ot - rural anecdotes

dewd,

to me grits is something you eat with poke salad, black eye peas and okra!

during part of my wasted youth i lived in a cowboy shack on a ranch in the northern sierra nevada (plumas county, gennessee valley). tin roof, uninsulated walls/floor, cold water in winter, a small wood burning stove only for heat, 5 degrees f. at night outside, and inside about 15 minues after the fire burned out. the shack was originally a carriage barn for the stage coaches that came from Beckwourth, and the nevada border, over the pass just up the road. the ranch was one of the first ones established in that valley since it was a stage stop. they had great water rights and therefore good pastures.

work was pulling beaver dams out of the irrigation ditches, trying to convince the loony old "okie" neighbors to stop shooting onto the property at the coyotes that ate their kitty cats (for a while it was sufficient to tell them that some pot growers or indians had been sighted several miles off on some side dirt road and they'd be gone for hours with their full arsenal in tow, but eventually they wised up), pulling cows and work horses off barb wire fences when they got stuck, chasing them out of the alfalfa fields so they didn't bloat, thinning timber &timber falling, milling lumber, baling hay, misc. construction, etc.

it was a very beautiful area, few summer tourists, lots of drunk crazy deer hunters from the city in the fall, otherwise quiet, but after the environmentalists shutdown the timber industry (mostly by driving small family operations out) almost everybody was poor as hell unless they had inherited land, or worked for the gummint/etc.

the general observation was that most city folk don't have the skills to adapt to a *really* rural existence for the long run, so make sure you know what you are getting into if you go far away from the city!

in one of the "foothill" areas east of sacramento where my retired parents live, the real estate people do good business selling and reselling rural property to city people. the city people think that they can commute down the hill, or to the bay area, to their good paying jobs, and then live the good rural life on the weekends. problem is that if you go too far out, the lack of infrastructure means that maintaining property is a *lot* more work than in the suburbs. working commuter people get tired of after about 3 years, and move back to the suburbs.

there are some high tech businesses just outside the fringe of the edge cities, and for the people that can get jobs in those places and find semi-rural properties that still have decent infrastructure, it is ideal (e.g., Grass Valley and Nevada City, Chico?).

if you want to see how stupid american politics is, do a web search on "quincy library" and look for how the environmental groups that get their money from city people actually tried to block economic & environmental reforms by a coalition of local ecology people, workers, business and the forest service.

some good general reading on the tragic decline of rural american culture & life is by Wendell Berry, e.g. "Unsettling of America". also Wallace Stegner is good on the history & lifeworld of westerners, "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian", "Angle of Repose", and so forth.

regards,
ep

> From: "Kevin Kostyszyn" <kevin_at_dulcian.com>
> Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 11:21:37 -0400
> Subject: RE: OT about to peeve off the vegatarians: RE: OT RE:

> ... That's my little dream, land and sweet smelling air and trees
> and animals and privacy. I want to go home after work, sit on a
> large porch that wraps around my house, put my feet up, listen to
> some sweet James Taylor, smoke a grit and drink an ice cold beer
> and watch the sun go down:)

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