I was stuck at a busy stoplight, cold rain beating down on the truck. The intersection used to be the edge of town; now it’s filled with the chaos of urban growth. Farms that once grew crops and cattle now sprout gas stations and cheap burgers. Across from me—invisible to the people crowded around—hides a little creek, pinched between a gas station and a tire shop. I waited for the light to change; my spirits sinking in time with my rising anger. I looked up, and through the rain I saw a blue heron flying above the chaos. As I watched the ghostly figure slide through the rain, I felt my heart slow down, no longer tuned to my anger, but to the steady beats of long wings.
For years now I’ve watched herons, setting them up as a beacon for things to come. It’s an odd choice—they’re pretty but not melodic and like many animals have a hard time adapting to new circumstances. Like me, I’ve often thought. My wife has long argued they were my spirit animal, sent with portents for the future or present. She’s probably right, but I don’t know what this one wanted to say.
I figured the heron was headed for the creek, intent on enjoying the rainy day in solitude. Maybe this was an old haunt for him, a return home like salmon coming upstream. That wasn’t his fate. Each time he tried to land, he was forced up to escape power lines, the buffeting of semis, and the chaos of modern life. He circled and tried to land in the creek over and over for an eternity before he finally gave up. I saw him head north to find a less crowded spot to set down. I guess he found it, but given how human life has spread I think he was disappointed until he found a place not too progressive for awkward, out-of-time creatures.
The light changed and traffic started to move. My spirits fell to ground, mired alongside the heron’s. I drove on and headed west to the farm, rain still drumming. I don’t know what to make of what I saw, other than sadness. Once I broke free of the chaos of the college town and back out into the clean spaces I saw another heron; bigger, surer of itself. It crossed the road in front me, settling into the Illinois River, content in its anachronism. I wondered how much longer he could stay that way, or if he too would be pushed aside so progress could teach us how to live. I wondered the same about our farm, and all those around me.
I think a lot about those herons—in them I see a lot about my place, the Ozark Mountains, and the people that live here. Settling here was never really a good idea, it seems. Historians tell how the beautiful vistas, green ridges, and gin-clear waters weren’t a place where Native American communities settled in earnest, at least until Europeans showed up on the east coast and pushed their way through Appalachia and over the wide Mississippi. As settlers settled, clearing ridges and benches and bottom lands, the oak savannas turned into crop land. The forests that remained were further changed by turning cattle and hogs out into them. Along the way, the towns I know here emerged, culminating perhaps in the home of Walmart. It’s a place that’s always been in motion, I suppose; or rather, always had people in motion on it and in it. It’s never really known where to stop as, like Toynbee said, “one damn thing after another” keeps happening.
Humanity and nature, history and stories, though, have never gotten on well around here, and it seems that the conflict is just heating up as we barrel on deeper into the twenty-first century. The things that keep happening one after another, though, are bound up in our relationship to the outside world, to history, and to hope.
Like a lot of rural places, Ozarkers have trouble thinking about who we are—do we look at the facts of how we got where we are, or do we just look at the stories, the memories twisted with time? It reminds me of how I deal with this problem in my own mind. For example: the facts of my grandpa are simple. Born in 1919, one of seven. A bit of looker as he grew up, and a bit of a flirt. Lived through the Depression. Went to the Pacific on the government’s dime, took a shell through his leg and got malaria. Came home. Raised a family, built a farm. Died in 1995. Them’s the facts.
His story, his memory, is more than that.
The history of my place is similar. Historians say we were ignored, save for what could be taken out of here, until poor folk from Appalachia showed up. Their arrival removed yet again the Native American communities that had landed in the rocky hills. Slavery and poverty and other bad things came. Farmers and poor folks left after World War II, and before, to find better ground elsewhere in the country. Then Walmart and Tyson came and saved us from ourselves. Them’s the facts.
The story of the place, its memory, is more than that.
The history of my place, the Ozarks, is not the same as its story. History, for all its charms, is a record of things dead and not so gone, wrapped up in theories of explanation that have more to do with now than then. Sure, we learn a lot. But we miss more. And so history often obscures people and place. To make matters more complicated, histories are themselves ignored; historians have described dispossession, human indignity, and worse for decades to a nation that only wanted a story. Scholars of my place have also tried hard to present a true enough face for the world. But in both cases, the lessons the past teaches are ignored, save by a few.
