Against the Country Read Free

only to suggest something truer with his California killing spree.
    Whether we were swayed by these particular boosters of the simple life or by others is for my parents to say, not me, though I do think it germane that we found ourselves banished to a desolate Virginia county at the foot of the Piedmont Plateau, to the east of Jefferson’s labor camp on Monticello, and to the west of the Confederate capital Calhoun’s rhetoric made inevitable, and to the south of the wounds Whitman peeled and scraped clean on account of the agricultural lie’s most spirited attempt yet to defend itself. Could chance alone have fetched us to such a nexus? Was it wholly arbitrary that we landed within a wind-aided scream of the very spot where the effort to farm the interior of this continent began?
    I thank God, if He has not by now entirely acquiesced to the rural cause, that we ventured east and not west, as Mr. Greeley would have liked it, because I doubt I would be here to complain had the opposite occurred. That we chose to head south, though, is a blow no God who retained even the smallest affection for His American subjects would have dealt us, and that we settled in so useless a stretch of the kudzu is a masterstroke no combination of Jeffersons could feasibly havearranged. I must therefore conclude, as I was moved at least to suspect during my long years of exile from town, that the land itself, and especially the land of the Virginia Piedmont, wooded and weed-choked and encased in hard red clay where we had been led to expect some semblance of topsoil, was actively, and perhaps even knowingly, involved in our doom.

More pessimistic circles
    Since those days when England’s rubbishes wagered all they had for the wisdom that they would shortly be dead in the Virginia brush, if not by native axe or flesh scoop then by the bloody flux or some other microscopic remedy to man, it has been the American’s destiny, or else simply his style, to head off into perdition unburdened with the price of a ticket home. Apparently the cost of a single rented U-Haul, as well as the gasoline required to traverse Kentucky’s failed imitation of industry (and then to negotiate the food-stampy hollers and tax-kept scenic viewpoints of the Appalachian range), sufficed to include us in this ritual of diminishment and despair. Even before they had seen for themselves the depletion along the once ballyhooed and now rightfully ignored James River, my parents were tapped out and frightened enough to make for the comparative oasis of Richmond, where a couple of weeks left to amuse ourselves in the parking lot of a waffle house near the motel, while our father looked for construction work and our mother searched in ever more pessimistic circles for an address within our means, made it clear that Richmond cared no more for us than had the decomposing forts back in Southern Illinois. We knew that within a month or two we would need to seek shelter elsewhere, most likely in one of those sad and vacant James-bound counties we had driven through on the way out and already agreed to detest.
    My brother, in what I take to be a stab at kindness, has claimed that our parents could not possibly have intended for their children to come of age so removed from the basic comforts, and so divested of human decency, and were bent for the nearest Kentucky town when, somewhere between Richmond and Charlottesville, the gas money gave out. Against such a theory I would offer our sister’s insistence that throughout this dark time she was continually promised a horse, which would indicate (a) that our parents nurtured a bucolic goal all along and (b) that they meant to have some money left over once their goal had been achieved, which would further indicate (c) that they were in no way impelled but actually chose to raise us in our subsequent isolation and misery. On the other hand, since my sister never received anything like a horse in the Virginia hills, despite the fact