The Climb from Salt Lick
A Memoir of Appalachia
In the mid-1970s, Nancy L. Abrams, a young photojournalist from the Midwest, plunges into life as a small-town reporter in West Virginia. She befriends the hippies on the commune one mountaintop over, rents a cabin in beautiful Salt Lick Valley, and falls in love with a local boy, wrestling to balance the demands of a job and a personal life. She learns how to survive in Appalachia—how to heat with coal and wood, how to chop kindling, plant a garden, and preserve produce.
The Climb from Salt Lick is the remarkable memoir of an outsider coming into adulthood. It is the story of a unique place and its people from the perspective of a woman who documents its burdens and its beauty, using words and pictures to tell the rich stories of those around her.
—Sarah Beth Childers, author of Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family
“A must-read for West Virginians. For journalists and would-be journalists. For feminists, young and old. And mothers. For old hippies and anybody who came of age in the sixties and seventies. For anybody who’s taken a toke or two. For anybody who has tried to balance integrity with duty, dropping out with pursuing a career while trying to succeed as a breadwinner and parent.”
—Sara Pritchard, author of Help Wanted: Female and Crackpots
“Abrams writes sharply and passionately, with a journalist’s skill at laying out compelling facts, and with an artist’s ability to make us experience this life with her.”
—Meredith Sue Willis, author of Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories
