Helicopters over Humboldt: a retrospective interview

Growing up in suburban Southern California, Humboldt County seemed like a completely different world. In some ways, I think it probably is. But stories about Humboldt—stories about environmental activists, cannabis cultivation, and, of course, Bigfoot—have always fascinated me. From bitter campus protests to its history as a major logging hub, Humboldt has been a major talking point on this blog for years. I wanted to contribute something to the already robust list of stories, but there was a problem: I have never been to Humboldt, and I don't have any stories about it!

My solution was to interview a friend, "M." He grew up at the end of a dirt road, on 44 acres of land ~15 minutes from the town of Redway. Initially, our conversation was general—we discussed his upbringing in the '80s and '90s and rural life in Southern Humboldt. But the piece of the story we kept coming back to (perhaps unsurprisingly) was marijuana. What M ultimately chose to share was, essentially, a brief oral history of cannabis cultivation in Southern Humboldt.

It started, of course, with the hippies. According to M, they were "mostly college-educated idealists, looking to live off the land." Most were looking for tranquility, self-sufficiency, an escape from city living. In rural Southern Humboldt, "they found it for cheap." These initial community members were "rich in natural resources, but not in money." There was an issue, though—In Southern Humboldt, you can't grow much. "It's an interesting landscape for agriculture. Most of it is... these vast conifer forests. It's not really agricultural land."

 Enter the Marijuana plant. 

"Cannabis, during those early years, was something that [people] perhaps stumbled upon as a means of generating income for their community." By the time M was born, it had blossomed into a "spectrum of growers." On the one hand, there were "those that were fully in it, willing to grow more, risk jailtime, and supply cities that were farther away." For them, cannabis was a livelihood. 

On the other hand, "you had the mom-and-pop operations that were just a small greenhouse, or a few plants hidden in the woods." For them, cannabis was just "used to supplement income from whatever job they had in the local community." By the '80s and '90s, both groups were facing serious challenges from local, state, and federal law enforcement.

At the heart of our conversation was a story about Vietnam-era helicopters flying low across the treetops around his home. 

You could hear them coming from miles away—and we'd all run out into the yard... to have that experience; ok, we're on a homestead, living in nature, on a homestead off the grid; to have that seclusion, that self sufficiency, and then to hear an army helicopter disrupt the tranquility was pretty strange...

This profound juxtaposition was the result of CAMP: the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Managed by the California Department of Justice, CAMP united local, state, and federal agencies in a concerted effort to eradicate illegal marijuana grow operations all over the State of California. Launched in 1983, CAMP activity escalated throughout the 90s. 

In Northern California, CAMP culminated in Summer 1990 with operation Green Sweep. During that operation, the federal government deployed active-duty troops to Southern Humboldt in a drastic escalation of previous drug-policing methods. The operation was met with large-scale protests, some of which became violent. According to M, the "community felt it was being targeted and really terrorized by this government-funded operation." 

Despite its attempts at deterrence, M felt CAMP only increased profits for determined growers: 

when you have these aggressive tactics, the beneficiaries are the ones that are able to continue [growing]. If you increase the focus and the efforts to disrupt the exchange of product... you increase the price. That's what happened: you had cannabis that wasn't initially of significant value, [skyrocketing] to four or five thousand dollars a pound. There were many in the community that felt the reward was worth the risk: friends and neighbors that either faced jailtime or were impacted by friends and family getting locked up for cultivation...

M recalled one community member, busted with what was later described as "a handful of sprouts. They slapped a 5-year sentence on him. He had a young daughter. But he knew the risks..." 

Sometimes, the dangers went beyond jail time. 

As far as the actual exchange of the product for cash, I've heard there were buyers that would come up from the city; they would go up to someone's house, and you would hope to establish some kind of rapport and trust. 

But finding a buyer, at least at first, entailed "meeting at the bottom of a dirt road, and hoping for the best." For one of M's high school classmates, this dynamic proved deadly. "[He] became affiliated with some buyers from the Bay Area... perhaps he didn't put a lot of trust in them. They came up and robbed him, he resisted, and they shot him. He was 17 or 18." 

"It's interesting," M remarked towards the end of our conversation, "to return to that time period and compare it to the traditional American high school experience." 

I am inclined to agree. 

M now works in Portland, Oregon as a registered nurse. When asked if he ever saw himself settling down back in Humboldt, he responded with a simple "no," adding briefly that "too much has changed."

