Rural lack of anonymity in the wake of Tennessee explosion

An explosion yesterday at an ammunition plant in McEwan, Tennessee, population 1643,  left several dead and many missing.  In the Washington Post's coverage of the disaster, I was struck by these comments from the Humphreys County Sheriff in that they reflected rural lack of anonymity.  

Nearly 12 hours after the explosion, law enforcement officers were still trying to contact victims’ families, Davis said, adding that officials planned to work through the night to keep looking for possible survivors, interviewing witnesses and family members, and trying to find out what happened.

“It’s hell on us,” he said. “It’s hell on everybody.”

The close-knit nature of the community compounded the pain. Davis said that he’s “very close” with at least three families involved in the explosion and that the sheriff of the neighboring county could say much the same. That closeness drove Davis to keep looking for survivors, caring for the injured and consoling the bereaved, he said.

“When you have small counties like this, we know each other, we communicate with each other, we love each other,” Davis said. “And that’s what — honestly, it’s what keeps my motivation alive.”

“We’re working for our people,” he added.

This is from the New York Times coverage of the explosion: 

The explosion has shaken the small, tight-knit communities in Hickman and Humphreys Counties, which have a combined population of about 44,000.

One of the communities is known as Bucksnort, where there are winding dirt roads, ample hunting ground and just a handful of businesses. Steven Anderson, who runs a trout farm there, said there were only three points of interest in town — the trout farm, the munitions plant and a gas station with a convenience store where he said workers from the plant often eat lunch.

Postscript:  On October 13, the New York Times ran this story, "A Tennessee Sheriff Becomes the Face of Grief after Plant Explosion."   

Literary Ruralism (Part XLIX): Rural life in "The Mighty Red" by Louise Erdrich

I've very much enjoyed Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Mighty Red (2024), set in the farming exurbs near Fargo, North Dakota, along the Red River.  I'm going to share some excerpts here that reflect on small-town life.  The protagonist is Kismet Poe, a high school senior when the story begins in 2008.  Her mother is Crystal, a Native American.   

Early in the novel, Kismet marries Gary, the somewhat hapless scion of a local sugar beet farming empire. She does this even though she is in love with another young man, the brilliant high-school drop out, Hugo.  Also looming over the novel, Gary has an ominous secret that gets revealed close to the novel's end.  Along the way, we get some vignettes that provide incisive commentary on small-town life.  Indeed, the entire novel is about a community entirely involved in each others' business. 

Also of note are Erdrich's ruminations on farming and different ways of being in relation to the natural world.  I'll save most of those for a separate post.  

In this opening scene, Gary and Kismet are out driving.

However, within a mile or two, Gary’s question whether she was bored made the silence complicated and exposed the fact that she actually was bored, very bored, and being consciously bored reminded her of what her cynical best friend, Stockton, had said—how boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept. She wasn’t drunk now. She wasn’t drunk very often. She did think that if she spent much time with Gary, though, she’d have to have a bottle handy.  (p. 13) 

Kismet wanted to forestall Gary from sharing his thoughts. He might get solemn and talk about his farming ideas or his philosophy, which was that you should do what your mother told you to do. Kismet had met Gary’s mother and she questioned that. Gary believed that radio frequencies could carry disease. He started many sentences by declaring ‘There are two kinds of people . . .’ He didn’t believe in God but said he could get behind the idea that aliens had manufactured the skein of life. He also talked about, say, the Ten Commandments, and would wonder whether ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applied to deer. He loved deer. He cried when he saw a dead one. He also cried when he saw a living one. This was a thing about Gary that really got to Kismet. He didn’t hunt. His father and uncle tried to take him out hunting. He refused. He loved animals, not only deer, but every animal. Still, she didn’t appreciate it when he said that she reminded him of a deer in winter with her dark brown eyes and matching hair. Deer were lovely creatures but they were prey animals. 

College will get me out of here, thought Kismet, and a tiny rush of fear made her want to sleep. She pushed her seat back. The sun was beaming through the windshield and it was autumn sun, the mellow light of early afternoon. She fell into a dreamy nap as Gary meditated aloud about whether dinosaur bones were real or had been placed there by a super-intelligent race of ancient humans, or by aliens. ‘Aliens again,’ she murmured. 

‘Damn straight,’ said Gary in a heroic voice. 

‘You know the bones are real,’ said Kismet. 

‘Probably,’ said Gary. ‘Here’s the turnoff to that place. Remember Blosnik? He was a hands-on man. There’s two kinds—’ 

‘I know,’ said Kismet. ‘Your mom and dad . . .’ ‘

Yeah, Winnie and Diz.’  

He liked calling them by their first names. 

‘They always say there are two kinds of people, hands-on and hands-off. They really liked how Blosnik took our class out to dig fossils—’  (p. 13-14)

This scene from one of Gary's days at high school, when he is upset about something a teacher has said to him about Gary's still unrevealed secret:      

He knew that Kismet had social studies during third period. He paused outside her classroom. Instantly, his breath slowed and his heart calmed. There was something mysterious and magical about Kismet and dating her helped Gary feel sane. He suspected it was her Indian, oops, Native American, blood—though he never mentioned it again after the first time. Gary was awed by her effect on him, but for most of the years he’d gone to school with her she just seemed weird.  (p. 24) 

On Kismet and her relationship with her mother, especially when Kismet went through a goth phase: 

Like all mothers and daughters, both Kismet and Crystal went through Kismet’s phases. Before she took a job and cleaned up her act, Kismet was a goth, a dollar-store goth, but wasn’t that the point? One bleary night she self-dyed her shiny hair a harsh lusterless blue-black, set off her narrow eyes with thick black lines, and brushed her eyelids with gradations of purple and maroon. Crystal didn’t react when Kismet came downstairs the next morning and went to school. So she upped the ante. Tried to be secretive about her stick and poke tattoos. Kismet and Martin had memorized some of their namesake Edgar Allan’s work. Crystal caught a glimpse of the word nevermore on Kismet’s shoulder blade and a raven that came out looking like a pigeon. She pretended not to notice. In truth, she was depressed about it for weeks. Kismet’s clothes were from rummage sales or Thrifty Life, all black of course. Some she shredded artfully, others were ripped or worn thin already. Kismet was sent home for the slashes beneath her butt that went too high and showed violet panties. She was sent home again for sneaking out of the house wearing a T-shirt printed with fake breasts including nipples—she’d found the T-shirt in a garbage can. 

