* * When a confrontation goes angry

I had an interesting e-conversation the other day with a complete stranger, a young woman from Brooklyn, New York, who I’ve never met, named Marisha Camp. You may have read about her; much to her consternation she’s been all over the news lately.

Marisha is a young, free-spirited soul, a vagabond, an adventurer, a student of the human condition. She’s a talented photographer. She and her brother Jesse were on a lengthy road trip recently when they encountered enough hostility to fear for their lives and on the front pages of local newspapers. I took more than a passing interest because the incident took place not five miles from War, West Virginia, where one of my novels was set.

(Note, these days you can find almost anybody on the Internet. Try it!)

(Note, the internet can also spread a story like wildfire.)

I took it upon myself to reach out to Marisha. When I wrote, she quickly replied with this response: “Had we merely had a weird incident in a parking lot, it would have ended there. But Adkins posted photos of our car and license plate on Facebook, along with cryptic comments about protecting children. So we wake up one morning and these posts are getting 200 shares and people are commenting about every place they've seen us, some of it true, some not, and there are these crazy stories about us chasing children out of parks...”

So here’s what happened. Marisha and Jesse were traveling around in his car, with Massachusetts license plates, seeing and photographing their way across the country. Admittedly, they weren’t minding their own business. They were openly friendly, engaging men, women and children in conversation and often taking their photos. But they were certainly not out to hurt anybody.

McDowell County, West Virginia, is by far the poorest county in the third poorest state in the nation, the most destitute of the destitute. From a zenith of 99,000 people in the 1950 census (more than Montgomery County has now), it has shrank to around 21,000. It is likely the largest non-disaster related diaspora America has ever seen. Nowhere has there been a greater boom, then subsequent bust, tied to the fortunes of coal mining, than the War area. It’s where assistance program, both public and private, go to die. It’s a gold mine for a novelist, but often hell for passers-by.

Marisha and Jesse stopped and spoke with some teenage boys who were playing outside, hitting each other with sticks. They didn’t even take photos of them. They drove a few miles up the road and stopped at a convenience store. While inside, a woman, the aforementioned “Adkins,” apparently a mother of one of the boys, parked her van so as to completely trap them. Twenty minutes of loud, angry, and accusatory confrontation ensued until they were finally “rescued” by a state trooper who roundly scolded them before allowing them to drive away.

Marisha wrote to me, “We were terrified. We'd spent maybe three minutes in (the prior town), in great part because the only adult we found to talk to did not want to appear on camera. So all of this was caused by Jesse asking some boys whether they were having a stick fight. A five second encounter. We didn’t have a long conversation or photograph them. The world has become a very dark place when either of these things causes a world of fear...”

Ms. Jennifer Adkins, the aforementioned woman who cornered them, took it upon herself to say nasty things on-line, posting their license plate and sinister accusations, and calling the act of taking a photo an act of aggression. Seriously!

Yes, there are child molesters out there and there are pedophiles. But most child tormentors are familiar to the victims. The Camps got portrayed as cultural strip-miners, so to speak. And the locals got portrayed as mob-like vigilantes. Nobody came out looking good.

Again, Marisha, “The internet turned what could have been just a weird and bad encounter in a parking lot into this nightmare that won’t end – people are still writing awful things about West Virginia and calling me ‘prissy’ and Jesse much worse. People were writing, ‘shoot first, ask questions later.’ It shook our foundation of safety, not naively overestimated in the first place, and then the whole world feels like they have to offer a critique of your behavior when you felt so vulnerable.

“I can’t tell you how much I wish none of this had happened.”

Me, too.

I do lots of similar travel, meeting and talking to lots of strangers. I try to conduct myself civilly but I’m opinionated and I’m sure I’ve ruffled some feathers. But do we have to be so suspicious of strangers?