Category Archives: Resilience

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.

Hurricane Laura, Eight Weeks Later

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This past week I spent the day visiting my hometown of Lake Charles, in Southwest Louisiana.

The old Calcasieu Marine (now Capitol One)

The first blue tarps appeared about 60 miles east of town, accompanied by the occasional snapped off tree or branch. By the time I was 20 miles out, the tarps and the trees alongside I-10 were joined by blown out billboards, crumpled metal buildings, piles of debris, and my growing sense of nervousness.

Driving into Lake Charles, a modest city of 78,000 and 200,000 in the metropolitan area, my sense that a catastrophe, an indiscriminate bomb of sorts, had hit, was overwhelming. I have driven through the aftermath of a tornado, and this was similar — but multiplied by a thousand. Instead of damage extending a few blocks, the swath of Hurricane Laura’s wrath reached 25 miles across. Estimates are that 95 percent of the buildings in the city itself sustained damage, and that does not include the impact to the areas directly outside the city limits or the parishes south and north.

I pulled off the interstate onto Enterprise Avenue, a major thoroughfare that cuts through the city north to south. Driving down the long-familiar street, I felt like I was being struck by a continuous gut punch. Eight weeks post-Laura and homes were still tarped, trees, belongings, and other debris still stacked high in yards and at curbside. Shuttered businesses — the triple hit of Covid, then Laura, then Hurricane Delta — haunted a landscape that will be fighting for years to try to recover. (The poorer side of town that I was driving through might just not make it at all.) Whatever financial resources a small-business owner might have had at the start of the year were gone, blown away.

Downtown, the old Calcasieu Marine building I helped build in 1982 stood as a silent memorial to 150-mile-an-hour winds: 22 floors of blown out windows, a contemporary folly to building a skyscraper on the Southern coastal plain. A few blocks away, a brother-in-law’s music venue lacked a second floor. It had spilled out onto the street like a ruptured bag of groceries during the storm. Throughout the city was the whine of chainsaws and tree crews mulching downed timber. The churches were not spared; one side was solid and welcoming of the faithful, the other side split open like a ripe melon, its pews and carpet piled up at the curb.

A landscape after a hurricane has hit is markedly open. Previously obscured buildings are now visible, a large percentage of the trees gone in a vast instant, as if a particularly greedy timber company has put in a big order.

the “open” landscape behind the family home

It was without surprise that I pulled into the family drive and was greeted by yet more splintered and severed trees and the ubiquitous tarped roof. Entering the house, I found my father, now 93, waiting at the kitchen table, along with a sister and niece. Rain from the approaching Hurricane Zeta (A record five hurricanes have hit the state so far this year) had poured onto the floor in what my sister jokingly called the “family swimming pool.” A living room that had sustained heavy damage from a fallen tree still waited on repairs by the overloaded construction crews. The house had been tarped and reinforced by another brother-in-law after Laura, but in a climate that deals in repeated storms, a thin layer of plastic is no substitute for an actual roof.

Throughout the day, family members collected for my visit to hang out, share stories, catch up. I remarked that this time the damage seemed more severe, much more so than for Rita. They all agreed. And if Rita was the benchmark for previous storm damage, then the catastrophic scope of Laura was off the chart.

But through it all I was struck by how resilient they all were. No one complained, just laughed off the destruction all around, if anything, grumbled the most about the never ending Covid restrictions. There were ongoing shortages, particularly of building supplies. Lake Charles is competing in its need with the rebuilding from the damage in the West Coast wildfires. And, of course, all of this is set to the backdrop of the ever-present pandemic and the related global supply chain deficiencies.

Schools are closed because of the pandemic and the storm damage. Senior care facilities are closed, their residents rehomed hours away in sister centers. Few restaurants are open, though many have food trucks parked in front of their buildings, serving meals as the work of cleanup goes on inside. Because most voting precincts were damaged, residents of all 34 citywide will vote on November 3 in the Burton Coliseum, the agricultural arena.

Hurricanes, like all disasters, test the mettle of a community. Some pitch in together, clear the debris, and rebuild. Some, riven by divisions and lack of will and resources, drift away and disintegrate. Lake Charles will likely be among the former, though there are areas, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods, that will need active assistance to get back to any degree of normalcy — whatever that looks like as we leave this year of 2020.

