One of the blogs we follow here is The South Roane Agrarian which is posted by an agrarian farmer in Tennessee. It's the best agrarian blog around [1].
Absent Landscapes
It ain't easy being an agrarian in the modern world, or a distributist either. As an orthodox Roman Catholic, agrarian, distributist whose was once a geologist but who practices law out in the world, I can assure that may daily existence is a sort of existential crisis.
The reason for that is pretty simple. You can't really reconcile them, and the world, very easily.
Indeed, being a distributist in economic mindset puts you at odds with a lot of the American economic mindset to start with. Very few people understand what Distributism even is. Deeply conservative in nature, if you take a tour through Reddit's Distributism subreddit you'll find it populated by what are pimply faced teenagers fascinated with socialism and monarchy, which have utterly nothing to do with Distributism whatsoever. It's not even worth bothering with (and the fact that its moderated by one guy is, well, anti distributist. So that leaves you with the half dozen or so people on the continent who grasp and like the Chestertonian species of small, but very real, free marketism to start with. Most Americans now days figure the world is instead divided between Capitalism and Socialism, with the former not grasping the role of corporations in capitalism and the former not even understanding what socialism is, and that its a big giant massive failure (yeah, yeah, I know, some socialist will come by and say "oh, that's because real socialism of the Prudhommeistic, anarchist, monarchist fluffy bunny type has never been tried. . . ").
And being an Agrarian works the same way. People smile and think, how charming, and then wonder on. Maybe they'll tell you that the buy free range squab at the farmers market or something if they're inclined to talk at all. Maybe they think that your into "homesteading", a that term is used in the modern world, which is vaguely.
And we can't even begin to explain how much the remainder puts you outside the world. Apostolic succession. . . the real (and yes, it's real) influence of evolution in our mental makeup, the broken but fixed nature of our biological makeup. Pretty much 95% of contemporary Americans have any sort of grasp of that stuff at all, and depending upon who you are talking to, and why, people are going to assume that you are some sort of flaming left wing radical, or some sort of flaming right wing radical.
Indeed, I guess that latter point is pretty good evidence of being generally on track.
Anyhow, there isn't day that goes by that I don't think of what it would be like to step out of a low ceilinged log cabin and looking out at a range homestead (using that word in the old sense) knowing darned well that at my age that's never ever going to happen. Nope. Never. I have cattle, to be sure, but I'm almost 60 years old and the thought that someday I'll raise my family by that means alone is too late to be realized. Both of my children are in their 20s. When I die, and people ask them what I did, it'll be "he was a lawyer". Same with my friends. Same with everyone I know.
Most days I just keep all of this to myself as I have no choice. I'm like my father that way. To this day I'll occasionally hear "he was a great dentist", which is what his profession was. I oddly never think of him that way. He was an outdoorsman, a Wyomingite, and he put in a garden that was so large that it was effectively a subsistence farm. Dentist? Yes, but I'm more likely to think of him fishing than I am that way. It's not like I hung around at his office admiring that constantly. Indeed, in an era when dentist didn't make gobs of money, what I mostly remember about his work is the extraordinarily long hours he put in.
Same with me. Practicing law has became so time consuming, it's really about all I do for the most part. I have no big garden this year. I'm getting one day per week off due to what I have going on. Tomorrow they're gathering cattle. I'm not. I'll be in the office practicing law.
Bitter screed, I don't mean it to be. Like the Hyman Roth character in Godfather II, I could say that "this is the life we chose", but I don't think that's really terribly accurate for most adults. It is in part, but like T. E. Lawrence's character in David Lean's depiction of the man, we "can't want what we want". Circumstances play a big part in that.
All of which leads up to this. South Roane has posted a new entry (his are weekly, as opposed to the vast flood of meaningless stuff I put out on Lex Anteinternet) which is a Cri de Coeur.
