Hello,
I never know whether to refer to older people by their first names or last -- is it "Joe" or "Mr. Bageant?" I suppose, out of my intense respect for your writing, I should go by the latter. Most of what I read on the Internet is juvenile ranting, but your site is the only one I've run into that I think I can take without a grain of salt. What strikes me, first of all, about your writings is the similarity of your southern rednecks to my Yankee hicks. It just goes to show that in an age when we all watch the same TV, geography no longer has the power to divide us -- class does.
When I read letters by old folks telling about the good old days, back before we were obsessed with buying stuff, back before TV when kids still read books, I just smile. I'm only 18 years old, and have no Depression-era sob stories, but the America you spoke of -- "an America that scarcely exists today, one that was kinder, more mysterious and certainly more connected with the earth and its verities" -- is still the America I live in.
My parents are "flatlanders" from Connecticut, an Irishman and a poor girl in a WASP-dominated state without an income tax that moved north into the backwoods of northern Vermont. In the town where we live, there are 800 people; my graduating class in elementary school had seven kids. Most of the food we eat is grown in our own county, our Thanksgiving turkey comes from the backyard. I can never remember watching TV as a kid, except sports -- we ran around in the woods, using our imaginations, of all things, to have fun. We learned the songs of our ancestors, American and Irish, at our father's knee, and there are four or five guitars strewn around the house -- when the neighbors get together, they bring their fiddles, banjos, and electric guitars.
We and our friends wrote plays and put them on for the adults. We made films with our old camcorder that, despite costing us a grand total of $0 per feature, are better than most anything Hollywood churns out for $150 million nowadays. We were raised on Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side (cartoons with real literary value, especially the former) the Marx Brothers and our own lack of resources that forced us to be creative. In the tiny town halls and statehouse lawns of backwoods Vermont, acting talent thrives -- I just watched my brother perform in a play of teenagers, some as young as 12 or 13, all of them far more talented than anything you would find in Los Angeles.
It's not easy to live here. The winters bring six-foot snowdrifts and the summers bring cat-sized deerflies, but I wouldn't live anywhere else. This is the land where liberals still have guns -- more than once a chicken-killing or child-killing varmint has brought my father onto the porch with the 22. There are so few people sometimes you feel lost in Siberia, but you make do -- the biggest city in Vermont is Burlington, with 40,000 people, but there's more going on there on a Saturday night than there is in Boston.
I remember one afternoon when my sister was visiting us from Boston, where she goes to college. She was playing songs she and a neighbor had written together -- the acoustic guitar drifted out the window onto the freshly-cut lawn. The wood grill was cooking Black Angus steaks we had bought from a butcher/neighbor. I stood there, utterly mesmerized by the dragonfly struggling in a barn spider's web, and just then began to fully appreciate the world that throbs beneath our feet -- a whole drama of nature one can never see unless one slows down to watch. I stayed outside to watch for hours more, and swatted mosquitoes as the sky turned to velvet, the fireflies started blinking like sprites in the grass, and the peepers started peeping. A peeper, in case you don't have them down south, is a frog smaller than the nail of your little finger whose peep can make your ears ring if you stand too close.
But the point I really want to make here is that the America you spoke of doesn't have to go anywhere just because we have electricity now. I can't imagine that childhood without the video camera, or the electric guitar, or driving around towns at 3 in the morning to see what kind of people the night would puke up, or even overruning the ancient Babylonians on the computer. Jefferson's agrarian paradise is still out there, even in this modern age, if we can just turn off the TV, drop about 50 million people from our population, and try to pick up a book or a guitar again.
Oh, and there's another point, which is that if you stop getting your entertaintment from corporate America and start getting it in your community, you'll find that not only is there more creativity due to lack of resources, but maybe ge ography can starting dividing us again, and the charming Vermont accent will return. We need to turn inward, back to our own 800-person towns, and stop thinking so damned BIG -- get your food from local farmers, your music at a local blues jam, and your TV from a high school play (not kidding, you should have seen some of the school plays I was in). We need to learn to make more with less and just slow down.
Anyway, this was a bit of a ramble, and not my best writing, but thanks for listtening and keep up the good work. If you really want to get away, you don't need to go to Central America -- give Vermont a try. Start with Burlington on a Saturday night.
Solidarity,
Winds
Vermont
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You have made my day. I do understand what you are talking about because I raised two of my kids in the woods on a remote Indian reservation in Idaho. The music, no TV, wood heat, killing our own chickens, and starry nights, hard work, dependable neighbors and friends. Yup. And it's all still there in Benewah County, Idaho. Just like it is in Vermont.
I chose Belize partly because we old farts like warm weather, partly because it is cheap enough for a broke old writer to live there, and partly because I feel deeply at home in that culture and the Village of Hopkins. But if I could still chop wood and shovel snow, I'd be in the woods now feeding my animals.
Anyway, "Yore right smart of a writer," as they say in these parts. Once in a while I run into young folks raised as you were and as my children were. And I wonder what your way and place in the world will be.
What kind of guitar pickin' do you do?
Joe