Late in the afternoon of my visit, as I drove out of town, I passed a stately live oak known as the Sallier Oak that serves as the symbol of the city. It had survived Laura in all its twisted beauty. Many of its leaves were missing, a few limbs gone, but it stood more or less as it had for 375 years, anchored in the earth of Southwest Louisiana. As I pulled onto the interstate and headed east, I smiled, thinking that that old tree was an apt metaphor for both my family and my hometown: battered yet still standing.

Living Life: Do You Really Need an App for That?

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Amongst the sea of photographs and notes on our fridge is a magnet holding up a photo of nephews and nieces. It reads, “Try Organic Food! Or, as your grandparents called it, Food!” Such is the excitement in our lives that we frequently laugh when we see it. Just as often, we reference it in our conversations about the world of technology we live in.

Usually the conversations’ theme is something along the lines of how reliant we all have become on technology as a substitute for observation — how the abandonment of, in the words of Wes Jackson, “eyes to acres” shortcuts our overall understanding of our individual lands (e.g., applying a chemical spray when closer scrutiny might have yielded a different and less harmful alternative). No doubt, shortcuts can be useful; nothing is inherently wrong with them. Yet is there even one among us who would prefer to jump directly from birth to old age, skipping all the living that comes in between? It’s the journey, after all, that provides what is needed to understand and enjoy.

The elderly neighbor just over the hill has always planted by the signs. He keeps a close eye on the phases of moon, the signs of the zodiac, the lengths of the days, and what he observes informs his decisions to plant crops, harvest hay, or cut green manure. Planting by the signs is backed by walks on his land, local custom, a lifetime of farming, and generational knowledge from those who came before him.

But, if you have neither the benefit of instruction by an elderly farmer nor the time in your busy life to acquire such skill, help is at hand: A planting by the signs app is available. Another is there to remind you when to rotate your pastures. Having trouble getting out to the garden? Yet another reminds you of when to pick your produce.

It would be funny, this “farming out” of our observational skills, if it weren’t. Our over-reliance on a technical interface undermines our knowledge of our land and environment. The shortcuts of our lives prevent us from taking the time to live our lives. That we have begun to confuse understanding with outsourced expertise is not a surprise. The apps are merely the latest indicator of our disconnect from the natural world.

Last fall, I was standing in the woods with a younger neighbor as we mapped out a fence line on our property boundary. We were looking for the terminus, an old white oak tree, according to the deed. The neighbor whipped out his phone and fired up a survey app. It was all very impressive, the glowing screen clearly marking where the line was, leaving no room for mistake. But as we stood in the quiet woods, eyes glued to the device, something did occur to me. He didn’t know the difference between a red oak and a white oak. There was simply no need. And if there was, well, you and I know the drill: just download a tree identifying app.

A beekeeper friend of Cindy’s uses the power of observation to monitor the state of her hives. To determine whether the colonies have started raising brood, for instance, she watches the incoming foragers to see if they’re bringing in pollen. She knows that brood need pollen to survive, and she knows the foragers won’t gather pollen if there’s nothing to feed it to. She also routinely tracks by sight the direction of flight by the foragers — which, because she intimately knows her surroundings, informs her of the types of pollen being gathered and allows her to predict what plants she can expect to bloom around the same time each year. Of course, if all of that sounds just too time and energy consuming … well, you guessed it, there are some clever bee apps to do the job for you.

This is all well-trod ground: What might we gain if we sacrificed our perpetual drive to outsource every bit of our lived experience, to take the shortcut on every path? I cannot say for sure, but I think it might just be worth finding out.

What the Sunrise Will Show

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the hives after the storms

A storm blew in late last night, dropping trees and powerlines and sweeping the porch of all chairs, bowls, and benches. At 5 a.m. I took a short walk to take stock of the yard and barnyard areas before returning to my desk to type this post. Now, waiting for sunup to take full inventory of the damage seems to echo the world at large: we are all waiting with apprehension for what lies in the wake of the storms.

It is not often that this blog can be accused of prescience, but on February 1st I wrote this:

This past week, off the farm for work, I chanced into a conversation with a computer scientist experienced in modeling disease outbreaks. For a couple of hours, we parsed the data of the coronavirus, looked at his modeling of the numbers, discussed the true fragility of a global economy. He had, with the exception of his current trip, canceled all work-related travel for the next eight weeks. The system will be overloaded during that period, he predicted.

