Category Archives: Rural Living

Origins

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My drive to the dump in Paint Rock is a short four and half miles away. This day, Buster, the rat terrier, rides shotgun next to me, and we both gaze at the cloudless spring day outside. I pull past the Baptist church, then the volunteer firehall, and I see that the little corner market next to the dump is doing a thriving business in the exchange of children. The parking lot is one of those rural designated drop points where surly estranged parents offload their offspring for the weekend. But the failures of the formerly conjoined are not what is on my mind. I’m thinking instead of another spring, one that led me to this farming life 22 years ago.

farm meals

While I have attributed my desire to farm to the influences of authors like James Herriot, I could credit the agrarian models of family as well. One of my grandfathers farmed rice and cattle before the Great Depression in Acadia Parish, and another oversaw a pecan plantation in Beauregard Parish near the town of Rosepine.

My farming journey also got a heady boost in the 1990s, during another glorious East Tennessee spring, one spent delivering meals to rural shut-ins. I was marking time between jobs and volunteered to do daily lunch drop-offs to the elderly. Each morning I’d load up hot meals in my pickup and head out to the more sparsely populated areas of Knox County. The recipients lived in tidy, humble homes, almost all with vegetable gardens, often with some chickens scratching in the dust or a hog near the shed. Without exception, the occupants would cheerfully greet me on my arrival. One 90-year-old woman was routinely in her woodshed splitting wood. Upon spotting me, she would swing her axe into a large chunk of firewood, wipe her hands on her dress, then approach me with a friendly hello and collect her lunch.

During those few months I delivered meals, I watched the season unfold in such lovely and minute detail, and I was seduced. The experience shifted my gaze from our trafficked city life, opened a door I wasn’t aware I had wanted to enter. The evident contentment of my charges, the blossoming spring landscape, the loving care of those humble places — all of it moved me. Likewise, leaving those winding country roads for the city’s sprawl and congestion made me want to heave the wheel and turn back around.

And one spring, a few years later, we did.

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.

A Short and Glorious Reign

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Ah, the quality of life for a rooster. From the first creaky pubescent crow to the full-throated voicing that stakes his territory, the rooster rules the roost. That is, at least, if he’s the dominant male in the flock. The other suitors lurk in the wings, watching impatiently for an opportunity for a quick assignation in the bushes with a willing (or unwilling) partner. But such is a dangerous existence for the youngster; infringements into the life of the royal court, if he’s caught in a dalliance, can result in a bloody beatdown by the king.

These roosters-in-waiting, these prince regents, skirt the edges of the demesne hoping for an early departure of their paternal unit. The age-old tale of one such rooster is what this story is about: the glorious reign of the heir, elevated at last to the throne … if only for a 48-hour period, before being toppled by his own lusts.

The protagonist of this story is a yearling cockerel, one of eight “spares” of his sex who had been caught, separated, and penned for fattening and butcher. From the beginning, he stood out as a particularly fine-looking princeling, buff and ready for what life offered. For 45 days he lived in this all-boys dormitory, one with plenty of outside space in which to quarrel with his mates and then dine twice daily on rich rations. A life lived in indolence while plumping up for the slaughter, waiting unawares for that cold, cruel day.

Yet, miraculously, on the fateful morning of beheading, he was spared. At the last second, as Cindy wrangled the roosters, handing each to me for the killing cone, we decided on a reprieve for one bird. Our old rooster, a large, beautifully plumed fellow of three years, was chosen for the sacrificial altar in place of the handsome prince. The rex of the roost had lived a good life. But now, in the twilight of his reign, it was time to “counsel” him to abdicate in favor of a younger ruler with a little more pep in his stride.

I grabbed the old boy as he ogled a nice plump hen and unceremoniously cut his throat before adding him to the pile of youngsters to be plucked and gutted. The heir to the throne was released without a formal coronation. Now the only cock of the walk, with 20 females all to himself, the new monarch wasted no time sprinting from hen to hen, fulfilling his destiny (and no doubt his adolescent dreams).

