Country Sketches [Part 1]

Every road trip ideally includes a stretch through the country. For this reason, the drive to Myrtle Beach can be more relaxing for me than after we actually arrive. Our drive to Pensacola consists of two long stretches through the country: one at the very beginning, on S.C. Hwy. 5, which cuts across York County, and the other at the very end, after we exit I-65 and cut across southern Alabama and part of the Florida Panhandle.

One of my favorite things about country driving is imagining what led (or keeps) people in these small communities. (Communities is how they are appropriately identified because they are too small to be towns, and besides they contain no "downtown," zoning, commercialization, etc. They are merely small clusters of houses, barns, and fields.) Many, I imagine, were born in these little places and have probably never ventured far beyond them because they do not need to or have to. As I told Heather, I don't think one accidentally ends up in Beulah Creek, Alabama. People probably live there because that's where their parents and their grandparents lived, and they will die there because their kids will live there and never leave for the same reasons. Yet, it is interesting to imagine what stories these folks might have to tell.

For me, the idea of country living is appealing even as I admit the realities are far less so. On the idealized side, I long for the wide-open spaces, large plots of land situated under long blue skies, filled with crisp-green vegetation and ripe with the smell of life, and even the idea of making a living that somehow connects me in some integral way to the dirt and land. Essentially, I long for the natural. I also like the idea of growing the fruits, vegetables, nuts, herbs, and spices my family eats and uses to cook, and I hope Heather and I can someday have a small garden, if for no other reason because our generation is so removed from the land and I want Abigail to see how nature works beyond stodgy science books and lectures. For this reason, I really enjoy Wendell Berry's writings, and his themes of sustenance farming and (re)connecting with the land. When we plant that garden, I will be learning alongside Abigail.

Completely hypothetical, this is something I wonder about: If the global economy crashed -- completely busted -- and all semblance of international and national trade ceased, oil supplies stopped coming so our trains, planes, and automobiles were useless, power plants ceased to provide the power necessary to refrigerate and sell food in grocery stores, etc., I wonder how many from my generation would be able to pick up a shovel and a hoe and work the land in their backyard well enough to sustain themselves and their families. I, for one, would probably starve without a handy copy of The Farmer's Almanac, a botany book, and a knowledgeable peer from the soil science department. Our grandparents' understood very well many secrets in nature: When to plant this, how to time that crop, when and how to rotate which crops to maximize certain minerals in the soil, how to predict the potential effectiveness of a crop by "reading" the soil, seasons, water levels. The point of the hypothetical is not to be apocalyptic but to challenge myself and others to consider just how much we don't know about basic survival. Many of us know more about economic theories than about cultivating the land to feed ourselves.

On the other hand, I can imagine the realities of just such a life, especially when that life is rooted in and dependent upon agriculture. I can only imagine how extremely difficult it must be, how fraught with uncertainties. Besides the long, grueling days that go hand-in-hand with working the land, there are no "paid holidays," no fancy "healthcare plans" except what the land yields, no retirement plans. It is a life far removed from what I and most of us could imagine.

Negative side effects from "progress" have led postmodern theorists to question what is "Real." Real here is often closely related, although not necessarily directly correlated with, the idea of "Truth." However, the Real can also be equated with what is genuine, or what is not fake, manufactured, unnatural. As Baudrillard put it in the title of his book, what is not Simulacra and Simulation. I will not go too deeply into this conversation in this post, but will say that in the context of country life, the Real is dirt under your fingernails and the supper you grew and cooked and that will sustain you and your family, which now sits on the table in front of you and passed through no other hands on the way to that spot than your family's. It's the culmination of working your own land, with your own hands, and having the result in front of you. The Real is the natural cycle of life so apparent before our eyes once we get outside the facade of manmade culture. The opposition of nature/ culture arose as a prominent theme in British Romantic literature amid the first industrial revolution in Europe, and I think the questions raised 200 years ago still hold much relevance for us today.

And so I enjoyed driving through the groves of perfectly lined pecan trees, the oaks with bright-red holly berries dotting the gray Spanish moss tangled in and hanging from their crowns, and the creeping hills with their many secrets tucked just on the other side of the bend, the break, the crest, the dip. It does my soul good to see the freshly plowed fields stretching almost as far as the eye can see, unhindered by architectural clutter. Such open spaces serve as a type of visual nourishment I need after living day after day entrenched in manmade culture, much of it visually assaulting, violent to the eye that longs for naturalness and serenity, longs for some connection to what is Real, what is genuine, what soothes rather than sells.

Out there in the country, I can breathe fresh air, I can see just how blue the sky really is without the tint of pollution, and I can smell the rain coming from miles away. I can walk in fields that grow naturally, and while I walk I can hear myself think.

It is inevitable that country life to city dwellers is ideal in some ways and in some cases vice versa. This is partly because each is ignorant of the challenges and downsides the other faces, and because we crave the new and the different. However, I strongly suspect that had I been born in Beulah Creek, Alabama, I would never leave either -- for all the right reasons.