The story of the Ozarks echoes history sometimes. But the story of a community, or a community of communities, which is what the Ozarks really is, bleeds through history, takes on a life of its own, and can be manipulated easily by folks who don’t know a place’s own story, or have an agenda for a region that excludes the people who live there. That happened here, like so many other places.
Those of us with blood and bone made from the rocky soil are left dismayed, wondering what happened as strangers tell our tales. Anymore it feels like we’re standing in a crime scene, asking detectives for help while we look at the bodies strewn about us. Instead of the detectives helping, though, the aid they offer is as meaningful as ash in the wind. As the ash blows, we forget our own complicity in the story of our hills.
One evening I was over at my grandparent’s house. My grandpa and I were out walking through the field while grandma stayed back in the house. It wasn’t long before cancer would take first her and then him, but at that moment grandad and I were just enjoying the evening. He likely knew something was wrong, in the way that long familiar lovers do. I was little and didn’t know anything. We walked and my eyes darted, following the evening dance of bugs in the tall grass under the fence. The small pasture held his last horses now that farming was behind him. The fences weren’t his work; some were brushy, grown up with grass and brambles, the odd rose or blackberry peeking through. Rabbits and mice and snakes darted along the ground, finding a home in the fencerow’s in-between. Sparrows and robins and jays and finches, flitted along the top wire, chattering at the end of the day. The fencerow became an Ozark Wind in the Willows; Rat and Mole replaced by Rabbit and Mouse. Woodchucks took the role of the venerable old Badger, though I’m not sure that the weasels and stoats need replacing.
Too soon we turned back to the house. Daylight had changed, the summer sun relinquished its fury to the moon’s gentle urging, and so we returned along the fencerow. We weren’t in a hurry, just strolling through the tall grass as we went. With my hand in his, in that hazy light anything was possible.
As we wandered along, the summer evening wove a deeper magic, one that still haunts my ears. Over in the fence line popped out a call. I had heard it before but didn’t know what made it. I knew—and know now—very little about birds, but I knew that whatever made this sound wasn’t a regular old robin or an angry crow. Two short pulses, and a longer. Then a short break, and bob bob white! Bob bob white! floated out of the grass, hanging around our heads in the dusk as lightning bugs woke up for their shift. “Bobwhite,” grandpa said when I asked about the call. Then he whistled away, mimicking the call, and coaxed the timid creature out of the grass and into the open, where I saw a fleeting glimpse of the spotted feathers before the bobwhite realized it was a trick and fled in shame.
Bobwhite—quail—once ranged all over the United States, especially the Ozarks. While pockets are still found, the population has sharply declined over the last several decades. I haven’t heard a bob white call since I was a boy, not long after my grandfather’s death. After that evening when he showed me how to talk to animals, I practiced until I could almost do what he did. I never again convinced one to come out into the open, but on warm summer nights as the dusk blossomed, I stood at a fence he built and whistled—bob, bob white—bringing them closer and closer, until my excitement scared them back to their nests for the night.
They’re a funny creature, and like herons are a good way to ask questions about folks in spaces like mine. They rely on a healthy rural landscape to thrive. Biologists who care for such things talk about how the fundamentals of good farming are needed for frail creatures like bobwhites to survive. Interestingly, especially in an era of increasing skepticism surrounding livestock and farming in general, grazing by farm stock—cows, sheep, goats, horses—is needed to help ensure a healthy space for nesting, chick rearing, and life under the leaves. Kyle Hedges with the Missouri Department of Conservation argues that in the absence of the old ways of managing a landscape like our hills—fire and large animal pressure like bison—practices like rotational grazing, careful or no use of herbicides, and a reduction of clean cultivation in cropland is crucial for the intrepid little bird.
Echoing ecologists—notably not the same as our current crop of preservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy or any myriad of land trusts—for generations, Hedges and other scientists note that the quail’s home must be diverse. Nature, after all, abhors a monoculture. The ground cover needs to be a mixture of grasses and forbs (broadleaf plants that can flower, like clover or sunflowers). This sort of mix gives both a varied diet for the birds—different types of seeds dropping throughout the year, different insects coming in at different times—and allows for the presence of what’s called a “thermal cover.” Essentially, the thermal cover is just leafy plants, sometimes woody things like shrubs and bushes and wooded groves, that give animals relief in the summer months.