‘Stop wearing garbage!’ Crystal yelled at her. She was on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. schedule and had been roused from crucial sleep by the call from the principal.

‘All we can afford is garbage,’ Kismet said.

This stung and Crystal teared up. Kismet got all hangdog and mumbled she was sorry. (p. 25) 

What follows next speaks to the community and lack-of-anonymity themes.  It has Winne, Gary's mom, arriving at book club--a book club in which it seems every other woman in the novel--and perhaps in their town--is a member:    

[Winnie] turned into Bev’s drive. She cut the engine, but her hands were stuck to the wheel. The others lived in Tabor and saw one another all of the time. She had gone to school with Bev, though, and stayed friends with her. Bev had been a Pavlecky before she’d married Ichor. Bev would stick up for her. Still, Winnie Geist sat outside in her car. She’d arrived early to the book club and had to gather her courage before facing the women who would walk into Bev’s house. This was only the second meeting she’d made it to since the accident, and at the first meeting she hadn’t said a word. So she needed to see who was coming before she entered.

Many women she knew from church would be at the book club meeting. She knew that some actually prayed for her and her family. But on dark days Winnie believed that some prayed against her. She found it hard to bear the sting of their eyes when they’d watch her enter a room, and it was even more difficult to open her mouth and speak. (p. 84-85) 

Here's a scene following Kismet and Gary's wedding, which takes place shortly after Kismet's father and Crystal's long-time partner, Martin, runs off with the local Catholic parish's building fund, also leaving Crystal's home mortgaged without her knowledge.  That gives rise to the need for a lawyer, a very unusual event for folks of such modest means in rural-ish North Dakota: 

Kismet raised the skinny glass to her lips and the gentle bubbles grazed her nose. She took her first-ever sip of champagne. The ghost of a taste, an emotion in her mouth, unreadable. She drank again to try and understand. But it was too fleeting. Then she got it and smiled. An ephemeral blip. She drank until the champagne stopped thought, stopped taste, stopped emotion. People whirled, talking in her face. People watched from the sides of the room. They were talking about her, talking about her father, trying to corner Crystal, who eluded them all. 

After a brutal set of photos, Kismet’s mother squeezed her arm and said that she had to leave. Early. 

‘Are you going to see a lawyer?’ said Kismet. 

‘Oh, honey, yes,’ said Crystal. 

They wrapped each other in a silent hug with eyes squeezed shut. Getting a lawyer? It had never happened to them. It was as apocalyptic as Kismet getting married. They hugged harder, trying not to cry. Everybody looked away. (pp. 126-127) 

What follows is a scene from very near the end of the book, where the women's book group gathers again, this time to discuss Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

There followed a pleasurable babble containing many theories: nuclear winter, the Rapture, aliens, the flu, ozone holes, this thing about the climate, which split members off in subarguments, China conquers us, Russia conquers us, or maybe . . . Tania White waited patiently so that her theory was the last. She stood up and with a smile of satisfaction unrolled a chart of the Yellowstone volcano, the probable epicenter of destruction, as well as the outlying circles of poisonous gas and falling ash. 

‘So we have here the super-volcano. You see the red circle? Kill zone. Right here, this is us. In the pink zone. We’re in the primary ash zone. The secondary ash zone is this peach circle from Lake Superior over to California, taking in the Texas Panhandle. If this volcano erupted, and I guess it’s overdue, we get covered in volcano ash. It would be another ice age. Everything in the Upper Midwest would die—just like in the book—only a few random apples left—just like in the book,’ said Tania. She paused for maximum effect and tag-teamed Tory, who rose and spoke. ‘This is why we wanted to bring it to the club. This book is a very realistic look at the aftermath of the Yellowstone super-volcano.’ 

‘I’ve read where an asteroid is more likely to hit,’ said Mary Sotovine. 

‘You guys are way off the mark,’ said Winnie, pointing out the window, at the fields. ‘Look. There’s your answer.’ 

The women leaned sideways or forward to stare out the picture window and saw that, as usual, the wind was sending up curls of earth dust and dust devils were crisscrossing the fields. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Tory. 

Across the horizon a band of gray dust wavered. The sun would go down in a bloody stew. Every night was like the end of the world. It was gorgeous! ‘What is going to happen?’ said Mrs. Flossom, excitedly. ‘What can we expect?’ Jeniver went over to the table and opened another bottle of white and one of red. Even Karleen had a few sips. 

‘Don’t you see?’ said Winnie. ‘Every time you look out the window there’s dust rising up.

That’s dirt. We are losing our dirt. No dirt, no food.’ ‘Okay,’ said Karleen, eyes glittering. ‘Round that out for us.’ ‘No dirt, no food, no life. General starvation. My parents’ fields were surrounded by shelterbelts and they left stubble in their fields the way Pavlecky does now. They planted cover crops, but . . . sorry . . . I did some historic reading before Diz and I went to Russia years ago and it curdled my bones. When Stalin made the little farms into humungous collective farms . . .’ ‘

Like the sugar beet collective?’ someone asked. 

‘That’s a voluntary collective and a functional one,’ said Winnie, with a hint of scorn. ‘In Russia it was total and complete retooling where the Soviets kicked out . . . well, starved and murdered, all the landowners and farmers who were growing the wheat and turnips and food crops. Then they tried to organize giant farms, but nobody knew how to farm because most of the farmers-in-charge were dead! It was like when Stalin killed the doctors in Moscow, then he dies because there’s nobody to save him!’

‘Let’s get back to—’ Bev started. 

Winnie blew right past her. ‘Anyway, let’s say present practices continue in our case. No dirt. Nothing to eat.’ 

‘Except people,’ said Jeniver with a stern, conclusive nod all around, as if they were on The Road or on a lifeboat, ready to draw lots. Karleen shrank back. Jeniver’s brown hair, held on top of her head by a small golden sword, flashed in the bloody sunset light. 

‘Correct,’ said Winnie, though Jeniver had stolen her punch line. Winnie nodded her head and looked down into her fuchsia lap. ‘Starving, that’s a bad way to go. You don’t just fade out. Extremely painful, and the cravings! One of the worst . . .’ 

