this is from april 2009, right after a visit to a local eco-farm. i spent an evening with chicks and pigs and cowsies and friends around a bonfire and then wrote this. i certainly didn't intend it a diatribe against agribusiness or commerical farming, mostly because i haven't fully formed my opinions on those things just yet and remain fearful of entering such debates. but it reads a bit like that, in retrospect.
[Currently pondering: Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden--a classic.
Part of this (as you'll be able to tell from the writing style) is ripped from a syllabus I'm working on for "America to 1865," the basic college survey course.
"Forty-plus years removed from Leo Marx's original publication of The Machine in the Garden, historians have returned to his literary analysis with full recognition that there is really no “machine” in his book. So much of modern environmental and social history scholarship is about the history of technologies, but looking back at Marx reminds us that intrusions upon the American landscape are just as much about how the American mind perceives them. At the time of its original publication, Americans were confronting mass suburban sprawl and industrial pollution like never before. So he used the history of the American literary imagination in an attempt to explain the pastoral ideal. What had we lost, exactly? Were we mourning an imagined past or a real one?
Students, then, need to understand that the pastoral ideal is something that has been used to justify and define the American experience since the age of discovery. And in the middle of the nineteenth century, as many Americans experienced industrialization and urbanization for the first time, writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain tried to make sense of it through pastoral symbology. Hawthorne cringed as the steam locomotive broke through his thoughts in Sleepy Hollow, and then the steamboat's shadow loomed over Huck Finn; the memory and legacy of Jefferson stayed nostalgic, not stale but fresh, as America became a nation of workers and industrialists."
That's what I wrote as a professional statement on teaching this book. I do think it's important for everyone, though, to think about HOW they think. Here in the South, it's much too easy to start a love affair with a completely imagined past--like long afternoons on big white porches and bright mornings out in the countyside, or the slowness of what we think is the "South," something decadent and syrupy and romantic. For most people, that South has never existed. It's pretty easy to understand where we get those images, though. It's all the mythology handed down to us from ancestral stories and cultural representations and even Progressive-Era historians. It's a whisper that just won't die. Kind of like the pastoral ideal more generally. America HAS been a nation of farmers, of makers, but life has never been easy. Or it's only been easy for a few.
So where is the "real" South? Or the "real" America? Has it been hiding, always, out in the country? Where do you find it, and how do you keep it?
I was on a farm last night, right outside of Athens. It's manned by a group of ecology students here at UGA; my friend Levi lives and works there and was gracious enought to have us over for dinner and a beautiful evening by the campfire, under the stars.
This particular venture provides all the food for Farm 255, a restaurant in town dedicated to serving only local and regional ingredients.
It's not really a "boutique" farm like you might be conceptualizing though. It's huge, stretching out along some lusciously dusty roads and pastures. I walked a little ways down to visit a few cows--one of whom, I have to mention, is named Howard Johnson. And he's red-haired and has the sweetest nose you'll ever see on a cow. There's a litter of pigs close to the main house right now, running around. And a coop full of tiny chicks.
You might see a pattern in my lauding here. These animals are HAPPY. They're in their element, seemingly anyway, feeding from fresh grass and sunshine and clean air. They're cared for lovingly by students who want to learn how to farm in an ecologically-friendly and humane way. Yes, these animals will be food. I had some farm fresh chicken last night, actually, and it was so good that my pal Tore was seen escaping into the night with some of the leftovers in a pot. But their journey from farm to table is relatively peaceful.
The point of all of this? Hear me out. I was strolling back to the main house with the whole crew. Night had really set in, and the stars were floating above us, bright little dots--so much brighter than I see them at my house in town. Tore and I were (slightly tipsy, yes) speculating about cosmology and light years and the possibilities for time travel. I stepped in some mud. I looked behind me, and I realized I was walking on the kind of "country road" that James Taylor always sings about. And that. That was when I realized that you MAKE the South you want, or the countryside you want, or the life you want. We were there celebrating the end of a long week as well as celebrating the farm itself and the people who work so hard to maintain it.
The "rural," historians have suggested to us, is never fully separate from the urban. Yet the rural is much more prone to nostalgia than the urban. And I think--and this is just a tiny chunk of a bigger answer I hope to have one day--that's because there IS something magical about it. About being somewhere more green, less hectic, a little dusty. There's something about holding a baby chick and keeping it warm inside your coat. Or sharing a beer with friends under a thick, studded night sky. There are reasons that we crave these things, that we even sometimes imagine them when they are not there at all. We may have let too many machines into our garden, Professor Marx, yes.
That's all I got for now.
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