Blame it on the rain, the excess food or that I’m struggling to make sense of the Paul Kingsnorth novel, The Wake, written in an invented language. But I can’t seem to muster the energy for a blog post today. So I’ll leave you with a video of my neighbor running our Norwood sawmill yesterday. He helped me cut and stack about 300 board feet of oak lumber.
Video link: Our neighbor cutting an oak board on our Norwood sawmill.
It always seemed cold out on the Louisiana marsh as a boy. On Thanksgiving eve my father and I would head out to the hunting camp, a ramshackle building under centuries-old live oaks. At dinner we’d sit down at a long communal table and enjoy hearty bowls of duck gumbo. The dozen or more men would talk, and we the sons would keep quiet, seen but not heard. The morning smell of bacon and eggs served as an early alarm. And by 4:30 we were climbing into mud-boats and heading off across the marsh. At regular intervals a father and son would disembark into a wooden pirogue and push off into the darkness, usually arriving at a duck blind an hour before sunrise. Our hunt would begin with my father calling the ducks, enticing them to circle and land.
At the end of the hunt in late morning, we’d head home, pulling into the drive around noon. Thanksgiving preparations inside were well underway, pies lined up on the counter. I’d cast an anxious gaze to determine that a favored sweet potato pie was among them, then off for a shower and a change to clean clothes. The table was set and dinner typically eaten in mid-afternoon; afterward, the calls would begin from distant relatives.
Today, as a grown man, my rituals have changed. I’m now the relative calling across the distance of a time zone and seven hundred miles. Instead of a duck hunt early Thanksgiving, my morning is filled with chores: feeding pigs, sheep, cattle and chickens, stacking wood for the woodstove. Busy, but still time will be made later for a woodland walk on our farm. We eat late, so no need to rush dinner preparations. Some years we are graced by the company of friends, and other years we dine alone. This year, Cindy travels and I will dine by myself or with a couple of friends.
I’ll prepare a roast duck in memory of those boyhood hunts with my father. And I’ll regret the absence from the table of a sweet potato pie. But since it is Thanksgiving, I’ll be grateful for reasonable health, a loving partner, a satisfying life, a full library; that my father is still with us, as is a large abundance of siblings and other kin. I’ll also be thankful for what is absent in my life, namely, the darkness of war and the dislocation from hearth and home of the refugee.
As I step out on the porch before sunrise Thanksgiving morning, the air will smell of smoke from a dozen farmhouses in our valley. It will be cold on our farm here in the hills of East Tennessee. The cattle will begin to bawl. But over their din, if I listen well, I will hear the sound of my father calling the wild ducks out on the marsh.
It was late afternoon when I stopped at a friend’s farm. An invitation to sample three new homebrews and some freshly sliced prosciutto from a 2-year-old ham had been issued. The short drive found me passing dozens of small homes and farms. None of them could be called financially “going concerns.” Most had vegetable gardens and chickens; some had fighting cocks staked to huts; many had a steer or two in a small pasture and a few pigs in sties near the barn; one had a gutted buck draped from a pickup truck. These are features of our landscape. It’s a traditional landscape of those getting by, doing for themselves. Not quite the “self-sufficing” farms of old, but closer than most in this modern world.
Tools of the trade
In the 1930 census, one-third of “self-sufficing” farms were located in Appalachia, accounting for the majority of farms in the region. These farms generated less than $100 a year, produced more than 50 percent of their needs on the land, and bartered and traded for the rest in an essentially cashless network. In a system hallowed by custom, kinship, shared work, and shared deprivation, these hill people still led a life rich in music, folkways, food, and craft.
Cashless networks create challenges within a capitalist economy. Communities operating outside the prevailing system must always be brought inside, to the sheltering embrace of improvement, progress, and markets. A people not in search of “the civilizing influence of a cash economy” will be given it anyway. And once it’s presented, they’ll often surrender to it, for after all, the sirens’ call of cheaper, plentiful goods is hard to ignore when there is money to spend.
The 1930s were really the midpoint in a long, complicated pursuit of bringing “progress” and wages to the mountain people. That pursuit ultimately resulted in the destruction of those self-sufficing farms, the cashless society and culture, and what remained was a shell, a dependent people, and the faintest ghostly echo of that world today.
