As I have written about elsewhere, I am from the country. Specifically, the very northern edge of Appalachia, in southern New York State. See the very top row of counties, just over the Pennsylvania border? That’s us.
I was born in Corning, New York, a (very) small town with a population of around 11,000 people. I grew up in and around the village of Painted Post, New York, which has a population of around 1,700 people and was where the post office was. The actual place I spend my childhood was what’s called a “hamlet” — Gang Mills, New York, population around 4,000.
The hills where I grew up are covered in forest and don’t look much different than they did when the Iroquois moved through them. The county has had New York State’s largest deer harvest during hunting season for decades. There are rivers, cornfields, long empty stretches of country road. There are people who live in trailers, and little stores on the side of country roads. Central Tractor does a thriving business, as does Agway.
The people I grew up with are kind, smart, tough, sometimes foolish, almost all white, almost all Christian. My home is on the northern end of what’s broadly described as Appalachia. Which is why I recognize J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s candidate for Vice-President.
This post is not about politics. It’s about people like me. You may not know too many of us. But, like Deadheads, we’re actually everywhere.
To Quote Talking Heads, Well, How Did I Get Here?
I’m currently reading Vance’s autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. Although the specifics (get it?) of his life are different from mine — my mother wasn’t a drug addict, my father made a nice living, and I didn’t serve in the Marines — much of his story is familiar. In particular, what’s familiar are Vance’s descriptions of the culture shock of experiencing the world of our society’s elites for the first time. When you grow up in the country, leaving home means experiencing things you didn’t even realize existed.
So like Vance, although on a different trajectory, I grew up in Appalachia, left my home and went to cities, to Ivy League schools, and professions far away. I have lived in New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, and for the longest stretch of my life, Northern California. And also like Vance, I gradually learned that being white and from a rural place is usually viewed in these circles as some kind of character defect. I’m serious.
And if, like me and like Vance, you leave home for a prestigious school, it’s like being dropped headfirst onto the surface of Mars. Vance writes about being at a recruiting dinner at Yale Law, and having to call his girlfriend, Usha, for an explanation of what all the cutlery in the table setting was for. I remember the first time I got on a commuter train at Swarthmore, and not realizing until it was too late that you had to buy a ticket. I thought it was free. I’d never seen a commuter train before, although I’d seen plenty of freight trains. I thought they were like sidewalks or mailboxes.
To Quote Talking Heads, How Do I Work This?
When I got to Swarthmore, I was eighteen and one of the few country boys in the place. Everyone else, it seemed, had gone to Deerfield, or summered in Europe, or had been taught Shakespeare when they were twelve. I can still remember my astonishment when I suggested we have lunch to some guy, and he whipped out a calendar so we could see when he was available. What? What the hell? What kind of place was this?
Or sitting around with people who had gone to Deerfield (my roommate, Adam), the Dalton School, or Sidwell Friends. I went to Corning Painted-Post West High School, home of the Vikings, a public high school if there ever was one. I still remember our school song. My new friends had never met someone like me except maybe the guy who mowed their lawn.
I remember arguing with a friend once about prison reform or something. She was Quaker, and very concerned about how inmates were treated. I informed her that I have at least three relatives who were, or are, corrections officers for the State of New York, including one who worked the night shift at Bedford Hills, one-time home of quite a few female felons. One of my mother’s caretakers during the last years of her life worked the night shift as a security guard, complete with hard hat and gun, on a fracking rig in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Note: February is really, really cold in that place, and going to the bathroom in an unheated porta-potty at 3 AM is not funny.
Explaining Me to Myself
People who have absolutely no idea what rural life is actually about, and who fancy themselves critical thinkers, champions of diversity and so on, will believe in the worst stereotypes about you and your rural neighbors. They will tell you, right to your face, that people from rural areas are backward, violent, racist, homophobic, brutal to outsiders, and so on. Sometimes this also means that the culture of my home needs to be interpreted and explained by someone from outside it, because apparently we’re too ignorant to understand and express ourselves.
Here’s an example: I subscribe to The Atlantic, because, you know, I’m an arty intellectual type. Recently, this fellow named — and I am not making this name up — Spencer Kornhaber — wrote a review of a country album by Zach Bryan called The Great American Bar Scene. The album is fantastic, and predictably, Kornhaber is ridiculous. And if you’re actually from the country, like I am, his thoughts are condescending and kind of insulting.