On rurality as a place to hide

Here's an excerpt from a New York Times essay on the capture of Ted Kaczynski, the homegrown terrorist known as the Unabomber, nearly three decades ago in a remote corner of Montana. The author of this piece, Maxim Loskutoff, who has written a novel based on Kaczynski's life.  Loskutoff grew up in Montana, about 80 miles from where Kaczynski was in hiding.  This is a rich essay, which I commend in its entirety.  I was particularly taken with this depiction of Kaczynski's hideout, which captures part of what I wrote in "The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space," about the potential of rurality to conceal: 

The sudden media attention [to Kaczynski] hinted at the answers. I heard the words “cabin,” “remote” and “wilderness” repeated on the evening news with an increasingly romantic luster. I began to see how people on the coasts viewed my home state: as a wilderness of possibility. A refuge for ruffians, seekers, dropouts, dreamers and the occasional psychopath. Someplace you could go if things didn’t work out. T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “The Last Best Place to Hide” popped up in local souvenir stores.

My "Rural Lawscape" chapter was published in The Expanding Spaces of Law:  A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press 2014).  Another post that centers this issue of law's struggle to police remote places, as well as the high cost of doing so, is here.  

Another illustration of how rural socio-spatiality conceals

That was the thesis of this book chapter from 2014, The Rural Lawscape:  Space Tames Law Tames Space, which elicited a great deal of controversy.  One controversial aspect--perhaps the most controversial among editors of the volume and workshop attendees in the run up to publication--was  my assertion that rural places could be more lawless because legal actors struggle to surveil rural locales, in part because of their vastness and because of the natural privacy associated with material distance.   

So I couldn't help feel a bit chuffed when I saw the news of where Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's associate, has been hiding out for months--on a 156-acre acre estate in rural New Hampshire.  The New Hampshire Union Leader's headline is "'A good place to hide:' New Hampshire locals had no idea Jeffrey Epstein ally holed up nearby."  Richard Valdmanis reported for Reuters.  An excerpt follows, beginning with a description of Maxwell's hideout, a "luxury timber-framed home perched on 156 acres of New Hampshire pine and oak forests boasts dramatic views of Mount Sunapee's foothills, but [ ] secluded enough to have kept her out of eyeshot of the tight-knit locals.

It was not until Thursday that other residents of this rural corner of New England knew her whereabouts, after FBI agents arrested her on charges she lured underage girls for the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse.

Maxwell's property is on the outskirts of Bedford, population 1,650, which features "white colonial homes, horse farms, stone walls and a historic covered bridge." Valdmanis quotes 53-year-old Laurie Colburn, whose home is less than a mile from Maxwell's estate,

I had no clue she was there.  Goes to show you, you don’t always know who your neighbors are.

The story quotes several other residents who also indicate they were oblivious to Maxwell's presence.  One, 74-year-old Alan Grandy, says:

People mainly know each other here, but there are plenty of places to hide away and not be seen.

Gandy said he'd gotten to know most people in town by "working for years at the counter in the local grocery store."

47-year-old Nate Herrick, an English teacher, commented:  

She’s right up to the Washington town line, and that is the smallest town in the world I ride my motorcycle along that road, and there’s just not much back there.

I have written a great deal about rural lack of anonymity.  In this case, it seems, Maxwell's anonymity was preserved because of the remoteness, the size of the landholding--and the fact that Maxwell had the fiscal resources to avail herself of the protective veil of rural privacy. 

New: Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology

The volume, edited by Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, was published just this week.  Here's what the promotional blurb from Routledge has to say about it:  

49% of the world’s population lives in small towns, villages and farms, yet until recent years criminological scholarship has focused almost exclusively on urban crimes. The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology is the first major publication to bring together this growing body of scholarship under a single cover. For many years rural criminology has remained marginalized and often excluded from the mainstream, with precedence given to urban criminology: this volume intends to address that imbalance. 

Pioneering in scope, this book brings together leading international scholars from fourteen different countries to offer an authoritative synthesis of theoretical and empirical literature. This handbook is divided in to seven parts, each addressing a different aspect of rural criminology:

• Rurality and crime

• Criminological dimensions of food and agriculture

• Violence and rurality

• Drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context

• Intersections between rural and green criminology

• Policing, justice and rurality

• Teaching rural criminology

Edited by a world renowned scholar of rural criminology, this book explores rural crime issues in over thirty-five countries including Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Australia, Tanzania, the US, and the UK. This is the first Handbook dedicated to rural criminology and is an essential resource for criminologists, sociologists and social geographers engaged with rural studies and crime.

I, along with David G. Gomez, UC Davis Law School Class of 2015, contributed a chapter on Rural Adolescent Substance Use:  Community Causes and Cures.  You can read the abstract here.  