‘Not as bad as—’ Mary Sotovine began like a pitcher winding up. 

‘Let’s not go there,’ Darva cut in. 

Once Mary and Darva began competing over worst-case ways to perish, the book club usually spiraled into ghoulish hysteria. Mary’s glowing round face flattened in disappointment. 

‘How about getting pickled?’ Jeniver wondered. 

The other women looked at Jeniver and she held out her empty wineglass. 

‘Oh, pickled!’ The general mood shifted. 

‘Wasn’t that last line of the book really beautiful?’ said Tiny Johnson, and the book discussion was soon complete, except that suddenly Bev stood up. 

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘While we’ve been talking about the end of the world like we’re looking forward to it, I’ve been thinking how the world as we know, used to know, it really is ending. I thought of what the world was like even when I was a kid, how it was more . . . it was more full.’ 

‘Last call,’ said Tiny. ‘I’m bringing out the ice cream.’ 

‘Don’t you remember?’ Bev went on. ‘How there used to be meadowlarks?’ She looked around. ‘C’mon, when’s the last time you heard a meadowlark? You know, our state bird. When I was growing up they were everywhere, in all the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town they started. Am I right?’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Mary Sotovine. ‘I’m older, so ten years before Bev remembers, they were in the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town. You’d hear them all the time.’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Winnie. ‘There used to be flocks of those cedar birds, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds, even. And bugs, which they ate. Grasshoppers. Mayflies when you went out to the lakes. Now you don’t even see grasshoppers. And there’s only a mayfly or two. It’s the pesticides.’ 

All of the women suddenly began to talk. 

‘Do you notice how you look at the grille of your car and there’s no bugs? No bugs hit your windshield? And moths. How they used to swirl in the streetlamps?’ 

‘They did. Like snow.’ 

‘And how when it rained the frogs came out and they were everywhere and the grass was thick with frogs?’ ‘Toads. You could always go out and pick up a toad.’ 

‘Now it’s surprising. A toad! It’s special!’ 

‘And there were nighthawks, lots of nighthawks swerving around, after the mosquitoes. And bats everywhere and how we used to scream if they dived at us. And flocks of pigeons on the grain elevators.’

‘What does it mean that prairie falcons are living in town?’ asked Stockton. 

Everyone fell silent. 

‘It means there’s less to eat in the country,’ said Winnie. 

Kismet waved her hand. Winnie recognized her with a nod and called out, ‘Kismet has something to say!’ 

Kismet looked at her mother and said, ‘I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. That’s just the setting, to show what happens between people in extreme situations. The end is about consolation. The father goes to the end of the earth for his son, then dies, satisfied. I mean, it’s a really sentimental book. McCarthy’s not afraid of that. And it’s a brutal adventure book—exciting when they find the food cache, and then there’s that cannibal army.’ 

Jeniver stood up and spoke with urgency. ‘This book is about what’s most important. You know, this kind of love between a parent and a child.’ 

Crystal put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and Kismet leaned on her mother. Winnie saw that Kismet would leave. She thought of Gary and started to cry, wondering how she could possibly save him. All of a sudden she had a thought that dried her tears right up. She’d searched for a way to thank Gary’s angel. Well, Kismet was his angel. Oh no! Oh yes! Again she wept. Bev thought about how Hugo had escaped that terrifying pre-apocalyptic landscape [the Bakken oil fields of western North Dakota], and she also started to cry. ...  Mary Sotovine was moved to tears at the thought of the days when she’d see bluebirds in a strip of grassland, now planted in soybeans.  (pp. 328-332). 

That which sets rural search-and-rescue apart from the urban counterpart

The New York Times reports today from Kerrville, Texas, more than a week after last week's tragic flood.  This story pays attention to how the search and rescue along the Guadalupe River in the "hill country" is different from these processes when they occur in urban areas.  Christopher Maag and Edgar Sandoval write: 

The search for human remains is focused on an area of Texas that is unlike many of the places where recovery professionals are accustomed to looking, several experts said. Most major search operations in recent years have happened in large urban areas hit by hurricanes, said Mr. Koester and Scott Hammond, a professor in the Department of Management at Utah State University who studies search-and-rescue teams.

In the flood plain of Central Texas, by comparison, searchers are dealing with a relatively high number of people who are missing and presumed dead, spread across an expanse of mostly narrow, rural territory, spanning more than a hundred miles of shallow valleys along the river.

* * *

The destructive power arrived with little notice, in a relatively constrained river valley where there are few homes or other buildings to serve as likely search targets. The recovery efforts are therefore focused on the massive piles of debris.

That will continue to make the search especially slow, dangerous, painstaking and long.

Also reflecting this theme, NPR's report this morning observed that the "search area has an enormous footprint." 

Here is a quote in the NYT story from 38-year-old Kerrville resident, Amy Vanlandingham, who has been helping with the search.  Her comment suggests the nature of rural community and lack of anonymity, which fosters a certain solidarity:

It’s overwhelming to see so many people come and help in the search. This is our town. I do it so I can sleep.

Other posts about the Guadalupe River floods are here and here.   

Judge in rural-ish county censured, partly for failure to disclose relationships with attorneys, litigants

This week, California's Commission on Judicial Performance censured and removed a judge from the Humboldt County California Superior Court.  Jackson Guilfoil reports for the Times-Standard, Eureka on the matter involving Gregory Kreis, who admitted 17 of 21 counts against him.  The former judge has also agreed never again to serve as a judicial officer.  (A prior post with background on the allegations against Kreis is here).

The Commission on Judicial Performance stated:  

The commission issued a censure and bar to Judge Kreis as a result of multiple acts of misconduct. In at least 44 cases over which he presided, Judge Kreis failed to disclose his relationships with seven attorneys; his familiarity with individuals involved in matters before him; or the extent of his relationships with the individuals. The extent and type of this misconduct is serious. Also, the commission commented that it took particularly seriously the judge's sexual misconduct with a female acquaintance. Further, the commission based the censure and bar on Judge Kreis's conduct in treating attorneys and litigants poorly, including making inappropriate, sarcastic, and gratuitous comments to them.

This familiarity among litigants, attorneys and judges reflects a challenge for administration of justice in rural-ish places:  the lack of anonymity or "high density of acquaintanceship" that marks these communities.   That is no excuse, however, for Kreis' failure to disclose these relationships.   