First, he’s from Orange County, California, which is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. He has no idea at all what the world Bryan sings about is actually like, and apparently doesn’t respect it enough to see that that matters. He then, of course, went to Northwestern, wrote for a bunch of indy publications as a cultural critic, whatever that is, and writes about county music in a way I do not like at all, perhaps because his attitude is so familiar.
For instance, he has a carefully-assembled appearance that telegraphs “Sensitive Left-Wing Urban Intellectual” — short haircut, short beard, serious expression, lots of black, and most irritating to me of all, the thick, dark eyeglasses that are part of the uniform. He looks like that guy who’s the lead singer for The National. The glasses particularly irritate me. I wear glasses because I have to. I hate them. These guys wear them as a fashion statement and a signal of social class. And apparently smiling is a big no-no.
Kornhaber writes about country music — you know, Hank Williams, Dolly Parton, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, all stuff people like him would be horrified to unironically like — as if it’s some fascinating anthropology experiment. It apparently doesn’t occur to him that Bryan’s songs are about real people, and a real way of life. Kornhaber’s commentary is all through the condescending lens I learned to absolutely hate after I left home.
If he wrote this way about the residents of, say, North Philadelphia, they’d burn his house down. But if you want to treat country people like they’re lab rats, have at it, man. Everything has to have a political dimension, a feminist one, and contain big, sweeping observations about our entire society. Like this:
Refreshingly, Bryan’s references to female independence aren’t tinged with resentment. In an era when manosphere podcasts and Drake songs present brotherhood and misogyny as the same thing, Bryan excels at portraying the opposite sex as genuine partners, not rivals or possessions.
The people I know from home would have no idea what a “manosphere podcast” was. Or what “misogyny” means.
Here’s more:
Traditionalism—or “trad”—is trending in all sorts of forms of late, including renewed calls for a repressive social order.
This is country music, dumbass. It’s about good people who are very, very close to the basics of life — who want to work, drink, fall in love, raise their families, go to church (gasp!) and not have some guy with a carefully-manicured beard tell them what it, and they, really mean. If you grow up in the country and leave for other places, you get very used to a nasal, high-pitched, pretentious voice explaining you to yourself.
Real People. Really.
But whether it’s Kentucky (Vance), Oklahoma (Bryan) or western New York State (me) the country is all of those things. It, and the people who live there, are real, and enduring, no matter what the New York Times, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker have to say about it. And whatever you think of his politics, J.D. Vance is a textbook example of someone from the country, from Appalachia. He could have gone to high school with me.
The thing about people from the country, in my opinion, is that they live remarkably bullshit-, glamor- and excuse-free lives. Vance may be an exception. You are expected to work, hard, because that’s what you have to do, and learn to live with what life hands you. You are also often right up against the most brutal, remorseless facts of life. There’s nothing like “failure to launch” out there. My father, for instance, used to just hand me over to his friends as free labor doing things like digging ditches. The women who cared for my mother literally helped her die. They do shit jobs when they need doing, without complaining or expecting anyone to care.
Beautiful Ice and Snow and Steel and Concrete
My part of Appalachia is very beautiful, I think. In the summer, it’s green, and lush, and you can practically hear things growing. In the fall, the foliage is incredible, and it’s so all-American it seems odd. But I like it best in the winter.
In the winter, the trees are bare, and you can see the landscape that’s concealed other times of the year. You can see the rock, and the shape of the hills. Cornfields are rows of stubble, with ice and snow in the depressions. Creeks are frozen. Roads can be treacherous, with snow drifting and blowing over them. Nights are very, very dark, and the stars are beautiful, but seem remote and indifferent. You are glad you have a good pair of boots on, gloves, a down vest.
It’s a tough, cold, very lonely landscape. I find it beautiful. I find it a place where the essence of things, the bones, are right there in front of you. Flowers and sunlight and warmth are, of course, lovely and welcome. Everyone knows that. They’re pretty. But to me, a snow-covered hillside, bare of leaves, showing you the geology that made a place a place is beautiful. As is the guy in Carhartts with the beard and the boots, sitting next to me in the diner getting some eggs and coffee before going back to work. I’m proud to be, in a way, just like him.
Peter how do I best forward your column to a friend in Texas who is going to LOVE your writing?