What’s something you think national conversations get wrong about rural attitudes or rural people? This is the somewhat dreadful question the publicist for my book asked. She lives in Brooklyn and struggles with what to make of me, what to say to sell what I have made. With her question, she hoped to spur me to produce an eye-catching thinkpiece or article we could place in a national paper or magazine, something that could then gin up interest in my book.
My first thought upon hearing the publicist’s question was just how annoyed I was back when all the news was about JD Vance’s “blood and soil nationalism.” My irritation was not with the charge itself but with how some of the commentaries about it invoked as evidence Vance’s wish to be buried in the country graveyard where generations of his ancestors already rest. This, I thought, cannot count as evidence for the charge. I myself have such a spot, waiting for the day when mine will put my mortal remains alongside my scrappy great-great-great grandmother, the one who outlived four husbands. And my great-great grandmother, herself widowed young with seven children, a desperate state of affairs that had her taking in other people’s laundry to keep the family fed. Those women are mine, my people. They rest in a country acre I mow and tend, as my mother did before me. So, about graveyards, I can say that I get what Vance is after here. And I wince to see what he is after turned to proof of menace.
There is forsythia growing on a rocky hill at our easternmost bit of land, and more forsythia down the hill some 300 yards west.[/pullquote[
Some people—I expect people not just rural but of all sorts—have a deep sense of place and rootedness. This sense is for some of us heightened where dead we call our own are laid. We’re not inevitably strange or cruel or gross about it. Something like broad recognition of this as a fairly commonplace human value is why we don’t disturb burial grounds. Whatever evidence needs to be brought to bear to show that the charge of blood and soil nationalism sticks to Vance, let it live elsewhere, not in his desire to join his body to dead he calls his own.
If I were an urban person, I’d say that publicly appearing to defend JD Vance—even in this mild, limited way—is like throwing yourself on the proverbial third rail. Since I am meant here to speak rural, though, I’ll say it’s like grabbing the electric fence on purpose, a gesture that can end in naught but pain for the one who makes it. It might do the kind of work publicity requires—after all, it’s all about attention and summoning some of yours to what I write in hope you’ll buy my book. Electrifying myself on the current of JD Vance could work a treat in that regard. But it would also be misleading. My book does have a rural graveyard in it, but there’s no trace in it of JD Vance or what we “rural people” think of him. I mostly try hard not to.
The bigger problem with the publicist’s question—What’s something you think national conversations get wrong about rural attitudes or people?—is just that I’m not well fit to answer it. The book—the one I’m meant to tempt you into buying—was written by me, but I am not what you might consider a “typical rural person.” Sure, I own and maintain my own tractor, can effectively wield a chainsaw, and laugh at news articles counseling people to put their ticks in the mail to identify what diseases they might carry, as if the dozens we accumulate on a bad day could be handled so.
But alongside these sorts of facts, there are others less convenient for opining on The Rural. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy and nowhere did this training equip me to act as a sociologist. In fact, I think the upshot of all that formal learning most amounts to a sometimes-crippling self-doubt. I know mostly that the reach of all I do not know is vast. Farming has only made this worse, has performed a radical expansion of those territories I have to count beyond my ken.
There is forsythia growing on a rocky hill at our easternmost bit of land, and more forsythia down the hill some 300 yards west. That eastern forsythia reliably comes into its spring color a week or more ahead of its western, low-lying cousin. It’s the same plant in both places, but the weather up the hill is slightly different, a fact apparent not just in bloom times but in a host of other ways. It is evident in the way that fog lays on the days we have some, seen plainly in heavier layers of dew the low land gets. I take lessons from that forsythia and from what its color signals. If the same variety of plant on a single farm isn’t even uniform in its expression of spring color, why imagine that “rural culture” or “rural people” means something, especially something I could grasp in any singular summation. I can only speak to the genuinely local—and by local, I mean what passes for “rural life” and “rural people” just here, on my fourth-generation, 200-acre farm.
There are some fairly standard stereotypes that you will see if you read about the rural, and not all of them seem fit to me, at least not where our small bit of rural is concerned. Here I cannot help but detour into a tale I like to tell, a tale of stereotypes leveraged to apparently important purpose.
Many years ago now, a group of college students showed up at our farm. They were working on a research project, looking to set out hair traps in aid of tracking bear movements in our region. When they arrived at our place, I had been out at work and was then filthy with it, my overalls caked in dirt and sweat, my heavy boots dragging with fatigue. I might have looked a fright, but I don’t think I looked a menace. Still, the students were all over caution, not coming in the yard but talking to me from the distance of the road. They explained their wish to come upon our land and politely asked permission.