The Guilfoil story includes this summary, which touches on the conflict issue, as well as other more salacious charges levied at Kreis: 

Most of the CJP's initial accusations remained in the stipulated agreement, including a moment when Kreis touched the butt of a mutual friend after being told not to, though the majority of the counts stemmed from hearings where Kreis either did not disclose a conflict or would not recuse himself. Several cases cited in the decision were litigated by Kreis' personal friends, former friends or attorneys representing him in other cases.

Kreis' attorney, James Murphy, said Kreis agreed to these terms because he lost his recent bid for re-election.  Murphy is quoted, "He lost the re-election bid, so he was going to be a short-timer. No sense staying on."  Murphy also commented that he "believes the CJP interfered in the election by announcing their disciplinary inquiry into Kreis during campaign season." 

Here is a story about Kreis' appointment to the bench, by Governor Jerry Brown, in 2017.  He was previously a public defender in Humboldt County.  Kreis is an alumnus of CSU Humboldt, which suggests he may have grown up in the region.  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLVII): Kent Haruf's "The Tie that Binds"

Kent Haruf's 1984 novel, The Tie that Binds, leads with something of a contrast--or perhaps it's a more  subtle distinction--between rural and urban.  The opening paragraph also introduces one of the principal characters, Edith Goodnough, whose life the novel chronicles from her birth.  Indeed, it goes farther back still, to her parents' migration from Iowa to eastern Colorado and the fictitious small town of Holt, where all of Haruf's novels are set: 

EDITH GOODNOUGH isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there in that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bud Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough. (p. 1)

Sheriff Sealy--representing "the law" plays roles throughout the novel.  He is a peer, for example, of the narrator, Sanders Roscoe.  

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2011
Kilmarnock, Virginia 

Early on in the novel, Roscoe is visited by a journalist from the Denver Post, and this exchange ensues: 

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “I’m Dick Harrington. With the Post.” 

“That so?” I say. “I hope you’re not selling anything.” 

“No,” he says. “The Denver Post. It’s a newspaper. Maybe you’ve heard of it.” 

“Sure. I’ve heard of it,” I say. “But we keep it out on the back porch where we scrape our boots, so we don’t have to track cow into the kitchen.” Then I throw my head back and laugh. “It saves throw rugs,” I tell him. 

But he doesn’t think that’s real funny; he looks at me like How can I be so dumb and live? Guys like him think they drive the 150 miles out here due east from Denver and when they get here we don’t know anything. They think they have to educate us poor dumb country bastards. They think we don’t know what the Denver Post is. We know all right. We just don’t give a damn. (p. 6) 

How interesting that Haruf offered this observation four decades ago because it's surely even more true now--this assumption that rural folks are stupid.  I am reminded of this recent empirical academic work by Michael Carolan of Colorado State University.  It documents the annoyance of rural Coloradans at their urban counterparts, an annoyance born of feeling unseen and unappreciated.  

The Tie that Binds also features this comparison of rural and urban teens' experiences; it also acknowledges the role of generational change. This excerpt features Edith Goodnough as a teen, along with her younger brother Lyman. 

BUT if Edith and Lyman had been city kids, things might have been different. City kids, even in 1915, had some opportunities to escape which farm kids didn’t have. City kids could take off and walk ten or fifteen blocks or jump on a trolley car going across town and end up as far away from home as if they were in another state entirely, another country even. Then they could make their mark, or not make it, and start their life over or end it, but whatever happened, at least the ties would have been cut, the limits of home would have been broken.

Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows)—it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado. 

But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father.  (p. 52-53)

I am not certain I agree with Haruf that city kids and country kids are now so indistinguishable... but I did love this novel, not least for its intimate, small-town setting.  

Holt is said to be based on Yuma, Colorado, where Haruf once lived.  Interestingly, Yuma was in the news yesterday because of a hail storm there on Monday.

Rural Legal Scholarship: Michele Statz on "The Scandal of Particularity"

 Here's the link to Statz's latest article, and the abstract follows.  The title is "The Scandal of Particularlity: A New Approach to Rural Attorney Shortages and Access to Justice," and it is forthcoming in the South Dakota Law Review:   

This article adds necessary dimension to prevailing understandings of the rural attorney shortage and proposed solutions to it. These solutions include efforts to recruit and retain rural attorneys; to advance “non-lawyer” practitioners; and to create distance-spanning rural access to justice technologies. While many of these initiatives are based in careful, empirical analysis and have strong evaluative components, they often start with an answer: More attorneys. UPL Waivers. Legal help apps. Legal empowerment. This makes sense, particularly when we consider that many of the individuals at the forefront of addressing the rural access to justice crisis are themselves law scholars or legal professionals who feel real, understandable urgency toward finding a solution. What happens, however, when we approach rural attorney shortages not with a proposed initiative, but with more, and different, questions? Instead of a solution-centric or even person-centered approach, what if we sought to understand the subjective, relational experience of legal problems in rural places? How might honoring the lived reality of rural community members who are and who are not legal professionals unsettle what we believe about professional hierarchies, expertise, and who is best suited to address attorney shortages?

Drawing on over seven years of mixed-methodological, collaborative research in diverse rural settings, this article proposes a new epistemological approach to rural access to justice and professional shortages. It provides empirically based principles for students, scholars, and practitioners to consider as they explore rural justice gaps and efforts to address them. It demonstrates that a deep, considered acknowledgement of crisis, trust, home, care, time, and relationships—in short, the embodied particularities of rural place and how they feel—offers a kind of knowledge that necessarily exceeds familiar metrics and indicators of “success.” Finally, this framework ensures that practices and policies aimed at solving rural attorney shortages are relevant, collaborative, and sustaining.

Literary Ruralism (Part XLVI): American Spirits

Reviewers have been mostly positive about Russell Banks' last book, American Spirits, which was published posthumously a few months ago, and  I recently got around to reading it and found the insights regarding rural folks, including their attachment to place and to the land, quite compelling.  The book is comprised of three stories, each set in Sam Dent, a fictional small town in New York's Adirondacks.

This excerpt is from the first of the book's three stories, "Nowhere Man," which involves a man, Doug Lafleur, who, with his sisters, sold their interest in the land they inherited from their father (Guy Lafleur) in the rural Adirondacks to a man from New Jersey, Yuri Zingerman, a mysterious figure.  

