When I was young, my family was completing the great American pastime of leaving the farm for the city’s brighter lights. My uncle’s new land, outside the swelling cities of northwest Arkansas, had a dilapidated barn reminiscent of the one on the old home place. Decades of neglect had left it worn and failing, but the original builders had worked true and it still held rain out and animals in, mostly. The barn would do, my uncle decided, as he joined the throngs leaving farming behind while our region rushed to get above its raisin’.
At the same time my uncle was thinking about that barn, my grandparents sold off a lifetime of work. Clarence and Beatrice’s farm a few counties away no longer competed for their children’s attention. And so, like millions, my father and aunt and uncle broke with the rhythms of small farms in small mountains. Grandpa didn’t let everything go, though. His love of good horses anchored him to his new home as efficiency and culture swept his kind away. That old barn at my uncle’s became central to my grandfather for a little while as he and my grandma transitioned to the small acreage where they lived out their last years.
Over the last decade, my wife and I have turned back to our family’s old ways, and I understand better the cost of selling the farm and leaving behind a life defined by hard labor. It’s a bill I hope never comes due. As my grandparents moved closer to their children and grandchildren, they hid the sorrow well. Had I known the pain of leaving dreams behind, or of the cancer growing silent and unchecked in both, I wouldn’t have been so full of excitement at their arrival. Fearing the loss, I wouldn’t have sought refuge as quickly in my grandpa’s arms. He, in his imperfections, became a place that I knew was safe and stable when all things at home were not.
These days I tell my students about the ideal imagery of middle-class life in America, and like any dutiful teacher I blow it apart, one commercial image at a time. What I don’t tell them is that I, like many of their parents, grew up in that image. But my image was gilded, empty inside. Not only were we pretending to be economically stable—like the Ozarks in general—but the hidden struggle of mental illness surrounded us. Though she likely didn’t understand the impact of her actions, the ever present bipolar and depressive version of my mom created a household I realized early on was unstable. Out of that volatility and fear grew my dependence on my grandpa, on the things he valued, and on the folds and forests that still surround me.
One weekend when I stayed at their house, he woke me up early, daylight breaking through the trees, slowly shaping the world. As we bustled about, the light came in fits and starts, glinting through oak fingers and steam from his coffee cup. It broke the brittle darkness into a million pieces, clearing the nightmares from my eyes, casting ghosts on my eyelids when I blinked. Distracted, not even shaved yet, he hurried me out of the house, and plopped me on the seat of his truck. As he shoved newspapers over dust bloomed around me, catching the growing light, spellbinding me. The sweet, spicy scent of tobacco spilled out of its pouch into everything from the spare hat on the dash to my hands even now.
I didn’t understand the rush, his nervousness. I was scared. At home, when that energy crackled in the house, I knew a storm would soon break over us as another wave of emotion overtook my mother and upended whatever hope the day was born with. I shrank into the seat before the tidal wave I was sure was coming, positive I had done something wrong and that he was taking me home. He slowed down, stopped, saw me, and understood. “Honey,” he said, “it’s alright. There should be a new colt this morning. I want to check on it and thought you might like to see it, maybe have it.”
We drove down the road a short bit to my uncle’s barn, an echo of grandpa’s old life. He got me out, truck doors groaning with his haste. Fear gone, I was excited, chattering like only a little kid can. He went to the door, calm and steady, hat tipped to the side like the old movie stars we watched together. I saw his face break into a smile as he beckoned me over. There, peeking through her mother’s legs, was a face shining with a white star, bright eyes trying to figure out what these two-legged things were. The nervousness went out of grandpa, and he breathed free and laughed, startling the little filly. He picked me up and declared it was time for breakfast. Later I named her Belle and watched her grow into a strong, solid horse before my parents sold her, years after cancer led my grandad back to the rocks of his home county.
His love of horses was a thing I never saw in its prime and, given my wife and I’s dependence on horses to power our farm is a thing I wish I had known. I have snippets of his care of them, his attention. Once, when I was little—I don’t know how old—he decided I needed to learn how to ride. He was busy, and likely needed me out of the way. He grabbed up his horse, pulled the blanket and saddle onto her, and then swung me up. “Go on, ride her around. Holler if you need something.” And so, for hours, it seemed, I rode in circles, this way and that, caught up in a corral but bounded only by my imagination.