The full table of contents of the Handbook is here.

How dozens of intellectually disabled men were abused for decades, unnoticed, in rural Iowa

Dan Barry's lengthy feature, "The Boys in the Bunkhouse:  Servitude, Abuse and Redemption in a Tiny Farm Town" appears in today's New York Times.   It recounts the details of how a few dozen men with intellectual disabilities came to be living in Atalissa, Iowa (population 311) and working in a turkey processing plant eight miles away in West Liberty, population 3,736.  This earlier post describes what happened in 2009, when the squalor in which the men were living in an old schoolhouse was discovered.  A subsequent lawsuit resulted in a record $240 million judgement against the men's employer, Henry's Turkey Service, a Texas-based company that had installed the men in an abandoned schoolhouse turned dormitory in 1974, and who employed their "caretaker."  The award was subsequently reduced to $ 1.3 million, representing two years of back wages.  

One of the interesting aspects of this story, as I wrote in my earlier post, is how the men came to be overlooked in the context of a small town.  Indeed, Barry's story revealed that they were frequent patrons of the local mini-mart (since closed, without the $65/month in earnings/pocket money that the men had to spend there) and a bar or two, and that many of them also attended the local Lutheran church and were fixtures in the annual parade.  This segment describes the community's reaction after the men were whisked away by social workers, after a relative of one of the men learned he had only $80 in retirement savings after decades of working at the plant.  That relative called a reporter at the Des Moines Register, and the place was soon swarming with media and state officials.  The men were immediately transported to a Motel Six in nearby Muscatine.

The people of Atalissa could not believe that the boys had been spirited away overnight. “Like someone swooping in and taking your children for reasons you don’t know,” says Lynn Thiede, the former pastor at the Zion Lutheran Church. 

They were especially upset that their requests to contact their longtime neighbors were being denied. But many of the men were suffering from post-traumatic stress, Ms. Seehase says. “We were trying to give them a break from that life.” 

The Iowa news media flocked to Atalissa to ask how such abuse could have happened there. Defensive residents recalled the parades and dances, and explained that they had not been inside the schoolhouse for many years. Still, the criticism tugged at the collective conscience. 

“I’m sure some of us — a lot of us, maybe — had second thoughts,” Mr. Hepker says. “That we should have looked into it a little deeper.”

Mr. Hepker, a former Atalissa official, had earlier reported to the Department of Human Services that the school house's front door was padlocked.  Hepker recalls:  

I was told that they were understaffed as all government agencies are, and did I have any evidence. And I said, ‘Well, just the door being padlocked shut.’

Barry's report continues:  

The padlock disappeared. But the incident continues to vex Mr. Hepker. If he had called about a skinny dog in someone’s yard, he says, the response would have been quicker, and better.

Another interesting part is this description of the men's work ethic:

The men were occasionally ridiculed, and even pelted with turkey slime; more often, though, they were admired for their work ethic. Dave Meincke, the plant’s evisceration supervisor, has never forgotten “how they took me under their wing” when he joined the assembly line more than 30 years ago, or the pride they had in letting no shackle pass empty. 

“They came in, and they got it done,” he says. 

But the men did not earn the same as their nondisabled colleagues.

Henry’s Turkey Service, which was paid directly by the plant for the men’s labor, was capitalizing on a section of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that allows certified employers to pay a subminimum wage to workers with a disability, based on their productivity when compared with that of nondisabled workers. 

The company also deducted hundreds of dollars from the men’s earnings andSocial Security benefits for room and board — and “in-kind” services, like bowling, dining out and annual visits to an amusement park. The rest was deposited in individual bank accounts in Goldthwaite [where Henry's Turkey Service was based] that the company dipped into to pay for incidentals and medical costs, since the men had no health insurance or Medicaid in Iowa.

Both West Liberty and Atalissa are in Muscatine County.  The men who have not returned to family in Texas are now living in nearby Waterloo.   

White supremacist puts down roots in North Dakota

John Eligon reports in today's New York Times form Leith, North Dakota, population 16 (or 24, depending on your source), where white supremacist Craig Cobb has been buying up parcels of land since last year.  Eligon reports that Cobb plans to turn the place into a white nationalist center, and that he has transferred some of the lots he has purchased to fellow white nationalists. Eligon writes:

In the past two years, Mr. Cobb, a longtime proselytizer for white supremacy who is wanted in Canada on charges of promoting hatred, has bought a dozen plots of land in Leith (pronounced Leeth) and has sold or transferred ownership of some of them to a couple of like-minded white nationalists. 

