Tag Archives: Lake Charles

Landfall

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Approaching storm

Growing up on the Gulf Coast, where life was measured by the big storms, your given name could serve as a handy marker of your age. Post-1957, Audrey disappeared from the lists of incoming elementary pupils almost entirely. After ’69, no one named their child Camille.

In the hallway of our home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, hung a map. On it we plotted the latitude and longitude of each new disturbance as it sprang to life off the African coast or in Mexico’s Gulf of Campeche. My older brother, always a bit of a weather nut, actively tracked the storms. He would often plot an apocalyptic path to our door, then erase the hoped-for trajectory with a “there is always next year” shrug when the storm petered out or went off to blight someone else’s life. It’s not that he ever wished harm on anyone. There’s just something seductive about the destructive power of a hurricane. It’s like watching a Powerball lottery grow, except that the payoff is something that no one really wishes to win.

This past week it was my extended family in Beaumont and Houston who won that lottery, and recipients of the winning tickets will still be dealing with the aftermath in years to come. Harvey is just one in a long list of tropical storms and hurricanes that have recently resulted in 500-to-1,000-year floods in the South: Houston (2010, 2015), Baton Rouge (2016), Columbia, South Carolina (2015), the Carolinas (2016). Sadly, epic floods account for only a handful of the extreme events now occurring with increasing frequency across the globe, and it looks as if this nasty-weather lottery will only keep building to a stronger payout with each daily contribution made to the fund of planetary climate change.

As the waves of Harvey hit the Texas shoreline, likewise a predictable wave of finger-pointing washed ashore. Seems that a certain segment of the population confused the larger community of devastated coastal residents with the lesser community that had voted for Donald Trump, and proceeded to say that they had gotten what they deserved —blaming the whole of Gomorrah on just its naughty residents.

This holier-than-thou attitude rankles me. Because, let’s face it, whether we fall into the camp of climate-change deniers, with their heads buried firmly in the sand, or climate-change acknowledgers, staring in awe as the storm approaches, virtually none of us is doing anything significant to change the planet’s trajectory of catastrophe or to prepare for its impact.

Both camps, by and large, are still active participants in the consumer-industrial machine. Unless we have gone Amish or medieval, we depend on the people of the Gulf Coast for our cushy life. Our great collective illusion of progress is that we can continue to enjoy our current lifestyle simply by making the correct purchasing choices or pulling a lever in the voting booth, that we can use magic or tweak our way out of this mess. We can’t. That life is no longer sustainable.

According to that map hanging in the world’s hallway, the potentially cataclysmic future — for earth and, consequently, for humanity — has now passed the Leeward Islands and is picking up speed and strength. No wiping the grease board when a fantasy destructive track changes its course.

We all have bought into this lottery, and we all are at risk of winning it. So, if there is to be finger-pointing, let’s do it facing the mirror. And in the meantime, fill your bathtub with water, stock your larder, and prepare for landfall.

The Great Tear-Down

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Well maintained farm structures

Perhaps it is barn envy. This farm has never had enough barns or sheds for the equipment, animals, forage, and tools to meet our needs, despite our ongoing efforts. Seventeen years of building hay sheds, equipment sheds, chicken coops, and well houses has provided me with a fair sense of the work, skill, material resources, and neighborly assistance needed to construct those larger hay barns that dot our landscape.

So I feel a particular sadness watching old barns fall into disuse or being torn down before their time, the wood destined to deck a second home on the lake or, more often, simply bulldozed and burned.

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This large barn may have been ignored too long

Often this tear-down is done by new owners seeking the “country life.” The country life is a consumer choice, bought and sold. It’s quite distinct from the agrarian life, which is a life of work and provision. In the past five years, we have watched two different neighbors tear down perfectly good barns and burn the lumber. One neighbor bulldozed a two-story hay and tobacco barn and replaced it with a poorly constructed lean-to for lawnmowers and weedeaters and leaf blowers. The other leveled a barn built of chestnut and oak so he could have more room to practice his golf swings.

A recent conversation with an extension agent about fencing revealed a similar pattern. According to his statistics, more than 50 percent of fencing in our county has been torn out in the past 20 years.

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This hay barn was overgrown and falling down three years ago. They replaced the rotting wood and support beams and extended the usefulness for another generation.

The destruction of an infrastructure that is often still perfectly suited for the continued productive use of these East Tennessee valley farms is concrete evidence of the demise of a formerly vibrant community of neighbors and family that worked together. From the tobacco barn and smokehouse to the chicken coop and milking parlor, all helped to explain who went before and what worked on this land.

Although not necessarily wed to our predecessors’ choices, we’d be wise to not wholly ignore them either by tearing down the evidence of their accomplishments. That evidence is a blueprint linking the past to a possible future. Because far deeper than the grain in the wood is the pattern to sustain life and community.

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Reading this weekend: Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hoschschild. An interesting new sociology of the American right that focuses on my home town of Lake Charles and Calcasieu Parish.

Manure Spreaders

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Manure

We bought our manure spreader over five years ago. The process reminded me that salesmen are the same the world over.

“Are you looking for a 25 or 50 bushel, PTO or ground driven, metal or wooden”, he asked?

Stalling, not sure of what he was asking and unwilling to admit that fact, I replied, “Well…we are not sure if the tractor can pull anything larger than a 50”.

“What size tractor?”

“We have a Kubota M4900.”

“Hell son, I’ve pulled a 125 bushel with a little old 8N!” “How many horses do you have on your place, anyway?”

Horses! With these guys it always comes back to horses. To accuse someone of horse farming is a dismissive and insulting thing to say, without the individual on the receiving end knowing they have been put in their place.

Translation: Hey, are you one of these interloping, dumb ass Yankees, spending too much money on land, driving prices up? You hobby farmer, raising horses, letting them eat the grass down, and not enough sense to know the difference between a 25-bushel manure spreader and 125-bushel spreader!

I said, “We raise cattle and hogs”. Which is of course a white lie; we do raise cattle and hogs. But, we also have two horses that eat the grass down to nothing when they have the opportunity.

After a little more banter about the weather and how glad we were for rain, comparing rain totals across the valley everywhere from Bean Station to Cedar Fork, Harriman to Kingsport, Stinking Creek to Ten-mile, I managed to slip in that I was from Lake Charles, Louisiana: Thus establishing the fact that I was not a dumb-ass Yankee. (Well…some might say I’m at least correct on the Yankee bit).

He allowed that he was from Houston, TX. Cindy stayed mum on her roots in the mid-west. American provincialism dictates that you play your home roots card with care when buying manure spreaders.

He lived up in Cosby on 170 acres, driving an hour and half each way to work selling farm equipment in Maryville. I said, “Owning land in Cocke County is a long way from growing up in one of the biggest cities in the US.”

Translation: Hey, are you one of those interloping, dumb-ass urbanites, spending too much on your land, driving three hours each day to stand here in your overalls, pretending to be a down home Tennessee boy? 8N my hat!

Subtle insults issued, still with smiles on our faces, like dogs peeing on tires; we talked of boudin and hurricanes. Cindy, above the fray, steered the conversation back to the spreaders. Oh, right, manure spreaders.

We did buy our manure spreader but not from him: A 75 bushel spreader, metal and PTO driven…in case you were asking.