My bookishness, my Louisiana childhood, my habit of looking at a rooster at the end of his procreational contributions and seeing a pot of coq au vin — sometimes I feel the odd duck in this Tennessee valley. But what I and my neighbors do share is a respect for the land, work, and community and the pleasure that comes from doing for yourself.
The homes in this valley are often unattractive, built piecemeal, their landscapes strewn with the debris of a wasteful industrial world. But one man’s junk is indeed another man’s treasure. Tell a neighbor that a weld broke on your bushhog and he immediately rummages around in the weeds before emerging with a stack of metal bars from an old bedframe he salvaged from a scrap heap 10 years earlier. “These should do the trick,” he says, then helps you weld the bushhog back together.
This is a poor but resilient rural landscape, a land inhabitated by multi-generation hardscrabblers seeking only privacy and independence. Chickens, a pig, maybe a cow are common even on an acre or two, and often a well-tended garden of tomatoes, okra, and pole beans sits alongside the house or barn.
In our valley, neighbors seldom call a specialist to fix the plumbing or dig out a clogged septic line. They repair tractors, mend fences, wire a barn, butcher chickens, cure hams, make wine, deal with an intruder (With wandering dogs, one old neighbor adheres to the three S’s: shoot, shovel, and shut up), or any of the thousands of other skills essential to living a rural life. They do it all themselves or shout over the barbed-wire fence for help.
A neighbor may help you run the sawmill for an afternoon, accepting payment in a few beers, conversation, and the side rounds from the logs for firewood. When you step into their hot summer kitchen, you may find them hovering over the stove canning endless jars of garden produce. Sometimes you’ll come home to find homemade loaves of bread, a jar of jam, a bottle of fruit wine, or a basket of vegetables leaning against the front door.
For better or worse, our neighbors have a yeoman’s obstinacy to rules and regulations and change. Even after a couple of hundred years (or maybe because of it), they still do not take to outside government intervention with enthusiasm. They prefer to be left alone to live in a manner that has been repeated down through the generations.
And this valley is certainly not unique. Across the continent rural values of community, cooperation, and resilience, while battered, still have life. Perhaps we are fortunate that while the urban centers still glow pink-cheeked with wealth, these rustics have more or less been abandoned to muddle along and do for themselves. It’s that abandonment that has preserved and nurtured self-reliance and partnership.
Definitely not an Eden, theirs is a resourcefulness often born of poverty. But it is one model, of sorts, that offers an emergency escape plan for the hard times to come: a poor people without the necessary capital resources to stripmine the future for their benefit — a gift that this planet might appreciate at this particular juncture in its 4.5 billion years.
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Reading this weekend: various winemaking books. This is the season of country wines. We have a plum mead and elderberry wine bubbling away merrily.
Stubborn is an adjective not happily worn by many I tend to travel with, but it does have some redeeming merits. Hardscrabble, resourceful, and full of life; a recipe of its own. Not too unlike a pot of coq au vin I’m guessing.
That is a good twist. Coq au vin: a delicious dish made of very humble ingredients.
Receiving any of this mid-August rain? We’ve been fortunate to get some much need moisture – without getting so much that Noah’s blue prints have been requested (Springfield IL, and Louisiana don’t seem to have been so fortunate).
We started the first week off with 3.5 inches of rain. But it has been dry since that windfall. I’ve been looking at videos of the homeland. A bit stomach churning.
Oh no, you want to kill Humpy The Coq!
You’ll have to be more diplomatic about that!
youtube.com/watch?v=pGJH_-S_MGs
Uh, right. So, we are doing performance reviews of members of the flock. Fowl not meeting current production standards will be encouraged to seek other opportunities. We invite all who don’t meet these standards for dinner next Saturday night.
Better?
My boss hasn’t made any procreational (though countless other) contributions to our national flock; I’d still like to serve her lean carcass as the main course (based on past and present performance and mindful of the fact that other job opportunities are unlikely to present themselves for someone like her). Shall we say eight o’clock?
Please bring a mixed salad as a side and a nice Rioja to toast her past achievements.
I’m trying to decide which book to bring to the funeral – Michael Oakeshott or Charles Walters?
And while I’m contemplating sponsoring a motorcade for her -any thoughts on J.D.Vance’s book? http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-on-the-bayou/
Michael,
Thanks for the link, Dreher is right on the mark about why the rural voter feels alienated. My thoughts on J.D. Vance? I’ll have to order his book. Another excellent work on this topic is “Deer Hunting with Jesus” by Joe Bageant.
Brian
This is the book where Joe suggests:
Liberals are going to have to pick up this piece of roadkill with our bare hands.
When talking about politically reconnecting with his kin in Virginia?? Wow, life in Umerika is gettin’ pretty rough. And this was written before the great recession. Is timing everything?
As always, Clem.
Just listened to the NPR piece. That interviewer seems to have partaken of the pharmaceutical goods advertised during the interview.
I bet the Bageant book is the better choice.
Clem, if you’re looking for evidence of things getting rough, here’s a sentence from the Irish Times:
“Using data and artefacts discovered from commercial digs during the Celtic Tiger period, archaeologists are attempting to piece…”
Sounds to me as though they, archaeologists of their own times unlike the archaeologists mentioned in the piece, have chosen a strategy of “positive estrangement by periodization” as a way to cope with the last in a long series of blows to Irish morale.