MALLORY, W.Va. — For the people of the hollow, opportunity begins where the road ends, and that was where they now went, driving onto a dirt path that vanished into forest. It was here that they came at the end of the month, when the disability checks were long gone, and the next were still days away, and the only option left was also one of the worst. The goal was simple. Get to the top of the mountain. ![]() Based on Chelsea Cain's novel 'One Kick,' Gone stars Chris Noth as FBI Agent Frank Nova, who rescues Kit “Kick” Lannigan (Leven Rambin). Years later after Kit trains in martial arts, Nova convinces her to join a special task force that specializes in abductions and missing persons cases. October 6, 2017 October 7, 2017 October 8, 2017. Location, Amphitheater, Patio Gallery, Room 1, Room 2, Room 3. Track, Discussion, Dynamic, Kundalina, Meditation, Movement, Moving Meditation, Pilates, Tai Chi, Vinyasa, Yin or Restorative, Yoga Nidra. 5:30 pm - 6:45 pm. ![]() Collect as many wild roots as possible to sell to a local buyer. Avoid the copperheads and rattlesnakes. Descend before the rains came again and flooded their way out. Disabled America: Between 1996 and 2015, the number of working-age adults receiving federal disability payments increased significantly across the country, but nowhere more so than in rural America. In this series, The Washington Post explores how disability is shaping the culture, economy and politics of these small communities. Above: Bobby Dempsey, carrying a pickax and a plastic bag, ventures up the mountain above his home on foot in search of roots to sell. The road was impassible for vehicles because of fallen trees. “My doctor gets on me all the time getting out here and doing stuff like this,” said Donna Jean Dempsey, 51, who had quintuple bypass surgery in 2011, as she gripped the passenger-side handle inside the truck. But what alternative was there? Her $735 disability check was the only steady money she and her brother Bobby Dempsey, who was driving, had coming in, and it was never enough. She didn’t have running water. She didn’t have furniture. For seven days in a row, she had worn the same gray flannel shirt and ripped jeans, muddy from the mountains. “You can’t just sit still,” she told Bobby, 52. “You got to keep going,” he replied. And where they were going was deep into the underground American economy, where researchers know some people receiving disability benefits are forced to work illegally after the checks are spent — because they can’t hold a regular job, because no one will hire them, because disability payments on average amount to less than minimum wage, sometimes much less, and because it’s hard to live on so little. The underground economy has long been a part of rural America, but it has become vital in counties such as this one, deprived of the once-dominant coal industry and redefined by a decades-long swell in the nation’s disability rolls that, in its aftermath, has left more than 1 in 5 working-age residents in Logan County on Social Security Disability Insurance, which serves disabled workers, or Supplemental Security Income for the disabled poor. “There is this theme of people being crooks, but it’s genuinely people trying to find a way to patch together a living when they have very little income,” said Mil Duncan, one of the nation’s leading rural sociologists.
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