Zingerman’s shooting range was a half mile farther up the narrow gravel lane that passed in front of [Doug’s] and Debbie’s ranch house. When he and Debbie got married, Doug’s father, Guy Lafleur, sold him the eight-acre lot for one dollar as a wedding present, and on weekends over the next three years Doug and his brothers-in-law, Roy and Dave, built their house where the lane ended and their land began. After Doug’s dad died, Doug and his two sisters, Nina and Tracy, and their husbands, Roy and Dave, his brothers-in-law and hunting companions, sold off the rest of the old man’s land, all 320 acres. It was the last large tract of undeveloped forested land inside the town limits. They sold it to Yuri Zingerman from New Jersey. He said he wanted it for a private hunting preserve, but promised Doug that he and Roy and Dave could continue to hunt on the property. Zingerman said he was a veteran of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, but he talked with a regular American accent. He ran a company in New Jersey that provided security for celebrities and professional athletes and business executives. It was impressive when he named who they were. 

 

Doug, who worked as a full-time caretaker for summer residents and a part-time handyman in the winter months, spent his share of the cash sale of his dad’s land on a new Dodge Ram pickup and paid off the mortgage on the house. Without the mortgage hanging over them, he figured he could support the family with his caretaking and seasonal work as a handyman, and maybe in a year or two he could build a third bedroom onto the house and the two-car garage Debbie wanted. They could get off food stamps and buy health insurance. When the twins were old enough for Debbie to go back to waitressing full time instead of part time, which should be soon, they’d be sitting pretty. That’s how he put it to anyone who’d listen, with his lips pursed in an air kiss. Sitting pretty. (pp. 10-11)  

This is after Zingerman orders Doug not to hunt on the family property, Lafleur Woods, any longer.  Doug is speaking initially to his wife, Debbie, who pushes back against his plan to continue hunting:

“He can go straight to hell if he thinks I’m not hunting on Pop’s land.” 

 

“Who? It’s not Pop’s anymore, remember?” 

 

“No. It’ll always be Pop’s. Just like it’ll always be Grandpop’s. That’s why people call it Lafleur’s Woods. Those two old boys, Pop and Grandpop, they’d roll over in their graves if they thought me and Roy and Dave couldn’t hunt that land. Max, too. Max’s gonna get his chance to hunt those woods, just like I did when I was his age. And my dad before me. And Grandpop. That sonofabitch Zingerman, he can have his hunting camp out there if he wants, he paid for that right, but he can’t keep me from tramping across those ridges and creeks that I know like the lines of my own hand and killing a deer once a year and busting up a few coveys of partridges and quails. It’s my goddamn birthright.” 

 

She was silent for a moment. She knew that he’d had three gin and tonics and had been publicly humiliated by Zingerman, but even if he were stone-cold sober and Zingerman had managed to be polite and had apologized for posting the land and barring him from hunting it, Doug would be threatening to kill his deer over there anyway. He was a man. That’s what men do. She knew that by tomorrow he’d be trying to talk Zingerman out of his decision, and by Monday he’d be grumbling about Zingerman’s decision, and when hunting season opened, he’d meet up early with Dave and Roy, and they would hunt on somebody else’s land, not Zingerman’s. Not Pop’s and Grandpop’s.  (p. 22) 

 * * * 

“We’ll just go in there early the first day of the season and take out our deer, and the hell with him,” he told Debbie. “He’ll never even know we done it.” 

 

“Doug, that’s about as dumb a thing as you’ve ever thought of doing.” 

 

“Sometimes you got to do a foolish thing in order to do the right thing,” he said. 

 

“I’m not letting Max go with you.” 

 

“Whoa. When it comes to educating the boy to hunting, I’ll say when he’s ready. It’s a lifelong process, and it starts now for him. He’s ready to drive the deer, or at least watch how it’s done. He won’t carry a gun for four more years, but he’s got a lot he can learn before then. I started carrying a gun a lot younger than that, y’know. Of course, that was before the government started chipping away at the Second Amendment,” he added. 

 

“Please, don’t start,” she said. 

 

“What if Zingerman…?” “What if Zingerman what? Worst he can do is call the state police, and by the time they arrive, we’re back here at the house butchering a deer we can say we shot in the yard from the deck in our stocking feet.” 

 

“What’s that going to teach Max? That it’s okay to lie to the police?” 

 

“The staties all know me and Roy and Dave. They don’t care where we shot our deer. They don’t like Zingerman any more than we do. Actually, the one I want to be teaching is Zingerman. He’s the one needs a lesson. Coming into our town like this and snatching out of circulation three hundred twenty acres of prime hunting grounds. And I want Max to know we aren’t gonna let him get away with it. I want the whole damn town to know it. And the state police, too.” 

 

“You’re the one who sold him the land. You and your sisters.” 

 

“Yeah, but we had a deal. It’s him who changed the rules. And I’m just saying no, that’s all. No, dammit. No.” 

* * *  

[Debbie]  didn’t buy Doug’s sudden sentimental attachment to his father’s and grandfather’s land. Where’d that come from? He’d been all too happy to join his sisters, Nina and Tracy, when they had the chance to sell the land to Zingerman, and they would have done it even if Zingerman hadn’t promised not to subdivide or develop it and hadn’t given them permission to hunt there. Doug wanted the money. He needed the money, not the land. They all did. (p. 24) 

 Then there is this powerful passage about Doug's attachment to the property:    

For seventy-some years this forest was the Lafleur family’s private hunting preserve. Before that, for a hundred years it was a Boston-based timber company’s wilderness cache of uncut trees, part of the land across the region that got auctioned off in the 1930s and ’40s for pennies an acre when the company shifted operations south, and in 1947 Doug’s grandfather had bought a chunk of it. Before that, before the American settlers and the British and the French Canadians and the Dutch, for ten thousand years it was the Mohawks’ and Mi’kmaqs’ home ground. Doug liked thinking about that. He liked calling up that long line of woodsmen and hunters. He liked to believe that he was descended from them, that his relation to this piece of the earth matched theirs, that he knew in all seasons its streams and brooks and swamps, its glacial forests changing from hardwoods to dark conifers to ferny sunlit patches, that he knew it fully as well as those old-time hunters did, and he knew the man-made trails and paths laid down over centuries on top of the trails and paths followed for millennia by the animals before the humans made their way here, and he knew the behavior and habits and needs and desires of all the animals and birds that lived in the forest. 