Usually when I see a post like this, there's a back story of some sort to it. Some experience that somebody has had that causes them to put metaphorical pen to paper. I'm guessing there's one here. No matter, it's from the heart and its well worth reading. It sets itself well with this:
I grew up on a dirt road at the end of which was an old-growth wood of many hundreds of acres. It bordered what is called Contraband Bayou. I have written before of this wood and Jean Lafitte, the pirate rumored to have buried his loot among the cypresses. I hunted those woods, fished those waters, was a boy along those banks, in that place. Today, like all the area surrounding, it is concrete pavement illuminated by halogen lights, a Walmart, a Super Target, a casino or two, budget and luxury hotels, homes built on every conceivable patch and lot. It is an absent landscape.
It then goes on with this stout comment:
For those of you still advocating for eternal growth and progress, I pose these questions: What is your secret to finding beauty in what we have achieved? Does your heart flutter at more shopping opportunities and a new strip mall? Are the woods and bayous and rivers an obstacle to your betterment? Do you see productive agricultural land along the highway as an opportunity for a solar farm of concrete and silicon and metal? When you see a pastured hill or a majestic stand of hardwoods, do you calculate only the fill dirt or the timber that can be sold from it. Is your heart unmoved by the leveled and the dead? If so, then I will tell you that you are the enemy.
The past couple of years I've had the odd experience of driving up a road that I've known my entire life. The current owners of the land on both sides of the road have been familiar with it only a fraction of the time I have. It figured two sharp right turns that went around a beautiful hay meadow.
No longer.
Now the road goes right through it. For some reason, I'm told, the current owners, who don't depend on agriculture for a living, wanted it straightened out, possibly so it didn't go so close to their house.
It's a tragedy.
Further down the road WYDOT has taken out an old wooden bridge and put in a new one. It's completely absurd. I don't know what the motivation is, but the new one is a massive concrete structure that they had to elevate the road for in order to put it in. It's a good bridge alright, where no bridge was needed at all.
That bridge goes through a ranch yard that belonged to a family that we knew well. My father employed one of them for years, and we knew them, as a family, for many years longer. Decades. They sold it out to some wealthy people who posted the crap out of it.
At least they didn't bust up all their land for "ranchettes", which in this arid climate become weedettes. Land to fool new arrivals that if they buy a cow they're ranchers, before they go broke, abandon the cow and let the land go to the county.
All that is mild compared to what South Roane is noting, which is the unyielding development mindset. We must develop because we must. Unoccupied land has no value because its unoccupied, they seem to think. South Roane is bitter, and declares them to be the enemy.
Whether they are the enemy or not, we have to keep something in mind. We can't develop every square inch of everything and a society that doesn't allow average people to make their living from the land is fundamentally broken. We're already there.
I can't, or at least shouldn't, complain about my life. My parents were both extremely intelligent people and part of their inheritance to me was a pretty good intellect. I've made my living from it. I've really had no choice, however.
To say that isn't a complaint, but an acceptance of reality. In McPhee's excellent book La Place De La Concorde Suisse one of the central characters who is followed (the book is about a reconnaissance unit of the Swiss Army during its annual training) is a man who has a science degree related to agriculture. He'd wanted to be a farmer, but couldn't, the entry cost of becoming a Swiss farmer, like becoming an American one, being far too high to realistically do. He's not portrayed as bitter, only portrayed as taking a different direction.
Indeed, I know a lot of younger sons and daughters from ranch families who have themselves been faced with the same situation. There are a lot of lawyers and a fair number of doctors and dentists of my vintage and a little older who fit that definition. No place to go on the ranch, so they went into a profession, keeping a tie with the ranch in their communities.
I fit that category to an extent myself, although its a double remote connection in a way. My grandfather owned a packing house in his county which also had farm ground. It owned cattle, had a brand, and raised potatoes. They also owned a "creamery" which is the equivalent to a dairy. My father, as the oldest son in the family, one of two boys (he had two sisters as well) would have stepped into the business. My grandfather's death ended that. It was all sold. He was still a teenager.
That left him with no choice but to find other employment, which he did. But he never lost his interest in things associated with the outdoors, which his early life clearly involved. I've touched a little on that already.
