Monthly Archives: June 2016

Lazy, I want to be lazy

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I pulled on my third shirt just after 9:30 yesterday morning. The drought continues here in East Tennessee with the high heat and humidity punishing all efforts at productivity. We had spent the morning moving cattle, clearing brush from electric fencing and cleaning manure out of the barn. All of which left me drenched and guzzling water as fast as it leaked out of me. Some days it just seems too brutal to keep up with the workload.

A three-shirt morning

A three-shirt morning

Finally Caleb (my farm helper) and I wrapped up our workday a little after noon. We went into Sweetwater to pick up some supplies at the farmer’s co-op and ran into Tim. After a quick bite to eat at a local Mexican joint we headed back to the farm.

In the evening Tim came over and joined me and Don Davis, a friend of long standing, for dinner. I fixed a pot roast along with carrots, potatoes and a cabbage salad, always a favorite dish of mine and one Cindy dislikes. But since she was visiting family in Florida I could indulge in whatever I wanted to eat (along with a cigar).

Although it had probably been ten years since I had seen Don, like all good friends we were able to reconnect easily. He has written a number of books on Appalachian culture over the years and he brought us up to speed on the history of the American chestnut book he has been writing. He hopes to have a publisher in the coming months and the book in print within the year.

Now, after the sweat of yesterday, I find myself dawdling this morning. There is a full list of projects commanding my attention. But I just can’t bring myself to go back into the heat. This unmanly procrastination is only making matters worse as the mercury climbs into the eighties before 10am.

Yet here I sit.

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Reading this weekend: The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr, a timely read after the Brexit vote.

For Father’s Day: Who We Are

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I grew up in an older time, a time when family members still shared stories about the family’s past. As a kid I latched onto the simple narratives. As I got older I learned to listen between the lines for the more complicated chronicle, the one that linked me with past generations of heroes, rascals, and ordinary men and women. It still amazes me at the amount of family history and stories my parents’ and grandparents’ generation amassed and cherished.12244031_10153787139892990_726768728_n

The paths of knowledge of that family culture for most moderns are overgrown and ill-used. But it’s not too much of a stretch to say that lack of knowledge of our own families’ past leaves us at the mercy of others to complete the narrative for their own ends. Knowing the stories and the paths help us as a people and culture navigate the present and the future.

A primary thread of my paternal ancestors was Huguenot. Kicked out of France at the revocation of Nantes, they landed in New Jersey in the early 1700s after spending a generation first in Amsterdam, then in the Lesser Antilles. My 3x great-grandfather and six brothers fought in the American Revolution. They got land grants in Lycoming, Pennsylvania, after the war. My great-grandfather was born there in 1860. His family joined a wagon train to Cedar County, Iowa, the same year.

A maternal line of Scotch settlers from Vermont fought for the Loyalists and removed themselves to Canada for the next 100 years. One of them finally connected with the Louisiana branch on a hunting trip that also resulted in his marriage.

My 4x great-grandfather owned a plantation in Lyons, Louisiana. The pirate Jean Lafitte’s men sneaked up the bayou one night, robbing the family and stealing all the slaves. The U.S. Navy sent a warship after the pirates. They were caught in Galveston Bay. Lafitte disavowed any knowledge of his men’s indiscretions and washed his hands of their fate. The Navy hung them on the deck of the warship and returned the slaves to captivity.

A maternal great-grandfather had a Confederate pension for carrying the mail during the war. He was the youngest of six brothers. The five older brothers fought in Gray’s 28th Louisiana Infantry in the Battle of Mansfield. One out of five men on the Confederate side died, and many more were injured in the fight. The Southern troops fought with buckshot-loaded hunting shotguns against the rifle-armed North. They walked across the field of battle as their ranks were decimated by rifle fire. They walked up to the Yankee line and fired their buckshot from mere yards away, and they won the day. Only one of the five brothers lived to surrender in 1865. This line of the family owned no slaves; another that did own slaves did not fight.

My aunt, who turns 95 next month, recalls her father giving food to a hungry black man who was asking for work one evening at the back door of the family’s farmhouse near Crowley. A few days later the man was found hanged by the Klan in a tree some miles from the farm, having eventually knocked on the wrong door.