Meanwhile, we got on with the work of prepping the carcasses for the freezer. As we cut them open one by one, we noted that their cavities were filled with fat, hearts covered in globs of glistening yellow, the result of a 45-day high-protein-and-grain diet and no occasion to be chased by a ruling rooster and burn it off — all of which would make for some mighty tasty soups and gumbos, though, had they lived, not so much for good cardio-health and a long and active lifestyle. We gave it no more thought.

Two days later I walked out to the sawmill. There, I found the newly crowned king, dead on the ground. Death by heart attack, no doubt, brought on by a frantic 48 hours of lusty indulgence as he made up for lost time trying to satisfy all the hens in his domain.

And that should have been the end of this tale … except. Except a few days later we discovered another handsome cockerel. He had bided his time even farther out on the fringes of the dominion, lying in wait for this momentous day. Now, having returned to his ancestral lands and claimed the throne, this heir and a spare, having eaten heart-healthy all his life, leads (we hope) a somewhat more enduring existence on this farm.

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Reading this weekend: Eastern Approaches (F. Maclean) and The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (J. Kotkin). The former is a terrific autobiography of a British diplomat during the years prior to and during WW2. The latter does a good job of explaining current politics, who profits from our partisanship, and where we might be heading.

 

Neither Past nor Future

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“It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.”—Sarah Orne Jewett

Corn fritters, crowder peas, tomatoes, and cucumber salad.

Well, this wasn’t going well. The employee had been babbling on for some minutes about how stupid Southerners were, bashing neighbors, co-workers, and everyone who lived within a few miles of her rural farm. Finally, she drew breath long enough for me to make a point. “You do know I’m from the South, don’t you?” I waited a few seconds, knowing exactly what was coming next. “Sure,” she said, “but you’re not really Southern. You are smart.”

It would take a long time to unpack the ignorance that lies behind that colossally impolite statement. That I have heard variations on the same theme from dozens, maybe even hundreds, of others about the South in general and the rural South in specific is enlightening. As many thousands during this pandemic rethink their commitment to living in the suburbs or the city, I’ve been mulling over what a move to the country might mean for them.

When someone moves to rural America, the South in particular, the fault lines of prejudice are often laid bare. And here I speak of the newcomer’s prejudice, much of which is centered in the post-war suburban ideal that you can filter out contact with those who are different from you. Like the Democrats who jettison blue-collar politics because they are uncomfortable associating with workers as a class and wish to trade them in for something different, outlanders who move to the country often ring clear their biases from the first day and dissatisfaction with what they consider their provincial neighbors on the second — as if the people whose family has lived on the land across the road for four generations could be taken back to Trader Joe’s for a new and more comfortable model.

If you are one of those considering a big move “back to the land,” then tuck this piece of advice in alongside your cultural baggage and worldly goods: Prepare to be lonely. At least until you have demonstrated an old-fashioned liberal willingness to accept people as they are rather than as you wish them to be. It is an age-old fault of humanity, holding up the exotic or at the very least the quaint and the picturesque as more desirable, more noble than the mundane. The reality seldom meets the dream.

Your new neighbor is unlikely to be an Amish farmer who plows with horses, conveniently providing a pastoral backdrop for your Instagram shares. Nope, he is going to be a part-time Primitive Baptist preacher, prone to washing feet on Sunday and voting for Trump on Tuesday. He is going to gut deer in his front yard. His very existence is going to affront your Peace Corps beliefs, and it sure won’t provide your cultural mining more than a meager payout for your social media posts.

Yet that same man can weld your broken bushhog (but will take offense when you offer payment); he’ll show up and help you mend a fence when your friends in the city only wish to text or Zoom their assistance. His kids will look after your animals if you’re called away, and his whole family will look after you when one of your family members is called home. Just don’t — and this is important — open your mouth to tell him how you did things back in Orlando or Ann Arbor.

Still thinking about that move? Let us do a final check, making sure that you are not that sad, clueless, insulting individual who moved to the country but wanted a different rural population from the one you are going to get. Start by asking yourself a question. Would you really move to rural Thailand and expect to find the cultural options, the governmental services, and the same people you get in a hip Upper West Side New York neighborhood? If that is the case, then you’d better prepare for a life of loneliness. Or, better yet, stay put.