He is using Craigslist and white power message boards to entice others in the movement to take refuge in Leith, about two hours southwest of Bismarck. On one board, he detailed his vision for the community — an enclave where residents fly “racialist” banners, where they are able to import enough “responsible hard core” white nationalists to take control of the town government, where “leftist journalists or antis” who “come and try to make trouble” will face arrest. 

* * * 

It is all people are talking about, in bars and in their homes, at funerals and at church. They are poking around on the Web to read Mr. Cobb’s positions for themselves. A stream of cars creep through the streets where horses occasionally trot, their passengers hoping to catch a glimpse of some action or take a peek at Mr. Cobb’s peeling, two-story clapboard home. Sheriff’s cars, too, are making more rounds.

Cobb said he was working in the state's booming oil fields until last week, when he lost his job after the story broke regarding his plans for Leith.  

Amazingly, Leith is large and organized enough to have a mayor, Ryan Shock, who says he and the city council have put in place a "suicide pact."  Well, Eligon calls it a "doomsday plan":  

If enough of Mr. Cobb’s friends move in to gain a majority that could vote out the current government, the Council would immediately dissolve the town.

Leith is in nonmetropolitan Grant County, population 2,394, in southwest North Dakota.  The population is 97.3% white, and the poverty rate is a shockingly low 12.4%.  One of very few African Americans in the county lives in Leith, and he features in Eligon's story, as do religion and community.  It's worth a read in its entirety.  

What do the gay marriage decisions portend for the conservative "rural heartland"? An analysis from Wyoming

Jack Healy reports for the New York Times today on the impact the Supreme Court's recent decisions on gay marriage might have in the "conservative heartland," and the story features the state of Wyoming, where state representative Cathy Connolly, an openly gay legislator, introduced a bill a few months ago to create domestic partnerships.  It advanced "further than anything like it in the history of this deep red state--sailing through committee and onto the floor of the full house."  Ultimately, however, the bill failed.  Like 36 other states, Wyoming limits marriage to a man and woman.

Healy's story features a gay couple who live in Caspar, Carl Oleson and Rob Johnston.  They have been together for 16 years but their relationship enjoys no protections.  He quotes Oleson,

You have to balance between so many things here.  I still have to be a little discreet.

Healy writes:

Being gay in Wyoming, known as the Equality State, has never been simple, and last week’s Supreme Court rulings, hailed as a victory for same-sex marriage, did little to change that. While many gay couples here cheered the decisions, they also said they woke up the next morning not feeling much more equal than they had the day before. 

* * *  

Wyoming has never been easy to pigeonhole when it comes to gay rights. Republicans dominate state and local politics, and support for gun rights, low taxes and small government runs as deep as groundwater. But so does a cowboy libertarian streak, residents say, rooted in ranches, homesteads and a notion of “You live your life, and I’ll live mine.”

Healy notes that Wyoming repealed its sodomy law in 1977, many years before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such laws as unconstitutional.  Also, within the last decade, Casper had a 27-year-old gay mayor.

From the heart of "Ron Paul country"

A story in today's New York Times, dateline Pahrump, Nevada, population 36,441, features this description of the place.

This is a town--unincorporated, to be sure--where many folks have little need for much government, whether manifested by permits, stop signs, gun regulations or anything that would threaten Pahrump's brothels. That goes for surrounding Nye County as well, which is more than twice the size of New Jersey but is home to only 44,000 residents, mostly in Pahrump.

***

This is also a place where many people come to be left alone.

Journalist Richard Oppel, Jr., makes the point that many residents of Pahrump own and carry guns not out of concern for their safety, but because they can, to make a statement about their right to do so. Being home to lots of libertarians, it is perhaps not surprising that Nye County is the only Nevada county Ron Paul carried in his 2008 bid for the Republican nomination for president. This quote from former Nevada governor Robert List comments on the links some in Nye have to the city:

"There are many libertarians out there, and many of them came from urban areas an sought relative isolation. And they found it. ... They don't come to Las Vegas unless they have to."

The picture is one of rurality--and relative absence of government--as sanctuary, albeit a gun-friendly sanctuary.

Community trumps privacy in the wake of Hurricane Irene

This story in yesterday's New York Times plays on a persistent tension in rural communities--that between a desire and respect for privacy on the one hand and a sense of community and commitment to one's neighbors on the other.

