Dillwyn, Virginia, only loosely fits the definition of "town." There's a Baptist center and a liquor store and a train depot, a town hall and a drug store, not much more. The stillness on this glaring June afternoon is, somehow, more sinister than the predawn shadows in the seediest New York neighborhood.
I am here to tilt at windmills, journeying solo to the pockets of civilization closest to the center of each state, chronicling the lives there. This is state number four.
I am taking photos outside the Baptist center when a white man anywhere from his late 40s to early 60s, depending on the hardness of his life, and with a mouth minus several teeth, passes by and asks me how my day is.
This is David. He looks like the kind of guy who's lived here his whole life—you quickly acquire the talent of sniffing out the born-n-raised, doing this. It's been hard to find people here to talk to here in Dillwyn; a willing conversation partner popping up out of the blue seems like serendipity.
David turns out to be the exact kind of stereotype I was looking to subvert by going out and talking to people who call themselves "Real Americans." He is lecherous and racist—"the blacks" are killing each other by the hundreds in Richmond (he sees it on the news every night), and all he wants is for me to come home with him. His momma will tell me he'd never hurt me. Yes, he's a felon, but it was all bull, his third wife, she wasn't a Good Christian Woman, she'd told some lies and said something about kidnapping and, well, there he was in prison for eight months. Why won't I come home with him? There's nothing wrong with two grown-ups making each other feel good.
There isn't another soul around. My shirt has become a second, damp skin, and every hair on my body is locked in an upright position.
After concluding his momma is likely scattered in pieces across his secluded property, I decline David's offer and make to leave. He grabs my hand and tries to kiss it; I slip free and bolt, cartoon dust cloud trailing as I deliberately take wrong turns down dirt roads to make sure not to lead him to the place where I am staying.
In this moment, the urge to acquire a weapon, any weapon, anything powerful enough to shred a human being's insides, is overwhelming. The visceral reaction to being made to feel powerless, preyed upon, is to reach for whatever thing will erase that vulnerability.
Again, Virginia was only state number four, out of 50. The odds of being put in a similar situation were decidedly non-zero. (I ended up in two more situations where I feared some kind of assault.) And so sprang up tab after tab of Google searches for something, anything, to ease my now crippling fear. Handgun? Knife? Mace? What was the best choice for a small woman with no formal combat training?
A man in South Carolina made me hold his Glock after hearing my story. "I like how you look holding that," he said, inspiring a level of revulsion I didn't know was possible, though it didn't put me off the idea of getting one of my own. I reached out to friends who held up handguns as the pinnacle of personal safety. In a pinch, a knife would do the job, they added.
There's always a "but," though, and with weapons designed to severely injure or kill, there's actually more than one.
A handgun may make you feel safer, but it doesn't necessarily make you safer. In a 2015 article in the journal Preventive Medicine, "The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007-2011," researchers David Hemenway and Sara J. Solnick concluded that there was "little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss." Another study, "The relative frequency of offensive and defensive gun use: Results of a national survey," published by Hemenway and Deborah Azrael in Violence and Victims in 2000, concluded that "All reported cases of criminal gun use, as well as many of the so-called self-defense gun uses, appear to be socially undesirable."
If you haven't had rigorous training with guns, you may find your actions in the face of danger don't match those of your imagination—you might freeze, or your aim might be off, and pulling out a gun you have no intention of firing could backfire. Firing a gun, regardless of the outcome, will likely lead to your arrest and possible charge with a crime, and even if you're found to have been acting in self-defense, that's the kind of disruption that can derail a life. It's certainly not an ordeal you want to go through while traveling alone to places unknown on a budget of $900 a month.
Legality aside, I tried to imagine shooting a person, really shooting them, watching them fall to the ground, possibly dead.
I simply couldn't.
With a knife, the threat is similar. Should you not immediately deliver a debilitating strike, you run the risk—I, at 5’0 and a buck-something, ran the risk—of being overpowered and having your weapon taken and subsequently used against you. Both options, gun and knife, can escalate non-violent situations to violent ones, and without proper training—and lacking the time to get that training—I was more likely to be injured than to cause injury.
I bought a keychain canister of pepper spray. I never did end up using it.