Sylvia O’Brion, 76, sat beside an oil lamp and wood-burning stove in her clapboard cabin on the sub-zero night, strumming her banjo and singing: “This is my home where the bobcats holler and the wild deer roam.”
She has lived in the primitive dwelling without running water or electricity on the slopes of Dead Fall Mountain her entire life. She shuns modern conveniences. She lives alone in one of the isolated pockets beyond the power lines in West Virginia.
The hardy, fiercely independent old mountain woman has never had a radio or TV. She chops wood to cook her food and heat her home. She uses an outhouse year ‘round, even in the dead of winter. Her nearest neighbors are on the other side of the mountain a mile and a half away by footpath.
“I never been sick. Never been in a doctor’s office. Never took a dose of medicine,” she said.
“Oh, I…
