"Not substantial opposition"

Heartland History Interview 6 - Writing/Craft

Prior to my When Once Destroyed interview with Joshua Kluever and Kevin Mason for the Heartland History podcast in March, I enjoyed answering their thoughtful questions about my work describing the destruction of Somerset, Indiana and surrounding farm land for the Mississsinewa Reservoir in the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project as directed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Indiana Flood Control and Water Resources Commission. In recent days I've been sharing my responses here. This is the last of those.

What role do you see this book playing in conversations about rural history and historical preservation today?

Starting conversations, I’d like that. These lives, and the way of life are important. We need to do a better job of protecting them.

After Somerset's fate was first revealed in June 1955 Congressman John Beamer began to get letters like this one from farmer Lawrence Scheffer. Beamer's answer follows:

Congressman Beamer often answered project critics that he was guarding the interests of everyone in his district. In March 1956 he told a U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee hearing that there was "not substantial opposition" in the district to the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project (documents from the Congressman Beamer papers at the Indiana State Library, Indianapolis).

What role do you see this book playing in conversations about rural history and historical preservation today?

Starting conversations, I’d like that. These lives, and the way of life are important. We need to do a better job of protecting them.

Questions for conversation:

• What attitudes and policies present in the book continue to threaten rural societies?

• What enabled the absence of Somerset voices in the decision-making process that destroyed the community?  

• In what way is rural culture misunderstood?

• Marginalized?  

• What problems that plague rural communities are also present in urban communities? To what degree are the sources of those problems alike? What separates them?  

• How might a better focus on rural voices enhance education in rural communities, combat alienation?

As an English teacher I’m drawn to the idea of developing fiction and nonfiction rural voice sources for rural high school students: Wendell Berry, Sarah Smarsh, Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Wuthnow, Grace Olmstead, and others including those in the folk and rock music genre. Rural kids are bombarded with pop culture images that portray them and their communities in a negative light. I’d add Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer to the reading list if I had the chance. Maybe Hillbilly Elegy, too, for the sake of contrast. 

The book touches on years from the early 30s to the early 70s and along with the life of my dad’s community tells the story of its death in the post WW2 advance of technological and industrial progress, the hubris of the powerful with an eye on rural communities. It’s a specific story with broader implications. Wendell Berry, “The Unsetttling of America.” 

The community where I taught is under assault by the mammoth data centers attacks that are encroaching on farms and rural communities all over the country, but especially in midwestern areas that have a lot of water. Making that connection was not what I set out to do with the book but it’s definitely there. 

Alienation. Someone publicly please address the connection between the gutting of family farming and rural communities since WW2 and the rise in homelessness, mental illness, depression, drug abuse, violence, and despair.

• Three and four generations down the line, where are modest self-sufficient independent people like my dad and John Huddleston and other people in communities like Somerset supposed to live and with what kind of work?

• What becomes of people who could live modestly with pride by the standards connected to self-worth values that are not connected to money?

Dad was forced off the farm and into urbanized factory work he despised. His message to me was, get out of here. Where, then, do I belong? Fifty-five years later I returned home in the form of a book that, as I wrote it, felt like, aside from parenting, the most meaningful thing I’d ever done. Grand-parenting. 

After finishing When Once Destroyed, how has your understanding of small towns, your family story, and your own place within them changed?

Writing When Once Destroyed has been a coming home for me. That began a bit before I started writing the book at my brother-in-law's funeral a few years ago. I grew up in a place where, as one of the “smart kids,” I learned that in my home community, “There is nothing for you here, leave.”

So, I did. I bought into that idea. My brother-in-law did not. He never left. What I saw that day, his funeral, and what his son, my nephew, said about his dad then awakened me to the value of the life I had run away from. John was chief of the Green Twp. Volunteer fire department for 40 years. In uniform, his colleagues sat in front of me. My sister, now also dead, taught third grade in that community for over 40 years.

“Dad should not be gone,” my nephew said, “and he should not be at some home in the sky. My dad belongs right here.” My sister and her husband had a sense of belonging that I could never achieve, and I think there are lot more people like me than there are like them. That’s been destroyed. Family farms are gone. Their community is shriveling away.

I don’t know which came first but this was also the approximate time that I picked up The World-Ending Fire, anthology of Wendell Berry essays at the Louise Erdrich Birchbark bookstore in Minneapolis a year and a half before the new Vern would be born. 

To some degree, I suppose When Once Destroyed is the story of why, why I’ve never felt like I totally belonged anywhere. Maybe where I belong was taken away from me a long time ago. Perhaps I’m not alone in that. Along with the political focus, I believe that (do we even have a neutral name for people in rural areas? Let me make one up) I believe that ruraltees should be making connections to real rural culture issues, not the phony “family values” bullshit, but what is real and especially what our children know is real about rural culture.

How did you balance narrative momentum with historical explanation, especially for readers outside the Midwest?

I’ve been writing periodic personal essays connecting the personal to the public for our public radio station for the last ten years and that was how I approached it. Again, the letter to my grandson Vern about my father Vern aspect made the accounts of even congressional testimony folksier than a standard historical account and so that made the gap between the history and the people less severe. I’m telling Vern a story, that’s all. Somerset is a common town name, that helps and memories of rural communities, though they may be overly romanticized, generations removed, are common, too. I hoped to leave readers between book sections with the notion that the story was still alive without them, but that they’d be getting back to it soon. 

Were there scenes or stories you found especially difficult to write, either emotionally or structurally?

Mostly, it was easy. I’m talking to my grandson. I gathered information and let the story steer me.  But I struggled and I sobbed when I wrote the final two chapters about Dad. For that, I am glad. Appropriate. I was mostly done with the writing when my sister died two years ago. I had already decided to leave out the piece I wrote for the radio about the significance of her teaching me to read when I was four. The dedication to her was easy but should have left off the last line.

How did your intended audience shape your prose, voice, and general approach to writing this book?

Vern is my intended audience. A letter to my grandson about my dad was precisely what I needed to relieve myself of a story I had wanted to tell for as long as I can remember, and it gave me license to tell it in precisely the way I wanted to tell it. It’s grass roots history.  If someone else wants to read it, that’s good. I think it’s a good book with some important observations. But it’s more than anything a letter to Vern. Maybe it’s a letter to two Verns. I’m glad I lived long enough to do it. 

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