In some ways, the story is a standard "pulling-together in the face of adversity" tale, one set in Williamsville, Vermont, in the wake of the dramatic flooding there over the week-end. Williamsville is not even a Census Designated Place, but journalist Abby Goodenough describes it as "a mountain village that has a post office, a volunteer fire department, a general store and not much else." She reports the population at about 800. What caught my eye in the story, though, was the privacy twist on the standard rural community trope.

People might not have known, or liked, their neighbors before the storm — privacy is important in places like this, where cellphone reception was nonexistent even before the storm and many landlines are now out — but that has all changed, at least for now.

* * *

Here, people with electricity and hot water are offering showers, Internet access and beds to those without. At the century-old grange hall, volunteers have made lists of what some residents need and what others can offer. A potluck supper was organized for Tuesday night, and a “lost and found” bench was set up along Dover Road ... so that possessions found in the floodwaters’ path might be reclaimed.

For move coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Irene's impact on New England, see here, here and here.

Assange invokes his rural upbringing as inspiration for WikiLeaks

Here's part of what Julian Assange said in defense of WikiLeaks, as presented in a New York Times story:

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, referred to his upbringing in a small Australian country town, where people "spoke their minds bluntly" and distrusted big government. "WikiLeaks was created around these core values," he wrote.

Hmmm.

Rurality and home-grown militias

I've often pondered the link between rurality and so-called home grown militias such as the one recently in the news following the arrests of nine of its members this week-end. Eight men and one woman involved in Hutaree, a "Christian" militia group that planned to kill a police officer and then use explosive devices along the funeral procession to kill more law enforcement officials. Ultimately, they hoped to spur a widespread uprising against the government. Read the New York Times initial coverage of the arrests and the plot here.

This morning's New York Times provides further details of Hutaree, which was apparently based in Lenawee County, Michigan, population 101,153. While Lenawee County is less than 100 miles from Detroit, Ann Arbor and Toledo, a photo of one of the Lenawee County homes related to this week-end's arrests looks pretty rural. It's in Clayton, population 326.

In addition to the David Stone and his wife, Tina Mae Stone, and their sons, who resided in Lenawee County (presumably at the Clayton home shown in the photo), others arrested resided in Blissfield, Michigan, population 3,223; Manchester, Michigan, population 2,160; Whiting, Indiana, population 5,137; Sandusky, Ohio, population 27,844; and Huron, Ohio, population 7,958.

Some of these places are clearly more rural (or remote or nonmetropolitan) than others. So, does rural locale have any significance with respect to these militia groups, either in suggesting the type of folks who are involved in groups like Hutaree--or in helping them go undetected? I recall, for example, that posse comitatus, another anti-federal militia group, tends to be associated with rural locales.

Here's an excerpt from today's NYTimes story by Nick Bunkley and Charlie Savage which mentions the rural locale of the apparent ringleader of Hutaree:

David B. Stone Sr. and his wife, Tina, made no secret about the fact that they were part of a militia, neighbors say. The couple frequently let visitors in military fatigues erect tents in front of their trailer home at the intersection of rural dirt roads, and the sound of gunfire was routine.

“In Michigan, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to be in a militia,” said Tom McDormett, a neighbor. “They would practice shooting, but that’s not a big deal. People do that all the time out here.”

But last Saturday night, Mr. McDormett watched through binoculars as the police raided the Stones’ home, tearing off plywood from the base of their two connected single-wide trailers to search under the floors.

This anecdote indicates that Hutaree's rural locale provided insufficient spatial isolation or privacy to "protect" the Stones from detection--by either their neighbors or the FBI. So why do these groups tend to seek rural locales? I suppose they are less expensive places to live--and also tend to be places where people can own a piece of land large enough to store equipment and practice military drills. But the cover previously provided by rurality (and perhaps still provided, at least from neighbors, in less densely populated places in the West) may be diminished in this age of enhanced technology. Such technology no doubt facilitated law enforcement detection of Hutaree, even as it facilitated Hutaree's promotion of its goals and its members' contract with one another.

A different spin on J.D. Salinger and his rural life

Don't miss Katie Zezima's story in today's New York Times under the headline, "A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors." It's chock full of anecdotes about J.D. Salinger's life in Cornish, New Hampshire, population 1,661. As the headline suggests, he was not entirely the curmudgeon of his reputation, as reflected in many of last week's obituaries of him. Read some coverage here and here. Indeed, if the tales in Zezima's story are to be believed, he was downright avuncular to children, and he sometimes sought extra time in public spaces, such as when he arrived as much as an hour early at church suppers, of which he was especially fond.