Perhaps it is a romantic streak, but I see ghosts. Ghosts of what we have lost in our drive for progress and shiny baubles. One North Carolina woman, at the brink of the Civil War, anticipated the loss to come in that conflict: “How quietly we drift out into such an awful night, into the darkness, the lowering clouds, the howling winds, and the ghostly light of our former glory going with us to make the gloom visible with its pale glare.”
A friend of mine works with non-profits and universities establishing links between the peoples of Appalachia and the Maramures region of Romania. ‘Twas a link I thought a stretch until he sent me William Blacker’s chronicle Along the Enchanted Way. It is a haunting work, beautifully written, of a land isolated and untouched yet by the capitalist economy and unaffected by the communist government just fallen—a land like ours once was, of custom, barter, and kinship, of self-sufficing farms.
During the years Blacker lived among the Romanians, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, he witnessed the impact of cash and commercial goods on that society. How quickly a rural, traditional society unravels, one outside paycheck or charity at a time, leaving a pale glare to light the path behind.
We find it hard to step outside our immediate desires and see the long-term consequences. We bemoan the loss of kith and kin, praise the handmade, the local, yet undermine all by our gluttonous drive for new markets and consumption. Left behind is the debris of formerly stable societies, slathered now with the cheap, sugary pink frosting of hope and mountains of discarded plastic toys.
On our farm, we don’t lead a self-sufficing life. We try. But even with our table loaded each night with food sourced from just outside our door, with a pantry full of jars of preserves, pickles, and canned produce from the garden, with bacon, jowls, and hams under the stairs, we conjure only a pale outline of what was or could be. We try to barter and repair the literal and figurative fences in our community. But, we fail. Those links to a self-sufficing life are now severed. We are too plugged into this economy, too enamored to envision a way out.
The problem is not just our fossil-fueled lifestyle, our globally connected train of goods and services, or our commodification of all physical aspects of our modern existence. It is our mindset. We discard with ignorance and shortsightedness and embrace the new without question.
Perhaps we mistake the lowering clouds as security and the howling winds as the sound of contented voices. Yet … if the pale light guiding my path leads me to three homebrewed beers and some home-cured prosciutto, then I’ll gladly trudge on.
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Reading this weekend: Book of Tripe: and gizzards, kidneys, feet, brains and all the rest. By Stephane Reynaud.
Doors are both opportunities and story tellers.
Front door to the potting shed.
Rear door, with ramp, to potting shed. Opens into barn.
Door to brooder run and coop door.
Opening to cattle chute.
Two entrances to the stock barn.
One hundred and eighty years ago, while Andrew Jackson was president, around the year the Cherokee signed the treaty to vacate these lands, a white oak seedling began to grow on our farm. Ignored by the tramping feet and perhaps nurtured by the blood, by the close of the Civil War this seedling would have grown to a modest thirty feet — one of many thousands in a vast troop competing for space in the canopy, biding its time, waiting for the weaknesses of other trees to become manifest before taking its rightful space.
At the turn of last century, this particular white oak would have approached sixty-five to seventy-five feet, closing in on its mature height of ninety feet. But it would have another full century and more to add to its girth. Nourished by a taproot plunging deep into the earth, undisturbed by the butchery of men in distant lands, the arrival of the car, the plane, the tractor, this tree methodically put on growth: skinny rings in the lean famine years and fat, upper-class belly rings of indulgence in the feast years.
A survivor of countless storms, the tree stayed put when others failed. Not some flighty understory sprout that rose, then fell back in mere decades. Not the grand, fast-growing tulip poplar. This white oak was the mighty burgher of the woodland village, stolid.
An active participant in staying put, it constantly moved. A casual glance down the drive found our gauge of the weather: with each breath of wind, the twitching and bending of its smaller branches in dance informed us of the tempo of the music.
When on that day an average thunderstorm rolled across the opposite ridge, when out of the thousands of lightning strikes one sought out this tree, our tree, was there any awareness of death, self, family, loss, and the endurance of nearly two centuries? Was there a sense of submission to a greater power, any hubris that this couldn’t happen to such a mighty oak?
In the end it was an honorable death, a long life that fell to a greater axe than mine, that random but predictable shaft of wild energy — an act foredestined those one hundred and eighty years ago, that the mighty and the low will fall.
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Reading this weekend: The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson. The perfect book in case you get marooned on the Faroe islands and have to cure a joint of mutton.