 

Without that ancient connection to the land, who was Doug Lafleur, anyhow? No one. Nothing. Just a not very talented amateur musician hanging around this small town for a lifetime, finding easy ways to house and feed his wife and kids and spending too much time at the local tavern amusing his neighbors with tall tales and dumb songs, a man with no good reason to be living and working here instead of somewhere else. Christ, anywhere. And no matter where he lived and worked, wouldn’t it be the same? 

 

A nowhere man, that’s what he’d become. Like the guy in the Beatles’ song. 

 

It was a mistake to sell the land to Zingerman, he said to himself. A mistake to sell it to anyone. He and his sisters should have clung to it for another generation for Max and his cousins to grow up on. It wasn’t fair to blame the old man, but Doug’s father had started the process by selling Doug the eight-acre pie-shaped corner adjacent to Route 50. The old man at first didn’t want to sell off the flat, birch-covered stretch of ground, but Doug, newly married, wanted to build his own house, even if he had to borrow fifty thousand from the bank to do it. He talked the old man into signing over the eight acres for a dollar an acre so he could use the appraised value of the land, a thousand times what he’d paid for it, to guarantee the bank loan. Doug and his father thought they were outsmarting the bankers.

 

They never should have done it, though. No one outsmarts the bankers. With help from his brothers-in-law over the next three years he built the one-story, two-bedroom bungalow with a full basement, and though he knew he could have done it cheaper with a double-wide set on cinderblocks, he wouldn’t have been able to expand on a double-wide, someday adding a third bedroom and a two-car garage with a tool room, the same as he could on a regular house. With his meager income from caretaking the homes of summer residents and handyman work over the winter, the mortgage payments turned out to be more than he could afford—several years into it and he was still paying mostly interest, and the principal was down barely seven hundred dollars from the fifty thousand he’d borrowed, and recently he’d been falling behind and was being charged penalties for late payments. 

 

After the old man died he never should have agreed with Nina and Tracy to sell the rest of the land in order to pay off the bank loan with his third of the inheritance. He could have somehow figured out a way to make the mortgage payments by taking a night shift at one of the resort hotels or a factory job in one of the larger towns downstate. Or he and Debbie could have sold the house instead and rented an apartment or a house in town. They might have saved enough that way to afford health insurance. And after they sold their father’s land, he shouldn’t have bought the new pickup. 

 

He could have squeezed a couple more years’ use from his old rust bucket of a truck. He and his sisters would still own the Lafleur Woods, the headwaters of Blackstone Kill, the sedimented shale slabs cut crosswise by the kill and the ridges and gullies, the moraines and eskers and erratics and the rock-strewn till left behind by the retreating glaciers ten thousand years ago. He’d still be able to hunt on his ancestors’ land. This love of the land, this irrational claim on it, was Doug’s strength, and it was his weakness.  (pp. 28-31) 

 Then (spoiler alert!) there is a show down between Doug and Zingerman, each wielding a gun:  

 Zingerman said, “Lafleur, you’re a fucking dead man.” 

 

Doug said, “I’m a nowhere man.”  (p. 60)

My Rural Travelogue (Part XXXVII): New Cuyama and California's Hidden Valley of Enchantment

Cuyama Valley from New Cuyama, with interpretive sign about the indigenous Chumash

 I had the opportunity to visit the community of New Cuyama, California (population 542) last month, in northern Santa Barbara County.  The area is known as the Hidden Valley of Enchantment.  

I first learned of the Cuyama Valley about a year ago when a student wrote this post about Harvard University buying up land there.  

Vineyard recently planted Harvard University land

I was excited to be passing through the region (ok, well, it was a bit out of my way on my journey from Los Angeles to Fresno) and to have the opportunity to see the enchanted valley for myself.  While the student had written about a sort of water controversy (really, water hoarding) in which Harvard University's endowment was engaged (see their vineyard in the photo to the left), I quickly learned of another water war--this one by local farmers against corporate agriculture, specifically the entities associated with Grimmway and Bolthouse carrots.  In fact, when you first approach the valley from the east, you see massive fields (brown at this time of year), with signs suggesting an association with Grimmway and/or Bolthouse (see photo below).  

When I arrived at my destination for the night, the Cuyama Buckhorn, a recently renovated 1960s motel and diner, I found signs imploring folks to "BOYCOTT CARROTS" AND STAND WITH CUYAMA AGAINST CORPORATE GREED."  These name Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms by name.  

Naturally, I wanted to know more, and I found two stories about the matter, one in the Los Angeles Times and the other by the Associated Press. 

For the LA Times, Ian James reported last November with this lede: 

In the Cuyama Valley north of Santa Barbara, lush green fields stretch across the desert. Sprinklers spray thousands of acres to grow a single thirsty crop: carrots.

Wells and pumps pull groundwater from as deep as 680 feet, and the aquifer’s levels are dropping.

As the valley’s only water source shrinks, a bitter legal battle over water rights has arisen between carrot growers and the community. Residents are fighting back with a campaign urging everyone to stop buying carrots.

Grimmway Farms land, eastern end of the valley

[Bolthouse and Grimmway] stirred outrage when they, along with several other allied entities, sued property owners throughout the valley, asking a court to determine how much water everyone can pump.

The lawsuit, filed in 2021, has left small farmers, ranchers and other property owners with staggering legal bills. Residents have accused the companies of going to court to try to secure as much water as possible, while forcing painful cuts on smaller farms.

Amy Taxin had reported for the Associated Press a little over a month earlier, "In a remote, dry patch of California, a battle is raging over carrots," with a lede highlighting one of the small farmers in Cuyama.

In the hills of a dry, remote patch of California farm country, Lee Harrington carefully monitors the drips moistening his pistachio trees to ensure they’re not wasting any of the groundwater at the heart of a vicious fight.

He is one of scores of farmers, ranchers and others living near the tiny town of New Cuyama who have been hauled into court by a lawsuit filed by two of the nation’s biggest carrot growers, Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms, over the right to pump groundwater.