As luck would have it, you need all that for healthy livestock. Grasses and forbs provide a varied diet, both seasonally and nutritionally, and the things that provide a thermal break for the mighty bobwhite can also do the same for a cow or ewe or, God forbid, a goat. But, unfunnily, here is where history and hope do not rhyme. The areas for quail need regular disruption—and while once it would have been done in part by fire (intentional or not) and big native species, these days we humans manage things differently, thanks to the turning of history into an industrial process. That management has hurt the quail. And so the bobwhite becomes our warning symbol.
One day I turned around and bobwhites were gone. It wasn’t like I’d gradually noticed their disappearance—like most folks in the face of ecological change I was actively ignorant, caught up in adolescence and trying to ignore my grandfather’s lessons. Maybe here and there I realized, in the back of my memory, that something was lost. I normally shrugged it off and went about my day. That nagging feeling didn’t leave, though. The bobwhite—and so many other things—had gone, forgotten by all of us except the ghosts. Grandpa’s ghost stood quietly in the back, leaning on my memory’s fences, naming the disappearing present. As a shepherd friend of mine once said, “the past falters and dies by little steps.”
Nobody has any definitive answers for why the population of our local quail has so diminished that I fear my children will never hear them. It’s similar to how nobody has any definitive answers for why my place has diminished and disappeared, though it’s easy to point fingers at simple answers. Some argue chemical use destroyed the birds, others types of grass, and still more urban sprawl. It’s likely all those and more. And it’s even more complicated for the place.
That odd little bird declined at the same time the farms and rural population in the hills did and also at the same time how we farm changed. Did we change farming and then people left? Or did people leave and then farming had to change? Or was it both? It was probably both. To make it more complex, like everywhere as rural areas depopulated and farming changed, the nature of how our countryside is managed changed, and land is increasingly owned by absentee landlords or absentee conservationists.
The Ozarks, though poor, weren’t immune from the changes wrought in agriculture with agribusiness’s midcentury boom. By the 1980s, Ozark farms followed the pattern of get big or get out as the imperfect old ways of mixed farming and cash crop rotations faded, replaced by large-scale poultry and cow-calf operations. A lot of ink has been spilled over the last few years on this whole farm business—agribusiness is bad, monolithic cropping is bad, and on and on. And honestly, I agree with that assessment from an ecological and community level. But, as my wife likes to remind me, things are more complicated than that. We should re-evaluate how agricultural practices are understood and applied in the Ozarks and beyond. But I’m not sure we can feed the world in times of crisis with slow agriculture, though I hope we can.
I also understand that our decision here in the hill country, and elsewhere, to join up with the larger and “better” rural world has come at a high cost, and while the general story for the countryside of America has been told, the specifics matter. Yet they are often forgotten, which to me is a problem. The details matter because they put a name and a face to what’s gone. The bobwhite is one of the names we forgot.
The losses piled up thanks to the combined attention of World War II and the Great Depression. Small towns and farms throughout the region always had an uphill struggle as money and people flocked, sort of, to only a few places in the mountains. When the Depression hit, and then the economic pull of wartime and post-war America, it was hard for many folks to see how they could keep a life here. Something like half the population, or nearly, of my side of Ozarks left for better opportunities between the Depression years and the early 1960s. The population that returned couldn’t replace both the people and knowledge that was lost. And most of the folks that moved in didn’t go to the farms—they went to the towns or the retirement centers near newly made lakes and lived out a life of ease.
So our people left, and with them went the old ways of being in the landscape. While the land ethic that Aldo Leopold called for certainly wasn’t perfectly applied, or even discussed, in the hills, it was nevertheless a living ideal. The realities of ecology, poverty, and slow technology created a world more in tune with the needs of little things like bobwhites. We had a patchwork of small, diversified farms that relied on one or two working animals until the 1960s. Chemical agriculture wasn’t a major player in the region until the 1970s, when the depleted farm population turned to things like 2,4-D—an herbicide that was part of Agent Orange—to help manage pastures and croplands.
That history is told in other places, and the evolution of rural spaces is the story of people and places exploited by forces beyond their knowledge and control. It’s too big a tale to get our minds around. How do we reckon with all the farms flooded by the damming projects, wrestle with the growth of behemoths like Walmart or Tyson in a space that never had much? It’s hard to try and give an answer to the ghosts leaning on the fencerows. It’s almost too much to even acknowledge the whisper in our ears that this is wrong.
