The Sign and the Commons

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childhood, commons, farming, Garrett Hardin, human nature, individualism, Ozarks, rural

When I was a kid, the German Community (where my mother and father grew up) had a huge signpost at the crossroads indicating the direction to each farm. I don’t know who put up the signpost, but I would guess that the Wiegensteins might have been involved, as their place was near the crossroads. It might also have been a Brewen.

Anyway, when we moved out to Reynolds County, my dad duplicated that effort, putting up a post at the fork in the road showing which way to go to each family’s house and how far it would be. When a new family moved in, or an old family moved out, he would saw up a new pine board and paint the name or take down the old sign. When age forced them off the farm, I took down his sign and have kept it ever since. Recently I freshened up the paint with the help of my daughter, and I plan to hang it as a decoration and a memory.

We hear frequent mention these days of the “tragedy of the commons,” a term used in Garrett Hardin’s famous environmental article about the hazards of unregulated common use of such things as air, water, and so forth. And we see examples of the tragedy of the commons everywhere. Yesterday I drove to St. Louis on Interstate 70, the main artery of the state, a highway which is is dreadful repair because our legislators cannot summon up the political will to fund its proper upkeep — not because they don’t recognize the need to improve it, but because their individual self-interest (getting reelected by avoiding the “he voted to raise taxes” canard) outweighs in their mind the general good that would be gained by pulling up their socks and raising the money to fix it.

But the commons — and a proper appreciation of the commons — is also a blessing. It all depends on how you view it. Nobody made a rule that a signpost be created; someone just did it. Someone with an understanding that taking time and effort to promote the general welfare (now where have I heard those words before?) is in itself a value.

Nowadays we spend a lot of time talking about individual freedom; recently I chatted with a visitor from another country, a businessman, who told me with a chuckle, “You Americans will buy anything with the word ‘freedom’ attached to it.” The underside of freedom is selfishness and the tragedy of the commons. The blessing of the commons comes from the recognition that we are all in this together, that our own individual choices have wide impact, and that we make decisions thinking about others as well as about ourselves.

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Place

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change, farming, Madison County, memory, rural

When I was a kid, my parents drove us out to visit our relatives on the home place pretty much every weekend, and sometimes during the week as well. My grandparents lived on what everyone called The Old Home Place, and my uncle Bill and aunt Gina lived down the road on why my folks called “Bill’s Place,” but which I understood in the sort of dim way that kids do that it was also part of the Home Place. Not to be confused with the River Place, where my mom had been born, now uninhabited but still part of the farm.

We passed other places – the Thurman Place, the old Kessler Place, the Graner Place (Graners long gone, now occupied by McCreerys, and in the slow process of becoming the McCreery Place). In between were mere houses, occupied by people we didn’t know, or by people we knew but who were yet too brief in their occupancy to merit a Place.

When you had a Place, you were somebody. You were probably just as poor as everybody else – my grandparents’ place was tiny – but people knew who you were, and where you lived. Your Place didn’t change much. Maybe an addition when extra children necessitated it, but the essential plan didn’t change. The house, the barn, the sheds, the pond, the pastures, all existed in a slowed-down version of time, one in which change happened, but on a different rhythm than the rest of the world. Change was more measured, deliberate, its implications considered more broadly. Other farmers considered my grandfather pretty innovative in his time; he was an early adopter of terracing and other practices advocated  by the county agent. But certainly no one would ever have called him hasty.

Needless to say, I don’t have a Place, and at this point in my life probably never will. The contemporary world, and my adjustment to it, doesn’t permit that. But I know that this is a trade and not an unalloyed gain.

Video Interview

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books, bookstores, fiction, historical fiction, history, Missouri, novels, Ozarks, River Hills Traveler, rivers, rural, Slant of Light, writing

Emory Styron of River Hills Traveler recently conducted an interview with me about Slant of Light, its origins and themes, the Ozarks in general, and I don’t know what else. We had a great time chatting, and I was delighted to find such a discerning reader and sympathetic listener. Here’s a link to the River Hills Traveler video interview.

May I just add that copies of the novel are available from their bookstore!

Woodcutting Season

Tags

Annapolis, firewood, Ozarks, rural

When I was a youngster, the afternoon of Thanksgiving was reserved for wood-cutting. My dad had a circular saw that hooked up to the PTO of the tractor, and for weeks beforehand my brother and I had been piling up slabs from the local sawmills. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with “slabs,” they are the edge pieces that are created when a sawmill shapes up a log for lumber — bark on a curved outer side, flat on the inner side, typically eight to twelve feet long.)

My brother would feed, my dad would run the saw, and I was the “off-bear” — the guy who would catch the cut section and toss it to the side. Occasionally my brother and I would trade jobs to keep from getting bored, but Dad always ran the saw. My mother’s task was to stand about twenty feet away and fret. She was convinced that one of us would eventually cut off a hand, and now when I think about that naked saw blade spinning about a foot away from Dad and me, I imagine her fears were justified. The footing was never smooth, and the weight of the cut pieces varied from featherlight to almost too heavy for me to carry. So yes, we were not exactly the poster children for the National Safety Council.

Somehow, we managed to make it through years of that labor without even losing a finger, so perhaps we were safer than it looked.

This image is not us (it’s a generation older, a photo I found via Google) but the operation is very similar. Our saw blade was about a foot larger in diameter, and the PTO belt from the tractor came out from beneath the seat, so it was fairly level rather than the high angle seen here. But I can definitely sympathize with the kid in the foreground plugging his ears.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 2

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art, books, Missouri, nature, Oliver Schuchard, Ozarks, parks, photography, rural, Steve Kohler

Back in April, I wrote an appreciation/commentary on a new book by Leland and Crystal Payton, Damming the Osage. Today I’d like to revisit a classic book from a different part of the landscape, Oliver Schuchard and Steve Kohler’s Two Ozark Rivers.