Or, and let me just toss this out as an option, learn to embrace an actual, nonacademic notion of “diversity.” The choice is yours. And who knows what you might discover.

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Reading this weekend: Kilvert’s Diary (Francis Kilvert) and The Country of Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett). The former is a new discovery (of mine) that has quickly become a favorite to read before “lights out.” The latter, at Cindy’s suggestion, I read this past week. It partly influenced this post.

Angels: The Phone Always Rings Twice

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Turnips in the yard

Reader beware. If you are expecting the seraphim to flap their wings solemnly throughout this piece, search elsewhere. This is not a theological work, no musing on how many of their numbers might fit on a pin head. Today, we simply speak of destiny.

I may wish for a different role in life. But alas, although the home phone seldom rings, when it does, I always answer with some hesitation. Are we marked at birth for the roles we will play in this life? Do the gods gather up a handful of archetypal or character dust and randomly start slinging it about — a little leadership landing there, a bit of maternal instinct here, the jovial, the innocent, the hero cast willy-nilly over the sleeping infants. Is that how it works, what it all comes down to in the end? An Angel of Death for this valley?

It pains me to make this public admission, but when an animal needs to be dispatched, I get the call. It is not a job I sought, yet it comes to me more often than I wish.

The neighbors with a mortally injured lamb who can’t bring themselves, literally, to pull the trigger? They call me. Dying deer on the side of the road, they call me. Pet chickens in the final stages, they call me, Brian the Neck Wringer. It can all get a bit depressing, this being the spine for, shall we call them, the timid. I’d much prefer that they get on with the job themselves. But they can’t, they won’t. They call. Like the day my muscle-bound neighbor followed his hog around a pen for half an hour, pistol in trembling hand, looking for just the right shot to put the pig down, but could never quite pull the trigger. I felt compelled to act. I went to the house, grabbed the 30-30, and, returning to the scene of indecisiveness, pushed past and killed the hog with a single shot.

If you are going to eat meat — hell, if you are going to drive a car — you are going to have blood on your hands. My attitude, perhaps, has more than a strong whiff of the judgmental. But it is justified, certainly. Soon after I first met Cindy, a neighbor’s Doberman got into her barnyard and savaged her sheep. After watching the neighbor hem and haw over killing the bloodied and dying animals, I reached for the 410 in his hands and did the deed myself. I hate to see an animal suffer or a hard decision postponed on account of spinelessness masquerading as compassion.

I hasten to say I’m not insensitive (right?). I chalk up my willingness to kill to a lifetime of gutting catfish caught on trotlines from the family pond, cleaning speckled trout and dolphinfish all night after a day of fishing on the gulf, butchering hundreds of chickens I’ve raised to put meat on the table. One carries out these unpleasantries if one eats. Or did, before the advent of mass man and consumerism distanced us from death. Allowed us to believe that it is better for the immigrant, the lower waged, the lower class to do our dirty work, butcher our meat, butcher our enemies. Washed our hands….

Oddly, and perhaps one reason Cindy and I have been together 35 years, she is called out for the opposite function. If the Angel of Mercy is needed, the phone also rings. When a mother goose got separated from her goslings at work, colleagues called Cindy to solve the problem. When a dog gets injured in the valley — bitten by a snake, shot by a neighbor, hit by a car — the call comes for Cindy. Where my toolbox contains an axe, rifle, and knife, hers includes clear-eyed compassion and skills honed over decades caring for animals in her charge.

Hers is the more rewarding role to play. People come up to her and give her hugs years later for helping nurse a beloved pet or farm animal back to health. I, on the other hand, get the careful nod, averted eyes. Wary, they seem, lest I discern a limp in their step and go for my shotgun.

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Reading this weekend: Sign Posts In A Strange Land (Percy). “the fruit of such mismatch is something to behold: Baptist governors and state legislators who loot the state with Catholic gaiety and Protestant industry.”