Those whispers tell us we left something behind when we tried to change with the times. The reality of what was left is often hard to see, like old farm equipment buried in an abandoned fencerow. The shapes are visible, but unknown except to the initiated.
In my home, modern life offered a promise of ease and narrow prosperity. Ozark farmers bought the notion that their children should leave and that they could save time with modernity. Things like chemical cleaned fences and fields became normal by my childhood. This happened even though we knew the dangers. Rachel Carson’s book had been famous for years by the time I walked the fence with grandpa. There had even been a nationally recognized fight between rural folks and the US Forest Service about the dangers of herbicides in the hill country.
It didn’t matter. People left, chemical use jumped, and farms shifted to an industrial efficiency that ultimately killed the rural communities of my home. The loss of history and the creation of mythologies of absence became normal, spurring on a new round of development in our place. For my part, I can’t change the past or even shift the present much. But I can learn from the loss. Haste, efficiency, and all the dreams of modern life can be left behind if we choose. And so I choose to do so.
My family’s farm is often a quiet one. My work is done not inside the rumble of an engine or a haze of chemicals. My fencerows won’t win an award for tidiness from a local landscape prize committee. Instead, my world is ordered by the settling of harness on horse, their steady breath as we work. It’s bound by the rest needed to let field and farmer come into rhythm once again.
To live this way, to anchor myself to the footsteps of a horse and not the mind of a machine, is a choice to move backwards in hope. I hope, I dream, I fight for my farm. It’s paid off: my ponds are healthy with turtles and fish and herons. The ground is soft and springy. Insects drown out thought in the summer; flocks of birds threaten the sun in a maddening joy.
I also hold closely a vision for my place. I hope for a network of communities reborn, that hold the past of story and history in balance with the future. But often my dreams of this are tangled in the dark hours of the night, and I fear for the future of my home.
But when I wake it’s slow and quiet, sharply cold against the warming spring. The sun comes in fits and starts, glints through old oak fingers and my breath. It breaks the brittle darkness into a million pieces, clearing hopelessness from my eyes as surely as I can see the curves of my wife lying beside me when moonlight replaces the caress of my hands.
My story begins and ends there; in the confluence of moonlight and sunlight breaking on oaks born of rock and red soil. The trees loom in my mind, holding the bodies of those gone near before me, fading buildings born of their trunks populate my landscape.
I am a bound to my home, living within time’s steady tread and the dissonance of story and history. After all, they aren’t the same. Much like a person, facts and dates don’t often match the cares and fears of a region’s ghosts. If I’ve learned anything in my short life, it’s that stories matter more than facts.
The story that stays in my mind is simple. In the mornings, when the creek is low, I drop along the narrow road into the bottom lands before heading up and out of our little valley. I leave the limits of my place and travel more and more into a world with none. As I twist down the gravel, I come in between my neighbors’ fields, oaks and walnuts and sycamores running the water’s edge. Mist hangs in the air in bands, ethereal sediment lifting off as if the earth was shedding her blankets with the waking day. The turn into the creek bed is almost blind because of the mist, but I drop low and see underneath the bedclothes and watch the water chasing itself down the riffles. Downstream, to the north, are the fields of my neighbors and family, prone to the ravages of the water when our creeks have had enough of our foolishness. Upstream, to the south, more fields rest as well. The crossing is always churned—the soft mud and gravel, legacies of poor logging a century ago, are always in flux. Most days when I go over the creek I’m the only human; an intelligence unable to see what’s right in front of me. Sometimes I’m not visibly alone.
When I get to the creek, with the mist rising all around, I slow to look and see what the world is showing me. I occasionally get lucky: on one side or the other, if I’m quiet and careful, a heron is there, daylight scattering diamonds around his legs while the water dances past; the quick dart of a neck and, presto! breakfast. Grace made real among the twisted legacies of my place.
I don’t know the range of herons. But I often hope this is the same heron that was defeated time and again. I hope that he, and his kin, close and distant, find not refuge in their home, but their home restored as those of us who can slow down and fix what we broke.
I’m still waiting for a bobwhite to call in the dusk. I’m hopeful—maybe it’s foolish—but the herons came back after a long absence, and the ducks, and owls, and more. Every year that we farm in the old ways, more of nature returns, despite the mistakes we make. Each return teaches hope.
I hope in a future, where, like my grandfather did with me, I can take my grandchildren into a field as evening falls and call for the little bird to come out. And that once more the old magic will pass to a new generation.
Image Credit: LOC
