Category Archives: Community

Ross Road on a Spring Day

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It is the kind of drive that restores some of my dwindling supply of faith. On this late spring day, two kids in inner tubes are bobbing in the faster current of the creek that sweeps under the bridge over Possum Trot. It is an unremarkable stream that runs alongside our road, and it never builds up much speed unless in flood. I honk my horn in hello as I pass. Across the way a neighbor is using a skid steer to smooth out a new driveway. He looks up and waves.

Young gilts

The skies are May blue, with deeper shades and depths in the distance where storms linger without threat. I make the left turn onto Ross Road. In a small pasture on the right that stretches back to a low wooded ridge, a large family works together to set out a garden. The man tills while his teenage sons pull sod from the patch. Back a distance from the road, a cluster of women chat in the shade. Perched in lawn chairs next to another stream, they keep a close eye on a passel of youngsters who run shrieking in and out of the water in a game of chase. I honk again and wave.

Around the curve I brake suddenly for a flock of chickens crossing. They belong to a neighbor whose poultry roam at will during daylight hours, as they should on all winding country lanes. That I never see a dead chicken in the road shows that either the poultry are street savvy or at least that area drivers keep a sharp watch. Off to the side of the neighbors’ is a small homemade hoop house. Behind it, in a quarter-acre lot, a distinctive pod of hogs lies beached under the cool shade of overhanging trees.

I glance to the left, where Big Sandy cuts off on an asphalt tributary. A man feeds his horses and another stacks firewood. Ross Road follows a soft curve, framed by a never-run-dry spring to the left and a bulk feed bin to the right. Cresting the hill, I see off behind a well-maintained rancher that the wife of a fellow who has dug several ponds on our farm is taking her rest from mowing the yard. We both wave.

Ross takes a long upward bend to the east just after passing Lynn Road, to the south. I come upon the Burnett family, who periodically buy our feeder pigs. They have recently leveled an old barn (which with the next good gust of wind would probably have fallen on its own), and today some of them are busy preparing the foundation for a replacement. Others are hoeing in an adjacent and embarrassingly tidy garden. Knowing the state of my own garden plot, I am tempted not to honk, but they flip me a quick wave and I reply in kind.

The road narrows as it passes through a wood just before the Brights’ dairy. Upon emerging from the trees, the lane aligns at certain times of the year with both the rising sun and the eastward route of the morning school bus — making for a dangerous game that involves squinting and a desperate hope that your own vehicle and that of the bus driver are both in separate lanes, keeping all on the above-ground side of life.

The path widens, slightly, and I turn down a hill between two dairy pastures, where I see Mrs. Bright tending the modest (and again tidy) garden across from her home. Another curve, past the dairy’s calving paddock, alongside the milking parlor, and I’m on the final stretch to Stockton Valley.

At the stop sign I turn left. A large garden just behind a small red barn that sports an extensive collection of metal farm equipment signs, a just-baled hayfield, another rancher whose lawn is erupting with spring flowers — I’ve arrived at the demarcation of my boundary. I pick up speed on the long, quiet straightaway that leads out of our community.

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Reading this weekend: How to Be a Farmer (MD Usher), a collection of Greek and Roman authors on farming. No Country for Old Men (C. McCarthy).

Notes on Community

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In America I encountered sorts of associations of which, I confess, I had no idea, and I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely. — Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America,” 1830

 

Bridge club, supper club, the Optimists, Boys Village, Campfire Girls, visits with shut-ins, hunting club, deacon, and trustee. These are a few of the volunteer organizations and duties in which my father spent his spare time, after work, participating and helping. And they do not include the myriad of professional organizations, as a civil engineer, for which he served on boards for most of his adult life.

Some of the organizations were merely social, but each brought people together in the community in a shared purpose. In referencing Tocqueville, it is a reminder that this predilection for voluntary association is longstanding. It was part of the fabric of our early democracy. It wasn’t a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ethic but a banding together to build bootstraps for the many … hospitals, churches, schools, colleges, care for those in need, friendships in likeminded professional and social groups.

That this son has failed to live up to the same standard, I am acutely aware. And it is of small encouragement to note the overall societal trend that keeps me company. For, as Mr. Tolkien said, and I’m paraphrasing here, surely it is more honorable to fight the long defeat with worthy companions.

It has been well documented and dissected by many that civic engagement through volunteer organizations, as well as by church attendance, has dropped off, and continues its descent, to all-time lows. The blame, if it is a blame, falls on everything from an expanded workforce to our easy preference for visual entertainments. Some of this unraveling can be laid at the feet of a greatly enhanced role of government in our lives. Hard to argue for a community effort to build a hospital, school, or bridge when the larger governmental structures can provide necessary funds. Yet, while I will not debate the merits of a more structured safety net, something is nonetheless lost. And that something — the ability to collectively organize at the smallest levels of our society — might be needed again in the future, as resources decline and the consequences of a couple of centuries of fouling our nest begin to pay back in increasing dividends.