Today, nearly thirty years later, my aunt shares stories with me of grandpa and his horses—working horses in particular. I’ll never be the horseman he was, but his love of horses—a love he gave me, somehow knowing I’d need it later—has been an inheritance I didn’t know about until the first time I stared at a pile of harness. Six years ago, on a grey and blustery day, I listened to a man, his hat tilted like my grandfather’s, explain how it settled onto a horse. The names of the harness parts spilled from his mouth, taking the jumble of britchen and quarter straps and belly bands and tugs and gave it form. Order from chaos, as another teacher of mine says.
My kin moved north from the Ouachitas, south of the Arkansas River, setting the work down as they stepped off the farm and into a place coming under the domination of Walmart and Tyson. They landed just outside of a blue-collar town in the northwest corner of the state. When I was little my granddad would grab my hand and pull me outside and we’d walk through the small pasture behind the new house. Indoor retirement didn’t sit well on him. The region’s hustle unsettled him. Slowing down to look and see, he showed me everything from poke weed to the finer points of a good black heifer. One day he took me into the holler and showed me a gnarly old oak tree halfway down the slope in the back corner of the little field.
This oak—I can’t remember its kind now, though he surely told me more than once—was bent, likely on purpose, though nobody really knew why. A team of university folks came out once and looked at it, part of a group supposing that Spanish explorers had bent the tree to mark some secret treasure that fortune hunters had missed. My granddad didn’t have the heart to tell them the tree wasn’t old enough to know de Soto and his lost boys. The tree still stands strong in my imagination—it scrambled from the rocky slope straight for a few feet before it bent 90 degrees and stretched out over the hillside, then turned skyward, punching its way through the forest cover to break free of history’s rhymes. I learned about stump water from this tree—at its first bend the years had hollowed out an opening of sorts that was always full of water and leaves. I didn’t know then that the water was magic, a pagan baptismal fount that cured warts and maybe everything. I didn’t know a lot, then. I didn’t know that oaks, like people and places, can be eaten away by disease until they’re just a pale shadow of themselves.
I didn’t know that folks would revel in the death of their inheritance, gleeful at the demise of their old world.
******
The farm my wife and I own is powered by a pair of horses, big Belgians, strong enough to terrify but steady enough to trust. The equipment we use is liberated from fencerows and junk heaps, worthy of museums but longing for practical use. The world we inhabit is a jumble of memory and nostalgia and the growing weight of taking up the lines and spells of an ignored bequest.
Every few months I drive deeper into the Ozarks for a load of hog feed. I leave early—the slow road is winding, not terribly long, but the farm truck can’t take the speed of the highway. Neither can I. Once I break free of the Walmart corridor the hills fold into themselves again, hiding what they’ve had to show the culture makers along the bypasses. The highway forced the hills onto a stage, shoved some singles at them, and demanded to see it all. When you get away from the stage, though, the reticence of the place comes back. To see my hills in their true glory requires a blood price be paid, a witchcraft even hilltop Baptists cling to.
As I went along one late spring day mists rose out of the hollers, a robe pulled tight over softly budded trees. Like a schoolboy stealing a glimpse, I watched for a gap in the robe. No immediate luck—my place has learned to be shy. Then the light crashed through, throwing everything into relief. Hills outlined against a bright window, a lover’s silhouette in relief. By the time I turned north toward Missouri my eyes were full and mind overcome. The dance between the light and hollers and trees was constant for hours, a vision just for me I thought. I shook my head free, unsure of how to manage the gift.
But there’s another voyeurism at work in the hills. I doubt it has a clinical name, but I guess you could call it decay porn. Most roads I drive are littered with dead dreams. Some have been dead for generations, some recently left to rot. Don’t get me wrong—as I twisted across the landscape old barns grabbed my eye, farmhouses held it, and fencerows built of old machines sent me on the way again. There is a beauty in death to be sure—when the oak tree falls in the timber it isn’t wasted. Its death provides for the birth of countless things—worms, fungi, insects, things that burrow in, under, and through. Its body is an offering to the place that birthed it, a closing of the circle. The death I see along these Ozark roads, though, is different.