She also remembers the day, while working at Barksdale airbase in Shreveport during WW2, when two black bomber pilots walked into the cafeteria. Both of the men were officers. The white ladies at the lunch line, she says, walked out in mass and were replaced by the black cooks from the back.

A great-uncle was port master in Baton Rouge. He had the excellent facility of being able to swear within a word. “I won’t be under any obli-god-damn-gation to any man!” was a favorite collected by my uncle, a professor of speech and rhetoric.

My father recalls buying live chickens at the A&P in Lake Charles. Back in the meat department, customers would pick out the live chicken they wanted to buy. It would then be butchered and packaged for the walk home. There was no refrigeration either in the grocery store or at home.

One early December day, my dad and a friend, who had been camping near Alexandria, Louisiana, stepped out of the woods and flagged a truck down to catch a ride. When they climbed in the truck, the driver informed them that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor the day before.

When Dad, after serving in the Navy in WW2, disembarked for the final time in San Diego and was discharged, he and his friends headed to their favorite ice cream malt shop. It’s an image that confounds the standard script of the hardened vet. He was 19.

I recall Dad stopping the car on Ryan Street, greeting a man by name and giving him a ride. The man had no legs, and a burlap bag around the stumps. He pulled himself up off the curb and onto the seat next to me.

These and many more stories ground me, place me on the path that goes in front and stretches out behind. Each of us has our own trailhead. That we forget the way and step off the path seems somehow dishonorable and unutterably sad, not only for our immediate families but for the larger human one.

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Reading this weekend: The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset

Eating Cake

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Empire rots and grows dark at the edges even as the lights seem brightest in its heart where the leaders feverishly tweak and prime the flow of the wealth-pump and would-be leaders make promises to restore the Republic to its former glory. And both sets struggle mightily to keep the haves content and the have-nots hopeful.

We live an hour from Knoxville to our north-east and Chattanooga to our south-west in a narrow valley with low ridges. Our county just ten years ago had twelve repairmen servicing phone lines. Today it has one individual who now services two counties with the same amount of landline.

Phone companies have always been required, as a semi-public utility, to maintain that access in rural areas. But the cell phone revolution has allowed them a way out of that obligation. In a historical slight-of-hand, as the number of cell phones proliferated, phone companies began dismantling the service infrastructure. Today a disruption to the landline entails many calls and a week or more response time; a process that is guaranteed to gin up the numbers who get fed up and opt out. The more who opt out, the quainter the requirement to provide the costly landline infrastructure seems until eventually the service is removed and replaced with….?

Meanwhile, currently 7 out of 10 teachers in the US assign homework to students that require a broadband connection to complete the work (according to a recent FCC report). And one out of three households do not subscribe to broadband. The report is primarily urban-centric. Very little data about how rural-households cope. But one could reasonably surmise that for lack of digital infrastructure or for affordability, large sections of this land are left out of the techno-fantasies of our education elites.

Indeed one does not need to read that report. Read an article in a newspaper or watch a segment on a newscast and witness that disconnect between the fantasy imaginings of a connected world and the realities of everyday life. It has only been three years since we began to get a cell phone signal at our house. Before that date I’d have to drive ten miles and park at the Fender’s Methodist Church to take calls. The teenage boy in a neighboring family walked up to our back field (north-east corner) and found a forty-foot patch where he could reach his girlfriend.

Today we enjoy a ghost echo of the digital revolution here in the valley. We now receive cellphone calls in the front two rooms of the house. Outside we can take calls from the house to almost half-way down the drive. At that point you’d still need to drive out to the church to complete your call. And our connection speeds have increased. We get a pretty consistent 1G in those two front rooms with the occasional 3G pulse. And some of the time we get nothing.

I’m not whinging, I have a good job, a good farm and a full belly. But one does wonder who speaks for or is concerned about the rural lives of this country, the kids held back by both finances and access to the digital promised-land. A technological revolution that I suspect the elites are no longer capable of either funding or even conceptualizing a need for outside the core hubs where the lights still burn bright.

There you have it, as a society we are busy rolling up the carpets of communication infrastructure while requiring kids to use a technology which is only sporadically available or on terms they can’t afford. And failing that, they are effectively being asked to kindly turn out the lights when they leave.

Our rural population along with the abandoned urban core are being asked to “eat cake”. And we all know where that ends. And in case you are having trouble imagining, it doesn’t end with a “digital” revolution.