You can pitch a quarter out your front door and hit three junkies with it before it lands on the ground. That’s how big the problem with drugs is here. Because of the large number of people who abuse prescription medication in this part of the state, it had become increasingly difficult to actually get help through medication when you have a legitimate need for it. Most of the doctors and their staff put you off as a pill seeker, because of the large number of actual pill seekers in and around Oceana. You can’t keep tools, weed eaters, or anything of any amount of value outside, you have to keep them locked up, or else someone will steal them, or try to. I live in a place where I’m scared to keep my toddler's play things outside. The police do very little about this problem in comparison to bigger towns and cities.
`What I thought was going to be a dusty, slow paced, sleepy small town turned out to be a drug infested, thief filled, dirty, undereducated, inconvenient place to live. It is a place where I do not intend to raise my son. A place where everyone is the same, in most ways, and where coal, no matter the problems it causes the environment and the beauty of West Virginia mountains, is considered wonderful. There is no culture here, there is no diversity. If you’re not white, Christian, uninformed, and slightly ignorant then you will never fit in. If you have a different point of view, then you’re simply wrong. People here tend to accept what they’re told, and rarely question anything. They school system does not teach people to think for themselves, to form their own opinions.
It is not wild and wonderful West Virginia. It’s not even close. It’s certainly wild, but not in the way that the motto implies, and the nature is wonderful, at least what has not been destroyed by mountain top removal. It’s polluted, it pollutes, and it has not a care in the world for global warming. Most of the citizens are content with the way things are. As for me, I’m not. It's places like Oceana and a large number of the residents that live here that give West Virginia, as a whole, a bad name. When I look around or speak to people here, it's no wonder to me that people in other states think that we are all a bunch of rednecks wearing flannel shirts and bibbed overalls while slaughtering the English language and sitting in a coal pile.
