One question keeps pressing on my mind, day after day. Where do we go from here? When I look out in the directions of different possibilities, I always come back to taking a closer look at what here means, Alleghany County in the age of television.

A book is being written in Santa Barbara, Calif. — an anthropologist's study of the culture that we mean when we say Alleghany County. The man writing it, Elvin Hatch, went back to California a new man after his years of meeting and talking with people of this region of the mountains.

Enough people have left here and become successful at whatever they do someplace else to prove that mountain people are not dumb. When I look around at the people in Sparta and all over the county making their own way in a business of their own, I'm impressed. There's more than you'd think when you don't think about it, by a lot.

We've seen Clint Bedsaul's trucking business on Highway 21 southeast of town grow from a few trucks to a fleet in just a few years. Before him, who would have thought a trucking business could make a go of it here? Evidently nobody.

Stewart Royall started a video store right out of high school with his own movies and expanded until he had Sparta's first video store in a place nobody else believed it would work. While working his video store he took an interest in photography and followed it into a portrait studio. While involved in photography he took an interest in picture framing.

Now he has an excellent photography studio and frame shop in one, with just as good an eye for framing a picture as taking it. He created businesses for himself following his own interests, self-taught all the way. Therefore, he enjoys his work. It's part of his life, not separate.

Robert Andrews, Marvin Myers, Kevin Dowell and Gene Dysart, who came here from Raleigh, took the deep plunge to open their own surveying businesses and they're all busy all the time. Who would have believed it thirty years ago if a psychic said somebody from India would have a successful clothing store on Main Street?

Look at the transformation of Sparta restaurant by Kim Sheets-Smith, busy from day one. It has good service, good food and good atmosphere for main ingredients, plus it looks and smells good, too.

There is no way we can compete with Wal-Mart and big discount places in the towns around us. With Wal-Marts in Elkin, Galax and now Jefferson, Sparta will not be getting a Wal-Mart. I say hooray to that, because they wreck the businesses owned by individuals everywhere they go, the same as a Barnes & Noble wrecks a city's small bookstores.

We're well accustomed to driving to Elkin, Winston, Charlotte, Mount Airy, Wilkesboro and Galax for so much that we're comfortable with it.

We can't compete with malls, so there's no reason to try. It's a long list of goods and services we need here that would be conveniences we'd not have to drive someplace else for anymore. Probably everybody has his or her own mental list.

A few years back, the starter on my truck started acting up. I took it to a Toyota dealership and explained the symptoms in detail. An hour later, the mechanic said he couldn't find a problem. I drove home frustrated, took it to Alton Brooks, who was mechanic at the Exxon station then, and told him what I told them at the dealership. He told me what the problem was and what it would take to fix it, just like on Car Talk. He said it happens all the time on Toyotas.

With Choate Ford shutting down, we have several good mechanics and body shop men needing work in a place where there's more than plenty for them to do.

Dickie McKnight left a job in a factory to open his own small-engine repair shop at home. He does good work, is honest and successful.

Factories that come and go have no effect on his business. Allen Sparks went out on a limb to open a custom car garage and now we have the annual custom car show.

A lot of people in Sparta and the county make their livings by their wits. D.W. Miles is the only businessman in town who gives the kids someplace to go and something to do, the skating rink and the bowling alley. Whether a factory comes or goes has no bearing on these businesses.

Individual initiative is what mountain people are proud of in themselves. We either make our own decisions or they get made for us.

You can count on that.

I'm thinking of the scene in the movie Gladiator where Maximus, the ex-general, counseled the other gladiators to stick together in the arena. They held together against great odds and came through their ordeal whole.

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