I found myself wondering if it was wrong to find a kernel of hope in the prospect of a global slowdown built on the bones of a possible pandemic. Ten years after the great recession brought housing expansion in our valley to a halt, the maw of our species is being stuffed once again as wooded lots are bulldozed and foundations laid. This frenzy too may end only with the close of the day. The sun sets on everything, eventually.

Little more than two months ago, this virus was something that was happening “over there.” In that short span of time, how much life has changed for most across the globe. Now it is here where we find the illness and the death. One of the casualties this week was Tom Waters. An old friend, Tom was a man who could wield a mean super-soaker in a water fight, but he was perhaps better known as a dedicated fighter for affordable housing in New York City. “Gone too soon,” as they say….

Meanwhile, here in rural America the medical impacts still seem far removed. The economic impacts, though, are immediate. As the economy has shut down, demand for my neighbor’s work as a handyman has largely dried up. Who wants a deck built when they are unemployed? The many small factories in the area have reduced staff or closed as the global supply chains that deliver parts are disrupted. My own off-the-farm job is shuttered for the time being, leading to speculation about the overall impact on bricks and mortar businesses. (Not that just-in-time shipping and parcel delivery seem a solid bet now that we have witnessed their real-time weaknesses.)

As the world at large careened down the tracks at high speed with clown conductors, I spent the past few weeks on the farm carrying on like so many others. Planting spring gardens, harvesting late winter greens, grazing the flocks, working the bees — from time to time, when the light hit just right, I caught the merest glimmer of what a saner world could be.

We are all, by necessity, spending less and driving less. We call neighbors and family more often. We consolidate our own grocery lists with shopping requests for older residents, dropping necessities off on front porches. Many of us are now living at a slower pace, a walking cadence that feels, in a pandemic, healthier.

This world may just have the chance to become both different and familiar: world-turned-upside-down different and familiar in that it becomes intimate, again. Death and disruption, and their accompanying fear and loss, have always been with us, but so has the opportunity for renewal and hope.

With the latter in mind, I will re-emerge in the wake of the storms and begin clearing the branches from the fencelines, repairing shed roofs, resolving this time to make a better farm and be a better neighbor. But like everyone, I’m still waiting for the light to clarify what needs to be done.

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Reading this week: Killing for the Republic: citizen soldiers and the Roman way of war (S. Brand)

When It All Falls Away

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The sun rarely shines, these days. The rains have set into our valley and don’t know when to stop. Farming chores are carried out in quick bursts between downpours, and plantings are postponed until a day when the storms finally subside.

Something doesn’t fit, like a key in the wrong lock. We oversow our pastures with cool-weather grasses and legumes, then plan for another round next month with warm-weather seeds. We wait for the sun to assist, but it demurs. The sheep stand at the barn door and look longingly at pastures denied. “Have patience, girls. The sun surely will come out someday,” I tell them. They are not to be convinced with words.

I call some of our elderly neighbors to ask if we can get them anything at the grocery store, hoping to spare them the risk of exposure. It has been, shamefully, a year since I last spoke with most. “My wife has been diagnosed with lung cancer,” I am told by one, deepening my embarrassment and my fear for them. Cindy speaks with another couple, both in poor health. They are good neighbors who share a fenceline. The man, a farmer who has never stinted on labor or advice for these past 20 years, is in his 80s. Cindy promises to visit and extends the same offer of groceries and other supplies.

I use FaceTime with my aunt. She will turn 100 come July. She looks at the phone, at my face, turns to her caregiver and says, “Isn’t it amazing?” Locked down in assisted living, she recalls the stories told to her of the 1919 pandemic. She understands. My father will celebrate his 93rd birthday in a few weeks in reduced company; our annual crawfish boil, with the extended family in happy attendance, has been canceled until better times. I wonder, is reducing the risk really worth the sacrifice of touch and companionship?

Friends and colleagues are furloughed, giving me more time than I have had in years to farm and garden. Yet what should bring me joy merely makes me sad. There is hope, I know. But there is also an awareness that what has been squandered lies rusted on the ground and what has been shattered doesn’t fit back together the same, if at all.

These are the cycles of history. Just as our generations no longer grieve at past horrors recorded in seldom-read books, in a hundred years hence, only the bore or the academic will find interest in this age when our little drama all fell away.

Still, with hope, I wait for seeds to sprout.