Rural America is everywhere. I mean that literally, as it makes up 90% of our national land mass (although, only a fifth of the population), but also figuratively, as so many urbanites are trying to grasp what their small-town country compadres see in the 45th President of the United States. Hell, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, the story of the author’s upbringing in a poor drug-ridden Ohio town, sits atop the New York Timesnonfiction best-seller list for Sherwood Anderson’s sake.
BUY THE BOOK
Hillbilly Elegy
by J. D. Vance
I haven’t read Vance’s book, but I have perused too many op-eds, and listened to entirely too much commentary about “rural” America, a word often used synonymously with everywhere that isn’t the D.C.-to-Boston corridor or California. Enough already. Rural America isn’t any more monolithic than anywhere else. I know this because I grew up in Montana, but in Billings, the largest city of 110,000, give or take. We didn’t see ourselves as rural at all, even if a fifteen-minute drive put us in the middle of proverbial nowhere. The point is, polemics are polemical. Rural America is much bigger than the punditry, and it includes parts of every state in the nation. Red, Blue, and In-Between. So, with that independent spirit in mind — and the suggestions of a few who know the rugged terrain–here are a few books to take you far away from the big city.
I’m personally recommending American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, 2009, and Fifty-Six Counties: A Montana Journey by Russell Rowland, 2016
American Salvage and Fifty-Six Counties capture contemporary rural life in its authentic glory, and ugliness. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story collection is an honest warts-and-all depiction of life among the Michigan country folk, one version of the white working class that’s been overly thinkpiece-ed to death. Campbell is from Kalamazoo, the region is in her blood, and the hardscrabble characters throughout her stories are linked by a sense of place and people. The isolated and lonely, but beautiful and proud, areas where money is always tight, the electric bill isn’t always paid, hogs are raised for special Sunday dinners, camouflage constitutes formalwear, and gas station beer (and worse, home-cooked meth) numbs the pain. There is violence and despair, salvaging scrap metal is both a way of life and a metaphor for the characters’ existence, but there is no cheap cynicism or easy finger-pointing. Campbell’s stark tales are of people left behind. Some are angry and bitter, but most are grinding it out the best they know how. The author turns the simple act of enduring into a heartfelt paean to living.
In 2007, after twenty-five years away, my fellow Montana native Russell Rowland returned home. Being back in the Treasure State elicited a strong yearning to understand Montana better, to take it all in, to try and understand the “Last Best Place” in ways he never had. Over the course of two years, and some 5,000 miles, he visited all fifty-six counties, trying to connect the past, present, and future in a place that’s home to the most majestic natural beauty and abject human sadness. Rowland’s book combines history, geography and sociology, with plenty of small-town portraits, both touristy boomtowns and Main St. closed-up-shop busts, Indian reservations and mountain gentrifications. It becomes apparent that taking the pulse of Montana — the 4th largest state by size with 2.5-times more cows than people — is a dream gig for Rowland, even amidst all of the pain and the eternal battle against the elements. He pieces it together methodically, and it’s a journey worth taking. As Rowland says, “Montana is a place that will not let go of you.”
Speaking of Rowland…
Russell Rowland (author High and Inside, In Open Spaces)
Recommends: Old Jules by Mari Sandoz, 1935
I’m a big fan of Old Jules as the most no-bullshit version of early rural life. It’s basically a novelized version of a memoir. Mari Sandoz’s father was a total scumbag, an alcoholic who used to write these letters to women back east convincing them he was a rich farmer in Nebraska who was much younger than he really was. So they’d come out to marry him and at least a couple of them had no way to back out of it. It’s an amazing, brutal story, but also laced with humor.
Nate Schweber (freelance journalist New York Times, Narratively author “A Racist Runs Through It”)
Recommends: DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation and the Public Good by Bernard DeVoto, 2005, and The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan, 2009
Bernard DeVoto was a smart, scathing writer whose prodigious talents have largely been forgotten because he focused on something arcane to most non-westerners: public lands. Writing the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine from the 1930s through to his death in the 1950s, DeVoto almost single-handedly beat back the forebears to the modern Sagebrush Rebellion. That movement seeks to transfer ownership of public lands like National Forests and National Monuments from the federal government to the states. There, they can be sold, and in DeVoto’s words “subjected to local vulnerability, local manipulation and local intimidation.” DeVoto urges readers to remember, “This is your land we are talking about.” A Utah native who taught at Harvard and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his histories of the American West, DeVoto hammered on the sham of the west’s omnipresent cowboy mythology. He pulled no punches criticizing an exploitative culture that history showed was a threat not only to itself, but to the United States of America. The book is powerful for its unsentimental critique of the rural west, and prescient because so many of the bad ideas DeVoto tried to bury again threaten the country. He was an important resource for a piece I wrote about the long ugly history of anti-public land crusades, “A Racist Runs Through It.”
To my mind, Timothy Egan has the highest slugging percentage of any writer working today. In 1910, a Connecticut-sized wildfire torched the rugged mountains on the border between Idaho and Montana. It was the first major forest fire the United States government ever tried to fight. No less combustable is the story of how locomotive-like President Teddy Roosevelt and his visionary but bizarre partner in arms Gifford Pinchot created what is now the U.S. Forest Service, and America’s suite of public lands. “Roosevelt’s task was to persuade people not just to cherish their natural heritage, but to understand that it was their right in a democracy to own it — every citizen holding a stake,” he writes. Rooting for Roosevelt to fail — as well the failure of the cause for which a new western alloy of Ivy leaguers, mountain men, soldiers, immigrants and even criminals risked fiery death — were a consortium of some of the richest robber barons and crookedest politicians of the Gilded Age. This is a rollicking adventure field with heroes and villains, a great cause and a hellish threat, and, ultimately, a celebration of the rural America that is still as wild as when it was created.
James Campbell (author The Ghost Mountain Boys, The Color of War, The Final Frontiersman, Braving It)
Recommends: Canoeing With the Cree by Eric Sevareid, 1935, and Reading the River by John Hildebrand, 1997
Both Eric Sevareid’s Canoeing with the Cree and John Hildebrand’s Reading the River are set in the wild and rugged North Country. Savareid’s is the story of two greenhorn paddlers – Sevareid, who would go onto fame as a CBS news correspondent, and a buddy – just out of high school who are intent on paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. The four-month, 2,200-mile odyssey, which many considered a fool’s errand, nearly undid them. But through courage, perseverance, a good bit of luck, and occasional help from the Native Cree, they arrived at York Factory on Hudson Bay as the brutal Manitoba winter set in. Unlike Sevareid’s youthful adventure, Hildebrand’s lyrical story is about a man returning to Alaska to confront the ghosts of his past and to find something of the life that eluded him. During his 2,000-mile journey down the Yukon, he runs into all sorts of characters, from homesteaders and hippies to drunks, mushers, missionaries, Natives, and biologists, all of whom have some relationship to the mighty river. Both are honest and simple stories.
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