It’s common practice here when a piece of land is bought to cut down most of the trees—from oak to elm, the whole ancient wealth of the place. Their fallen bodies lie unused, pushed into a big pile, limbs intertwined, broken and bleeding. A fire is lit in them, not as a sacrifice to the old gods but a final act of disregard. The fire destroys, it doesn’t cleanse. Our circles of community are reduced to ash and the fading stink of death. It’s the work of an army clearing a battlefield of dead enemies. The old barns and houses here often meet the same fate, collateral damage in the rush to the present. The fallen places I drive past haunt me. As I go, I don’t see beauty. I see what was and what could have been.
Every time I drive deeper into the heart of the hills, I pass an old two-story farmhouse. When I was young the house and its outbuildings anchored a lively farm on the edge of a small town. The old highway ran off to its south, curled across the top of the state like a rat snake lounging in a hay loft. Suddenly a bypass was needed—though we still don’t know why—and the farm and its family were sacrificed for the good of the region. The house still stands, pinched between a remnant of the old slow road and the new four lane fast road. For years the house stood proud; now it’s falling. Like so many places, the empty promises of progress are no longer sufficient to keep it alive.
This was brought into stark relief when I saw the comments on a social media post captioned “Rural decay brought to you by the #Ozarks.” It was a common enough picture: an abandoned home with an old tree beside it, roof splitting at the seams and windows askew, finally letting in the weather after generations of struggle. The response to the photo was enlightening:
“Rural decay always translates to poetry…for me. Beauty;”
“I love rural decay. I have a whole collection of old barns and sheds/houses;”
“Love that description. I know the Ozarks and this fits like a well-worn shoe;”
“If a man had a decent lawn chair, he could sit at the base of that tree and think his own thoughts, I bet.”
I went hunting for the “ruraldecay” hashtag (which had some forty thousand posts). A quick look showed more of the same: busted up homes, boats, cemeteries, churches, barns, junk in abandoned yards, empty main streets, rusting cars, trucks and tractors given over to the weeds. The usual. It was all heralded as a great moment of beauty, even celebration, as our old world died and a new one made of concrete and social networks emerged, a Frankenstein from the storm.
It made me angry. It still makes me angry.
Rural decay is brutal. Death by neglect is violent. Photograph collections of old barns and sheds and abandoned houses are not mementos of a day well spent, they’re the vulture-cleaned reminders that a community once was dreamed into being and is now destroyed by the nightmare of an economic war machine. Rural decay doesn’t create space where someone might sit and think deep thoughts. It’s the destruction of life, of hope. It’s rooting for the contractor plowing out the Joads.
The newcomers and boosters that feed the fires, once called carpetbaggers, see a picturesque landscape populated by grey barns and broken houses. Relics of our simple hillbilly past. “Look at this old barn,” they say. “Here’s an old store,” another proclaims, “look how amazing it is,” right as their piss splatters the wall, the stench of it overpowering my people’s ghosts. The decay of my homeland isn’t the slow rebirth of a fallen oak on the forest floor. It’s a calculated indifference to what’s here in favor of what should be, always defined by our betters and their accomplices in city councils, county planning boards, and corporate boardrooms.
It’s hard to mourn—especially as we mountain folk don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Once we did. When I was a kid and we’d drive past a graveyard, my dad and grandad slowed down, hats off. If we passed a funeral procession, we pulled to the side, turned the radio off, joined the grieving for a moment. The world slowed to acknowledge the loss, a final effort to reclaim the dead, even though we likely had no claim on them in life. A person’s death is mourned. The death of the hill country, the place of my blood and bone, is sought and celebrated and I don’t know how to stomach it. Where’s the funeral, the cemetery for the hill country? Where do I go to doff my hat and toast the memories when the place is buried in an unmarked grave beneath progress? Where do I go to weep and rage when my grief and anger are denied at every opportunity? And make no mistake: this is a death only rage can mourn.
Some years back the heirs to the Walmart fortune began giving a damn about the place that birthed their billions, though I’m not sure we can afford their interest. Leisure and culture making spiral out from an art museum that ignores us. Instead of public schools and rural health care, bike trails and high-priced restaurants sprout like weeds. The out-of-town folks populating these enclosed trails and eateries ignore the worsening inequalities in our place, afraid to bite the hand that feeds them—or because they’re blinded by salvation via recreation. For those of us that deal with the consequences of our regional overlords’ latest whims day in and day out there’s nothing to cheer. Rooted in greed and an unflinching disregard for anyone that might not be worth a few billion dollars, they wish to cure the Ozarks of being the Ozarks. Ask the towns that have withered away, stores shuttered and people going, thanks to Walmart. Ask the farmers on the hook for millions to appease the whims of Tyson. Ask the regular folk who want to be let alone when conservation groups set their sights on their land—groups whose efforts are paid for by the decaying descendants of a dime store magnate and their henchmen.