The move has saddled residents in the community 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles with mounting legal bills and prompted them to post large signs along the roadway calling on others to boycott carrots and “Stand with Cuyama.”

“It’s just literally mind-boggling where they’re farming,” Harrington said, adding that his legal fees exceed $50,000. “They want our water. They didn’t want the state telling them how much water they can pump.”

The battle playing out in this stretch of rural California represents a new wave of legal challenges over water, long one of the most precious and contested resources in a state that grows much of the country’s produce.

For years, California didn’t regulate groundwater, allowing farmers and residents alike to drill wells and take what they needed. That changed in 2014 amid a historic drought, and as ever-deeper wells caused land in some places to sink.

***

Grimmway, which has grown carrots in Cuyama for more than three decades, currently farms less than a third of its 20 square miles (52 square kilometers) there and has installed more efficient sprinklers to save water. Seeing groundwater levels decline and pumping costs rise, the company began growing carrots in other states, but doesn’t plan to uproot from Cuyama, said Jeff Huckaby, the company’s president and chief executive.

“It’s one of the best carrot-growing regions that we’ve come across,” Huckaby said, adding that arid regions are best so carrot roots extend below ground for moisture, growing longer. “The soil up here is ideal, temperatures are ideal, the climate is ideal.”

This water controversy aside, I want to share a few more photos of the town, which has a small grocery store and cafe in addition to the spiffy refurbished Cuyama Buckhorn.  There is both an elementary school and a high school, a branch of the Santa Maria (Santa Barbara County) public library, a family resource center, a recreation district, a community service district, a (new) sheriff's substation and fire house, as well as a transfer station (dump). Nearby is the Carrizo Plain National Monument, famous for its spring wildflowers, with the San Andreas Fault running through it.  

All photos are (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Interpretive sign noting that California 
Condors live in the Valley 

U.S. Post Office, grocery store, and cafe, New Cuyama

County Road Yard

Cuyama Buckhorn motel resort and diner

Cuyama Valley Recreation District Office

New Cuyama Transfer Station

New Cuyama is about 50 miles east of Santa Maria

Santa Barbara County Ballot drop box

Cuyama Valley Family Resource Center

Cuyama Valley High School

United Methodist Church, New Cuyama

Santa Barbara County Sheriff and Fire Station
New Cuyama

Art Cullen on how Trump came between him and his long-time, small-town friend

Cullen is the Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, and his column in today's New York Times is titled, "We were friends for years. Trump tore us apart."  Cullen leads with some background on his relationship with a group of men in his home-town, men he's known since Little League and often fished and played pool with.  Here's the part where things start to go wrong, amidst politics and the pandemic--and the politics of the pandemic. 

One of my old friends, or shall I say acquaintances, recently said on Facebook that I lacked integrity after I posted an editorial from our newspaper complaining about Mr. Trump’s contempt for the democratic process and rule of law.

* * * 

You would think we could see around our differences. We can’t. We’ve been programmed by nonstop propaganda, especially those of us in Iowa besieged by presidential campaigns and the wedge issues they drill home. Instead of trying to hash things out, I just quit trying. My bad. I got tired.

Small-town hacks learn who their friends are. We publish uncomfortable facts of public interest and opinions that often go against the grain. Businesses stop advertising because you wrote about their lawsuit. That I get. It’s a hazard of the occupation that I regret every day. You pledge to do better even when you have done nothing wrong.

The ad hominem attacks have become the norm, especially since Mr. Trump took center stage and refuses to exit. We went from Iowa Nice to Iowa Nasty. We’re stuck there whether Mr. Trump leaves or hangs around. That’s my lament.

* * * 

I know where I live. Northwest Iowa is a frozen slice of Texas, one of the most conservative places in the country. I guess I am what you call woke because I don’t think immigrants are the problem; I think income — lack of it — is the problem. All this talk about bathroom bills and book bans is one giant distraction from how global corporations have stolen our franchise. I am not the enemy of the people, dude — we were in Cub Scouts together.

The many hats of a rural child welfare attorney

I've dedicated my three previous posts (here, here, and here) to exploring rural child welfare systems. My own research spanning law review articles, child welfare journals, news articles, and legislative reports, however, took me nearly everywhere except the realm of attorney-specific reforms.

Attorneys can play vital roles in furthering child welfare; it was an attorney, working pro bono, who emancipated one of my own family members, saving them from a situation that would have satisfied any child welfare agency's criteria for removal.

So stories like Gabriel Fernandez's hit too close to home and shook me to my core. The death of eight-year-old Gabriel, at the hands of his own mother and her boyfriend, became the subject of a 2022 Netflix limited series documentary that exposed the shortcomings of the child welfare system.

So many adults failed Gabriel, and there were reports that the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services falsified records of child abuse and kept him with his abusers.

If an urban child welfare agency had these glaring flaws, I wondered how such agencies managed in rural communities.

Casey Family Programs highlights some of the rural-specific barriers to child welfare: higher rates of child poverty, geographic spread that impedes access to social services and family members, limited infrastructure, fewer community-based services, and difficulties recruiting and retaining professional staff.

I wondered where attorneys fit into the child welfare equation and how they could better serve at-risk rural children in their day-to-day work.

Child welfare scholars Paul Johnson and Katherine Cahn provide a generalized approach in their article "Improving Child Welfare Practice Through Improvements in Attorney-Social Worker Relationships."Johnson and Cahn push for cross-training between attorneys and social workers to develop better working relationships for more effective and efficient child welfare outcomes.

The child welfare system requires engagement of several different professionals, including social workers, lawyers, judges, mental and public health professionals, and educators. Johnson and Cahn stress “patience, flexibility, and sacrifice” when sharing knowledge across these professional boundaries.

However, Johnson and Cahn found that attorneys and social workers often diverge on who is responsible for deciding if the child should testify in court; who should recommend a disposition to the court; and who should interpret the court’s orders to the parents. They also reported a “wide range in the levels of consultation between attorneys and social workers” in court cases, with attorneys “generally ha[ving] less social service training than social workers ha[ve] legal training.”

Johnson and Cahn discuss the “Children Can’t Wait” cross-training seminar. The 1988 seminar was designed by the Northwest Resource Center for Children, Youth, and Families to address the conflicts between social workers and attorneys. The seminar included attorneys, public agency social workers, judges, court commissioners, court personnel, guardians ad litem, citizen advocates, child welfare administrators and supervisors, community treatment-resource professionals, volunteer citizen board review members, foster parents and other community professionals from schools, members of local indigenous tribes, and law enforcement officials.