When I told them I’m a professor, a change overtook them on the instant. Like people who have held their breath too long, they let it out in a relieving sigh; they started talking naturally and not like people expecting to get shot. Turns out that whoever at their urban university up north briefed them on their task had also schooled them in how to interact with rural Ozark folk. They should expect us to be ornery and oppositional; watch out for bears and, also, for the locals. This was the guidance they had got, and this is why, on seeing me, they seemed awash in fear and caution. We didn’t get much further with our talk, though, because my brother came out of the woods and had those students go all stiff in fear again. To me, he just looked tired but he was carrying a chainsaw, and was then also all over dirty and made rough by work. Seeking to set the students back at their former ease, I announced cheerfully, “Don’t mind him, he’s just an algebraist!” This did not help.
In the end, I don’t begrudge the training that those students got. The danger they expected isn’t all or entirely wrong. I can’t like that, but I must also own that it sometimes works a treat. In a lot of places, a woman alone, out in the wilds and where voice won’t carry if you need some help, must be uneasy should she find a stranger. Out here, I find it rarely so. When I have encountered people trespassing on our land, I just tell them they should leave, and they do. For you never know round here who might be armed, and that includes the women. It makes men who might not otherwise incline to listen, listen and obey. In short, I sometimes like to be taken for a menace, revel in it even. Does this mean that I fulfill, or frustrate, the stereotype? I am never sure myself, but I can be sure that even when a stereotype will fit, it might not fit the way one might expect.
Sometimes government can really fuck you up, and even fuck you over.On our farm, we have several man-made ponds, ponds dug out to keep cattle in water in their grazing pastures. One of these ponds is called the Government Pond, but to get its name right, “government” must be pronounced compacted, with a bit of sneer, as a pejorative. Anyone who hears us speak of this pond may well conclude that here are people of a Certain Rural Type, those backward sorts who don’t know how their bread gets buttered, rejecting “gubmint” while stubbornly oblivious of national economics. After all, rural communities rely heavily on that gubmint for all manner of necessary goods, from aid to farmers to our regional hospital, itself on life support as Medicaid funding drops. When I talk about our pond, I sound like someone ignorant of all that. But I’m not, nor are my people.
My entire family are what you might call FDR Democrats. In the ever-economical words of my grandfather: “I remember what poor was like before FDR, and didn’t like it.” But still, that pond and how we got it rubs a family spot still raw and sore. That pond was an argument my uncle lost.
Sometime in the 1980s, the USDA offered grants to farmers looking to set up water sources and my grandfather wanted to apply. My uncle fought him over this, didn’t want any kind of money from the U.S. government, not even for a good pond, so great was his animosity. My grandfather prevailed. My uncle couldn’t stop his father getting federal money for that pond, but he could name it and he did.
The difference between my grandfather and uncle might be cast as generational. Both were U.S. Army veterans: my grandfather served in World War II, my uncle in Vietnam. My grandfather reliably spoke warmly of his years in service and antique buddies from his army years traveled from across the country to come to a grand party thrown for my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1991. My uncle came back from Vietnam haunted and forever changed. He didn’t talk at all about his experience, an abiding, total silence that told enough to explain some of his ways, his reclusive habits and his holing up alone on every Fourth, there to abide where he wouldn’t hear the percussive cracks of fireworks. The wars were not alike for those who were most in them. Sometimes government can really fuck you up, and even fuck you over. So I, too, pronounce “Gubmint Pond” with a tinge of hostility. There’s more than one way to honor veterans’ service and this is mine.
I am here drifting too far away from the question I was meant to answer: What’s something you think national conversations get wrong about rural attitudes or rural people? I suppose the best that I can say is that, like all people everywhere, we are often cast in stereotypes. And that is sometimes quite unpleasant. Stereotypes, when it comes down to it, are mental short cuts, ways to understand in broad strokes what registers as unfamiliar and different. We all are prey to using them—it’s a tiring thing, this business of living, so we conserve what energies we can. But what we gain in hasty efficiency loses out on much.
I come back to my brother and myself, all dirty in the woods—him the mathematician and me the philosopher, and both of us all over ticks and wielding chainsaws. I’m not sure what to make of us. I expect there are no “national conversations” of such a type. Those conversations would divide us into halves antagonistic, the “elite” professor bits and the “rural” farm bits. The best that I can add as a corrective is to say it isn’t always so. There yet remain some open spaces where both at once can bloom.
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Kill All the Chickens by Amy Olberding is available from Polity Books.