Zezima also describes how town residents helped to protect his privacy:

“Nobody conspired to keep his privacy, but everyone kept his privacy — otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed here all these years,” said Sherry Boudro of nearby Windsor, Vt., who said her father, Paul Sayah, befriended Mr. Salinger in the 1970s. “This community saw him as a person, not just the author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ They respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.”

The curious constantly descended on Cornish and the surrounding area, asking residents for directions to Mr. Salinger’s house. Instead of finding the home, interlopers would end up on a wild goose chase.

The entire piece is well worth a read for its appealing portrayal of a small New England town. In a sense, it depicts what I have elsewhere called the paradox of rural privacy--the phenomenon whereby rural residents often know each others' business, even as they pretend they don't or at least act in a way that respects others' privacy.

Rural America and the stigma of government help

While rising foreclosure rates are not a new, cutting-edge topic, some of the implications of foreclosures in rural areas are rather surprising. The Reuter’s website recently featured an article discussing rising foreclosure filings in rural Ohio. Foreclosure filings rose 4.9 percent in counties with a population fewer than 50,000 people, while filings only rose 1.2 percent in Ohio overall. The vast number of filings are to be expected given high unemployment rates and a lack of affordable healthcare. In fact, hard times are upon a great deal of Americans. Whether unemployment, the housing crisis, or the plunging stock market is to blame, virtually all Americans have felt the brunt of our poor economy.

Most surprising is the resistance rural Americans experience with regards to seeking help in the form of government programs. One citizen of the rural town of Zanesville, Ohio stated, “It’s not easy to get people in a conservative, religious area like this to accept help.” Rural Americans who embrace conservative values tend to disfavor government programs and help in general. As a result, many are opposed to taking advantage of Barack Obama’s housing rescue plan. The 75 billion dollar program is designed to help as many as 9 million American homeowners rework mortgages into more affordable monthly payments.

On another note, rising foreclosure rates are merely a symptom of astronomical medical bills accrued by those lacking sufficient healthcare. Thus, rural Americans are opposed to “help” on two fronts because rural areas also tend to vehemently oppose universal healthcare.

The article specifically discusses the plight of homeowners Ruth and Ronald Swope, both 69, who are now facing foreclosure. A lack of affordable healthcare and rising age-related health problems have led to the Swopes’ pending foreclosure. Ronald states, “I have always paid my own way. I’ve never asked anyone for anything my whole life. But we had no choice.”

What is at the core of the stigma attached to accepting help? Are rural Americans just plain ignorant? In my opinion, the answer is no. Rural Americans have legitimate fears associated with government programs and help, in general.

The stigma of such programs is partially due to a tendency for conservatives to disfavor democratic programs. Many elderly rural Americans experienced the Red Scare and fear these programs are just the beginning of communism and socialism on their home turf.

Another answer is the lack of anonymity in rural areas. In urban areas, financial decisions can be more anonymous. But when everyone knows everyone, taking advantage of a program and expressing the need for help is not simply a personal decision but, instead, is practically local news. Brittany Oglesby, a single mother living in rural Highland County in Ohio, expressed this concern when she stated, “I was afraid to say anything because everyone around here knows everybody's business,” she said. “But I later found out people understand because so many of us are in the same boat.”

Ms. Oglesby’s statement leads me to consider whether the answer is as simple as a fear of diversity. Could it be that rural people value a preservation of homogeny over their own livelihoods?

Regardless of the reason for the resistance to government programs, many are just beginning to push their fears aside and take advantage of programs. Thus, one trait of rural America is preserved: the tendency of rural people to persevere in the face of adversity.

An incidental discussion of rural health care, along with self-reliance and other traits associated with rural folk

I've been writing about the Montana Constitution's right to dignity (see here), the only such right included in any of the fifty state constitutions. So this story by Kirk Johnson in the New York Times caught my eye. The headline is "Montana Court to Rule on Assisted Suicide Case," and it's about just what it suggests. But there are a couple of references to the rural character of Montana and its residents that I wanted to highlight here. Some relevant excerpts follow:

The legal foundation for both sides is a free-spirited, libertarian-tinctured State Constitution written in 1972 at the height of a privacy-rights movement that swept through this part of the West in the aftermath of the 1960s. Echoes of a righteous era are reflected in language about keeping government at bay and maintaining individual autonomy and dignity.

* * *

[A] list of unusual Montana factors have elevated and complicated the debate.Montana already has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation, for example. As a huge state with a small population — about one million people in an area more than half the size of Texas — there are pockets of deep rural life where access to health care, in living or dying, is severely limited.