At this seminar, social workers recommend that attorneys “participate in more child welfare training from elementary concepts to advanced practice.” They also suggest that attorneys “respect and understand[]” social workers’ limitations. Social workers also underscored the need for attorneys to be “less adversarial and more trusting, while providing more time for consultation and more consistency in their appointments.”

The lack of anonymity in rural areas amplifies both the need to build this gap and the ability to do so. Given the shortage of attorneys and social services in rural areas, rural attorneys are likely to interact with the same social workers on several occasions.

At the end of the day, better relationships between rural attorneys and social workers provides a unified advocacy effort that is more effective and efficient.

As already noted, social workers are not the only other force at play. The American Bar Association (“ABA”) finds isolated rural courts and government agencies have a scarcity of services which may lower the court's expectations and have detrimental effects for child welfare: lowered expectations may take the form of “decreased visitation, phone-only court appearances, greatly expanded timelines for removal and adjudication findings, significantly limited discovery, denial of expert requests, lowering the bar for reasonable and/or active efforts, increased pro se representation, and so on.”

"Advocating for Parents in Rural America: A Best Practices Approach" provides the ABA’s best approach for rural attorneys representing parents to combat this harmful two-tiered system.

Attorneys representing parents must employ a knowledge-based approach, which revolves around a strong understanding of the rural communities they work in.

This knowledge can help rebut the “cookie cutter” case plans that courts often impose, without any concern for the availability of the services they are mandating, nor the parents’ ability to access those services. A knowledgeable rural attorney will have a better idea of what services are available and advocate a case plan consistent with the parents’ capacities—one that doesn’t set the parents up for failure. A further discussion on rural parent’s limitations and their impact in the termination of parental rights can be found here.

This knowledge-based approach also enables better working relationships with the community’s social service hubs and the people within them, including social workers, judges, and other involved professionals

Furthermore, rural attorneys can and should go a step further to help parents access these resources through both informal and on-record means. These extra measures are vital to ensuring parents can meet case plan requirements in spite of any personal and community limitations.

Child welfare is a team effort, and large-scale and long-term reforms are necessary to overhaul the system. In the meantime, rural attorneys can shape their practice habits and working relationships to provide the immediate assistance that at-risk rural children and families require.

Going beyond the CALL for rural foster youth

In previous posts, I have addressed the structural barriers to adeqquate rural foster care systems, singling out the shortcomings of generalized child welfare reforms for rural communities and acknowledging the value of previous governmental efforts at rural specific foster care reform. This post turns to the issue of what institutions can do today to prop up these ailing systems with rural children in mind?

An online seach fo current rural child welfare reforms first brought me to "the CALL," which stands for "Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime."

In 2007, Arkansan churchgoers formed the CALL after recognizing the steep barriers to family foster placements, for both the state and potential foster parents. The CALL leverages the pulpit in 45 of Arkansas’s 75 counties to encourage domestic foster adoption, train foster-parents-to-be, and operate offices for county foster care needs. They act as an intermediary between the State and the foster families to break down the bureaucratic, informational, and resource barriers of the foster system.

Between 2007 and 2018, the CALL claims it trained “half of new foster families in [Arkansas] and that families it has trained cared for more than 10,000 children and provided permanent homes for 800.” By all accounts, this is an amazing effort assumed on behalf of the State and Arkansan foster youth.

But this begs the question: should a volunteer group have to shoulder this immense burden?

Moreover, are there reforms that can be established today to set rural child welfare on track? This concern has already been addressed on the blog, from a variety of angles, here, here, and here. 

The unfortunate reality is that most social work programs, including child welfare, continue to be situated in urban areas and social work training focuses on urban issues, which is a chief concern highlighted by social work scholars Joanne Riebschleger, Debra Norris, Barbara Pierce, Debora Pond, and Cristy Cummings in their 2015 article "Preparing Social Work Students for Rural Child Welfare Practice: Emerging Curriculum Competencies." 

Riebschleger et. al. pave a path for not only acquiring but retaining competent rural child welfare workers.

First, rural issues must be infused into the social work curriculum to bring awareness to the field, its needs, and its challenges. Riebschleger et. al shape rural-specific social work education around the “three R’s,” which entail (1) dealing with increased remoteness, (2) working with lower levels of resources, and (3) putting strong emphasis on relationships.

A great deal of rural child welfare work relies on personal knowledge of the community. Riebschleger et. al. describes lack of anonymity as a tool, through proper knowledge, for effective rural child welfare work: the rural social worker can “engage in informal networks, and they can sometimes make use of informal resources and relationship skills to create resources for clients and families.”

Feasible case plans--that provide rural parents opportunities to succeed--rely on the child welfare worker’s knowledge of both the parents and the community’s resources. It is the case worker’s awareness of and reliance on the community that allow them to be effective in rural settings.

In general, Riebschleger et. al. document competencies for rural child welfare workers that confront rural issues and enable the worker to provide effective and sustainable care in rural communities.

Nevertheless, real hurdles that remain. Riebschleger et. al.’s research found child welfare workers identified professional and geographic isolation, inadequate access to formal community services, traversing dual relationships, multiple job roles, and lack of personal anonymity as major barriers to rural child welfare work. Several of Riebschleger et. al.’s suggestions confront such issues and advise structuring child welfare work around them.

Several barriers to choosing rural child welfare work persist, even for competent child welfare workers. Often, a rural child welfare worker may be the only professional trained in trauma-informed practice (tailoring interactions with an individual in recognition of their trauma and avoiding re-traumatization). They end up being relied upon in other capacities and may need to train other community professionals in this practice.

One solution Riebschleger et. al. posed was for universities to create partnerships with rural organizations and recruit potential social workers from rural areas. Students from rural areas already have an investment in the rural lifestyle and an understanding of the rural social work issues.

Educational institutions should be taking these steps by providing more curricular and clinical opportunities that center around rural issues. Broadening efforts for adequate rural social service workers generally can begin to remedy the persistent lack of services with a stable and competent work force.

In my next post, I hope to identify particular reforms that legal actors, including attorneys, can initiate in the interest of rural child welfare.