I graduated high school, like my father, at age 17. At that time what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, but I knew it was unrealistic. I looked into what I could, even looking at the options to homestead, in the old fashioned sense, in the Canadian far north. I decided to become a Game Warden, but concerns about being employed kept me from that. Instead, I went into geology, but when I came out, there were no jobs. Law followed.
Early in my legal career my father and I had an opportunity to buy a small ranch. A real one, but a small one. Had we done it, I would have kept my job for some time, and he his, but ultimately, we would have done that. Then he died.
My mother would have supported me going on with my father's plan, but I didn't know that and I didn't bring it up to her. She'd been ill for a very long time, and as she was in her 60s, my thought is that she'd need every bit of saved money to carry on. She was just 65 at the time and in fact did live many more years. As each passing year went by, the cost of ranch land went up and up.
Now, I am married, as it were, into a ranch family and we do have cattle. That marriage has nothing to do with the above, other than how we met, a story which varies depending upon whose version of it you believe. At any rate, people who travel in common circles will commonly meet each other. I know other "power couples" who are married lawyers or married professionals, but we aren't. We're married rural people.
But as a rural person I've watched the houses spring up outside of Denver or Dallas, or any larger city you can name. And I have heard again and again the cries for progress. But what is that?
The name "progress" implies a progression towards something. And we're always progressing towards something. On the day I'm writing this (it usually takes me several days to write a "thoughtful" entry like one), a column of U.S. battle ships was progressing a century ago towards somewhere, the sailors on board not realizing that the very ships they were on were progressing towards obsolesce. Also on this day, the Wehrmacht was progressing towards Moscow and the Volga, in a progression that would lead to mass rape, murder and ultimately the Red Army in Berlin. And both of those were human planned progressions.
In our own benighted day and age the left wing of one of our two political parties, as we unfortunately only seem to have two that every get anywhere (although in reality, of course, there are several, and at least a grand total of five substantial ones) labels itself as "progressive" and is referred to in the press that way. This would suggest that they're progressing towards something, but what the end goal is, is never stated. You really can't label yourself as a progressive unless you have a plan to progress to a point, and that point has to actually be a final destination. There is no such thing as perpetual progress.
There's no such thing as perpetual growth either. Things that grow without bounds suffer. They grow too big, too fat, or too something, and die.
It's noteworthy that Solzhenitsyn famously noted that there is no progress. He tended to drive westerners nuts, as once he left/was ejected from, the Soviet Union the common assumption is that he was going to say "Wow! Free market economics, K-marts and consumer goods with no restraint, sign me up baby!". He didn't. Instead, he went on to be just as big of critic of the West as he had been of the Communist East.
Solzhenitsyn was deeply intellectual and deeply conservative in an existential sense. He tended to say shocking things. Doing that got him tossed out of Russia and doing that caused him to be criticized in the US. But in a very real sense, he was right. There is progress in various ways, but existentially, we progress very little and perhaps not at all. Indeed, the more removed we are from our natures, and our natures are pretty feral and agrarian, the more unhappy as a society we become.
Not matter what your current view of history may be, one thing that can't be ignored about the US is that it was settled in part because people could do here what they no longer could in their homelands, and that was to own, their own. And what often was, for many, was their own farm. Now that dream is dead for most Americans. We're no more able to own a farm than our ancestors were who stepped off the boat from Westphalia or Cork.
And that, in and of itself, makes the American Dream more than a little bit of a lie. There isn't perpetual progress if you can't progress towards the most basic of occupations. We're told, of course, that progress moved us off the land and into the city for great jobs and the like, but we know better when we go to the big box stores.
A land in which you must live in a big city, and you can't simply be a farmer, or even really want to be, is more than a little sad. It's unjust.
Footnotes
1. Not that there are very many. There are a few, but quality wise, South Roane's is far and away above the rest.
The same is true, I'd note, for Distributist blogs. There's a few, but so far none of them really measure up, and Reddit's Distributist subreddit is a mess. At least, however, its more active than the Agrarian subreddit, which is barely making a pulse.
What this says, I'm not sure of. Off the radar in general society perhaps.
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