So they made me an offer: I could stay in one of the family’s hunting cabins, set deep in the woods amid their hundreds of acres. Minutes later I was hanging out with Kevin, 19, and his cousins, Cody, 14, and Jordan, 10, at their pool. The family was obviously well-off, at least in local terms: The house was huge, and in addition to owning the gas station, the family bred hunting dogs and owned a metal scrapyard. And raised goats, who stared down at us from a small bluff as we dropped down the water slide.

Kevin, Cody and Jordan seemed to be tickled by the presence of an urban guest; they showed me the house’s “man-cave” (a sign labeled it as such), where camouflage furniture prevailed and hunting trophies covered the walls. Cody told me they had once adopted a sick bobcat. “You’re the first family I’ve ever met to have a bobcat,” I told him.

He corrected me: “We’ve had two.”

The boys took me to two safes in the master bedroom, where the family’s huge gun collection was stored. The arsenal included collector’s items like an intriguing double-barrel shotgun with a separate trigger for each barrel and a pink gun, “for Mom.”

We jolted up an impossibly rutted, rock-filled hill in the family’s side-by-side ATV, with Cody at the wheel. Nobody but me buckled his seatbelt. The cabin, really a Lowe’s tool shed with pieces cut out and windows installed, was perched on a platform high off the ground, deep in the woods. Night was falling.

“This would be a good place to kill someone,” said Kevin, and then looked to see if he had scared me. Inside was a cot, a stove and a half-dozen buzzing wasp nests. Cody burned them with a stove lighter and killed any escapees with his baseball hat.

Later that night, after a pizza from the gas station, we headed back to the cabin for the evening’s activity: target practice. They placed an Ale-8-One bottle horizontally in the nook of a tree, and handed over the Smith & Wesson pistol. (I should note here that I have used guns before and know the basics, so this was not as insane as it sounds.) Bam! I knocked off the whole bottom of the bottle with the first shot, though the top stayed put and I proceeded to miss it entirely, six shots in a row.

The night was calm, except for a sting from a half-dead wasp that I missed on the cot. I thanked everyone the next morning and took the road into the hills, reaching Paintsville by about 11 a.m. It turned out I could have made it the night before, but I was glad I hadn’t tried. My motel in Paintsville was quiet and anonymous. The Marsillett family experience had been anything but.