Even if Mr. Zuckerberg’s Metaverse brings us the intimate consolations we didn’t know we desired, we are getting closer to finally achieving the complete atomization of the individual, leaving each to his own great loneliness. This isolation from former community I felt keenly while attending the funerals of my parents last month. The church of my childhood, where all knew you, for better and for worse, had changed. It had morphed into a gargantuan entity, now complete with climbing wall and coffee bar that nourish the experiential life, if not the soul. The metamorphosis was so complete that few church members, and none of the 12 (count them) pastors, or any deacon bothered to stop by and offer condolences to the family of a man who had been a faithful and active member since the early 1960s. That both visitations were held in one of the numerous church chapels, down the hall from the administrative offices, made this abandonment of a member more striking. For if a church can’t come together as a community for the death of one of its own, then it is indeed dead as an institution.

Direct on the heels of my despairing over the loss of that particular community, this simple outing happened: I joined Cindy and our most recent farm volunteer for our area beekeeping club’s annual potluck. It was held under a pavilion on a beautiful October evening at the fairgrounds of an outlying rural county. Like my memories of church picnics of old, two long tables offered up dozens of homemade dishes. (We provided a large pot of pork-seasoned collard greens that was emptied by evening’s end). Perhaps 50 of us gathered and talked in common purpose, drew tickets for the lottery of items that all attendees had donated. There was warmth and fellowship aplenty, acknowledgment of new beekeepers who had emerged from their first year with healthy hives, attention called to the new officers of the club, certificates presented to those who had served as mentors — in short, all of those standard small organization activities that most of us have experienced. The club made each and everyone there feel included, gathered around shared goals, something that Tocqueville would have recognized.

The future, by my reading, offers long odds. It’s possible, of course, that my viewpoint is such that, because I farm small I am conditioned to see small; or maybe it is because my anarchistic tendencies are to distrust large solutions. But the knowable scale of small groups working together is to me the essence of our democratic past. Even if, by involvement, we cannot turn the tide, then perhaps our aim should be simply to keep the spirit alive, the muscle memory of collective autonomous action exercised. Maybe we are just Irish monks in a new dark age emerging, copying texts for a future generation to decipher. Yet involvement in where we live is the tapestry of who we are.

We must do better.

I must do better.

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Reading this weekend: A selection of ghost stories, by M. R. James, A Short History of the World According to Sheep (S. Coulthard), and The Way Home: tales from a life without technology (M. Boyle).

 

Thoughts on Rural Resilience

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Scraping a small hog

(This post was first published in August, 2016. I have been wondering recently what this Covid influx of Californians and Oregonians, among others, will mean for our small valley. Nothing good, I suspect.)

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 equipment back together.

This is a poor but resilient rural landscape, a land inhabited 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: I Drink Therefore I Am: a philosopher’s guide to wine (R. Scruton) and Death On the Barrens (G. Grinnell). The latter is a grim and beautiful account of six somewhat foolish young men taking a canoe trip through a landscape they didn’t understand.

Notes From My Other Home

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Good morning,

I am off the farm and spending time with family in Louisiana where my father is observing his 94th birthday. He still has a handshake that will make you wince and his appetite for boiled crawfish, I am happy to report, is undiminished. Sitting around with family and eating the good food of this region has left me both stuffed and content. Or, as my maternal grandmother taught me to say, I have had a sufficiency. Here is a post from the archives about both the sufficient and the gourmandizing tendencies of this son of this soil.

My father, nephew Cody with his son Eli.

Blog note: I’ll catch up on my country wine posts next weekend.   

What We Share

Sitting down with kith and kin at my dad’s 91st birthday, I was reminded that we learn to eat as children. The table last Saturday was weighed down with more than 150 pounds of crawfish and accompanying bags of spicy boiled corn and potatoes. Homemade jambalaya my sister Laura made. And, for the vegan niece, some sort of weird processed “hotdog.” We variously stood and sat as we talked and listened. Food, family, friends, and lots of conversation.

The role food played last week was the same role it played in my childhood, and still does in my adulthood, that of bringing people together. From the crawfish and crab boils to grand Sunday dinners and church picnics; from duck and chicken-and-sausage gumbos to BBQ and fried catfish, links of boudin, and platters of dirty rice; from running trotlines, fishing 30 miles out in the gulf, and hauling up shrimp nets or oyster tongs to shooting ducks and geese and harvesting deer, the end goal was always the same: food that you could share.