The hardcover edition of Two Ozark Rivers was published in 1984 by the University of Missouri Press, and the press released a paperback version in 1996 that remains in print. At the time of its original publication, the two Ozark rivers of the title — the Current and the Jacks Fork — had only recently been placed under federal oversight via the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, and the text of the book feels somewhat dated today because of its creation during that heady time. Interesting to note that the Riverways recorded 1.9 million visitors in 1982, but today that number has actually declined to about 1.4 million.

The best parts of the book’s text, in my opinion, are the fourth and fifth chapters, “Devastation” and “Preservation,” which give succinct, well-researched summaries of the area’s transformation at the hands of big lumber interests around the turn of the 20th century, and of the contested efforts to set aside portions of that land as part of the National Park Service. Kohler is at his best when he recounts a narrative; the earlier chapters have too much of the adjective + noun + random statistic that I associate with National Geographic writing style, in which the essence of a location is supposedly conveyed by a combination of personal anecdote and encyclopedia entry. But once he starts putting that research to use in telling a concentrated history, the pace picks up and the prose takes life.

Schuchard’s gift for landscape photography shines throughout the book. In fact, the human artifacts photographed here — barns, schoolhouses, drugstores, churches, canoe rentals — are unpopulated. Only a page of portraits provides human faces to the Ozark story. The landscape photographs are sized large and given lots of room on the page, and they have a quietness to them that perfectly matches the understated beauty of the Ozarks landscape.

I suppose you could call this a “coffee-table book,” but in both prose and photography it goes beyond that term. As I said, it’s still in print from the University Press, and it’s well worth the purchase.

Wood-Splitting

Tags

childhood, human nature, indirection, memory, nature, rural

We’ve been burning more wood in the fireplace this winter than last, thanks to some colder temperatures, and have now reached that moment when the woodpile is down to those unwieldy chunks that I’ve been avoiding for a year and a half because they’re too heavy to carry in or they won’t burn well. So yesterday I took my wedges and splitting maul out to the pile for some splitting time.

Wood-splitting was one of my chores as a boy, although we used a double-bitted ax instead of a maul, and of course when doing an outdoor chore I am always reminded of my father, who passed away eight years ago this past week. He would have been horrified at the poor condition of my maul and wedges — I’ve not sharpened them in years — and would no doubt have reminded me that a poorly-kept tool doubles not only the amount of effort needed for a job, but the chances of an accident. But I labored on, recalling also Thoreau’s remark about how firewood warms a person more than once.

The natural world and its processes are easy targets for moralizing — isn’t that what writers have been doing since Roman times? But I’ll throw in a few observations about wood-splitting anyway.

It’s not so much the force but the accuracy of the blow that counts. That being said, even a well-aimed blow that doesn’t have enough power behind it won’t split the wood. You have to set your feet, figure your distance, then just swing from over your head with confidence that you’ll hit where you’re aiming. Half-hearted over-the-shoulder swings never work.

To preserve your back, stop every so often and pretend to inspect the woodpile. This task actually helps, because you can clean up your workspace and avoid stumbling over split pieces.

Never try to split through a knot. You end up frustrating yourself and chopping off weird-shaped chunks from a piece of wood that stubbornly remains too large. Turn the wood and split around the knot instead.

Thus Endeth the Sermon of the Wood-Splitter. And oh yes, I need to go to the blade sharpening shop down the street.

Misty, Moisty Morning

Tags

ballad, England, history, poetry, rural

One misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather….

That’s a nursery rhyme my mother would repeat on mornings like this….overcast and foggy, rainwater dripping off trees.

The first verse is all I ever knew, but it turns out that there’s a whole series of verses. The old man that the narrator meets in the first verse disappears, and the rest of the poem deals with the narrator meeting a milkmaid named Dolly a little farther down the road.

The narrator immediately sets to courting Dolly, and “with many kind embraces, I stroked her double chin.” And for once the ballad is not about seduction and abandonment: “Her parents then consented, all parties were agreed, her portion thirty shillings, we married were with speed.”

How do you do, and how do you do, and how do you do again!

Favorite Ozarks Places – 3 (revisited)

Tags

Missouri, nature, Ozarks, photography, rivers, rural

Rocky Falls in Summer

Early on, I posted Rocky Falls as one of my favorite Ozarks places. Here’s what it looks like in summer. I visited there last week. Fun to compare the two photos . . . the water over the falls is down to the trickle on the right side. Admittedly, this has been one of the driest summers on record, but this appearance is not too different from the usual late-July look.

On the bright side, the pool at the bottom is perfect for swimming this time of year! It’s not a large swimming hole, but it’s a good one.

The Art of the Rural

Tags

art, rural

Just ran across this interesting group by way of my friend Terry Sherer at Culver-Stockton College. Here’s their blog site, and here’s their Facebook page.

 

Blackberry Picking

Tags

favorite_places, Illinois, Missouri, nature, rural

This is blackberry-picking time — in my youth, the trip was always down to Sinking Creek, where wild blackberries grew in abundance in the river bottom. Then in later years, I have great memories of Rod Walton taking us to his secret blackberry-picking place, an old farm owned by a friend. The edges of all the fields were overgrown with blackberry vines about three feet tall, and we had to push through briars every step of the way — but the berries were great! After a while, it was hard to tell which smears on our hands were berry stains and which ones were bloodstains, but hey, it all washed off eventually.