On Native Ground -- The art of abidance and staying home (Joe Bageant)

[Tace]

The front porch of the crossroads store, post office and mill at Unger Store, West Virginia. Photo Credit: Eva Solhern

Americans in particular find it hard to grasp that there’s no “better place” left to run toward, geographically or economically. No new frontier other than the present, upon which we can begin to build a more resonant and meaningful place in the world

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

In gathering material for his next book, Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's class war, has been traveling his native hills of Virginia and West Virginia. Below is a short excerpt from his ongoing road journal.

April 21, 2009 -- Driving Shanghai Road on the way to visit my childhood church in Unger Store, Morgan County, West Virginia, I crest the hill just above our old family farm. And I spot something that makes me stop and turn off the truck motor, lest the moment be interrupted. Ahead of me in the Sunday morning sun is an old farmer I've known all my life and most of his, Ray Luttrell, who is meditating on his hayfield. Standing on the very roadside spot where I’ve seen his late father Harry stand countless times. Ray is just looking at that hay field, motionless for many minutes.

Before him is his most familiar place on earth, his native ground. And I feel that for a moment at least I once again know that same home ground, again feel the personal sense of eternity in its very “itness.” A tableau profoundly exclusive to that place and its people, so specific in its fabric of detail and history that it cannot exist anywhere else on earth.

When you are born and raised in one ancestral place, and, like Ray, accept that you’ll probably die there, you know it intimately, specifically and forever. Just as those before you knew it. All your early memories, all the voices inside your head, they come from there, and you know it and its community in a way other people never will. The geographic arch and trajectory of a life can be so specific as to know its precise beginning and ending spot. Once while squirrel hunting Pap stopped in the woods at a pile of leaf buried stones that had once been a chimney and said, “Right there, right there was where I was born.” And all his life he knew exactly where he would be buried. In the cemetery where I am headed, where we may find him today, should we care to dig deep enough, right next to Maw and his children.

On this late April morning in 2009 the sun raises steam from the dewy lawn of Greenwood Methodist Church, high on the hillside bend in the road near Unger Store, West Virginia. Inside about fifty people, most of them above that same number in age, listen to the minister, a young woman in her thirties, tell about how the lord does provide. First comes the group recitation: “Be guided by God’s word, that you may bear good fruit…” Then as living proof of that good fruit, farmer Ray Luttrell’s fresh faced 10-year-old granddaughter is called up front to be recognized for her recent accomplishment -- a prize-winning school social science essay titled “Why We Are In Iraq.” For that she earned a story and full color picture in the local newspaper, The Morgan Messenger.

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