The old ways, though, don’t go as quietly as some want. Memories of a different time wreak havoc on modern hopes, reminding us that things don’t have to be this way. The future didn’t have to be built on sorrow.
One day, as my grandparents were packing up their hopes on the home place, my great uncle Roy came in from California. He stood tall, tan and smiling with his new Stetson tipped back on his head. Grandpa took me along with him when he and his brother went to the barn. It was one of those mystical barns nobody builds anymore, gambrel roofed with red walls, horse stalls hung with tack.
I have no idea what they talked about—probably the garden, how the horses were, if Clarence liked the northern part of the state. Who knows. What I know now, and maybe then, was that I was part of a lineage that worked with big animals and the land and was proud of it. I remember being eye level with my grandad and Uncle Roy for a brief moment when Roy swung me through time, setting me on a fence rail somewhere between the 1940s and now. It seemed that afternoon all cares fell away, and they were stepping out of time as I reached after them, ghosts of themselves and their place. My child’s eye still sees them, hats tipped, grinning in the dappled light as the world changed around them and left them in between me and the future, beckoning me to pick up what they dropped and step into the work.
*****
The holler and it’s bent oak are buried now; unmarked graves known only by memory. I don’t know when or why the new owners filled it in, I guess to level out the small pasture. It shocked me. I hadn’t realized that the holler, filled with ghosts and a little rainwater creek I stumbled on one day, was such a stabilizing force for me. A little part of grandpa had remained unburied, at least in my mind, but as I drove past the old place it was clear that he was now fully folded into the rocks and soil he had toiled in.
Of course, I had known for a long time that he was gone. Like tea used over and over, some things fade. The essence remains, the faint aroma, maybe a little of the flavor. His ghost hasn’t faded at all—thoughts of him, if dwelt on too long still stop me, forcing me to bargain with the dead again and again to stay among the living. Time has only served to sharpen the urgency of his loss.
I used to think of my grandfather as matter; solid and always present, like the stone and timber that hold our hills together. Now he comes as spirit instead, transmuted from human to something more, floating above the trees before settling onto the pond bank. We don’t walk together anymore, but I watch him, and he watches over me.
Time’s a bastard, laying bare bones like a butcher and never repairing wounds. Its cruelty is only outperformed by progress. In the Ozarks, time and progress have worked out a deal. It was signed at the crossroads in dust with the Devil as witness. It’s the same kind of deal that cancer worked in the body of my grandfather.
My place is changed and changing, being buried, just like the last of my grandpa. The end of a thing may bring about a relief to long suffering, but there’s a difference between an end that erases and one that heals. The assumption by those in the know, it seems, is that these hills are empty, only capable of promise if we erase the old ways. There was no culture here, the Walton matriarch declared, until she brought it. And so, a family’s wealth is spent to create the world they want instead of bettering the world that is.
*****
One hope against another, the new against the old. It’s easy to despair in such a situation. Old things in the hills have a way of hiding before wealth and power, fading to weathered grey as the rain gets in and worries away the hope of the future to nothing. The legacy of the past is something they seek to erase, one old barn and fencerow at a time. But occasionally somebody will keep the roof on a barn and a little filly will arrive. A remnant will hold fast against the onslaught of progress, beckoning those who see to pick up the work and hold on a while longer.
By happenstance, seemingly, when we needed a new work horse this past year, a friend had one for sale. She’s tall and lanky, not prone to holding fat, like grandpa.
And the name she came with was Belle.
Jared Phillips is a multigenerational resident of the Arkansas hill country. Together with his wife he farms above the Muddy Fork of the Illinois River, relying on draft horses to keep them anchored to their place. In addition to farming, Jared is a historian at the University of Arkansas, and is an alumnus of the Rural Writing Institute, led by Wainwright Prize winner James Rebanks (A Shepherd’s Life; English Pastoral) and Kathryn Aalto (Writing Wild). His work has been published by the University of Arkansas Press, Successful Farming, and the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette.
the water and the gills 