Julie French, a Democratic state legislator from Scobey, population 1,082, in far northeast Montana where the population density is about 1.4 persons per square mile, opposes any "expansion of death rights." French's quote in the NYT story implicitly references the lack of choices for many rural folk, including choices regarding health care:

Before we deal with assisted suicide, we should make sure first and foremost that everybody has equal access. . . . It is not simply whether everyone has a right to choose; it’s whether they are given all the choices.

Indeed. For many of French's constituents, even rudimentary health care is hours away. Scobey is in Daniels County, on Montana's High Line (border with Canada). It's current population is estimated at 1,650, and it has lost almost 20% of its population just since the 2000 Census.

A rural angle on lesbian separatist communities

Sarah Kershaw's story in today's NYT about lesbian communities makes several mentions of rurality. Writing of lesbian pioneers who founded a community in St. Augustine, Florida in the 1970s, the story tells of 20 of these pioneer women who still choose "a separate lesbian world . . . hav[ing] built homes on 300 rural acres in northeast Alabama, where the founders of the Florida community, the Pagoda, relocated in 1997."

Kershaw continues:

Behind a locked gate whose security code is changed frequently, the women pursue quiet lives in a community they call Alapine, largely unnoticed by their Bible Belt neighbors — a lost tribe from the early ’70s era of communes and radical feminism.

The story notes that most such communities are in rural areas, which reminded me of the utility of rural places for those seeking privacy, for those with a separatist bent. (I've written about this before in relation to religious separatists, such as here and here).

The point of Kershaw's story is these communities' struggles to survive as mainstream society's acceptance of lesbians has increased, leaving less perceived need for these enclaves. She writes:

As the impulse to withdraw from heterosexual society has lost its appeal to younger lesbians, womyn’s lands face some of the same challenges as Catholic convents that struggle to attract women to cloistered lives.

For me, the story represented an opportunity to reflect on the tranquility of rural places and what that has meant and means for these women. Some rich quotes from the women at the Alabama community suggest their profound appreciation for the natural settings in which they live. I also liked contemplating these communities living in peace with -- if apart from--their rural neighbors, especially given the stereotypes of rural people as intolerant of LGBT folks (read here and here) . . . . until I noted that the women agreed to be interviewed by Kershaw only if she promised not to disclose the exact location of their homes because "they fear harassment from outsiders."

Middlebury College students take a realistic look at challenges facing a small Vermont town

Read Abby Goodnough's story about Starksboro, Vermont's consultation with Middlebury College students here. Here is an excerpt:

Like other New England towns rich in history and tradition, Starksboro, 20 miles south of Burlington and population 1,900, is eager to preserve its uniqueness in the face of growth. But hoping to head off the conflict that often stymies planning, this fall it tried a new approach.

Starksboro asked students from nearby Middlebury College to spend the semester interviewing its residents to document what they value most about the place. It intends to use their thoughts to influence decisions about its future.

Here's a telling quote from one student involved in the project:

“I’m guilty, like most of us, of really romanticizing Vermont life and Vermont towns,” said Max Kanter, a junior from Phoenix. “Now I have a sense of the challenge they have to stay afloat.”

The story touches on many rural and New England themes and is well worth a read.

The good, the bad, and the historic from my hometown

An old friend of mine, Tricia Turner, who blogs at Expeditions by Tricia, has just posted this story about the Newton County Home Tour, an annual event in my home county. She knew I wanted some photos of the Newton County Jail, about which I've periodically blogged (like here and here), and so she let me know that she took some and used them to illustrate the post.

In case you are wondering, the home tour, which raises funds for the county's single-parent scholarship fund, did not tour the jail! You'll have to read Turner's post to see how she links the two. You may also enjoy her descriptions of some of the wealthy folks who have moved to Newton County in recent years, seeking privacy as part of the rural life there.

Small-town lack of anonymity and bias, big-time consequences

I'm seeing lots of coverage this week of the just-disclosed, long-time romantic relationship between a judge and a prosecutor in Collin County, Texas. Two of the stories are here and here. The affair came to light because one of many cases tried during the period when the affair may have been ongoing were criminal charges against Charles Dean Hood. Hood was convicted of capital murder in a September 1990 trial in which Verla Sue Holland presided and Thomas S. O'Connell, Jr. was the prosecutor. Hood was sentenced to death in the case, but several irregularites -- including this now confirmed intimate involvement between Holland and O'Connell -- have put that conviction in doubt.