TV and computers were not part of our world. No screen time, head down, eyes staring. You left the table only after you asked to be excused and were given permission. Weeknights were family dinners and catching up. Weekends and holidays were gatherings of the larger group of friends and family. And always set to the backdrop of food, meat, seafood, game, vegetables, and the ubiquitous dish of rice.

Sunday was the time for the big dinner of the week. It was frequently an occasion for serving up some fish or seafood we had caught — red snapper in butter and lemon, mackerel balls fried with a cornmeal dusting, platters of oysters, mounds of fried catfish, all accompanied by coils of the spicy local sausages, warmed on the grill. The family would often be joined by guests, perhaps a couple of youth from Boys Town or a new minister and his family.

During one such dinner, with a new pastor from Oklahoma, we received a call from an elderly neighbor. Upon coming downstairs that fine spring morning, she found an alligator in her parlor. It had strolled in through an open door and made itself at home. Dad used a ski rope to make a noose, slipped it over the beast’s head, and dragged it back out to the bayou, no doubt confirming in the new minister’s mind his worst fears about where he had relocated his family.

That is me (on the right) with my youngest nephew, Finn. We just finished having breakfast at K.D.’s

Some Sundays after service we headed to the Piccadilly. Dining at the small-town Southern restaurant was reminiscent of the Lyle Lovett song, “Church.” If your preacher became a bit long-winded, you might just find yourself waiting in line behind the First Baptists, or, God forbid, the Methodists.

From a kid’s perspective, Fridays were hopeful evenings. My parents were active in a supper club and a bridge club. Supper club in the house meant hovering near the kitchen to snag plates of oysters Rockefeller fresh from the oven, bridge club loading up on shrimp broiled in butter and spices.

Annually, there were the church picnics, feasts of such epic proportions they required each of us to be heroes of the plate and fork. Whole tables were devoted to fried chicken and banana puddings, the memory of which would still be a siren’s call onto the rocks of gluttony, except for the fact that underpinning all the food was the fellowship of friends and family.

A bowl of goodness at a roadside diner in Mermantau.

So today, on our farm, with freezers full and gardens gathering steam, we ask the weekly question, What do we have to share and who can we invite to join in the bounty — neighbors in the valley, friends from town or city, longer-distance guests?

Last night six friends helped us devour bowls of creamy grits topped with cooked-down collard greens and fried slices from a terrine of braised pork. We dined outside, sitting late into the evening as the full moon rose high in the sky. Good friends, conversation, and a bottle of elderberry mead helped us keep the faith with who we are as a people and the traditions we carry forward from childhood.

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Reading this weekend: Essays from The Gift of Good Land (W. Berry)

 

Exit Strategy: Thoughts on an Election

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Clearly, we love a conflict, to pick a side, root for the team, experience letdown at defeat and exhilaration in victory. We love our quick dopamine hits: the Facebook post that generates a fast 50 loves and the vote count that suddenly swings our way. More than anything, we love to have an enemy, an other, on whom to focus our frustration.

Mustering patience for anything other than an immediate result is tiring to the spirit. So we eschew the path that requires time, cooperation, and uncertain outcome in favor of the sure but temporary win. We embrace the Pyrrhic victory, placing the laurel on our heads even while standing on the bodies of our own troops.

In these contests there is no room for the individual to stand at the 30-yard line and hold up both hands, saying, “Stop!” To ignore the onrushing team and shouting crowd, refuse to chant with the cheerleaders on the sideline, is the conduct of a fence straddler, a milquetoast, a loser.

To suggest a middle ground while one side marshals masses of shock troops and the other encourages outliers with assault rifles is seen as a capitulation of Chamberlain proportions. Suggest, however, that both teams are playing the wrong game, that different rules are needed, that the stadium itself should be decommissioned, and shouts of “Heretic!” reverberate from the stands.

The farm, I submit, is an ideal off-ramp to exit the battle. It’s a quiet, sequestered space where a person might practice losing his mind in order to find it. On the farm, there is no winning side; every success is built on the combined efforts of the players. The farmer can only garden long term in the same spot if he works in concert with the soil. The cabbages he eats need the manure of the sheep and his own labor in order to grow. The fence is built much easier with the aid of the neighbor. The grass depends on the rain and the sun to flourish. The lamb is butchered only with a thoughtful coalescence of effort: a provision for future generations, a conservation of resources, a debiting and crediting of natural outputs and inputs….

a large white oak log on the sawmill

Milling a pine log (Trevor)

oak log on the sawmill, cut into 1 inch thick planks.

If we are to yell at our neighbor instead of asking for assistance, expect the cabbages to grow again without replenishing their plot, slaughter and eat all of the livestock at once, then we might enjoy momentary gratification. But, be prepared, the next season will be one of want and loneliness, the laudations false echoes off the ridge and the crown of laurels we wear on our head withered.