The closing paragraphs of the New York Times story about this breach of legal and judicial ethics caught my attention in relation to rurality:

Ms. Kunkle, the court clerk, said that nearly everyone in the courthouse had heard the rumor over the years. She said Judge Holland and Mr. O’Connell were part of a tight-knit legal community that lived in Collin County before its population boomed in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Sometimes the little small-town stuff just doesn’t go away,” Ms. Kunkle said.

That sent me over to the Census Bureau website to see just how rural or nonmetro Collin County and its seat, McKinney, were during the relevant period. (Holland was a district judge there from 1981-1997). Here's the scoop from Publication No. 1990 CPH-2-45 (pages 3 and 83):

In 1980, Collin County's population was 144,576, whereas in 1970 it had been just 66,920. McKinney's 1980 population was 16,256, a modest growth over the 1970 figure, 15,193.

By 1990, Collin County had 264,036 residents, while McKinney had grown to 21,283.

Collin County is now dominated economically and in terms of population by Plano, a Dallas suburb that grew quickly in the past few decades. McKinney, the county seat, is now probably fairly characterized as an exurb. Still, thinking back to the McKinney of a couple of decades ago, when the Holland-McConnell affair apparently began, it's not hard to imagine that it was the talk of the town, or at least the legal community. In light of that, I find it interesting that an investigation was never initiated, especially in light of the number of trials in which the two apparently played their respective roles. Perhaps that failure is attributable to another characteristic sometimes associated with small towns and rurality. I call it the paradox of rural privacy; it is the tendency to mind your own business, even if you know everyone else's.

Rurality Then and Now, Here and There (Part IV): "End of the World"

In an earlier post, I said that the properties we were looking at in the foothills of Amador and El Dorado counties might be categorized as either “rural gentrification” (a/k/a/ “rural light”) or “end of the world.” I’m writing today about the latter category.

Like the “rural gentrification” properties, the “end of the world” properties may be in housing developments or subdivisions. If they are, however, they tend to be in older subdivisions and those with fewer covenants and restrictions – and those with more lax road maintenance and homeowner associations. We’ve also noticed that sometimes the properties at the rear or end of the road in a subdivision are in this category, while those nearer the county or state road entrance are not.

Needless to say, such properties tend to be farther off the beaten path, farther from amenities such as grocery and hardware stores and post offices. Never mind restaurants. They also tend to be larger lots or parcels, usually down long dirt or gravel roads -- which seem longer than they are due to their condition. Reaching these properties makes four-wheel drive vehicles appear no longer to be the luxury that they are in the ‘burbs where we live. These properties are often “off the grid,” and the water situation is more likely to be iffy. We’ve also noticed that there seems to be a lot more junk in view en route to these properties. (See bottom photo). These are the properties (and not just the junky ones) that one realtor associated with meth houses. Nevertheless, many offer stunning views. (See top photo). Most have potential.

We’ve also noticed that the folks who live in these places tend to be the “back to nature” type. Each is living on more than 60 acres. They seem to relish the adventure of living off the grid; they also tend to have lots of practical skills to navigate the challenges. We met some of our prospective neighbors while looking at one Amador County property, and they seemed like really nice folks. Both couples are in their 40s or 50s and have been living in the area less than a few years, having moved from out of state. They’ve both lived city lives but prefer where they are now. They clearly place high value on their self-sufficiency and their privacy. One couple has made clear, for example, that even though the owner of the property we’ve considered buying would have a legal right to pass over roads on their land, they will not permit it. They have taken this stance because they, not the homeowners’ road association, maintain the road. Right of access via the road over the other’s property is less clear legally; what is clear is that the other owners won’t permit it. In both cases, one would likely have to litigate to achieve a resolution that would permit access, but that would undermine neighborly relations. And I think these are neighbors we'd want on our side over the long run. Besides, another road runs onto the property, but it is more circuitous and less well maintained. (So much for that homeowners association and the road upkeep function).

Both couples are, in one way or another, telecommuting from their very remote properties, and they have had DSL lines run onto their property for that purpose. One was very proud of the fact that he hadn’t been off his property in several months; his wife goes into town for the grocery shopping and such. They drink well water, and they get power from some combination of solar panels, generator, and propane.

So, you get a sense of why I call these the “end of the world” properties. They are the sorts of places you can imagine hunkering down and hiding away, if necessary. As romantic as I find the prospect of living on 80-100 acres, off the grid (take that, utility companies!), I’m not so sure that the oft-touted (by realtors and immediate neighbors) “end of the road” privacy is for us, nor the inconvenience that goes with it. Even with the practical skills to manage such a place, it sure looks time consuming, and this property is supposed to be about week-end relaxation and retirement . . . Plus, as I said in my first post of this series, how much privacy do we really want?